87 And What Can I Remember
George Pickard, illustrated by Julia Matcham
A ratcatcher sleeping it off by the roadside, Miss Mercy Guilbert winning the pig in a raffle, rustic drinkers with “delermtremons”… You are taken back to a rural childhood in the 1870s/1880s.
87 And What Can I Remember is a record of George Pickard’s early memories, written shortly before he died in 1960. There is no question mark in the title — George regarded punctuation as optional, spelling an opportunity for creativity. He was the sixth child of a Bedfordshire railwayman and worked on local farms from the age of ten. His writing is direct and unselfconscious, giving a shrewd, affectionate portrait of the countryside, characters and conditions of the time.
Home was an isolated railway lodge, swarming with brothers and sisters, and young George found many distractions on his three–mile walk to school. There were trees to climb and in the brook were “several kinds of fish and plenty of eels, moorhens and kingfishers”. Still, he managed to master the basic skills sufficiently to read the daily paper aloud to his illiterate father and grasp the burning issues of the day. “I became a politician. It was the Irish Home Rule that was on. Joey Chamberling spoilt it. And he spoilt Joseph Arch’s work with his three acres and a cow.”
Work on the farms was unremitting. The day started at four in the morning and went on until eight in the evening but there is no sense of injustice. No health and safety regulations either. When George falls into a claypit and is soaked, he comments philosophically, “Did they put a gaurd? No. There were plenty of boys.” The men and boys supplemented their diets by using brick traps to catch birds, which they would dress with onion and parsley.
But it is the pleasures that are remembered most vividly: listening to a nightingale, sliding on ponds, riding a penny-farthing bicycle along the railway. And local characters: Lively, a former sheep stealer with an iron hook instead of a hand; the woman who tried to kill her husband; Charles, who silences a Primrose Dame with an account down to the last halfpenny of how he spends his wages. Life is never dull. There’s a fight with the village policeman, a horsebox careers down the railway, a hot-air balloon escapes its moorings, village Christmas parties round off the year.
Illustrated by George’s granddaughter, artist and printmaker Julia Matcham.
| cover | hardback | |
| dimensions | 170x120mm, 80 pp, 30 b&w drawings | |
| price | £12.95 (list) | £8.50 (website) |
| ISBN | 1 902173 082 | |