Heres a bit more about Barripper and district a good few years ago. Let me know when youve had enough and Ill stop posting: The colours and smells of those hay meadows would come to me again, in the depths of winter, when the farmer would use a huge hay-knife, as tall as me, to open up one of the ricks to carry hay into the waiting animals, slicing through the layers like cheese. It was like uncorking a fine wine. All the distilled scents and sounds of summer came bursting out to bring a brief snatch of June in December. Then to carry it into the cows house, into the warmth and comfort of those resting, eating animals. I had a firm belief, too, that on Christmas Eve at Midnight all the animals would go onto their knees (though I suppose at night, in winter, they would be lying down anyway!) I had always supposed this to be a Cornish tradition until later in life I was exposed to the evocative works of Thomas Hardy and learned , by heart, his beautiful poem on the same theme. Many in our modern times turn up their noses at the smell of cows but not I - to me it brings memories of happy, happy days when the sun always shone and when there wasnt a thing to fear in the whole world. I have one clear memory, though, of an exceptionally vicious spell when I helped the farmer, Jimmy Cooper, carry hay out to the animals when the weather was hard. It must have been in the late 1950’s and snow lay in deep drifts for day after day, preventing any movement of vehicles, either motorised or horse-drawn. Hay had to be cut from the ricks and carried out, laboriously, by hand, often by pulling it over the deep snow to the fields. One field was at the end of Barton Lane, now a little used track on the right just as you leave the village on the way to Camborne. Even in my day it ended in a field but like so many other tracks in the area it seemed as if it were once part of a more ancient network of tracks in the area perhaps linking farm to farm. This winter Barton Lane was filled with deep drifts and there was a clear anxiety about the state of the beasts. It seemed to take forever struggling through the deep snow, getting colder and wetter by the minute, but I still remember the relief and satisfaction of seeing those animals alive and well and then enjoying their feed. It may have been that snowfall, or another, that saw an enjoyable, but highly dangerous, activity. Not many people had cars but the landlord of the pub, next but one to us, a man called Jack Richards, also ran a taxi. It was a traditional taxi, too, not like today when any make of car can be a taxi. Riding in a taxi was an alien concept to us village children as it was not part of our lifestyle to use one, except perhaps, as the close relatives at a funeral, but this one came into its own at this time. Big, black and powerful, it delighted us youngsters. Jack built, or probably already possessed, a large sledge, capable of carrying about a dozen children and, with chains on the wheels of the taxi, towed shrieking hordes of children around the snowy lanes. He would be prosecuted now, wouldn’t he, but it was such fun! Another pleasure of those waterside meadows in spring and summer was watercress, growing luxuriantly in the clean spring water and we gathered it in basketfuls on balmy summer days to provide a tea a king would have seen fit to eat. It seemed at the time that watercress and the huge blackberries which came later provided all the diet a person needed. In spring too, the hedges of these meadows exploded into mounds of creamy primroses, whose scent filled the air on those cold mornings still early in the year. It was a joy on those clear-blue mornings, not quite winter and not quite spring, to don Wellingtons and walk through the still wet grass to pick and carry home great bunches of those vivid signals that the season was turning. My mum always greeted their appearance with pleasure and put them in a prominent position and it was not until having children of my own, and then grandchildren, that I felt that joyous tug on the heartstrings that is evoked by that little outstretched hand with its token of love. Sometimes we would gather them for sale, bunching and boxing them before sending them to London. It gave me pleasure, even then, to think of people living in the filth and grime of a great city being able to share the same simple joys we did. Another flower that gave equal pleasure, and which was cultivated and sold in the same way, was the violet, grown on a small scale by lots of people and then sold on. My father and uncle Ronnie devoted their respective gardens to this venture for a couple of years but I guess it made no great fortune as the usual flowers and vegetables soon made a return. In periods of wetness the Connor River would burst its banks here, covering meadows, making roads impassable and flooding houses in the lower parts of Barripper. It was never welcome but it was expected and people took it in their stride, knowing that, as quickly as it came, it would go away again, leaving the houses to dry out. No fine carpets and fittings in the economically poor cottages of those days so it was not quite the calamity we would see it as today. The pigs and fowls which most people kept at the bottom of the garden had sometimes to be rescued but that was the worst of it. Those I knew to be most at risk were Eddie and Winnie Pearce and their sons Jim and Harry. They were always “uncle and auntie” to me – as were many others in the village to whom I never had that close a relationship in terms of blood ties. They lived very near the streams and rivers, right at the end of African Row in one of two cob houses that had clearly been thatched at one time but were then roofed in corrugated iron. I suppose these were some of the earliest buildings in Barripper, survivals from the time when much of the more recent building occurred in Victorian times. Part of my extended family, they kept poultry and, having a stream in the little meadow in front of their house, the inevitable ducks, whose eggs we would fish out of the stream. Their pride and joy, though, was the sow they always kept. On reflection there were probably several sows over the years and I forget now the pet name they had for it but the piglets would have been a welcome addition to the household finances. I can hear the contented sighs of that old pig, even now, as she suckled a double row of pink youngsters. It was there that I often heard that lovely dialect word, “piggywidden” for the smallest of the litter. Clearly this source of wealth would have priority when the floods came! Incidentally, Eddie also doubled as the village barber and cut my hair until I rebelled and wanted it cut “up town” with all the other boys I came to know, Most of the flood risk was to their poultry and animals but for those who lived just by the chapel it was the houses themselves that were inundated. I can clearly remember this happening to the first cottage in the row there, lived in by our cousins, William John and Edna Moon. (They were cousins who had married each other in the way of rural communities and like others I have known in these circumstances, had no offspring.) Life went on, though, without recourse to expensive insurance claims! It is surprising that we didn’t have webbed feet as many summer hours were spent, barefoot, in the cold waters of that river where we would walk for what seemed like miles in the bed of the stream. One occasion was eagerly anticipated - that time when the mill stream needed to be cleaned out or maintained. At such times the water was diverted and all that was left was a deep pool here and there from which it was relatively easy to capture the trout. They were never huge but nevertheless tasted good. I sometimes caught a few but my companion at that time, Adrian Arthur (from another off-shoot of my family) was very skilled and always beat everyone to it, carrying home the lion’s share. Here the river was full of all sorts of water life and I have sat for hours and watched the harmless watervole dive, swim and eat vegetation. Erroneously called water rats, these gentle creatures seem uncommon now and it is many years since I have heard the characteristic plop of one dropping into the water. Birds there are, still, in abundance, however, with the moorhen perhaps the most dominant along the quieter stretches. Then, for the observant, the flash of blue of the kingfisher can sometimes be seen. In the past the stream was also the haunt of the otter and after a long decline in their population due to hunting and pesticides they are once again fairly common throughout Cornwall.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Nov 2014 21:25:39 +0000
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