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In this resume, Jack Hill recalls aspects of his life as a lad on The Gables Farm before the war.
As mentioned somewhere else, the kitchen fire was usually kept alight with chopped wood but sometimes it was topped up with coal from Desford pit. The arrangement was for John Richardson to take the cart and go to Desford after morning milking and collect a ton or so. This always happened when the thrashing rig turned up but also at odd occasions throughout the year.
The job as usual was labour intensive with the lumps being transferred to a barrow for dumping in the coal house,{ an unlit very dark room with the coal heaped at the rear} so breaking up the large lumps was always a hit and miss affair which I sometimes did for the hell of it.
I grew up with the experience of hearing blasting every working day at one o' clock when the granite at Bardon Hill or Stanton was fired for the days spoil. I never had the opportunity to visit the quarry and in fact never saw a blasting till I went to Australia in l994
Almost without a miss there would be a collie dog on the farm kept as a pet for us children. Never did they do any farm work, and in fact I can remember them all being untrained and liable to dash off after cows or horses to the annoyance of John R.
My recollection is that they all tended to suffer from paralysis of the hindquarters and would eventually have to be killed by the Vet. Put down was the phrase always used. I cannot recall names other than Rover. There would also be one or two cats but these didn't seem to have names. I think Connie used to dress them up in dolls' clothes and parade them in a pram.
I was allowed to keep rabbits and was allotted the granary over the potato store but eventually the rabbits took over the granary. I with my dislike of killing anything just allowed the numbers to grow, and as they tended to live a free life within the room, they arranged their own sex life and nests and killings. The latter were the result of a buck taking a dislike to other bucks' babies and biting them in the neck. I would find the babies with their backs arched and in their death throes.
The feeding of the five thousand took up a great deal of my spare time with the search for plantain, clover cabbages and so on. They also had bran feed and this was mixed with tealeaves and some liquid, perhaps tea or water.
With the free love situation, there was always a doe preparing a nest by tearing soft fur from her underside, and the delight of seeing a nest full of tiny babies always made me happy. Soon they would grow used to me and I could sit on the floor with rabbits climbing all over.
The numbers reached 36 and so it was decided one Monday that they should be spirited off to the market in Bosworth. When I arrived home and went as usual to the granary I was shattered to find the
place devoid of life. I can remember being very upset for several days but somehow my Parents didn't think that it was so tragic.
After that, Hollick took me in to Leicester one Saturday and we bought a multi coloured guinea pig in the game market. 'Jimmy' at first lived in a box in the room over the kitchen but then in the summer he was allowed to stay in a covered pen in the orchard. I would go and visit him every evening and sit under the trees, listening to him squeak, and also listen to the whine of the wind in the branches.
However, the Roebuck Inn had an outside yard with a relatively low wall and they acquired a Boxer dog, which used to stand with its forelegs on the wall coping. One afternoon whilst I was at school, the said boxer leapt over the wall and upturned the wire pen and did the dirty on poor Jimmy.
A small burial ceremony was carried out on the remains within the orchard. Come to think of it, all the dogs were buried under the branches of the walnut tree, and for a giant tree it never seemed to produce any walnuts worth eating.
After the trauma of Jimmy, I decided to play safe and so converted the box into an upright bird cage which was also located in the room over the kitchen. The two budgies did very little but sit together on a perch and chirrup, so I soon lost interest in them and they were sold to somebody whose name I didn't know.
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