Like climate change and fossil fuels, ‘sustainability’ has become a buzzword that is so liberally used by environmentalists, politicians and economists, that we are in danger of forgetting what it means. The central idea of sustainability is to find a balance between exploitation and renewal of the world’s resources. In forestry, it is the principle to never cut down more trees in a forest than can grow back. With projected population rises suggesting a huge increase in demand for food in the next fifty years, understanding the need for real sustainability is more important than ever. Agricultural scientists and researchers in Germany have developed indicators and models to analyse the sustainability of agricultural enterprises, and have created computer software to help agribusiness operate in a ‘sound environmental way’. However, looking at the animals and chatting to farmers at our traditional country shows this year, it is easy to see why the vision of small farming feeding local communities, and worldwide sustainability in agriculture and food, can sometimes be poles apart. Small farmers know, and have known for generations, that to get the best from their land they have to look after it – they don’t need computer software to tell them that. Whilst large scale agriculture may be important to feed an expanding population in the future, the role for small farmers, smallholdings and even allotment schemes is vital to local communities. It would be a mistake to push these aside to focus only on the bigger picture.
September in the Garden 2009
The last gasp of summer or the first breath of autumn? September keeps you guessing as so much depends on the weather and how benign it turns out to be. Of course the legendary, and these days almost mythical, ‘Indian Summer’ can make this month a real bonus.
Whatever the weather, autumn flowering bulbs lend a fresh fillip to planting schemes. You can’t beat sheets of ivy leaved cyclamen with their pretty white / pink flowers appearing before their marbled leaves. In a wet summer they will actually start flowering as early as August but they get into their stride right about now. Although they are supposed to favour shady conditions the ones in my garden seem to have forgotten that and pop up all over the place; gravel paths, the lawn, cracks in the paving – they’re not fussy.
What else is coming into it’s own now? The late flowering, ‘orange peel’, clematis, such as ‘Bill MacKenzie’, is a particular joy. Jaunty little nodding flowers, like pixie bells, smother an established plant and stay blooming for many weeks. Being a late flowering clematis, that is one which flowers after midsummer’s day, pruning is a cinch as they can be chopped back to just a framework of stems in the spring. They flower on the shoots which grow in the current year so even a drastic chop back will not stop them from flowering. For this reason they are great planted where they can scramble through a spring flowering shrub, festooning it with flowers when otherwise the space would be dead.
On the herbaceous front Japanese anemones are reliable perfomers, as are the novae-angliae (New England) varieties of aster. The latter can be floppy so-and-so’s, demanding timely staking. I know all the advice is to get your pea-sticks in nice and early, i.e. May, but I’m no good at timekeeping and shoving in a few emergency twigs, just before flowering, is not a hanging offence. Asters do best in full sun but the obliging, self supporting, Japanese anemones will tolerate some shade and thrive in full sun if the soil is relatively moisture retentive.
For soils with that rare combination of constant moisture and full sun we return to the realm of bulbs and, in this case, corms; Schizostylis coccinea has many forms from deepest red to palest pink and white. Stunning when they are given the conditions they enjoy; all leaves and no flowers when they are either too shady or too dry.
Bringing it back to bulbs reminds me that it’s now that I really should be starting to plant spring flowering bulbs. Start planting them in the order that they flower in the spring so that the earliest flowering ones, early crocus come to mind, have enough time to get some roots down before producing the flower stems. Tulips are famously planted late, in November, to reduce the likelihood of ‘tulip fire’ (a debilitating infection) so don’t worry about those yet.
One timely task which I actually completed last month, but which it’s not too late to do now, is sowing ‘Yellow Rattle’ seed into grassland to reduce the grass’s vigour before introducing wildflowers. It’s a bit complex, this ‘Rattle’ business, because the plant, a naturally occurring species in traditional hay meadows, is semi-parasitic on grass species and as such drains energy out of the bullying grasses and gives the more delicate wildflowers a chance to compete. It’s not as simple as that, of course, because the ‘Yellow Rattle’ seed needs to be sown while fresh and it can only be gathered during a small window of opportunity when the hay meadows are cut around July. As long as it is kept in favourable conditions it will remain viable for a few months but it must be introduced into its new sward before the onset of winter.
As with many seeds ‘Rattle’ requires a period of cold weather, ‘winter chilling’ or ‘vernalisation’, before it can germinate in the spring. That’s why it must be sown fairly soon after collection. I read a report on the internet which stated that there wasn’t any difference in germination between seed sown onto short mown grass and that sown into a broken up soil surface. I didn’t quite trust that so I compromised with a combination of brutal mowing, using a metal bladed strimmer, raking off the cut grass and then scattering the ‘Rattle’ over this surface before raking roughly in with a soil rake.
