Experiment

St Faith's

And so I went to see Richard and Jackie again this afternoon before picking Phoebe up from school.  Our conversation lasted for two hours today - before I put my coat on and marched off to the school gates. Again the talk was easy and comfortable and I plan to see them again next week.

If you have not been following this blog story, let me just say that Richard's surname is Hines and his brother was Barry Hines - the famed author of "Kes". It was Richard who trained the kestrel in the first place.

Both of Richard's published books have been memoirs. Linked to that, I thought I might try a small experiment here in this blog where I pick up on  some aspect of my own early life and craft it as though producing an excerpt from a larger memoir.

Obviously, there are lots of times I could choose from even though recollections of those days become dimmer with each passing year. For the purposes of this experiment, I have picked village life and a small selection of things I remember from the village where I was born and raised on The Plain of Holderness, twelve miles north of the East Yorkshire city of Kingston-upon-Hull...

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Beyond the village, low-lying farmland stretched all the way to The River Hull. Historically, it had been marshy "carr" land but centuries earlier drains had been dug across the landscape to take excess waters away.  Running  straight they gurgled, connecting with each other like veins.

The loamy soil was rich and fertile and there were remote arable farms out there - Linley Hill, Aikedale, Low Baswick and Baswick Steer but the one I knew best was Hall Garth Farm, the home of the Watson family. I pedalled there many times to play with my primary school friend Les Watson.

We did not need a commercial soft play area or an urban playground because Hall Garth's farm buildings provided all the opportunity we needed. There were barns filled with bales of hay and straw and we tunnelled into them making caves and once we cornered a rat with potato forks. Trapped in a bricked up corner it has nowhere to run at first. In my memory it is corralled there for eternity though I admit that in reality it was certainly just a few seconds.

Very close to Hall Garth Farm was St Faith's churchyard. The last of the sandstone gravestones that stood there were carved in the middle of the nineteenth century which was the very time that my village,  in agreement with The Church of England, decided to build a brand new church a mile east of there  in the heart of what had become the new village - on slightly higher ground. St Faith's itself was demolished though one or two drawings of what the humble building looked like remain.

On old maps, very close to the site of St Faith's, a mysterious feature was marked - "St Faith's Well". It was probably a holy site but there is no sign of it any more and as far as I know, no history books have ever recorded its significance way back in the medieval period and possibly before that.

When I was a boy, we had freedom to spend spare time and summer days out in that seemingly endless windblown farmland where very few vehicles ever passed by. It seemed to never occur to my parents that there might be any danger out there. Mum just asked me to make sure that I was home in time for tea.

Every two or three days, a milk lorry from Hull collected silver-coloured churns from a stone platform at the bottom of Heigholme Lane. That lane led to a fairly grand country house called Heigholme Hall that was surrounded by trees. It was the very private home of Colonel Wood who was, like my father, a church warden. You only ever saw mustachioed Colonel Wood when he came to church. Looking back, I suppose that he had seen active duty in World War II and he may have witnessed terrible things. Perhaps that is why he was so reclusive and appeared so fierce.

One summer, he generously invited all the Sunday School children to the grounds of Heighholme Hall for a Sunday afternoon picnic and games and that was the only time I ever got to see the place. Though I did not know what it was called, the garden had a "ha-ha" - a kind of sunken boundary wall - frequently used in country house gardens  to prevent intrusion by farm animals without spoiling the view. At that garden party, we repeatedly jumped off it for fun, rolling in the grassy trench below. We also played a strange lawn game called croquet for the first time, bashing wooden balls through white hoops.

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All right. That's enough of that. For now at least, the little memoir experiment is concluded. I doubt that I will be adding two hundred more pages and besides I still have to bring  my "Stanage Edge" poem to the finishing yard.