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Derbyshire Born By John Smith |
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Reviewed In The Nottingham Evening Post & Online 19th July 2008 |
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FARM BOY LEARNED TO LOVE THE SMELLS
OF STEAM John Smith, a farmer's son from the Derbyshire village of Newton, near Tibshelf, was 15 when he landed a job as a junior clerk at British Rail's London Midland Region offices in Middle Furlong Road, Nottingham. To reach work in time meant leaving before 7am, cycling three miles to the station and then catching the Nottingham train. Young John did not get home until after 7.30pm and he also worked half days on Saturdays. But he soon became absorbed in the job, the people around him and the great locomotives that worked the lines around Nottingham. In his new book, Derbyshire Born... Farm Boy to Financier, he writes evocatively about the smells of the railway days in the late 1950s. "There is no smoke without fire and no steam without smoke, and smoke in an enclosed space such as Victoria Station is smelly," he wrote. "Perhaps it was the frugal practice of making the working shirt last a few days by changing only the collar and only having a bath once a week that made people a bit smelly. "Working horses and ponies were plentiful and so were their droppings. "All manor of working machinery was not wholly fuel-efficient and belching fumes were common place." Steam soon worked its magic on John. "I started to appreciate the engines that hauled the great loads and sometimes I wandered through the massive motive power sheds to get close to these fantastic examples of engineering." John also writes evocatively about boyhood days on his father's farm, offering a gritty portrayal of rural middle England as it was. "The countryside today is empty, handed over to crops and machinery. "But it was not always so. People walked to work; walked to take the air; walked to play in the fields with children; walked for pleasure. Before the grey Ferguson 35 tractor appeared, there were two working horses, Violet and Daisy. John remembers them as "huge, warm, hairy and plodding friends." "Hairy because of the flowing mane that had to be hung on to for grim death once I was lifted on to that enormous high back. "Hairy too because of my slipping in the mud and then being galloped over without a scratch. "So, here we are in this magical wonderland. Wild flowers, trees, hedgerows, uphill walks home, horses, milking the cows and spreading the muck and bringing in the crops and no thought of incarceration at school. "But it had to come and did come as certain as a fifth birthday with angel cake and jelly." John describes threshing day - the biggest day of the farming calendar - and remembers haying as a magical time. "This joy though was always tempered in my mind by the worry of whether, once we got started, there would be enough dry days strung together to allow the hay to form without damage from rain. "Without hay to feed the cows during the winter (turnips and kale and cabbage being only supplements), there would be little or no milk and with no milk my dad had no income. "Perhaps my business brain was forming. My dad saw no such need for urgency, pre-planning and preparation." "He continued to scratch a living for a further 35 years from 35 acres of undulating poor coal-infested soil until the day he died, having just collected the eggs." John, who now lives at Egmanton, near Tuxford, spent most of his working life in the world of accountancy and finance. But clearly his home roots are very precious to him and this book, a derivative of John's full length autobiography, Violets, published in 2006, is likely to revive memories for many readers. Derbyshire Born... Farm Boy to Financier. |
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