My Fathers House

A Memory of Fernhill Heath.

I remember my father's house in Station Road, it was called 'Wheatfields' and, as far as I know, had no street number back then. He had made a beautiful garden around it, flowers at the front and an orchard and vegetable patch at the back. When the apple harvest came in there were so many apples that he would put them in crates at the bottom of the driveway just outside the gates, and they were free for anyone to take.

I loved the beautiful countryside and our trips to the bluebell woods, the long walks we took in the wheat fields, the birds and the wild flowers, the red berries on the holly tree in the front garden in autumn, and how wonderful the orchard looked in spring when it was a sea of blossom and fragrance, and filled with the sound of bees working hard. I remember the warm summer evenings and picking daisies from the long green grass in the orchard, collecting wild blackberries and rose hips from the lanes and  watching the snowdrops push themselves up through the winter snow. I remember the white owl that used to visit us, the foxes and badgers and the colour of birds eggs in the nest, the little village post office and the church near the station.

I remember how my father's large American car could only just fit down some of the lane ways and how my mother was always terrified we would meet someone coming the other way, but we never seemed to; and I remember our drives out to a pub called the Pear Tree and its garden full of white roses. I remember my friend Linda who lived over the road, I still have a photo of the two of us together one hot summer's day, splashing about in an old tin bath in the garden, painstakingly filled with buckets of water by my father and mother.
Fernhill Heath was a beautiful, quiet, safe place filled with everything that made it quintessentially English. I do not know what it is like now as when my father died( when I was still a child), my mother took me overseas, and, although I have travelled widely I have never been back, perhaps because I am too afraid of what I might see, sometimes 'progress' is a terrible destroyer of what was fine and beautiful. But something is pulling me back and I would like to walk down Station Road once more and look for an old house with the name of Wheatfields, I do hope that the name is still visible after all these years and that something is left of the wonderful village that lives on in my memory.

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