The Daisy Field

 

“The centuries have come and gone and so have the many shepherd families that used to call me home.   All around me the moorland hills, now quiet and deserted, were once abuzz with the men, women and children living in this isolated spot.   Once I was the centre of their lives.  Now I am a ruin.  But my old stone walls still echo with their voices.  I am a home with a story to tell. ”

I am #hoaroaktalking

Not far from me – about half a mile away and down by the river – is a patch of ground that is a bit drier than most of the moorland all around me.  I can see it easily from my top windows.  You can see it from the top of the ridge opposite.  Everyone can see it from my front door. It is always a slightly different colour.  The plants are different you see because the soil they are growing in is unusually dry.  There are no weeping, seeping springs in that patch.  There are no rivulets carrying water, collected from higher up the moor, down to the river.  And when dawn breaks over the hills in the distance this is the first place the sun drops its warmth in the morning.  This patch is dry and sunny – well a bit drier and a bit sunnier than most of the fields around me – and for as long as I can remember daisies have grown there.  Spring comes late up here at Hoar Oak but when the daisy field is in bloom you know summer is on the way and it is a treat for everyone.  I love it.  My people love it.  Everyone calls it the Daisy Field.  Always have done.  Maybe they always will do.  I don’t know.  I can only tell about the past.  So that will have to do.  Let me tell you what I remember about the Daisy Field.

For most of my time I was quite a small place.  Just one room and during the summers I was lived in by just one man – the summer shepherd out here on Hoar Oak with his flock grazing on the summer grass.  That’s not to say the shepherd was always alone mind you.  I know I’m a long way from anywhere but if my summer shepherd had a sweetheart, and that sweetheart had strong legs – which of course most hard working girls did in those days – I’d often see a maiden making her way over the brow from Furzehill and down the track that led to my back door.  Maybe it was her day off or, in the long summer nights, maybe it was after she’d finished her day’s work.  Maybe she’d have a basket over her arm with some bits and pieces to eat in it.  Always she’d have a lightness to her step and almost always the shepherd would be there to meet her as she came down the path towards me.

Now.  Don’t get carried away.  Don’t go thinking they huddled straight into my walls and got up to nonsense.  First of all, no self-respecting girl would want to come inside my walls in those days – I was a dark, damp, smelly place.  The central fire pit never quite went out and I was full of the rich odour of a shepherd who’d spent his days on the moor and the nights asleeping, fully clothed, on my dirt floor.  No.  I was not what you’d call a pretty spot that might win a maiden’s heart.  And secondly those were, dear listener, rather more innocent days and romance was slow thing.    The two would greet shyly.  The shepherd would take the girl’s basket as if relieving her of a precious load.  They’d wander down to the driest place to sit by the river – down to the Daisy Field.  A lovely spot for a picnic and a chat and a bit of fun.  Maybe they’d be daring and kick off their shoes and go barefoot in the cool river water.  Maybe they’d be a bit more daring and kick off more than their shoes and sometimes a marriage would come along towards the end of that summer.  A Daisy Field marriage the locals would call it.

Later, when I grew a bit bigger, when my one room had become two and a ladder led up to another room built under the eaves for sleeping in, the married shepherds lived in me all year round.  They came with their wives and in those days the babies often came along every two years or so.  For a woman with a new baby to tend to; baking and chores to do; and three or four other small children rushing about it was a crush inside my walls.  Over the years I’ve seen many a housewife desperate to get the kids out of the way for a bit.  Somewhere still in earshot.  Somewhere that could be seen from my windows. Somewhere away from the boggy ground so the children didn’t ruin their shoes (if they had any) or get their clothes wet (what little they might have of them).  The Daisy Field was the obvious choice and they’d be sent off with eldest child in charge.

I still laugh when I think back to seeing a young boy or girl, maybe only ten or eleven years old, in charge of several tiny wee scraps of younger brothers and sisters.  They were told, ‘Of you go, down to the Daisy Field to play, and mind you keep an eye on little Edwin, or young Sarah, or Mary or Betsy or ‘our Willum’.  And off they’d go.  A trail of near-wild creatures running down the path to the Daisy Field to spend hours all alone.  All together.  In their safe little pack and under my watchful gaze.  They’d play and make up games; try to catch fish without getting (too) wet; lie on their backs; watch the clouds and have discussions about their world out here at Hoar Oak.  If the Rector had been on a pastoral visit recently out here at Hoar Oak or the children’s father had read to them from the Bible, the childrens’ talk of clouds might turn to God and Jesus as they tried to make their own sense of religion.  A lot of learning and debating and decision making went on down in that field.