I’ve sown ‘inoculation’ patches of random circles in the grass, rather than broadcast sowing the complete meadow, because to do the whole area is beyond me without special machinery. With luck the seed will germinate in the spring, parasitize the grass and grow to flower before ripening seed, during July, which is spread around when the long grass is cut and dried as part of the haymaking process.
The grass in the ‘inoculation’ circles needs to be mown, in the absence of trained sheep, right up until germination in the spring so I’ll have what appears to be an elaborate series of crop circles to enjoy for the next six months or so. What fun! I love experimenting with this gardening lark.
Mibuna, Mizuna etc.
As the summer draws to a close, bare earth begins to appear in the vegetable garden, and we are always keen to keep as much of it as possible green with growth.
Apart from garlic, over-wintering onions and broad beans, which you plant in October, you may like to take a chance on growing some winter salads outdoors. Many are best sown in August, but if the weather is mild, here are some crops to try:
Mizuna is the fastest growing plant outdoors, with juicy, mild flavoured leaves. Leaves grow fast and you can decide whether to pick them large or small, which depends partly on your spacing. Like most oriental cabbage leaves, it will flower in March or April, and the flower head is tasty too.
Pak choi is famous with all stir fry addicts, but on a cut and come again basis is a delicious salad leaf. It is adored by slugs, and not frost hardy, but if you sow under fleece or a tree you may get a decent crop within six weeks before they get eaten.
Tatsoi is similar but smaller than pak choi, and slightly hardier. It is a mainstay of our winter salads, and a prolific producer in warmer spells.
Rocket is a favourite winter leaf of mine. Wild rocket has a stronger flavour, salad rocket has larger leaves. Keep picking the ever smaller leaves into April as it rises to flower with pretty white flowers.
Mustards add a bit of heat to the salad bowl, the smaller the leaf you pick, the milder the flavour. Variety ‘Green in Snow’ is a hardy variety.
American land cress may get going if sown early in September, and is a perfectly hardy plant which produces plenty of mildly mustardy leaves in an attractive rosette on an 8″ spacing.
With all these plants, the wider your spacing, the bigger the leaves on each plant. If they are kept warm under fleece, they should grow stronger. And if you can sow under the shelter of a tree or fleece or, best of all, in a greenhouse or cold frame, then the greater the yield. Yields will be lowest in December and January, but will pick up logarithmically in early spring.
You can sow a packet of mixed oriental leaves if you don’t mind what you get, and may have some nice surprises. Most of these packets have a mixture of the ones above, and perhaps one or two more. A flick through some of the seed catalogues will show just how many new varieties there are coming on to the market in response to everyone wanting greens in the long winter months.
Although it is already late to be planting out of doors, you have nothing to lose, and may be lucky to have regular salads through the winter.
He Made Them High and Lowly…
I was a choirboy and bell ringer in our village church, but when our venerable old priest retired he was replaced by a younger man. I found the new Vicar’s sermons boring, as they were rather like some politician’s speeches, full of words and no content, mainly consisting of the repetition of “Paaarh” (Power). When I started work, studying for a qualification was a contractual requirement and I used the three evening classes each week as an excuse to stay at home on Sunday to complete the homework. The Vicar asked my Father why I was no longer attending and when told that I was studying he asked why and Father replied with the old cliché “to better himself”. The Vicar retorted that I should remember the words of the hymn, implying “knowing my place”. Hardly likely to make me return to the fold! He obviously was unaware of Samuel Smiles, who published “Self-Help” in the mid 1800s. The Vicar was later promoted to another living (as they used to say – perhaps promoted beyond his competence!) and we heard little more about him.
In the past people often not only knew their place, they had no expectation of changing it. In the village we had several large houses, each occupied by a single elderly spinster, with perhaps a maidservant “living in”. If we went to one of the houses on an errand, the door was opened by the maid, dressed in black, with lace edged pinafore and mob cap – she knew her place and so did we when we encountered the lady of the house. But “knowing one’s place” goes back to time immemorial. I was given an excellent book last Christmas, The Land of Lettice Sweetapple, by Peter Fowler and Ian Blackwell. It describes the archaeology and history of West Overton in Wiltshire, on the Marlborough Downs, not far from Avebury. (Lettice Sweetapple does not really appear until the last chapter). We have no documentary evidence about the people living there before the Romans arrived, but some hierarchy must have existed for the building of Avebury and the large burial chambers of the Neolithic period. Fowler and Blackwell suggest that the Romans forced the local population to build a fort and then build their roads, as slaves. During the later stages of their occupation some locals became farm owners and others had to work for them, the produce being passed on to the Romans. Then came the Saxons and about 630 AD they became Christian, so the original locals had to provide free labour and pay rent to a new lord and also pay the priests too. The Church marked out and owned estates on land which had originally belonged to everyone. The Normans required new stone churches to be built by the local populace.
