Julia Mear met Maya Kaye at the family home where she grew up; Hinkhams Farm, Whitchurch Canonicorum, Dorset. This is Maya’s story.

“I was born in Andover, Hampshire in the summer of 1975 to Peter and Marion Ray. My Mother had grown up in Weymouth, then Bridport and finally Griddleshay Farm in Whitchurch Canonicorum. Her parents had bought the farm so that they could have ponies, which was a passion of my mum’s and still is to this day. In her teens my mum went to the Norland College, Bath, to study to become a nanny but somewhere along the way she met my dad, Peter Ray, who was working on a farm near Andover. They quickly married; I was born and named Maya Rainbow Ray. At the age of almost four I was presented with a little sister, Sasha Sunshine. Our middle names are only unofficial – my mother didn’t actually have the bottle to put them on our birth certificates. Just before my sixth birthday we moved from Hampshire to Castle View in Whitchurch Canonicorum and I started at Charmouth County Primary school. After Castle View we moved down the road to Hinkhams Farm, where my parents still live now.

At heart my parents have always been hippies, our first cat was called Karma for heaven’s sake and my younger brother, Tom does have a real middle name Joshua because Joshu was a Zen wise man! Their idyllic plan was to be as self sufficient as possible. My early childhood memories are of vegetable gardens, warm buckets of milk (often floating with straw and other bits of inedible matter) and our first house cow; called Goldberry, chickens, warm eggs, home-made bread, jam and other delights. Of course, when you are seven your desire is to be like everyone else, so often I bemoaned the fact that our milk didn’t come from a bottle like everyone else’s. Now I would give anything to taste that rich, creamy nectar and be a child again peeping into the parlour or exploring the vegetable garden on a hot summer’s day with dirty knees and fingers sticky with raspberry juice.

It is true isn’t it that childhood is the best time of your life and looking back now you couldn’t have asked for one better than mine. Those long, hot, summer days spent idling the time away were in fact, full of adventure, mischief and above all freedom. Sasha and I had grown up knowing the grandaughter of a woman in the village for what seemed like forever, but one summer we all really clicked and she became more of a third sister than a friend. So began some of the best years of my life. Every school holiday, Gypsy would be sent down to Whitchurch from London to stay with her granny. Together we would set off on our bicycles through the lanes with a bottle of watery, warm orange squash and a squashed picnic and we wouldn’t come home until the evening. We must have looked a real sight because we only had two big bikes; one unfortunate (as the oldest, I usually nominated Sasha as the unfortunate) would be forced to ride on a tiny red and white miniature bicycle designed for a four year old. I can see Sasha now pedalling like crazy trying to keep up and complaining bitterly the whole while. As a threesome we spent hours roaming the fields, the river and the woodlands.

As we got older we embarked on slightly more risqué games such as going to the churchyard at midnight. We used to wait until my parents had gone to sleep and then creep out of the house, meet up with our co-conspirator, Gypsy, and go to the churchyard. Our plan was to run 12 times around a grave to raise the dead but funnily enough, once we actually arrived, it wouldn’t seem quite such a good idea and we would slink off home again to bed. Once Gypsy’s mum overheard our schemes to creep out at night and told us stories of children being taken by adults, a thought I can honestly say had not crossed our minds, and there begins the loss of innocence I suppose. However, I am not sure how I would feel about my own children getting up to such mischief now.

One of my most prevalent memories is of caravans. The farm seemed to be littered with caravans in various states of dilapidation. Caravans let out to holidaymakers, caravans dragged in by family friends, intending to stay for the summer, after which the friends left but the caravans invariably remained. The empty carcasses becoming a den, a hideout or to store a butterfly rescued from a spider’s web with only one wing. The floors slowly rotted into the mud and the walls became entombed in ivy and brambles. In teenage years, Gypsy, Sasha and myself along with other most privileged friends spent nights sleeping in the caravans. One of our favourite caravan games was ‘tombstones’ and involved folding the caravan bed back into its space against the wall. The unsuspecting sleeper would find themselves suspended upside down, crumpled unceremoniously behind the mattress, their muffled cries for help drowned out by our raucous laughter. My father taught me this game as he himself had played it at public school. It is great that my father has been a respected member of the community; Chairman of the Flower Show Committee and on the Parish Council. However, I have memories of him in a different role, being filmed running around the field herding sheep, naked apart from a pair of wellies, as a favour to a friend who was doing a film studies course.