And it wasn’t just the children who played and talked in the Daisy Field.  The shepherd and his wife would also go there.  A place to be quiet and alone with each other.  Away from my crowded walls.  On a warm spring night or a hot summer evening, when the children were asleep and the chores all done, the shepherd might say to wife ‘shall us go down Daisy Field?  The children will be fine here without us.’  I liked that they trusted me – a silly old cottage out here on the moor.  They trusted me to keep their precious family safe and I’d make sure to do my very best for them.  As I squared my shoulders to the task I’d see them wander off down the track.  They’d go for a bit of a quiet time, for a bit of a natter, for a bit of a smoke – men and women often shared a clay pipe smoke in those days – and sometimes for a ‘bit of the other’ as so many called their loving time together.  As my walls filled with more and more children there was less and less opportunity for a man and wife to be, well, a man and wife, and a warm night at the Daisy Field offered just such an opportunity.

Afterwards, the shepherd, if he were the romantic sort, might make a daisy chain and place it on his wife’s head – a pretty sight.  Afterwards, his wife might make and secretly place a daisy chain on her husband’s sleeping head and not bother to tell him ‘til they were back inside my door.  She’d giggle and point to his head and say ‘you’d better take that off in case you scare the childer.’  And he might laugh or he might growl but it was all fun.  It was all Daisy Field fun.  And many times I’ve heard one of my housewives say to her shepherd husband, quietly of a night, when the days were getting shorter and the fire was lit for a bit of evening time comfort “I think there may be a daisy field child on the way” and they both knew what that meant.

The surveyors came to Hoar Oak in 1836.  Those poor men wandered about in all conditions, sunshine and rain, with staves and long measuring tapes.  They were trying to draw up a map of the land around me.  To identify and plot the fields.  To calculate how big they were.  To find out how much tithe the owner had to pay.  I heard them talking to my people and wondered what a tithe was.  My only clue was my shepherd murmuring behind their backs to his wife, ‘nice enough chaps they are but them bleedin’ surveyors are here to work out how to charge us taxes.’  Even I knew what taxes were.  Over the years I’d heard enough of my people talking about death and taxes.  Not good.  Well, one day I heard those surveyor chaps inside my walls asking if any of the fields around me had names.  ‘Well, yes’ I heard the shepherd say ‘I think some of them may have names’ and I could tell he was trying to be cagey.  I knew what he was doing.  Holding back on the information the surveyors needed with the hope that maybe the taxes they calculated would be lower.  Wouldn’t hurt them not to know about every field around me was his reasoning.

But before he could complete his cunning game of cat and mouse with the surveyors I heard the children shout out ‘Pa, make sure you tell him about the Daisy Field and how we get there – you know, through the House Field, then the Gate Field, past Goviers Lake Field and then down to the Daisy Field.’  This was their world.  They were proud of it and even prouder of their precious knowledge of the small world they inhabited – a world where the Gate Field might as well have been France and the Daisy Field as far away as if it was India.  They could recite all of the names of the fields around them and they were happy to show this skill off to the surveyors.   Their father groaned and glared but it was too late and so it was the Daisy Field was put on the map.  Along with all of the other fields around me – the Higher Six Acres, the Bottom Piece, Goviers Lake Field the Oaken Piece and on and on they go.  Nearly 20 fields which make up my world out here at Hoar Oak.  You can find them if you want to.  You can look on the map and find them.  It’s all there to see.  And you can find them out here on the moor.  They’re all still here.  You can come and find the Daisy Field, sit in it and think about this story.  You can look at the clouds, listen to river bubbling past, ponder on God if you wish, keep nice and dry and – if it’s the right time of year –be surrounded by daisies.