In the mid twelfth century the Knights Templar were imposed as absentee landlords, planning a new village. When they left, the economy began to collapse, coinciding with poor harvests and then there was plague, in the 1350s. By the middle of the 16th century land was taken over by the Crown, with Lords of the Manor as deputies, but the peasants still worked at the ‘bottom of the heap’. Quarrying and brick making commenced, with more labour required. Around 1800 Lettice Sweetapple appears, renting and cultivating a number of scattered land strips, but in 1802 rents increased, creating difficulties for the villagers. In 1818 a local landowner bought out some of their land and enclosed it. The villagers could no longer collect firewood freely and Lettice ended her life old and poor.
Here, there was a bread riot in Bridport in 1816 because the poor could not afford to buy it and in 1865-66 the Children’s Employment Commission reported that (in Bridport) “turners were boys or girls who might begin work at six but were on average 8 – 14 years old. Wages were from 1s 9d to 2s 6d per week, often for a working day of 6am to 8pm. In winter time…spinners fastened small lanterns to their bodies whilst the turners, who did not require light, often sat in darkness in the sheds.”
Bonny Sartin has told us of the plight of the Dorset Labourer. No wonder they turned to poaching or smuggling to help feed their families. In the 1830s Tolpuddle farmers promised to pay their labourers 10s (50p) a week, but then reduced them to 8, then 7s. Local labourers decided to form a trade union and we all know the result – the “Tolpuddle Martyrs” were taken to court by Squire Frampton and deported.
In historical novels we often find a rather different, one sided view of life. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion they all go to Lyme in Mr Musgrove’s coach and Charles’s curricle. Other characters include Captain Wentworth and Lady Russell. The book covers from 1760 to 1810 and their servants do not deserve a mention, so plenty of “high“, but no “lowly”!
Bridport History Society will learn about life in Lyme Regis, both high and lowly, in the late 17th century from the will and inventory of Sarah Bowdidge, relating to an early coffee house and Post Office. Dr Judith Ford will talk about “Mrs Bowdidge’s Coffee House” on Tuesday 8th September at 2.30 pm in the Main Hall of Bridport United Church. Visitors welcome £2, including tea and biscuits. Details from 01308 488034 or 456876.
Cecil Amor, Chairman, Bridport History Society, telephone 01308 456876.
Ema Pop
Some years ago Julia Mear worked for the Woodruff family at their home in Offwell, East Devon. It was a busy household with four lively young children. Just after the revolution in 1990 Sue and David had travelled to Romania and managed, with a degree of tenacity, to successfully adopt two small babies, Ana and Alex. It therefore came as little surprise to Julia when in 2000 she met Ema, another addition to the Woodruff family, who had just arrived from Romania. Though Ema has only just turned twenty, her life is already a rich tapestry. This is her story.
‘When I arrived in England at the age of eleven I really thought I was entering a ‘brave new world.’ With the invaluable support of Sue and David Woodruff, and aided by the funding from a generous academic scholarship, I came from Romania to start school in Devon and to live with the Woodruff family. Life is so different at home in Romania, living in a city, my parents have never owned a car and I certainly had never travelled by plane. Coming to the West Country felt a million miles from the Transylvanian city of Cluj-Napoca where I was born and brought up.
When I go back to visit my parents and my own brother, Andrei, I see a changing world. The fragile economy wavers and unemployment is high. Like many thousands more, my mother is forced to work abroad as a chef to support the family, as my father is unemployed. The effects of the recession are not just felt here and in the USA as the media sometimes portrays.
My parents recall the days of the communist regime when food was rationed and there were virtually no opportunities to travel. They can remember, as a young married couple, practising a dance to be performed with fellow workers to welcome Ceausescu on a visit to the city. My mother particularly likes to return to her village, Parduren, which means ‘edge of the forest’, and is situated in the hills outside Cluj. Cut off from the city when the snow lays thick in the winter, little has changed in the village since my mother’s childhood. The small houses with their patch of land where they mostly grow vegetables, now have electricity, though there are generally no bathrooms.
