Old Farming Tales of the Fens: By Leslie 'Bill' Read of Sutton

ISBN-13: 9781540505484 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 98 str.

Rod Read; Wendy (Read) Ramsell

Opis

Description: Early last century my old man was born to a tough hardworking Fen farmer, instructed in local ways he spent his life among similar rough old boys up and down the fields and tracks of an isolated small community now blown away by modernity, mechanisation and the Siberian east winds. Retyping these tales my saintly sister took down by hand in the 1980s has deepened my relationship with him in a way that never took place while he lived. "People are strange" as Jim Morrison sang to my generation while the Doors pounded away, but it is even stranger learning a whole lot more about how your own Dad was, and how observant, many years after he departed this life. Tolstoy famously said in his novel Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Our father was no Tolstoy, it is clear from the tales he told he was from the other end of the literary scale; and our mother was no Anna Karenina either. But as childhoods go, the six of us never doubted most of the time we were happy as children are meant to be. Music, games and laughter abounded. It is my hope some of this joy, which depended so heavily on our father's gentle farmer's nature - and even rural wisdom - comes through in these wry observational sketches. These are local tales of sometimes daft goings on but of the oral tradition of their own time and place, a time now past, ones he wished and hoped would "make readers smile" just as he had been entertained by such often silly events in their day. So he told my sister Wendy, and by the wonders of self-publishing so we pass them on to you, may you smile at others and their lives as recorded in these short sketches. "Let us now praise famous men" we sang at my school, here we mark those without illustrious pedigree or achievement and then let the mists of time and the winds of change obscure and erase the details of how things and people used to be once upon a time in the hamlet of Sutton Gault.

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