Description

A collection of short stories based for the most part on the writer’s experience of growing up and working on a Shropshire estate where his father was head gamekeeper and grandfather managed its home farm. They are of particular interest because they portray everyday life in that part of the British countryside through years which witnessed the beginnings of the momentous social and agrarian upheaval triggered by the Second World War. The writer describes the surge in agricultural mechanisation which has continued to the present day; also farming as practiced before its current reliance on chemical fertilizers and spray chemicals: acreages which used to employ ten men now employ but one. It should be stressed these stories and anecdotes are not an exercise in nostalgia. Instead they are a fractual record of the countryside which the writer knew so intimately, and as such, contain a wealth of interest for many. So great have been the changes over the last seventy five years, it is but small wonder the younger generation struggle even to begin to imagine life as it was at that time.