Last Post in the Hardy Country

John Hiscox RIP

‘Arr, two teats bain’t enough for ‘e, ‘e gotter ‘ave twelve!’ Recalling John’s warm voice saying that takes me straight back to Somerset; he was the married dairy-man talking about another neighbour, a younger man who worked every hour God gave him with his pigs, after he had done a dairy round in the morning, and to John’s disgust never went out at night. Not that John, and Hilary his wife, didn’t work very hard, rearing five children on the sixty acres owned by a limestone quarry of which he had inherited the tenancy.

A day at the sea-side was all the holiday they got, like the one when we all went down to Weymouth on the train from Frome; Hilary was wearing hot-pants and John bought a top hat bearing the message ‘Down With Hot Pants’. I often used to wander up the lane past his farm browsing our herd of goats on the long acre; later he said to me ‘When I were in a good mood, I would say to myself Why that’s the life! When I were in a bad mood, I would say There goes that darned lazy hippy again!’  He was always up for fun and they were happy days, but there was another dark side to him as well.

I think I got to understand him better one evening when I was helping him with the hay. As the last trailer-load pulled away, he said ‘Come over and have a look at this then!’  You had to go to the very edge of the field to see down into the vast quarry, like a sudden vision of Mordor. ‘A girt cancer eating up the land!’ was John’s comment. It was taking about an acre a year, though admittedly the landlord did find some more land a bit further away to make up for it.

The story that we heard, as the years after we left went by, got darker. Maybe someone will make a novel of it one day, a kind of post-script to the work of Thomas Hardy. Learned commentators of a sociological disposition might chunter on about the final demise of the old Wessex and its family farms. It does seem as if something besides John has passed away.

These days it is fashionable to speak of this person's story and that person's story, of my truth and your truth; yet there remains the hope of some final distillation, in which whatever real goodness, truth and beauty there is in every story will be reconciled, combined and crowned with immortality. If this be so, John's love of his family and of the land will be in there!