HOAROAKTALKING Copyright © Bette Baldwin 2017

To find out more visit www.hoaroakcottage.org

To learn more about the Tithe Maps of 1836 at Hoar Oak Cottge visit The Daisy Field Blog 

Letters to Sarah

“The centuries have come and gone and so have the many shepherd families that used to call me home.   All around me the moorland hills, now quiet and deserted, were once abuzz with the men, women and children living in this isolated spot.   Once I was the centre of their lives.  Now I am a ruin.  But my old stone walls still echo with their voices.  I am a home with a story to tell. ”

                                                                      @hoaroakcottagetalking

One of the babies born inside my walls was a little gaffer called Thomas.  He was a small baby but strong and wiry and I watched him grow into a fine boy.  He was good with the sheep.  Excellent with the sheepdogs but even better with horses.  He was a hard worker.  Loved by his family and if my memory serves me well by many of the local lasses.  He got engaged to one of them and the family held a little party in my kitchen for Thomas and his new fiancé Florrie.  That day you would have thought that they had everything to look forward to.  Had everything ahead of them.  That was how they were treating the day and there was no doubt that they were looking forward to their life ahead.  Thomas was 19 and Florrie just 18.  But it was a celebration with a reason because, not long after, Thomas left Hoar Oak, walked across the moor to Lynton and went to war.  He joined the North Devon Hussars and later transferred to the 5^th Battalion of the Dorsetshire Regiment.  He didn’t come back.

His mother, Sarah, received two letters.  When the first one arrived, from the front line, a stillness descended over the cottage and my stones froze in anticipation.  I looked on as she opened the small envelope and withdrew its thin contents.  She read it to herself.  Over and over until the words had all sunk in.  Then, she read it out loud to all the children gathered around her in silence.  It was written by the Reverend W.H Kay – the Army Chaplain attached to Thomas’s battalion.  It is on a scrap of flimsy, tan coloured paper and the words are written in pencil.  It is dated  20^th August 1917.

The first letter to Sarah reads as follows:

My dear Mrs Johnstone,

 It is with very deep regret that I have to tell you your son Corporal Johnstone 19282 of this battalion was killed during the recent attack we made on the 16^th inst.  Fortunately, his body was recovered and buried.  He suffered no pain death being instantaneous. 

He was respected and loved by his section and his officers thought most highly of him.  I can only commend you in your great trouble to our Heavenly Father who is leading us through the sorrows of earth into a deeper and fuller joy in the life beyond.

 He sees you now though you do not see him and the last thing he would have you do is to worry or fret.

                                                                                                            May God comfort you.

                                                                                                                  Yours in deepest sympathy,

                                                                                                                         W H Kay CF (Chaplain to the Forces)

Here is a photo of that letter.

 

The second letter to Sarah is imagined and based on what is known about Thomas’s last few months at war.  It is what Reverend Kay could have written to Sarah.  It is what Sarah may have really wanted to read.  The truth about her beloved son’s comings and goings at war.  Truth that could replace her imaginings during the many long, dark Hoar Oak nights when, sat in front of the fire – knitting and writing letters – she wondered about her son.  A son killed at Passchendaele when he was only 23.

The second letter to Sarah reads as follows:

Dear Mrs Johnstone

It is with very deep regret that I have to tell you your son Corporal Johnstone 19282 of this battalion was killed during the recent attack we made on the 16^th inst. 

In much of the past year, Thomas and our battalion have been in France in the Somme River area – flat farmland now full of damaged and deserted villages and farms and scarred by both our own and the enemy’s trenches and fortifications.   In late September of last year, the boys – I confess that I think of them all as my boys though I am only a year or two older than most of them – were tasked with trying to run the enemy out of the village of Thiepval.  As part of this action Thomas’s battalion, alongside a battalion of brave young men from Canada. were focused on trying to take the heavily defended Mouquet Farm from the enemy. 

Thomas often talked about your farm back on Exmoor but poor Mouquet no longer looked much like a farm.  It was in ruins and the farmer and his animals had gone long ago.  The ground was muddy and cratered and sad looking and all during that day and well into the night the enemy put up fierce resistance.  A number of Thomas’s mates and officers were killed or wounded but I want you to know that he was fearless in battle, in the unrelenting noise, the mud and confusion.  Thomas and I were, every now and then, alongside each other moving forward in battle but also trying to help our fallen comrades.  At last our battalion was relieved and we marched away from the fighting to a nearby village called Ovillers.  The village was empty.  The houses bombed and broken. But a few scraggy, old dogs came out to greet the boys and made them laugh as the hounds seemed to be marching alongside them.  On and off, over the next few weeks, the boys went back to the front line and continued the fight to win back the farms and villages around Thiepval, including Moquet Farm.  They never seemed to lose their resolve. Such strong young men.  At Christmas time, Thomas and his battalion – now bolstered by fresh troops arrived from England – were still close to the front line.  Still fighting.  And when they weren’t fighting they were supporting the other battalions.  

