Hooptedoodle #264 - The Pilgrimage

Here's a cautionary tale about the recent adventures of an old acquaintance of mine.

Colwyn (pronounced "Colin", in case it matters) has now been retired for some years and, one sunny Saturday morning, when his wife was away on a shopping trip, he suddenly took a fancy to make a sort of personal pilgrimage to the village where he had lived as a young child.

Colwyn's parents have been dead for many years, and his surviving brother is in Australia, so his only association with the place comes from old family photos. Quite excited by this unexpected project, he realised that he'd wanted to do this for years, so he collected his camera and his travel pass, bought himself a pack of fruit pastilles and set off the 70 miles on the bus into darkest Northamptonshire to his birthplace.

He was delighted to revisit the village as an anonymous  tourist. It was a beautiful morning, and the obvious first stop was the house where he had lived. He found it easily - walked straight to it - on a corner in a small council housing scheme. He was pleased that the place was nicely painted, and things were pretty much as he remembered, though there were more cars parked in front gardens, and a lot of satellite dishes.

As he stared at the place where he began what has been a long saga, involving a lot of travel and a very full working and family life, he became aware that a little girl in the garden was watching him.

"Hello," said Colwyn, full of sunshine and goodwill, "I used to live here, once upon a time - when I was your age, this was my garden."

The little girl just stared at him, so he smiled and waved cheerio, and took a few photos of the surroundings before he continued his tour. Next stop was the little park where he had first played football (and later, let it be said, he was a very fair amateur player) and where he and his little mates had played complicated games of tag in the long evenings during those forgotten summer holidays from another century. Great. There was now a rather run-down playground encroaching on one end of the traditional football pitch - round about where they used to put sweaters down for the goalposts. More photos. Of course, there was no football now - in fact there was a sign prohibiting ball games of any sort.

Next pilgrim site was his old primary school. This had been modernised extensively, and there was cricket coaching or something going on, so he didn't hang around for long. This time he didn't bother with photographs, since there was very little he recognised. He set off towards the high street, to see if he could get some lunch, and maybe a beer. On the way he was intercepted by a very large, very young police constable, who asked him could he speak to him for a moment.

Colwyn wondered if the young cop was lost, and wanted directions somewhere, so he put his camera away in his shoulder bag. The policeman grabbed the camera from him, and when Colwyn attempted to hang onto it a second policeman appeared from somewhere, and they bundled him into a patrol car. He was more than a little confused, but he was informed that he was being apprehended in terms of some byelaw or other, and would be taken to the police station (in a neighbouring town) to answer some questions.

Of course you have seen this twist coming for a while, but the little girl's mother had telephoned to report a strange old man approaching her daughter, and the police had turned up and quietly followed this obvious pervert around the sort of haunts you would expect - the park, the primary school - there was even a strange tale that he had attempted to climb into the garden of another house.

Since no-one in the area knew him, Colwyn's wife was brought - very distressed, in a police car - to identify him and give some kind of character reference. Then he was taken home, late in the evening, after being given a stern warning that there must be no repeats of this episode. Apology? - no - of course not. Colwyn says that it took some weeks for his wife to forgive him, though for what he is still unsure.

I think there is a lesson here for all of us. If you ever get an urge to go and find your roots, just give yourself a slap, will you? Don't be so bloody stupid - just switch on the TV like a good fellow, and stay at home - save the police time and inconvenience, and don't frighten all those poor mothers, who have enough to worry about. You can still have the fruit pastilles, but don't offer one to anyone else. 

We'll be watching. 

Vauban Fort - maybe back on again?

This topic has been on and off like the girls' costumes in an old Windmill Theatre revue. Last update was about two years ago - here. 

As discussed before, I am the proud owner of approximately one half of a Vauban fort - it is nominally in 15mm scale (vertically), but the (horizontal) ground scale seems to be about right with my game scale of one-7-inch-hex-equals-200-paces, so you can work out what that might be if you can be bothered. Whatever it is, it looks very presentable and works nicely for my siege games (such as they are). The fort was made and painted by the old Terrain Warehouse operation (henceforth TW) - this fort, by the way, was once described by Henry Hyde as "the Rolls Royce" of fortress kit in this scale, so you have no need merely to accept my word that it is nicely done.