Many young Romanians travel to other countries to seek their fortune. There is a very popular green lotto competition where a winning ticket wins a visa to America. The ‘brain drain’ of the young and able from Romania seems inevitable until opportunities to stay at home are better and the endemic corruption ceases. However home will always be home for me. As I step off the plane to visit my family there is always huge excitement. There will never be anything as good as the love of your family and some real home cooking.
In 2007 I realised a dream and gained a place at Newnham College, Cambridge to read Modern languages. When you read this I will have just arrived in Buenos Aires to study for one year at The University of Buenos Aires in Argentina prior to returning for my final year at Cambridge.
From a very young age I have always been interested in different cultures and languages. I now speak five languages fluently and I have just started to learn Japanese, which is proving a real challenge. With the absence of formal classes and textbooks when I was growing up as a child in Romania, I used to watch the foreign language channels on TV, and I tried to learn the words by ear. After the fall of communism when Ceausescu was executed with his wife Elena on Christmas Day 1989, the television channels were no longer controlled by the Communists with their constant propaganda. The networks were flooded with foreign language channels, films and soap operas.
I became fascinated, particularly with Spanish and Latin-American culture. Buenos Aires is such a vibrant city. I love the buzz, I love the colours and I love the smell. It is like I imagine Paris might have been fifty years ago but with no boundaries. I have a healthy ‘passion for fashion’ especially shoes. Teetering heels are commonplace here in Buenos Aires which seems incongruous against the poverty of the bare footed street children. Excess sits beside poverty. Gold Rolls Royce cars travel beside old bangers done up mostly with bits of tin and string.
Though I am often away, it is always lovely to come back to Summerdown and the Woodruff family. When I studied English I was introduced to the work of Thomas Hardy. Hardy often alluded to the fact that though life may carry on at a frenetic pace around us, the beauty of West Dorset remains steadfast. In my few quieter moments I reflect that wherever I am in the world and wherever I lay down my head, places I love, like Lambert’s Castle, will always be there.
My ‘English brother and sisters’, as they have become, and I, are all beginning, as we move on from being teenagers, to go our separate ways. However, on the rare occasions that we all manage to come back home at the same time, we all want to walk, to talk and to laugh together at the places we have all come to love, like Stonebarrow or Golden Cap or just around the fields at Summerdown.
My life might appear quite eventful but so are the lives of my family. Sue and David are nearing the end of a contemporary cob and thatch build at Summerdown, the main work being done by Julia’s brother-in-law David Joyce. Though we are giving Sue and David a bit of grief likening the house to a ‘Hobbit House’ and question why they would want to build out of what essentially is mud and straw, it is actually a fantastic example of strong design and beauty.
Tom (pictured with all of us above) is studying at Nottingham University. For the last two years he has spent the summer working in the USA for a charity funded by the late Paul Newman that gives terminally ill children the chance to have the holiday of a lifetime. This year Tom completed the London Marathon for the charity. We are all hopelessly proud of him.
Alex is training to be a plumber – a great extrovert, we have a lively friendship. Ana, despite being absolutely tiny is excelling in the equine world and Amy is a great sportswoman who seems to face all challenges with her customary humour and determination.
One day I hope I will be able to support my parents and family in Romania. It must have been very hard for them to let go when I came to England at such a young age. The opportunity to go to Cambridge was amazing; it is a very cosmopolitan city. From initially being very shy, I have become more outgoing with what many would consider a rather debatable taste in fashion; mostly hunted out in thrift shop corners.
My life is building up like a jigsaw puzzle and I already have some solid corner pieces. One is my family at home and my home country of Romania. The other is the Woodruff family, Summerdown and the West Country. Who knows what the other pieces of the jigsaw will be made up from but I know that the places and the people I love will always be there. As Hardy says in his poem, In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’
…Yonder a maid and her wight
Go whispering by:
War’s annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.’
Derek Stevens 09/09
During the war our small village of Rousdon had a searchlight battery to the west, anti aircraft guns and mine fields on the cliffs to the south and a Royal Air Force signals establishment to the east where a caravan site exists today. Tall radio masts and interconnecting wires warned that it was a place not to be talked about. We befriended a Welsh airman from here who would turn up to do the garden and repair broken parts of the chicken runs which had fallen into disrepair since granddad had died. We had no fresh water supply, except for a ten gallon milk churn dropped of by Ron Carter who made the rounds each day picking up the milk from surrounding farms in the morning and delivering coal on the same lorry in the afternoon, so it became a habit for us to take a bottle with us wherever we went to bring back fresh water from other people’s taps.
