Timms Tales

David Timms has lived in the family farm in Illston on the Hill all his life. David remembers his childhood and some of the memorable characters he encountered on the farm.

I was born on 12th October 1942. Dad said he could remember it because they were carrying beans in a little carry well, the old method used then, of loading the plants by hand onto a farm cart, making a stack in the corner of the field. Later in the year the grain would be parted from the plant by a threshing machine brought in by the contractors, John Holman. This local man was an outstandingly strong man and it was reputed hat he’d held up two twelve stone sacks of corn with a Land Girl sitting on top of the second! I have seen him pick up a fifty six pound steel weight and use it for a hammer as if it was precisely that – a hammer!

My first encounter with this man was when I was a very young child was that he wanted to introduce me to a nest of young mice which he had cupped in his massive hands. Later I prided myself that I could run and I think it was on that day that I started my serious training!

My earliest memory was helping my Mum plant seed potatoes when I was about four years old. I milked my first cow when was seven, by hand of course.

My father was thirty six and my mother thirty eight years of age when I was born. What with double summer time, the war, managing with German and Italian prisoners of war, (because farm men had gone to the war), growing corn, potatoes, swedes and other crops, milking cows and the fact that they had not had a good night’s sleep for the first two years of my life – no wonder they were tired. They became very fond of the prisoners of war and I can just remember Joseon on his way back to camp getting something caught in the front wheel of a bicycle and going over the handle bars and being killed. Everybody to man, woman and child who knew him was very sad indeed, so quickly had people become fond of him. Some prisons stayed on and became farmers in their own right, and very successful ones too.

Not all workers were to the manner born in farm work. Bert Neal, who came from Burton Overy on his bike two and half miles to work for Dad was working with some POW’s and was in charge of doing some seasonal work urgently and so fed up with the lack of progress that he told them if they handled their guns like they did their tools it was no wonder they were there.

Bert would not come into the house to eat but ate his bread and cheese and the soup provided by Grandma in the harness room where I would join him to keep him company. He referred to me as the Young Boss. People once came out of the pub and stopped him on his way home from work and asked, “Did you see so-and-so with so-and-so’s wife in a car on your way Bert?” “I saw them all right”, he told Dad, “But all I was going to get out of it was a thick ear or a black eye, so I said nothing.

My Dad had an accident when he was eighteen as the seat snapped off the mowing machine and he fell on to the hard road with such force that severe bruising led to osteoarthritis at the early age of thirty six.

By the time I was seven he could just about put one foot in front of another so he could not milk cows by hand. One incident I recall led to the milking machine being installed. We employed three men, but one was a trouble maker in a very underhand way. This resulted in the other two having a fight in the dairy and blood being splattered over the walls. My Dad immediately sacked all three, although he later re-instated the one he felt was the innocent party. I well remember my Mum and me praying that he would. After this fight took place I was sitting on a bale of straw in the waggon hovel crying, when my Dad came and found me... “\What are we going to do?” I wailed. He reassured me that we would somehow manage. I can’t remember the details, but part of it was having a milking machine installed. David Timms

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