LIKE Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the brothers Jack and Ray with their wives live side by side in two identical cottages, sharing a vegetable garden. All four look much alike: shortish, squarish, amiable, unhurried, red-cheeked except for Jack, keeping their own counsel but au fait with everything that goes on. All staunch churchgoers; Ray is in the choir and his wife plays the organ, Jack’s a sidesman; they seldom break the routine.
Ray’s wife was working in her garden and we discussed what happens to butterflies when the buddleias are over . . . the peacocks, tortoiseshells and red admirals that suck the buddleia blooms vanish as suddenly as they appear. She thinks they go to the sedums and always grows some, largely for that reason.
Jack and Ray, unmarried then, were living at Woodfolds when we bought it; their father had been first carpenter, then bailiff, for the Oaksey estate, and the tenant of a 60-acre farm. I was told that he possessed the enviable, if hazardous, talent of being able to go to sleep when up a ladder. Manby’s farmhouse has crumbled away into the earth; little remains but a chimney, ivy-smothered, and some derelict sheds.
Thrushes and robins nest among rusty bits of ancient implements and among clotted cobwebs and old rotted manure. A cat used to rear her broods up there and once we saw her leading kittens across the fields, to take up residence among the hay bales in our Dutch barn.
Jack and Ray were still working the farm with horses when we came. They milked by hand . . . old-fashioned red-and-white Shorthorns in a dark, low-raftered cowshed, sitting with their caps back-to-front and heads pressed deep into the flank of the cow, on three-legged stools. No fuss in those days about tuberculin tests, sterilising in the dairy or clean white overalls. Every evening I put a jug on top of the gatepost and next morning retrieved it full of fresh, frothy milk, containing I am sure hundreds of thousands of bacteria for which none of us was ever the worse. The water, whether used for drinking or to wash the dairy or for any other purpose was pumped by hand from a well situated underneath the pig-sties.