Unrequited Love At Church Farm Honingham.

A Memory of Honingham.

Samantha was about seventeen when I first met her, she lived at the large house next to the old Church Farm. I remember it was a hot sunny day and I was heaving straw onto the ground from the cart, wheat straw as a bedding for the cattle. I could see her drive and front door over the wall of the paddock, she had huge liquid brown eyes. By now I had a large lump of callus at the base of my right thumb from using the pitch fork so much, I would use the pitch fork for turnips and straw, hay bails and pretty much anything that could be stuck - an old tool of a dying breed of farm worker and once upon a time even used as a weapon of war. I once used it to skewer a rat in the old cow shed. I remember pretending to be totally disinterested, something I did rather too well - thinking (like horse whispering) that this would lure her to me and it seemed to work. This was a year of farming experience prior to my NCA at Plumpton Agricultural College in Sussex. I was staying at the old vicarage in Easton, riding most days, on the vicar's horse and cycling to Tae Kwon Do three times a week near Norwich, a punishing routine even for a young lad. George was my boss and pretty much ran the farm single handed, other than at harvest time, a stocky, good humoured and gentle man he was a tremendous chap and very patient. He lived in one of the cottages, still does I suspect, as I write this, I wish him and his family well. While dreaming of Samantha I forgot to unhitch the hydraulic cable from the tractor and trailer on a few occasions, hydraulic juice squirting all over the place, how I was not sacked I will never know! The farm was a few hundred acres and my jobs included fencing for long hours along little streams; topping sugar beet; stacking hay and de-stacking hay that was rotten, often for hours in pouring rain; bedding down cattle; chain harrowing on an ancient old tractor; helping with the harvesting of potatoes and sugar beet, again on an incredibly old and battered little harvester; feeding the cattle and rounding them up etc; spending hours pulling up weeds by hand in fields of barley and wheat. I would drift into a kind of trance, wind and waving corn eventually making me fall to the ground where I would sleep soundly dreaming of Samantha. Two old men of about 70 would help out on and off, as weather beaten and tough as oaks, they never hurried and never got into a sweat, they did as much and more than George and I combined. In the hottest summer sunshine they would still wear the same heavy great coats 'Keeps the heat out' they would say. They had quite a laugh at my expense on and off, particularly when I backed the long, spiked, rear bail loader into George's best tractor, puncturing all his tyres. On another occasion I nearly took down the roof with the front loader...One day she asked me to kiss her (we were in her parents sitting room one evening), her sister was watching and simply would not go to bed. I did not kiss her and the next day she made it quite clear that she had no intention of speaking to me again. Wherever she is I hope she is happy. Who knows she may read this one day. That one kiss might have changed my life completely, however I would not have it any other way, unless it be to wish for the impossible, to have walked every path.

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