The pedigree Jerseys were all born on the farm and had never lived anywhere else. We knew from the taste alone which cow the milk came from. I howled as the innocent cows were loaded onto trucks that took them to a farm where nobody knew their names. My sister says this is ‘false memory’, that we were at school when they went. I’m sure I howled when I saw they were no longer there.
The dairy, the milking parlour and the hay barn joined the abandoned chicken houses to create an agricultural ghost town that looked like a photograph by Dorothea Lange. The only things that now grew were broken chairs, old bedsteads and galvanised milk churns, but we still called it a farm. Long after the deeds belonged to people we didn’t know, we called it the ‘home place’.
The farm on my father’s side went before I was born. It was in the Mississippi Delta, but it was never called a plantation, a word now gone with the wind. There were no mint juleps and hoop skirts, only miles of gravel roads, fields of cotton and soybeans, bony mules, incestuous bird dogs, swamps and lazy rivers. My grandfather spent half of his life managing thousands of acres that he had once owned. I never asked him what it felt like to lose your land, but I don’t think it is a ‘false memory’ if I say he was sad.
I didn’t activate my melancholy rural memories until I married a Suffolk farmer. Before then, I reckoned the most significant achievement of my life was getting off the farm and mastering the art of living in cities. For better or for worse, however, the past is imprinted on us in mysterious ways. Before I could tell wheat from barley, I was determined to Save the Farm.
Denne historien er fra December 04, 2024-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra December 04, 2024-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på
Give it some stick
Galloping through the imagination, competitive hobby-horsing is a gymnastic sport on the rise in Britain, discovers Sybilla Hart
Paper escapes
Steven King selects his best travel books of 2024
For love, not money
This year may have marked the end of brag-art’, bought merely to show off one’s wealth. It’s time for a return to looking for connoisseurship, beauty and taste
Mary I: more bruised than bloody
Cast as a sanguinary tyrant, our first Queen Regnant may not deserve her brutal reputation, believes Geoffrey Munn
A love supreme
Art brought together 19th-century Norwich couple Joseph and Emily Stannard, who shared a passion for painting, but their destiny would be dramatically different
Private views
One of the best ways-often the only way-to visit the finest privately owned gardens in the country is by joining an exclusive tour. Non Morris does exactly that
Shhhhhh...
THERE is great delight to be had poring over the front pages of COUNTRY LIFE each week, dreaming of what life would be like in a Scottish castle (so reasonably priced, but do bear in mind the midges) or a townhouse in London’s Eaton Square (worth a king’s ransom, but, oh dear, the traffic) or perhaps that cottage in the Cotswolds (if you don’t mind standing next to Hollywood A-listers in the queue at Daylesford). The estate agent’s particulars will give you details of acreage, proximity to schools and railway stations, but never—no, never—an indication of noise levels.
Mission impossible
Rubble and ruin were all that remained of the early-19th-century Villa Frere and its gardens, planted by the English diplomat John Hookham Frere, until a group of dedicated volunteers came to its rescue. Josephine Tyndale-Biscoe tells the story
When a perfect storm hits
Weather, wars, elections and financial uncertainty all conspired against high-end house sales this year, but there were still some spectacular deals
Give the dog a bone
Man's best friend still needs to eat like its Lupus forebears, believes Jonathan Self, when it's not guarding food, greeting us or destroying our upholstery, of course