I have had some adventures over recent years, trying to get more parts for it. TW no longer exist, and the rights and moulds for the fortress were sold to another firm; I had a faltering dialogue with them two years ago, and the suggestion was that it might go back into production some time - not definite - but there was a good chance that they could make up some extra pieces for me.

Then, as so often happens, the line went dead. I have recently been thinking about doing some scratch building to augment the fort - the original production did not extend to gates, and there were a few other obvious bits missing, so scratch building had always been somewhere on the agenda.

Well, I am now back in contact with the current owners - it seems they about to set up a new company to concentrate on MDF and resin buildings, and the fort is a high priority.

We've been here before, of course, but that seems like potentially good news - I am asked to keep in touch - when something more definite develops I'll mention it here.

My original dealings with TW included me sending them some sketches of other pieces they could add to the range - so the garrison could get in and out. The aerial photo shows the original TW kit, the action picture (from 2009 or so) includes additional buildings to make up a fortified town.

Anyway - no news really, but the Windmill girls are once again in a "back on" situation.

Hooptedoodle #263 - The Airline and the Krell

I was not personally impacted by the dreadful systems failure which hit British Airways and their customers a few days ago - my heartfelt sympathy is extended to anyone whose holiday was destroyed, or who suffered personal discomfort or inconvenience - all of that goes without saying. I am interested to see that there will be an independent enquiry into what went wrong - I fear that there might just be a whitewash job, or that some poor department head somewhere will be the subject of a token beheading, but in principle I look forward to seeing what they come up with. This is something of a hobbyhorse of mine. Certainly the current official explanation that it was all due to a power surge of some sort seems so laughable that it is equivalent to the old catch-all, "the dog ate my homework", though, naturally, it would be unwise to pre-judge. Already, there is sinister mention of software support having been outsourced to India - erm - right...

There was a professor from Glasgow University on BBC Radio 4 this morning, talking about the boring but rather essential matter of system resilience. He talked a lot of sense - there is not much sense around on the radio at the moment (don't get me started on the Election).

If you will forgive me, I'll plead for two quick timeouts at this point; the first is a link to a post I wrote here almost 5 years ago - The Banks and the Krell - about the increasing scope for catastrophic system failures in business, and the implications for society in general. If you care to check that out, it will save me saying a lot of the same things again. If you do not care to, that's fine too.

The Krell's computer installation in The Forbidden Planet

The second is a short story about a car I used to own. It was a 1995 Mercedes - only Mercedes I ever owned, and it was a great car - not very exciting, but dependable, and built to last. The date is significant, because it was a period when cars were starting to be equipped with automatic sensors and systems which were intended to make life simpler for the motorist, but also meant that the family car was becoming more and more of a mystery to both the owner and the supposed mechanics at his local dealership.

After a while, my Mercedes suddenly started suffering frequently from a flat battery - eventually it was every morning. The dealer replaced the battery (at Mercedes prices, of course), and checked the car over - no problems. Well - not so fast. The battery was flat again the following morning - that's the new battery with the clean new labels on it. The car went back to the dealer, who kept it for two days and returned it with a clean bill of health. Battery was flat again the next day. A terse phone call prompted the offer of another replacement battery under the terms of the warranty.

In desperation I took the car to a proper automotive electrical engineer somewhere near Prestonpans, and within an hour he had identified the problem. The car was fitted with a special sensor, the entire purpose of which was to detect if the electric windows had been left open when the vehicle was locked with the remote key. If it found that any one was open, it automatically switched in the motors which closed the windows. Great idea, eh? Unfortunately, the sensor had become faulty, so that when the car was locked the system incorrectly detected an open window, and attempted to shut it. Since the sensor was faulty, of course, the car was never satisfied that the windows were now closed, and it continued to try to close them continuously until next time it was unlocked. This doesn't mean that the motors were grinding away - the motor would not actually run if there was any resistance (another safety feature), but it would keep checking and trying - silently - and by the next morning this would have consumed enough power to flatten the battery.

The engineer rang the workshop at the Mercedes dealer and discussed the options with them; I could pay £370 + VAT for a replacement system - no other possibilities. In fact there was one other possibility, but I'll get to that.

I talked it through with the engineer. I was probably going to sell the car within a year anyway, and I had never left - nor was I likely to leave - the windows open when I locked the car. If I did, the worst result would be an open window - without the keys, the immobiliser system (Ha!) would prevent anyone pinching the vehicle.