The Five Bells in Whitchurch is a pub that holds a special place in my heart, particularly during the times when Terry, Melanie and Nigel were running it. They used to hold biker’s conventions, Medieval Fayres and an alternative Flower Show with prizes for the most revolting sandwich. Years before, I remember going to the pub with my dad to help out on Skittles night. I felt incredibly privileged and trusted to be able to ‘stick up’ for the men who were playing; Simmy Symonds, George Barnes etc. ‘Let em roll’ they used to mutter if it looked like I would be too hasty in my lunge for the ball.

I now live in Ottery St Mary, Devon with my wonderful husband, Richard, whom I met years before we actually started dating when his parents moved from Coventry to Lyme Regis. I had moved to London with my sister who was studying International History at the LSE. I was having a wonderful time discovering the wonders of the big city. I got a job at Purves and Purves (a very trendy furniture shop on Tottenham Court Road). I didn’t really know anyone but I discovered that Richard lived only a short bus ride away and being starved of company I gave him a ring. He invited himself around for dinner that very night and never really left again. Shortly after we met Richard started working for Ash as their DJ. It meant that he got to have a great adventure going off around the world with them on tour and I got to swan around backstage at loads of cool gigs and parties.

Together we have a seven year old son, Alfie and a four year old daughter, Rosabelle both of whom are wonderful, adorable creatures who constantly provide me with moments of awe and wonder as I watch them transform into little characters in their own right. We moved back down to Ottery St Mary when Alfie was two because we didn’t want to bring up children in London. I wanted my children to have the same country childhood that I had. We still spend a considerable amount of time at the farm in Whitchurch; my dad is an incredibly good cook and my mum is often the life and soul of the party. Even though I have forged a life for myself in Ottery St Mary, my heart lies in Whitchurch and I would love to return but work dictates that we live closer to Exeter at the moment. Although I did my teacher training at Goldsmiths University and taught in a school in South East London for three years, I now work for Connexions in Exeter, helping young people into work or education.

When we return to the farm and I see my children cast aside the Nintendo Games Console or other such gadgetry and run laughing to the old swing hanging askance from the plum tree, or take up a fishing rod and net and head to the pond, it makes my heart sing. My childhood has been idyllic and to know that my children are growing up in the same magical surroundings and are creating fantastic memories of their own that will be so entwined with my own is something special indeed.”

Julia Mear met Charlie Holbrow at his home in Chard, Somerset. A hard working man with an independent spirit, he truly has a marvellous memory for detail. This is part of Charlie’s story.

“I was born in 1923 and brought up in the foothills of Clee Hill in South Shropshire. Before I was six I’d been choked, strangled and almost drowned. As a baby I nearly choked on a crust of bread. Mother was panicking and I was black in the face, but a great Uncle swung me by the legs up and down until out comes the crust and I’m saved. When I was two I got amongst our two milk goats, got their chain wrapped around my neck and, but for Uncle Bert seeing me, I’d have been strangled. Later on I fell out of a tree into a dam and was saved from drowning by a twelve year-old neighbour that I’d been visiting.

I had to leave school at 13 because of the lack of money. Over a weekend I switched from school to agricultural labourer and worked at the 3,000 acre Kinlet Estate nearby, owned by Squire Childs. I worked as a poultry boy for 15 bob a week for a seven-day week. They employed 40 poultry boys and had over 250,000 hens on free range at three farms. I stayed for 18 months but had enough and in 1938 I went to work in the coal mine – Chorley Pit. The pay and hours were better, 17 shillings and 4 pence a week, that’s the equivalent of 85 pence for 5½ days. Chorley shut so I went onto Highley Pit until 1941 then to Blidworth Pit near Mansfield. Blidworth was 864 yards deep and about 2 miles out to the coalface. The air which was full of dust, would nigh on burn your face – it was very hot and dusty. I stayed there about 18 months then moved onto Blaenaven Pit in South Wales (now turned into a museum). If I didn’t like their set up I always quit, I never was one to stay and moan, I’d rather pack up and move on.

I worked in 21 pits in 11 years. I left South Wales after six months and went to Keresley Pit outside Coventry. This didn’t suit me at all – it was 22ft of coal and it wasn’t the job I’d been promised. I ended up in a tribunal. They decided I should leave Coventry within two days and go to Dunsthorpe Pit, South Derbyshire. I said ‘I don’t need two days – give me two hours and I’ll never step in this city again’. I got on a bus right away. When I arrived at Dunsthorpe Pit, the manager sent for me as he’d heard what had happened and asked if I’d come to work or wreck the place – I told him I was a worker. He sent for me again a month later and told me he wished he had 200 more men like me. In 2½ years I missed only two shifts due to dysentery. The wages were double what they were anywhere else – £3 a shift. I worked 6 nights a week. Saturday night I went to bed – I wasn’t a drinker. When I decided to pack up, the manager, Bill Hunsworth, sent for me and asked why I was quitting. I told him I was going to Canada as soon as I could get transport, I wanted a change. He told me if I was ever looking for a job come back to him. He was the best man I ever met in England – fair, friendly and someone who appreciated an honest workman. After the war he was made general manager for Leicestershire and South Derbyshire coalfield. He lies in Ashby-de-la-Zouch graveyard now.

