Bonzer Words!: Penketh
...The cuckoo called and when in season there were mushrooms for the picking. The soaring song of the lark was ever with us and swallows and swifts glided and swooped; Willy Wagtails perched on the barn roof and thrushes and blackbirds nested in the orchard, whilst snowdrops, violets, wild roses and 'conkers' helped to define the seasons....
Peggy Blakeley tells of an idyllic childhood.
Peggy writes for Bonzer! magazine. Please visit www.bonzer.org.au
'Penketh'—the farm in the Fylde area of West Lancashire where I was born, was way off the beaten track, or, as a dialect saying has it, it was 'in t'back o' beyond where they shoe sheep wi' tripe'.
It was a dairy farm of about 60–70 acres, bordered on the south by the River Ribble and about two miles from the tiny rural village of Warton.
In those days, fields were surrounded by hedges and ditches, which sometimes were overlooked by weeping willows or rustling poplars. Blackberries and elderberries flourished among the hedgerows; marsh marigolds and mayflowers grew by the brook where tiddlers swam and bulrushes stood tall at the edge of the pond in the Top Field.
The cuckoo called and when in season there were mushrooms for the picking. The soaring song of the lark was ever with us and swallows and swifts glided and swooped; Willy Wagtails perched on the barn roof and thrushes and blackbirds nested in the orchard, whilst snowdrops, violets, wild roses and 'conkers' helped to define the seasons.
Altogether, a long-gone organic idyll?
The livestock on the farm consisted of a herd of fifty pedigree Friesian cattle— and a bull; three horses, Nelly, Peggie and Auld Dick, and up the yard was a pigsty with a few pigs—some of which became our breakfast bacon!
There were about a hundred hen cabins (where the hens roamed free) and once-of-a-day, a small flock of sheep—including my two pet lambs, Sammy-Baa and Tizzy-Baa.
Near the Ribble foreshore there was a gravel pit which brought in additional income, and some of OUR gravel was used in alterations to Blackpool Tower— (such is fame!)
Across the Back Field stood Beach Cottage, a farm property and home to my grandparents; I had three brothers, two of whom worked on the farm with my father, and at least one labourer was also employed as was a servant girl or 'skivvy' who helped my mother in the house. However, on a day in May 1940 there came about a “happening” which transformed the lives of my family forever.
I was away at College at that time so I have relied on family (and other peoples' memories) for some of the sequence of events that led to the ending of 'The Way We Were'.
© Peggy Blakeley