Thus my £370 + VAT would provide a complete solution to a problem which I was unlikely to have. The alternative was simply to remove the fuse from the bit of the system wiring which supplied power to the Windows-Open-When-Locked sensor - the cost of this would be zero, of course, though I might be at risk, however unlikely, of leaving the windows open by mistake. No brainer - I went for the cheaper solution.

There are many lessons like this, but that one stuck in my mind - someone had provided a costly, over-the-top, luxurious solution to a problem which did not seem terribly serious, and - after it became defective - had thereby generated a much more significant operational problem in my use of the car. Something wrong there?

This whole industry expanded at a crazy rate - huge cleverness being applied to provide solutions to problems which might or might not exist, in the holy names of convenience and (the ultimate trump card) safety. My wife's current car knows when it's raining, knows when you need to change gear, knows when it needs to switch on the lights, knows the numbers in the phonebook on her mobile, will give you running statistics on things you never even thought of, has a built-in satellite navigation system, has an intelligent cruise control system which can be set to maintain a minimum distance to the car in front and - of course - can park itself without your assistance. It's wonderful that a piece of everyday technology can do all these things, and some of them are definitely useful, but what's going on here? If my wife's car suddenly stops running, or if the doors decide they are not going to let her get in, she is well and truly stuck. There is no question of opening the bonnet and spraying WD40 on the plug leads, or improvising a temporary fanbelt replacement. She is stuck. All she can do is phone up on her mobile, and get a mechanic with a laptop to come when he can, and diagnose what the problem is.

Righto - our cars are very unlikely to conk out, compared with cars we've had in the past - this is the power of technological progress - but if they do then the degree of well-and-truly-stuckness may be of a different order from what we have seen in the past. Not only has our vehicle let us down, an event which we will not have expected and for which we will not have a back-up plan, but our greatly diminished residual experience of coping with emergencies, of applying flexibility and adaptability, of having contingency margins built into our Plan for Today, the unfamiliarity of having to switch on our own lights and wipers, of getting to Lancaster without having a robot tell us what to do - none of these things is going to be a big help.

To sum up - the technology looks after us wonderfully well, but if anything fails we can be more desperately exposed than we used to be.

Consider the mobile phone networks. Presumably your local (or national) service could be impacted by a power surge (surely not?), or a malware attack - it is even possible for natural events like unaccustomed levels of sunspot activity to cause technology headaches. It could happen. If it does, how many kids will be out of touch - lost somewhere on the way home from school? - how many mothers are going to be running around screaming OMG? - how many calls will not be made to rescue sevices in response to genuine emergencies? - how many online banking transactions will fail because the text message to the mobile with the passcode will not work? - how clever is your Apple Pay app going to be in the supermarket? Does any of us have any idea what we could do, in the event of what might be a fairly routine and low-level failure?

Well - you might, quite possibly - but I know that I don't, and I've thought about it - I used to have to think about things like this in my old job. My 2012 post about the Krell was mostly about the fact that we take these advances for granted, and we very quickly forget what it is they are  doing for us, and what it was that we used to do for ourselves before they arrived. We do not understand how the business which employs us works, because normally we do not need to; we do not know how to spell "laughs out loud" in full, nor how to read a map, because we no longer do things like that - there's no demand for that sort of knowledge.

If your airline of choice has a major systems collapse, and they do not seem even to know what it is, or what caused it, you may not find this reassuring. One day, aircraft may be so complex that only the onboard flight systems know how to fly them - with who knows what level of outside communication with global systems. In a world where, to save money, we are trying to achieve UK passenger trains manned by a single individual, how long will it be before the flight crew on a plane are just there to serve the coffee and make sure the computer is happy? At what stage will progress mean that they are no longer able to land the stupid thing without the technology?

Do you feel lucky, punk?

The English Home Army in the Napoleonic Period

A Yeomanry officer circa 1800 - your homeland is in safe hands

A very pleasant gentleman named Frank got in touch with me by email, to see if I could help him. He and some friends have been exporing the possibility of fighting a Napoleonic-period campaign based in Southern England, following an invasion of some sort.

I asked did he mean the planned French invasion of 1805, and he said possibly, but not necessarily - any old invasion would do. He and his mates are fascinated by what the English home army consisted of - where would regulars be stationed, how much use could be made of the various militia and county yeomanry units - how were they dressed? - how would such an army be organised?