Mrs. Johnstone, I have to tell you that Thomas spent Christmas Day 1916 in a dugout in another damaged village very close to the front line.  No celebrations.  They were back helping defend the ground we had gained around Thiepval and putting up with a the constant thundering of artillery exchanges. Some of the boys remembered it was Christmas.  Others forgot – or chose to forget.  But your Thomas made me laugh on that Christmas day.  In a lull in the fighting he looked over and saw me and snapped a cheeky salute and shouted out, “Say Happy Birthday to Jesus for me Reverend.”  Finally, late on Christmas Day, when it was dark and cold and had started snowing, the boys were relieved by a battalion from the Yorkshire Regiment.  The mud had frozen hard and cold, and hungry and weary to the bone, we marched to the relative safety of a small village called Forceville.  Another sad little place.  Empty of people.  All in ruins.  But at least away from the constant noise and danger of the front line and with the usual troop of skinny dogs coming out to welcome us and to try and cadge a bit of our grub. 

You’ll be pleased to know we did eventually get to celebrate Christmas.  We all rested in dugouts at Forceville on the 26^th December and on the 27^th we kept Christmas day with a slap up meal. Letters and parcels from home were handed round to all the boys.  I think you sent a cake?  And a woolly muffler and gloves?  And a card and letter too I think.  Have I remembered that correctly?  That day Thomas told me he remembered Christmas at home at Hoar Oak Cottage with a joint of pork from your own pig that had been raised in the lean-to at the end of the cottage.  He made me laugh when he said, “We all loved ol’ piggy but we loved my Ma’s roast dinners more.“    On the 28^th we were all allowed to have a bath and then my boys attended Church Parade.  Between you and me I don’t think many had their heart in Church Parade.  How could they? But they all came and sang and said their amens and went away a little bit lighter in spirit.  At least I hope they did.  

New Years Day, 1917, came and went and we were still in the Somme Valley and busy with frequent training exercises and working parties.  You know, war isn’t just about fighting and the front line – despite what the papers would have you believe.  Men work just as hard at the unglamorous jobs that need to be done to support the men up front.  It is all taken very seriously.  So is the constant training.  Mostly, we have no idea what we’re training for.  It’s all secret you see, but we’re told that those-in-the-know know, so we do what were told. Follow orders and learn the drills that our lives will depend upon.

By May, we were ordered back to the front, to hold the line near the village of Boursies and here we were under constant bombardment by enemy artillery.  We didn’t move forward. We didn’t go back.  Stalemate and under constant threat.  I confess that even my spirits became low during that tedious time.  Wounded boys, dying boys, sad boys and frightened boys.  I was surrounded by them all and tried to keep up their spirits when my own were failing.  Did I start to doubt in Our Good Lord?  Maybe.  But in the middle of May, we were relieved and marched to safe billets behind the front line and for the rest of the month we carried on training.  Day in and out.  It was warm and the sun shone and the noise of fighting was in the distance.  Big pushes were being planned and we had to be ready for when they came. Thomas and his fellows all worked hard at their training and sure enough, in June, we were on the move – marching north through France and into Belgium and by the end of July were in billets close to the small village of Elverdinghe.

My boys are wonderful at making up cheeky nicknames Mrs. Johnstone – for each other and for the tricky French and Belgian words and village names we encountered.  And so Elverdinghe became Elmer’s Dingle.  Naughty of the men but it made us all laugh. Mouquet Farm, by the way, had been nicknamed Moo Cow Farm – one of my favourite of their naughty renamings.  So, there we were at “Elmer’s Dingle” when, in the beginning of August, we got moved to a Siege Camp – that’s what we call a big tented encampment for lots of battalions gathering together in preparation for a big attack.  Now we knew we would soon be in heavy battle.  After another week’s training at Elmer’s Dingle we moved, on the 14^th August, up to the western bank of the Steenbeek Canal – not much of a canal anymore, closer to a deep muddy ditch.  We were alongside other battalions, lads from Manchester and Durham mostly and there were hundreds of men, horses, guns and artillery.  The whole area was featureless, destroyed in previous battles.  It was muddy, there were big craters, no trees and the farm buildings in ruins.