One of our neighbours was Mr Cook, the gamekeeper of Stedcombe estate. He lived down a lane which led along a small valley through a spinney, past a barn alongside a pool where we children would catch freshwater shrimps. It was here Mr Cook had his rogues gallery. This consisted of a line of wire stretched between two posts from which was suspended dead magpies, crows, weasels, stoats, sparrow hawks and other birds of prey. This was a warning to all other similar creatures who posed a threat to the estate’s supply of game. The attitude of landowners and country sportsman in those days was pretty heartless towards any creature considered a threat to their sport. Game fishing conservation groups paid a bounty of 2s 6p on each head of a cormorant presented to them.
Taffy, for that was the name we had given our Welsh airman friend, and I set off one Sunday morning to visit Mr Cook and as we walked through the estate fencing alongside the spinney a disturbed animal suddenly crashed out from within the undergrowth into our path. It was a wonderful young stag. Having leapt over the rails of the fencing on one side it faltered as it was confronted with the rails in the opposite side. I remember running towards it with my bottle. I turned for support from my Welsh friend but he was running in the other direction. I suppose he had never seen such an animal in Cardiff. The stag by this time had gathered its wits and with a bound was over the fence and pranced wonderfully over a field, just like one of those young stags in ‘Bambi’, and disappeared into the tree line. We walked on to gamekeeper’s cottage and I excitedly told Mr Cook about it all and he told me that if I had knocked it on the head with my bottle and brought it on to the cottage he would have given me sixpence.
I remember that animal vividly, it was much larger than a roe deer and was surely a red deer stag. Could it have come from the deer park of Shute house, the historic home of the Bonvilles and Poles? At the end of the war the house was in use as a school for girls. In her book “The Story of Shute” published in 1955, headmistress, Marion Bridie, writes “During the recent war, labour being short, the landowner sought to give up the keeping of the animals because of the constant need for the mending of the palisades to prevent them from escaping and making for the hills.” So, perhaps the chap I saw that day was an escapee from Shute. On the other hand a huntsman I was talking to recently suggests it could have been from farther away. Single stags from Red deer herds have been known to roam far away from their herds in Exmoor or the Quantocks in search of hinds, one was flushed out in recent times in Gittisham near Honiton.
Despite the apparent pressures being suffered by certain local wildlife it did seem evident that, with most guns being overseas and being aimed at the enemy, populations of some species were expanding. I remember the seasonal experience of seeing wide skeins of wild geese flying along the course of the river Axe, not to be seen so often today. I remember one alarming evening when walking over a stubble field in the light of a full moon the whole field seemed to erupt as I disturbed a mighty flock of wild duck. There were so many of them they blocked out the face and the light of the moon. Momentarily frightening it was a fantastic sight, and they made quite a memorable racket too.
Shute woods run along the crest of the hill which lies opposite the old deer park and runs down the far side to Kilmington village. At the time of the war a grand plantation of Scots Fir grew there and the late Tom Reed, a great countryman, woodsman and well known thatcher told me about his wartime labour in the sawpits of Shute Woods. Early in the morning he would start work with his father, Tom being the underdog in the pit his father being the top dog. They were cutting out 60 foot lengths of Scots Fir timber 18 inches by 18 inches square which were then sent off to Devonport dockyards. After a break at lunchtime they would work on until father would stop and pull out his fob chain and look at his watch. As Tom brushed off a layer of accumulated sawdust from the afternoon’s work his father would announce “Nearly 6 o’clock, I reckon we can go on for another couple of hours.” and so they would.
There was one occasion, Tom remembered, “When we finished sawing one evening and went on to put in a couple of gateposts in the moonlight.”
It was one of Tom’s not too distant relations who told me that fierce wartime restrictions had forced them to partake in a bit of petty larceny in order to continue with important wartime business. Whilst a hospitable lady of the village of Dalwood was entertaining American soldiers in her cottage with tea and cakes two young village lads were outside relieving the parked Jeep’s petrol tank of US Government property. “Well, us couldn’t get no petrol, could us!’” he explained.