Naturally I haven't a clue. I have seen and read of such wargame campaigns in the past, but the British army usually looks suspiciously like the Waterloo force - the campaign is usually just the Hundred Days or the Peninsular War temporarily transplanted into Dorset or somewhere, which seems pointless.

Part of the appeal, of course, is the scope for painting up all sorts of colourful units of fencibles and suchlike. I used to have a book by Fortescue about the old county lieutenancies in the Napoleonic Wars, but I sold it years ago, and I recall an old Rene North series of colour-it-yourself cards based on yeomanry. I guess there must be standard works on this topic, but I do not know what they might be. Now I think about it, I used to have a rather tatty but complete set of CCP Lawson, and I think there were second-line units in that.

Obviously such a campaign would be dramatically affected by whether the main British Army was absent fighting elsewhere, but the idea of organising a home army to fight off Johnny Foreigner is quite attractive - Frank has plans for buying shedloads of plastics - Strelets British Egypt campaign troops - especially the light cavalry. As alternative history goes, that could be fun.

Anyway, it was kind of him to believe that I was wise enough to be able to help, but I have no idea at all. As they say in Glasgow, not a Scooby. Has anyone been involved in such a campaign, or does anyone know of any recommended books about the yeomanry and volunteer troops? All clues will be most welcome.

I'm sure it doesn't matter at all, but Frank is French, by the way...

Just Another Napoleon Groupie?

I've been poking about, doing some research as background for a forthcoming battle at the headquarters of the shadowy Baron Goya. Actually, "research" is a bit strong - primarily I've been browsing through lots of my old books, because that is the sort of thing I like to do.

The challenge is to find a suitable battle in which to oppose my French army to Goya's and Stryker's combined Austrians. That sounds easy enough, but we don't have any Bavarians or Wurtemburgers, and we do have Italians, so something from the eastern backwaters of 1809 or 1813 would fit the bill nicely - why, I even have a good supply of Spanish buildings, which can be transported to Italy at the drop of a cappello. 

Battle of Raab, 1809 - note that big granary building at the farm - hmmm - anyone
got a 15mm version of the very similar building at Essling...?

Good so far - the current proposal is to go for the Battle of Raab, 1809. My first discovery was that it isn't so easy to find very much about Raab; I managed to track down enough in the combined works of John Gill, George Nafziger, Scott Bowden and Professor WK Pedia to get a decent OOB drafted up, and enough of a narrative to give a context. I don't really do scenarios, as discussed before...

One of the obvious sources is Napoleon and the Archduke Charles, Francis Loraine Petre's famous book about the 1809 Danube campaign. A little disappointing, for once, in that there wasn't a lot about Raab, but also there was a bit of vitriol in the author's dismissal of Eugène de Beauharnais which surprised me. To set the context a little, for those unfamiliar (as I am) with Raab, Eugène commanded an army in Italy (and eventually, at Raab, in Hungary) against a secondary Austrian force commanded by the Archduke John. 

Now I am a convinced fan of FLP. One of my most enjoyable early experiences of what hobbyists like to think of as military history was in about 1978 or so. I spent a couple of months working my way through Petre's book about the 1813 campaign - on the No.16 bus to and from work! - initially a library book, but someone, alas, had borrowed the maps from the library book, so after a few weeks I bought my own, only to find that the maps, though present, were impossible to unfold on a bus, and almost impossible to read once you had.

No matter - the procedure was that I carried a notebook and pencil, did much scribbling on the bus, and in the evening before bedtime I would follow the action on a big wall-map and with Esposito and Elting's big red atlas. That was in the days before magnetic whiteboards - I had a big cork noticeboard, a mighty map and lots of coloured pins, and I had all sorts of detailed jottings of OOBs - who was where, and when, and who commanded them. The ultimate army roster. Fantastic - I had a terrific time. I've never quite managed to get so completely absorbed in a campaign subsequently, but I did buy four more of FLP's Napoleonic books, and became a big fan.

