The Plowman's Tale
Higher Court Farm was a 500-acre hill farm nuzzled up against the Brendon Hills, and in the early 70s home to over a hundred head of beef cows, three bulls, innumerable chickens and a shire horse named Jack. Most of the locals regarded the place as a hippy commune, which to a rather minor extent, was partially true. But it was much more of a working farm than a commune, albeit the fact that the workers were indeed long-haired and said ‘far-out’ quite a lot. And why not? Higher Court was in an idyllic spot, down towards the end of a narrow country lane, a hidden and secret paradise to those us who lived and worked there … a sometimes shifting number ranging from three to five or six who were regularly augmented at the weekends by visiting friends from cities and towns around the country, eager for a rural weekend. These visitors were welcomed with enthusiasm, and not just for their friendship but also for their willing and free labour.
One of the regularly visiting couples was Mike and Jayne. Mike was the archetypical hippy, long black hair and a long black beard, always smartly dressed in clean hippy attire, a white Indian cotton top, tastily embroidered in white cotton, gaily colored homemade trousers belted by a silken cord. Across his face he wore the required fixed hippy grin, designed to radiate peace, love for all the people, love for all the animals, love for all the plants, and of course, his wife Jayne, who wore a similar smile that was also designed with identical aims.
Jayne was a tall pale woman, who walked delicately through the world enveloped in a swirling cloud of patchouli, a coruscation of serenity and peace, luminescent faeries danced in her long black hair and elves swept a path for her. She regularly visited Findhorn in Scotland, a much-storied eco-settlement where vegetables were reputed to grow to enormous sizes aided solely by the nature spirits, whose presence signified a locale of stunning psychic activity.
These two visited several times a year, and usually stayed for a week or so at a time, and were great fun to be around, as it was the Age of Gullibility, and most of us were fellow gulls to a greater or lesser extent.
The hospitality we were able to offer visitors such as these often included a visit to the local pub, the Royal Oak, in Luxborough, which was reached by a walk of a mile or two along the footpath through the meadows, an enjoyable walk made all the delicious by the beery anticipations that lay ahead. The meadows had been farmed for centuries, and the very landscape spoke in sentences that harked back, way, way back. Towards the top of the meadow, which narrowed into thin fields with steep hills on either side, had been irrigated decades ago by ditches that ran parallel to the stream in the valley bottom. Obviously man-made, they were the product of what must have been months or years of backbreaking labor - no steam shovels back then, nor diesel-driven diggers - and must have been made possible solely through the immense amount of manpower that lived on the farms in those days of yore. The concept was that the stream was diverted at its head, and sent along one of these channels, to be dammed at intervals to allow the water to cascade down the hillside.
Ancient archeological remnants such as these captivated the imagination of Mike and Jayne, who rhapsodized about the simplicity of life in those far-off times when all was pure, organic and unmechanized. On those walks, their smiles assumed extra beatific proportions.
The Royal Oak was, in those days, pretty much what it had been for years - an old country pub with blackened beams and a tiny bar, the period before ‘old country pubs’ were fashionable, and were simply old-fashioned country pubs. These days it has been expanded, but it is still well worth a visit. Back then the landlord was a newcomer to the area, a genial bearded ex-professor named Brian, who with his delightful Irish wife Colleen, had taken over the pub in the early seventies.
And so it was through the old oaken doors of the Royal Oak that we led Mike and Jayne, and nestled up to the bar, and ordered pints of Brian’s best bitter. A smattering of locals sat around, playing dominoes at one table, while three ruddy-faced farm workers threw darts at the board on the wall as they talked about hay-making and the possibility of it being literally farmed out this year to the local contractor, one Rodney, who was legendary in his ability to fulfill his contractual obligations in record time, running as he did a large team of experienced workers together with the very latest equipment. Rodney’s very modern organization was in direct contrast to the ancient manual order through whose manicured works we had just passed, and he was well known in the area, and the subject of much discussion around the breakfast table at Higher Court.
Mike, Jayne, Hilary, and myself sat at a long table close to the dartboard. At the other end of the table sat Reg, a venerable and hoary old man, well into his eighth decade, clad in a battered tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, a tweed cap on his head, and a neatly knotted tie over a soft collared shirt. He pulled on his pipe, sipped at his pint, and nodded a greeting.
I could see our two visitors listening to the dart players’ conversation, and it wasn’t long before Mike started to speculate how long it would take to make hay with a team of horses. Soon he and Jayne were off to the races, indulging in one of their favorite topics, life before mechanization, and all the benefits that such a lifestyle brought to the community. Reg leaned in, listening, as befitted a regular in an old country pub. For was that not what was so wonderful about the very concept of a public house? It was public. Inherently public. Conversations were not necessarily private, patrons were always a mix of locals and strangers, and the whole point of the pub was to mix and socialize, chat and quaff, to be a community clubhouse.
Neither Mike nor Jayne had ever worked with a team of horses, but they had seen teams working on previous visits to the West Country. A friend of ours, Leary Brooks, ran a small organic farm a couple of dozen miles away, and did use horses - although he also possessed a tractor - and I knew our two visitors had visited Leary’s place a couple of times. Of course, the very lack of their personal practice in their much-vaunted vision of rural paradise understandingly had no bearing upon their enthusiasm for it, and so they charged forward in their earnestness with a passion that began to border upon a rapture wrapped in ecstasy. The faeries were dancing overtime around Jayne’s head, and the patchouli wafted into every nook and cranny.
At last Mike, exhausted by his sermon, paused for breath, looked about him, took a sip of his beer, and smiled at Reg, who precisely fitted the very picture of ancient rustic Mike and Jayne epitomized in their minds as being the perfect countryman.
Reg sensed a break, an opportunity, and slowly but firmly entered the conversation for the first time.
‘I’ll tell ‘ee summat ‘bout ‘orses, young man. I worked up at thic farm up there’, tossing his head backward to point out a farm invisible from inside the pub, ‘all me life. We ‘ad ‘orses, ’n ‘ad to use ‘em every day. ’N this is what I ‘ad to do. Now, f’rinstance, if I were to be ploughin’, I’d ‘ave to get up at 4am and walk to the farm, and feed the ‘orses, put the tack on ‘em, ’n then walk ‘em to the field we was gonna work. Praps a two-mile walk sometimes. Work there all-day be’ind thic plough, up ’n down the bloody field, and at the end of the day, well, of course, I ‘ad to walk ‘em back to the farm, by which time it was prob’ly 8 o’clock at night by the time we got there. ’N then I ‘ad to take all the tack off of ‘em, rub ‘em down, feed ‘em and bed ‘em down.’
Reg paused, looking at us from beneath his cap, his eyes strangely agitated, and then resumed.
‘Could well be ten o’clock afore I got ‘ome. Bloody tired I c’n tell ‘ee.’
He paused again, took a long pull on his pipe and an even longer sip at his beer, and then, eyes dancing, delivered the coup-de-grace.
‘Lemme tell ‘ee, young man, ’twas the ‘appiest day of my life when we got our first tractor’.
And banged his pint glass down on the table for emphasis.
Mike and Jayne looked at each other, doing their best to disguise their shocked countenances. And on the long walk back through the meadows at the end of the evening, they were oddly quiet.
When the clouds parted and Mike’s face was briefly illuminated by a passing moonbeam, he still wore his smile, but it seemed a little fixed, a little determined, and lacked that promise of joy that had hitherto prevailed.
And most of the faeries had left Jayne’s hair and it looked like the elves had been called off to another job, failing to alert Jayne as she stepped into a fresh cowpat, and slid backward into a bed of nettles.
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