Up Front 08/09
Food waste has been in the news for a number of years and we’ve seen many initiatives to help cut down the huge amount that we throw away. In the UK, the ‘Love Food Hate Waste’ campaign, launched in 2007, encourages consumers to shop and cook sensibly. According to Tristram Stuart in his recently published book Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, whilst retailers and manufacturers waste millions of tonnes of food every year, consumers waste a further 4.1 million tonnes. Last month Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, launched an initiative to convert London’s food waste into eco-fuel, and just recently North Yorkshire County Council approved a project to create a facility to turn kitchen left-overs into green energy. Whilst we can all do our bit to stop food waste and support local initiatives, some people worry about what local councils might do to help combat the problem. It’s not that long ago since we heard that some councils had dust carts fitted with mini computers to record recycling offences. Now, recent news suggests that almost 100 councils have admitted to secretly taking rubbish and examining it, to see how much is not being recycled. Some councils said that, although the searches were undertaken covertly, they only sought to accurately record people’s habits to help plans with waste collection. Whilst I can see the benefit of separate food waste collection I pity any council employee tasked with the job of sifting through our food waste to see what could have been composted.
Derek Stevens 08/09
The first German prisoners of war I saw were with a platoon of British soldiers relaxing for a break and a Woodbine cigarette just up the road from our house. One of the soldiers told me that the job of the POWs was to go ahead of the marching patrol and set up a pretend ambush. Being brimful of anti-German sentiment, as you were in those wartime days, I felt this to be a bit dangerous for our soldiers and excitedly quizzed my Tommy friend about those two Huns. He suddenly alarmed me by shouting across to one of the Germans saying “Hey Fritz, little matey here wants to know how Adolph’s getting on”. The German beckoned to me with a crooked finger saying “Kommen sie hier”. I scarpered off down the road as fast as my 9-year old legs could take me, much to the great merriment of the soldiers.
Captured Germans at the beginning of the war, mostly Luftwaffe and U-boat crews, were shipped across the Atlantic to North America, as it was feared that large numbers of POWs encamped in the UK would provide a mightily useful contingent of German servicemen in the event of a successful invasion by the Nazis.
After D-Day, and with the growing success of the allied progress through Europe towards Germany, the number of POWs entering Britain grew to such an extent that the number of camps built to contain them grew from the original 2 to 600.
The numbers of Italian POWs increased dramatically after the collapse of their forces in North Africa. There were so many that the amount captured was reported back to England by acreage covered by the containment pens, rather than a head count.
The use of Italian POWs from the sudden influx on British farms caused great alarm among the senior members of the Women’s Land Army. A cautionary letter was sent to all members of the WLA pointing out that although we would wish to think that the treatment of these POWs would be similar to kindliness we hope are being extended to our forces in similar circumstances, caution must be exercised if one finds oneself working alongside Italian servicemen in the hayfield.
Rules of the Geneva Convention specified that prisoners of war could not be forced to work, they could; however, volunteer to do suitable work if they wished. The majority of POWs opted for work preferring to do so rather than hang about kicking the dust from the floor of prison pens. It was estimated that at one time 25% of Britain’s workforce comprised POWs, 22,000 in the building trade, 169,000 in agriculture.
There was some resentment among the British at the fact that another ruling of the Geneva Convention was that POWs should be given the same ration allowance of food as British troops. This meant that POWs were getting a larger ration of cheese than British civilians. This was also a matter of resentment among the French when it was found that captured Germans were receiving the same rations as American GIs. In the midst of the surrounding turmoil of the Battle of Normandy there was very little food to be had for the civilian population. It should be mentioned here that in 1943 surprising reports were reaching Fleet Street that British POWs were being approached by German civilians begging for food.
German POWs began to be repatriated in 1946. The last being members of the Waffen SS, an organization deemed to be criminal by the Nuremberg War Crime Tribunal, were not repatriated until 1949.
After VE Day restrictions on movement were relaxed for POWs. Like some French POWs during the Napoleonic wars they became a feature of local life in some parts of Britain. Many friendships were formed, Christmas dinners shared and children delighted with wooden toys carved on behalf of Santa Claus. Many of those toys and carvings are cherished to this day.
In 1946 a memorable Christmas service was held in the Honiton Catholic church of the Holy Family. German POWs had gone to great pains to construct a replica of the stable of Bethlehem. Carols were sung by a German choir for half an hour before the celebration of Mass which was then sung by a mixed congregation of English, Scotch, Irish, Spanish, French, Polish and German Catholics. Finally the service ended with the Poles singing some of their traditional carols. The congregation was so large the main doors of the church had to remain open to allow those outside to be present.