F Loraine Petre

I found his books easy to follow, clearly expressed, and carrying just enough military nuts and bolts to satisfy the hobby nerd, without threatening a brain haemorrhage. Everything seemed scholastically sound - why, he had even read a lot of foreign sources, which was not common for British writers at that time! It was clear from the old photograph of FLP in uniform on the back cover of the books that he had been a soldier. That's all I knew. His five "Napoleon" volumes - the campaigns of 1806 against Prussia (yellow cover), 1807 in Poland (orange), 1809 on the Danube (green), 1813 in Germany (blue) and 1814 in France (brown) were all consistent with his personal interests commencing after Austerlitz, and were written pretty much in chronological order, but the sequence seemed to imply some obvious gaps - no volumes on Spain, or Russia, or the 100 Days, for example. However, his five published volumes first appeared from 1907 to 1914, by which time the public's appetite for military writings might have waned - or maybe he became too old, or discovered darts and strong ale - who knows?

In the 1809 (green, that's right) volume, I found the following, which is interesting enough to reproduce in full:

This Italian campaign between Eugène and John is of little interest[,] for neither of the commanders possessed any great military abilities, and the whole thing was a series of blunders on both sides.

Erm - pardon? Fair enough, I suppose, but we can't deny that the campaign did take place, and the resulting casualties and political ramifications and misery were not necessarily anulled on account of FLP's lack of enthusiasm. Personally I can think of few things more interesting than a campaign fought between incompetents - we should note that historians have not used the same argument to ignore the First English Civil War, nor the exploits of the British Expeditionary Force in France. However, it is FLP's book, so if he wishes to give Eugène minimal space we can't really complain.

I believe this glossing-over is observable very commonly - general histories of the Napoleonic Wars are often very short of substance in those theatres in which Napoleon was not present. You can find this effect in the aforementioned Esposito and Elting atlas, even dear old David Chandler is guilty of averting his gaze a little when the Corsican hero leaves centre stage.

Anyway, no problem - I have found plenty of material for our battle, but I was left with a few unanswered questions about F Loraine Petre, so I did a little research on him, too. Not a lot to find, really. He was born in Aberdeenshire in 1852, descended from minor nobility, he was educated at Oscott College, became a lawyer and worked for the Colonial Civil Service in India from 1880, retiring as governor of Allahabad in 1900. At this point, as the result of his own personal interests, he became a writer of military history. He died in 1925.

So he was not an academic nor a soldier - he was a time-served diplomatic administrator turned amateur historian, who had the time and the money to indulge his interests, and - don't get me wrong here - he did a damned fine job, too. I wouldn't be without his books for anything, but I suddenly get a little suspicion about why those three campaigns are absent from his catalogue - Napoleon didn't do so well in those, did he...?

Most unfair, I know. I have to say it was not easy to get any useful information on Petre at all - if anyone knows a little more, I'd be delighted to be put right. In the meantime, I shall just nod smugly and mark him down as yet another Napoleon groupie, and he is, let's face it, in some excellent company.

Hooptedoodle #262 - Owls of Derision - plus one more from the Small World Dept

Topic 1: Lately we've been puzzled to hear owls hooting during the day in the wood behind our house - even experienced countrymen like Dod the Gardener are puzzled by such behaviour. Well, we've now seen one in the garden - a couple of visits. The Contesse is still working to get a better photo - this is what she's managed to date.

Online experts suggest that it is a Little Owl, though we had thought it might be a Short-Eared Owl, more renowned for their daylight hunting. In the upper picture, you will notice that the blackbird sitting close by does not appear to feel at all threatened.

Topic 2: I only relate this story because it involves a couple of surprising coincidences - the subject matter may be of little interest, so I shall deal with it as quickly as might be decent.

My view on coincidences is boringly downbeat - they interest me, but I believe that the proportion of truly unlikely events in our lives is about as small as you would expect; when something unusual happens, however, we remember it clearly, so that our perception is distorted - we think remarkable things happen more often than they do. Get to the story, Foy...

Well, I've recently been trying to sort out my mp3 collection of the old BBC radio Goon Shows from the 1950s - many of the official published compilations of these shows were edited to drop the musical interludes, but most of mine are intact - sometimes a bit frayed, admittedly, but all the shows are complete. The Goon Shows had music of a good standard - apart from Wally Stott and the BBC's own orchestra, they also featured Ray Ellington's Quartet, and then there was Max Geldray, the virtuoso jazz harmonica player. All a bit dated now, maybe, but good stuff - and, anyway, nothing could be more dated than the Goons, dear boy.