Three times I’ve had my life saved – by a Welshman, an Irishman and a Japanese man. Once when I was working in Yarn Drift, Blaenavon, I was climbing across a loaded conveyor when somebody started the belt and my head got jammed between a big lump of coal and the roof. I thought my time was up until somebody spotted my lamp and stopped it just in time. They had to break the coal lump to get my head free.

Another time I was working nights at Blidworth Pit and my foot got caught and I was being pulled into the conveyor transmission. The belt was travelling at about 4mph and there were steel joints every so often on it. An Irishman heard me shout and had the sense to grab a steel prop and jam it into the roof and the conveyor to stall it. Luckily I wasn’t badly hurt and carried on with the job.

In July 1947 I went out to Canada. I got a job as a logger up the coast – it was dangerous work. I worked with German, Swedish and Ukrainian nationals. One time I was timber felling alone in Eastern Ontario. The snow was 4ft deep and it was cold, in the dead of winter. Somehow I got a tree across both thighs and was pinned down and freezing. I was helpless. I had been there an hour or two when a Japanese fellow came down the trail and managed to save me. I’ve missed death by inches time and time again. I even had two attempts on my life – once in England and once in Canada. In 1955 I left Canada and came back to England; I’d had enough of frost and snow.

I bought a cottage in Worcestershire. I had plenty of money saved as I never drank or smoked. I went timbering. They’d just opened the Sudbrook pulp mill outside Chepstow and I got a contract with them to supply hardwood. I helped to cut the first 500 cord of birch ever put through to see if it would pulp to make a super map paper. It was the first mill to manufacture hardwood. Turned out such a good paper before long there were six across the world in production. I had the rigging, plenty of experience and had bought my own 7-ton Bedford lorry. I had the first Dolmar chainsaw ever to come into this country. I had to wait three months for it to come off the production line. I got the hardwood from local estates, paid them £1 a ton standing and cleared it. The best pulp would fetch £5 a ton at the mill so I had £4 to produce it and deliver it to the mill – it was hard work.

In 1961 I sold the cottage and went down to New Zealand but came back to England in the hard winter of 1963. It was like walking into a refrigerator, nine weeks of frost that started at Christmas right through to March. I went to Cheltenham – mother had a place there. The only job I could get was with Elliot Brothers who supplied fuel in the areas – they had 36 lorries. They were only too pleased to see me wanting a job shovelling coal off the back of lorries. As the weather got better I went cutting down orchards for Alfred Robertson Company – I had plenty of timber work for a couple of years.

In 1971 I moved to Puriton, near Bridgwater in Somerset and worked on site clearing the run for the M5 motorway. After that I moved nearer to Chard and got a job at a sawmill in Tatworth. It had belonged to Bill Day who’d kept the Dolphin pub. He’d won £30,000 on the pools and bought this site at Tatworth and put in a saw mill – he sold it to Halls Timber Company. There were only three of us at the mill. I was there about 18 months or so. I went on holiday in Kent with my Mrs every September when the fruit was ripe. When I came back the mill was burnt down. I made a good move then.

The old Chard station was a Roads Company owned by Colas, handling bitumen. It was a subsidiary of Shell Oil. I took a job there driving a loader. I’d been with them for nine years. The boss said he’d retire me at 60 but I said I was good for another 10 years. But it was their policy to retire us at 60 and they told me I’d be well looked after. I was not a friendly person – I used to fall out with everybody. But they gave me a retirement party at the pub and a sledgehammer with an inscription on it, which cost £35 to do.

In 1983 I continued with my timbering. I had a lorry and went timbering for orchards and had a yard at West Farm in Cudworth until recently, when I had to pack it up. I was working the timber for a big farm with nine acres of woodland. I worked for the old man for 15 years – it was him that encouraged me to go onto the yard to work their timber. The apple orchard was redundant so I ripped it up for them, had plenty of work there. He died and I gave it all up about 18 months ago.

Throughout my eventful working life, I’ve been married three times. I had a son, Adrian, with my first wife Rosemarie and I now live happily with my third wife Diane. The poor old body that has served me so well over many years, in all sorts of situations, has finally decided to pack up. I got a hip gone, bad legs and white finger from the vibrations of all the machines. I’m on my last legs now, after all I’m 86, and this is where I will stay now.”