Similar Christmas services must have been celebrated throughout Britain at that time. In Burton Bradstock 48 German POWs marched from their hostel to the Congregational church led by their Lutheran Chaplain, the Rev. Helmut Spieth. They sang ‘Silent Night’, and joined with the congregation in other carols. After the service, members of the men’s club at the church entertained the prisoners in the Church Hall with refreshments, and each man was given a gift by the members, who were all British ex- servicemen
Mrs. Valerie Watkins recalls Otto who lived and worked at the Lawrence family’s farm at Andrewshayes in Dalwood when she was a schoolgirl. She still has a small panel of wood worked and finely decorated with hot poker work. It reads, in German “North, South, East, West, home is where one finds the best”. He happily found that his family had survived the war and eventually returned to Germany keeping contact with the Lawrence family for many Christmases thereafter.
Otto had a soldier colleague, Werner, who worked on another Dalwood farm nearby. One day Werner was to hear that his wife had formed a strong friendship with a Scottish soldier of the occupying forces in Germany. Pulling his wedding ring off his finger he threw it with fury into the long grass of the field he was working in. Werner had already suffered the grim experience of hearing that his twin brother had been killed on the Russian front. Eventually he was repatriated back to Germany where he married his widowed sister-in-law.
Many thousands of POWs opted to stay in Britain, especially as their homes in Germany had become overtaken by the Soviet Empire. They became designated as Displaced Persons. One such DP, Henry Thoennissen, domiciled himself in East Devon. Remembered by many for his hard work, sometimes seen making his concrete blocks in the freezing cold and pouring rain, he is still hale and hearty at 89 years of age and living in retirement having established the local Axminster business of Westcrete Precast Concrete Ltd.
We’re all going on a summer holiday again (thanks Cliff!)
Despite me writing in last month’s magazine of how much better it is to stay at home this summer, our recent appalling UK weather throughout July has persuaded me otherwise. So, it’s time for the whole family to jet off on a cheapo late holiday deal to a probably polluted part of the Mediterranean with at least (hopefully) a sunnier beach than Chesil. I say ‘whole family’ because this includes my son and his IPod, Uncle Norman’s medical kit (with pill factory and 12 different types of suntan lotion) and Aunt Sarah with her three sets of false teeth. What a joy it’s been to plan this particular summer holiday… endless arguments about where to go, what might be available at this late stage and whether we can go back to where we all went in 2002? The answer to that one is a resounding ‘NON’. Although the boys liked the French farm and liked the French family very much and especially liked the French farmer’s rather attractive daughters (perhaps a little too much for comfort), all I can remember from that time were the torrential downpours, daily sunstroke and screaming grandchildren, wasp stings and sodden socks hanging out to dry.
So it’s off to somewhere else. The last month has seen some brilliant planning on my part: four weeks of keen anticipation as I looked at online brochures and photos of nice families smiling and waving for joy as they relax by sun drenched pools. No doubt they all look happy because, due to a bit of digital photo editing, the nearby car breakers yard and pig farm have been successfully airbrushed out. Either that or they’re happy because they’re leaving rather than arriving.
However, I have persevered and booked it all, armed with the realistic fatalism that perhaps the reason this particular holiday is still available so late in July is because nobody else wants to go there. (‘Beautiful view and you really don’t notice the 200 metre tall wind turbines rotating happily behind the car park. Unfortunately, the hotel is not responsible for any headaches caused by the resulting low frequency sounds’).
I have even prepared individual maps, tourist guides and timetables and have emailed all family members about what to bring (disinfectant hospital hand-spray, water purifying tablets, phone charger, jellyfish repellent etc). All of this may still come to nought amid scenes of gloom, wailing and despair as yet another French Traffic Controllers’ strike brings forth queues for the loos and vouchers for overnight blankets at Bristol airport. Instead of a nice steak & frites under a palm tree with a glass of vino, it’ll be six quid for the airport’s reconstituted ham sandwich (“Sorry dear but ham’s off – how about our Bristol Special? – organic coleslaw and aubergine ciabatta, only £9.99…”) while sitting under the disturbingly blank flight departure screens with a plastic mug of lukewarm lucozade.
Why do I bother? Why go to all this trouble and get everyone excited only to find that the hotel we’re going to hasn’t yet been fully built and there’s a dead cat floating in the hotel swimming pool. Everything’s blocked – from the loo in our room to the grid locked roads jammed with holiday traffic…
I am predicting the following things may happen this August:
(a) Two of our children will go down with colds shortly before take-off. Upon arrival in Spain/France/Scotland (suitcases in Dortmund), immigration officials will declare our family a ‘swine-flu’ epidemic threat and cart us all off to a nice quarantined hospital where we will be attended upon by nice doctors wearing head-to-toe decontamination suits and NASA Apollo 11 style helmets. Our holiday scenery will consist of Italian landscapes of the airport surroundings and runway, viewed from behind our own airtight sanitised glass screen. Perhaps I will get a better class of sterilised continental ciabatta to eat, but I’m not banking on it.