Ray Ellington had a hot little band - on hearing them again, I was interested to note that his electric guitarist was exceptionally good - in fact he sounded most un-British, to be unkind about it. A little research revealed that he was Lauderic Caton, a Trinidadian, one of the leading pioneers of electric guitar on the English jazz scene in the years after WW2. He was friendly with, and a major influence on, a couple of the other lads of note of the day - especially Dave Goldberg and Pete Chilver. He was also noted for being a skilled luthier, and produced good-quality converted electric guitars in the days when it was impossible to obtain modern American instruments in the UK.

Pete Chilver circa 1948 - with electric guitar produced by Lauderic Caton

Goldberg I knew of - a Liverpudlian - but Chilver was a new name, so I read on. He shared a flat in London with Goldberg for a while, was very highly regarded - even by visiting American players - and played with (amongst others) the Ted Heath band and, for a while, Ray Ellington. Then, it seems, he married the sister of the girl singer in Heath's band (are you taking careful notes here? - there will be a test at the end), moved to North Berwick (which is where I live!) in 1950, retired from playing professionally, and thereafter managed his wife's family's hotel, the Westerdunes (now long gone). He also opened the West End Jazz Club, in Shandwick Place, Edinburgh - a place which I vaguely remember, though it was no longer a jazz club by the time I went there. Pete died in 2008, in Edinburgh.

Remarkable - so here's an important English jazz guitarist from the 1940s that I had never heard of, and he even became a prominent resident in my own neck of the woods! Only thing to do was email my old chum and former associate Hamish, for many years a hero and stalwart of the Scottish jazz scene, who has now also retired to the North Berwick area. Sorry to bother him, but did he know anything about Pete Chilver? - and I included some background details.

Hamish mailed back to say yes, he did know Pete a little - latterly Pete and his wife Norma retired and moved to Barnton Avenue, in Edinburgh. Hamish had been to his house there.

It seems that the handyman who now helps Hamish's wife around the house and garden used to work for Mrs Chilver - who is now in a care home, I understand - and only recently he had to dump a load of old acetate 78rpm masters of recordings from Pete's professional days [ah - drat]. Furthermore, the very night before he replied to my mail, Hamish had been a dinner guest at Westerdunes House - for many years converted into apartments, but now restored to its original state. Prior to this he had never heard of the place, never been there, and until my note was unaware of the connection with Chilver.

Westerdunes House

Now that is a bit of a long shot, I think. It looks a nice place - must have been a swanky hotel - healthier than the London clubs - a smart move by Old Pete? In passing, his friend Goldberg died of a drug overdose in the 1960s, when he was only 43. The Devil's music, your Honour.

Hooptedoodle #261 - Nellie

This is another farm at another time, but the farm I used to visit had an old
Ferguson tractor - I even drove it a few times. Two gears - one to go along
the road, one to work on the fields. Interestingly, you had to stop to
change gear!

 More ancient history - I last met Nellie nearly 50 years ago (there's a song in there somewhere!), but I was discussing her with the Contesse recently, and thought she might make for an interesting Hooptedoodle - at least I can be confident that I shall enjoy writing it.

Toward the end of my time at university (in Edinburgh) I was "going out" (did we really used to say things like that?) with the young lady who eventually became my first wife. She lived and worked in Edinburgh, but she came from the Borders country - her dad was a farmer. Eventually, as was the protocol in them days, it became necessary for me to visit the Borders to make the acquaintance of her parents, and so a trip on the SMT bus (to Earlston) was undertaken, and I duly presented myself for inspection.

I was completely out of my comfort zone - I was a townie, born and raised - an Englishman, what is more. Her father was nervous about my being from Liverpool - I think he expected me to steal the wheels from his car.

The trip went well enough - everyone was very kind and tolerated my almost total lack of social graces - but it was a real culture shock. The farm was out in the wilds, a few miles from Greenlaw, in Berwickshire - it was so quiet that they had to wake me up for breakfast, or I would have slept through most of each day. The food was a lot better than the Students' Union, as you might imagine, and the Old Man took me to the sheep sales at Kelso Market on the Saturday. Interesting, but all very unfamiliar, for me - like a trip to the moon.

