Journey by farm tractor and caravan from London to Sydney in 1953-54 This Memoir is the story of the journey I, my husband Tom and another couple, Joan and Rod Johnson, took in 1953 to 1954 overland from England to Australia in a caravan pulled by a 30 hp farm tractor. The journey, […]
Overnight In Ootacamund “Stop, please…give me your story..I’m with the Ooty paper…a reporter…I need this story…please talk to me…please…..PLEASE” The young reporter ran alongside the tractor, pleading with Rod to slow down and talk to him. Rod was driving. He shouted “ Get away..we’re not stopping…get away from the bloody wheels before I […]
HERBS “Wake , Wake-Robin, All-Good, Sweet- Buckeye. Male-Fern for Tall-Veronica, White-Angel, Lad’s Love is in the garden. Fasten your Bitter-Buttons, Chicken-toe. run Red-Cock’s-Comb through Flea-Bane, Blue Curls, swallow your Butter-and-Eggs, the Simpler’s-Joy – get out to her, then.” “Sweet-Scented-Life-Everlasting, Tall-Veronica” he called, raising his Ragged-Cap ,my Bird-On-The-Wing, Star-Of-The-Earth – how are you?” […]
Ruminating on the question of whether, in my entire life, I have ever actually joined a club I’ld be hard pressed to come up with an answer in the affirmative. I do claim, however, to belong to a group of the world’s people, an exclusive club, whose numbers must surely be miniscule. […]
Here’s a strange little tale. Years ago I banged my leg against the pointed corner of my dish-washer. The wound made a hole in the shin of my left leg. I looked at it, evaluated the wound, gave it a bit of a wash and forgot about it. Some days later the wound started to […]
Raising The Consciousness Of Hardwick……. Many years ago, when the Annual Dowsing Convention was still held in Danville, a group of around twenty dowsers gathered early one Sunday morning at the old Beede Lumber Yard for a trip up Buffalo Mountain. The twenty had been part of a larger group of dowsers , gathered […]
THE HOME GUARD “Don’t forget the key, Don” my mother called from the cozy , eiderdown depths of the bed in which my father, off to a night-time meeting of the British Home Guard, would have preferred to be. The date was July 5th. 1940. We were at war with Germany, and living then in […]
After two months, or thereabouts. when I had made the shack into a home of reasonable comfort and attractiveness, I began to paint again. I had bought canvas and stretchers, and acquired a few more tubes of paint and some additional brushes. I painted the snow scene outside the living room window, realizing just […]
What’s with the rodents this summer? The population of mice , squirrels and chipmunks this season has positively exploded. We live in the country and, naturally, expect them to be streaking about in and around the barns and leaping from beam to beam on the porches but this summer they have been omnipresent, audacious and […]
Technically she was no relation, “Auntie Elsie”, but my Godmother. She lived in a 17th Century farm-house in Ladymead, in the county of Somerset on the Bristol channel in the west of England. Uneven great chunks of flagstone, probably quarried slate from the wilds of nearby Exmoor, lined the floor of her enormous country kitchen. […]
Forty years have gone by since I arrived in Vermont full of vinegar and enthusiasm to live in a “Let The Land Sustain Us” mode. I was really into it. Blessed with a good set of muscles, relative youth and boundless vision, I soon hacked out and planted an enormous garden in what had previously […]
In the early 1970’s an invitation to a summer Sunday party was to flirt with a trip into another dimension. As I was to learn. “Sunshine Cottage” is no more. Wild asters and poplar saplings now grow on the quarter acre patch of land along Route 14 on the way to Woodbury, Vermont. ‘ […]
AFTER TRAVELLING HALF WAY ROUND THE WORLD WE HAD FINALLY ARRIVED AT OUR DESTINATION _ THE ROYAL AGRICULTURAL SHOW IN SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA. WE WERE BROKE, AND NEEDED MONEY FOR A SHIP HOME. “Gunna buy yer wife a parrit?” the Aussie pet-shop owner asked Tom. “Got some bonzer birds ‘ere…whaddyer think a […]
An Evening With Dragi Dragi D.Todorowicz was an enigma. We met him in Zagreb in Croatia, although exactly why and how we met him is lost to memory. What he did for a living, I have no idea. He was tall and slim, athletic, suave, aristocratic-looking and strangely dangerous. He had about him an […]
We were used to the war by the time the bomb landed. We were used to sleeping under the Morrison shelter at night – the big steel table with the rough edges that tore the skin off hands of the unwarned – the table that took up half the floor space of the little kitchen. […]