(b) Aunt Sarah will complain every morning about the cleanliness (or lack thereof) of her hotel shower and room. After the hotel has changed her room three times and been as helpful as it is possible to be, she’ll still be grumpy and will cause an embarrassing moment when she falsely accuses the hotel staff of stealing a 5 euro note from her room. She will then have to move to the Ritz at four times the price and not talk to me until Christmas (I should be so lucky). Something like this always happens. And we always swear afterwards never to go on holiday with her EVER AGAIN. And yet we always relent and include her the following year. Why does this happen?
(c) Due to the strange climatic events caused by global warming, any country we go to will have gale force winds, a hurricane and be unseasonably cold with frost on the beach. The sea will be unswimmable owing to an outbreak of great white shark attacks and the pool will be covered with a thin layer of ice (with the as yet unremoved dead cat just below the surface). The weather in South West Britain will – on the other hand – be brilliant. Tropical breezes and beautifully balmy sunny days at 30 degrees centigrade will attract everyone sensible enough to remain at home. If only I had listened to myself from a month ago…
Watering
Good watering is a precise art and one worth mastering, as the right amount of water makes a big difference to crop growth. Above all, avoid over-watering, especially on germinating seeds and seedlings. Factors to consider are: how warm is it, what is your soil, and what plant are you watering?
How warm is it? Generally August is the warmest moth of the year, and a fortnight without rain does call for some watering. Even so, in a sunny August the nights can dive to 6 degrees after being 25 degrees in the day. A cloudy week often gives a warmer average temperature than a sunny one, and is very good for most crops, as we saw last year.
We have all seen how much more plants grow after rain than after being watered. It is humid air they most like, as it eases their transpiration. So even a slight drizzle, which doesn’t even wet the soil, counts for a lot with the plant. Windy weather is bad news all round, as it puts the plant under strain, and evaporates water from the soil.
What is your soil? In the summer, half of soil water loss is upwards by evaporation. Whatever your soil, a thick layer of mulch will help your soil retain moisture, as well as feeding your plants.
Not digging will reduce the speed water drains away downwards after rain, when so much goes down the big cracks you have made. This was noticeable this spring, when we had little rain. It is much easier to get a good germination if you don’t rotavate. Neither seed nor rain will disappear down cracks in the soil.
What are you watering? Established plants should be encouraged to get their roots working hard, and not watered too often. In a healthy soil, roots develop a symbiotic relationship with mycorrhizae. These are fungi that form long strands in the soil, feeding the plant with water and nutrients in return for feed. In this way the roots reach much further than you think, and water is being extracted from every corner of your soil.
The leaves of all plants capture the dew and hold the moisture in their leaves which, together with the fact that when they fully cover the soil, reduces evaporation from it.
Some crops need more water than others. Celeriac and courgette like moist soil. In the driest of dry spells, my 3 courgette plants, on 4 square metres of soil, will never get more than a gallon of water. Carrots growing in my clay soil often split if there is heavy rain after a dry spell, so I usually water them lightly after a dry week.
In my greenhouse I now water my tomatoes and cucumbers every other day. They have a thick layer of manure on top of the soil to help hold the moisture in. When it is dry and hot, I will use up to 3 gallons of water in my 12’ x 8’ greenhouse. If it is wet outside, and the air is humid, I cut this down by half.
Seedlings do not have their roots deep and will appreciate gentle watering. So often I see people watering from afar with a hosepipe, which will blast most seeds out of the ground, and bruise small seedlings. The soil really isn’t made to get an inch of water in 3 seconds, and doesn’t like it. Water gently, keeping the spout of the watering can as close to the ground as possible. This is particularly true if watering newly sown seeds, heavy irregular watering will easily wash them down a crack, or drown them. Bad germination is often over-watering. Seeds need air as well as water. It is best to water the soil well before sowing the seed, and from then on merely moisten the soil just enough to stop it cracking.
Don’t over water! I prefer a watering can to a hose or sprinkler. People with sprinkler systems often get trigger happy. I used to have one and left it on overnight by mistake, which is wasteful and bad for both the soil, the plants and the environment. Water in the morning if you have any slugs, so that the surface will dry off in the day before slug breakfast time.
So, the message is not to be wasteful, your plants don’t like it.