I also had to get the hang of the fact that the locals would consider carefully what they were going to say, and then say it - very slowly. They were, after all, used to weighty matters such as whether it would be dry enough for the harvest in September, whether the shift in market prices suggested that next year there should be less barley and more turnips - that sort of stuff. I, on the other hand, was accustomed to speaking very rapidly, without any thought at all, so communication was something of a problem - I really had to work at it.

In fact, these are the workers' cottages from the farm in my story - I think that
Hector and Beth and Old Nellie lived in the second one along. There was an old
smithy just behind these cottages, but I guess it fell down decades ago.

This reached its most extreme form when I met Nellie, a lady from another age. Nellie lived in one of the farm cottages, with her daughter Beth, and Beth's husband, Hector Small, who was officially the tractor man but pretty much ran the whole farm singlehanded. Nellie was enormous - about 6 feet tall, and built like the proverbial brick outhouse - she must have been in her mid 70s, but she could still lift a sack of barley that I would have struggled with (I saw her in action when I came to help at the harvest). She had hands like millstones, her face was bright red - weatherbeaten, like a trawlerman's - and her teeth were terrifying - she didn't have many, and they were irregularly positioned, but what they lacked in numbers they made up in size - they were enormous - like horse's teeth. If I appear to be painting a deliberately unattractive picture, that's not the case - this is what she looked like. At harvest time, her standard working attire included men's overalls, tied with string below the knee, Nicky Tam style, to keep the mice out, and a man's flat cap, worn backwards. Scary.

This is an 1884 painting of Berwickshire farm workers - I'm sure it is, but
 I understand that the weird sun-bonnet is what is known as an East
Lothian Ugly, so these may be incomers!

Nellie and I really couldn't understand each other at all - not a word - but I didn't see a lot of her. Because of her age she only worked outdoors at busy times of the year; otherwise she helped the farmer's wife in the back kitchen. The house was early Victorian, and the layout was typical for a farmhouse of that period - the back kitchen, the dairy, the passage that led past the room which was called the kitchen (which was really the main living room, but was also where the cooking was done, on a massive range) to the hallway, these were all separate from the family rooms - and had no carpets, no fireplaces. Also the two servants' bedrooms up the back stairs - these houses dated from an age when the womenfolk who worked on the farm would perform manual work when it was the season, but otherwise would do domestic service in the farmhouse. Nellie used to keep out of sight when there were visitors, even wheel-tappers from Liverpool.

Workers near Earlston, Berwickshire, sometime before WW1 - those look more
like the traditional Berwickshire bonnet. Naturally this is long before any
experience of mine, but Nellie must have been a young girl around this time - this
is the culture she came from. We are always about - what? - two handshakes from history?

She spent her entire life working on the land. I'm not sure when the Bondager tradition actually died out in the Border country, but Nellie seemed like the last of a breed (the Bondagers are a worthy subject for a separate book of their own, but you will be relieved to learn that I am not an expert). She had never been to school - she must have spent her childhood moving between farms as the seasonal work dictated. She could not read. She knew everything there was to know about planting cabbages, and how to look after sick lambs, but little else. She used sometimes to travel to Kelso (10 miles away) in Hector's car; she had visited Berwick on Tweed (maybe 20 miles away) a few times, but the last occasion had been years before; she had never been to Edinburgh (40 miles away), though she knew of the place. Every year, when she took her holiday, she packed up an old cardboard suitcase and walked - yes, that's walked - to the village of Gordon, maybe 8 miles, and stayed a week with her unmarried sister.

The wonder of it all is that, in Hector's cottage, there was the first serious colour TV I had ever seen. It seemed enormous (this in the days when TV screens still had round corners), and Nellie was delighted with it. This medieval peasant woman who had never read a newspaper (and could hardly understand the radio) used to sit and watch not only the world news, but also the Martini adverts and the travel programmes, with glimpses of sophisticated living that she must never even have heard of. I still feel giddy when I try to imagine what on earth she thought she was looking at.

The farm was sold off years ago. Nellie must have been dead now for almost half a century; her kind has disappeared. The automation of farming and the better pay and conditions offered by jobs in the textile mills in the Tweeddale towns - all these things changed the economics and the lifestyles of the area. One legacy is the last vestige of a particular housing problem for the local authority; they are dying out, but there are still a good few elderly people who worked all their lives on farms, in tied cottages. When the last family member with a farming job moved off to the town in search of better things, the old folks were often left with nowhere to live. Once they have died off, that will be the end of an age.