By then we knew that the ‘big attack’ would come on the 16^th August.  And so there we were.  Waiting and all ready for it.  Now I want to tell you Mrs. Johnstone that the boys knew what was to come.  No one had any doubts.  A few had misapprehensions.  I asked all the boys to think about writing a letter home.  Just in case.  You know.  And I’d make sure it got back to their loved ones.  Thomas did write a letter and he did leave it with me but it got torn and wet and dirty and I’m sorry to say I no longer have it to send on.  But I can tell you what he did say.  I remember it clearly because it was just like brave, cheeky, naughty Thomas to say to his mother, “Just a wee note Mam to say the chances of me getting back are nix.  Don’t let the papers say I was a hero or anything daft.  Your son is a soldier and if I get pipped it’s just because I’m doing my job”.  Of course, he signed it with love to his brothers and sisters, a few kisses for you and he asked you to look after Florrie. 

Zero Hour on the 16^th of August was at 4:45 AM.  The sky was just beginning to lighten and Thomas and the others began to move forward behind a creeping barrage – that’s when our big guns behind us start firing over our heads and into the enemy.  Protecting us as we moved forward about 100 yards every 5 minutes.  Finally, Thomas and the others from the 5^th Dorsets – having crossed the canal balancing on slippery, wet and muddy planks – had managed to join the great mass of men, the 34^th Brigade, who were making ready to attack the enemy in the nearby village of Langemarck.  Ahead, they were faced with a difficult and treacherous manoeuvre.  The land was featureless, churned up and flattened by shelling, horses, men’s boots and rain.  Some of the soldiers were sent ahead to place stakes in the ground with tapes run between them so that the others would have a means to find their way, to grope their way along, in the confusion of battle. We’d trained for this but it was all so much harder in reality.   Our attack on Langemarck started at 6am and later that day the British took Langemarck.  In the official diary for that terrible day I’ve seen it written that, “the objective was successful”.  We Army types should all get a medal for understatement.

But, somewhere between crossing the canal and groping along in the mud trying to hang onto the guide tape Thomas fell. The enemy were only about 500 yards ahead.  They had been firing on us constantly with machine guns and mortars. 28 men of the 5^th Dorset Battalion died crossing that muddy field.  Trying to get to Langemarck and capture it from the enemy.  All of my boys had a long hard difficult day driving the Germans back and winning Langemarck.  It was an important battle and we won it.  Thomas was part of it.  Part of the success.  But sadly, also part of our terrible losses. I have to tell you Mrs. Johnstone that we don’t really know what happened to Thomas.  We knew he started the battle.  We knew he wasn’t with us at the end of the battle.  The ground was muddy, wet and full of shell holes and we did manage to find and bury the bodies of some of my boys where they had fallen. In the mud.  With their other chums who, as Thomas would have it, were also ‘pipped’ that day.  Hand on heart, I think I can say that Thomas suffered no pain.  He probably wouldn’t have known what hit him.  Wouldn’t have had time to know what had happened.  I think his death would have been instantaneous.

I liked your son. He was respected by his officers and loved by all the boys in his section.  He made us laugh.  He often sang us silly songs – ones about hunting on Exmoor which were a little bit rude but made us all grin.  He never let anyone down. He never put his own safety before a fallen colleague who needed help.  Be in no doubt.  He was brave.  Brave as brave.  We all thought well of Thomas and he was singing his funny songs in the trench on that last night before the battle for Langemarck, making us laugh, making us think of home. 

I know how often he thought of you and wanted you to think of him as a man who was just doing his job.   But what a job he did.  You will already know that Thomas has been awarded the Military Medal, a medal that only goes to soldiers of great bravery and courage and who go above and beyond the call of duty.  He certainly did that.  We will miss Thomas, the soldier.  We will miss Thomas, our friend.   I’m sure that he sees you now though you do not see him and the last thing he would have you do is to worry or fret.

                                                                                                    May God comfort you.

                                                                                                               Yours in deepest sympathy,

                                                                                                                       W H Kay CF  (Chaplain to the Forces)

 

 

If you’d like to read more go to http://www.hoaroakcottage.org/WW1HoarOakStories.  The story of Thomas will shortly be updated.  Thanks to Jeremy Banning, Phil Curme, Jim Baldwin – dedicated battlefield history guys – who helped with Sarah’s second letter.