Granfer Harris

When I was extremely small—yes, yes, I know; hard to imagine, isn’t it!  We moved to a tiny village, as it was then, called East Budleigh.  This was a place with two shops, two pubs and a church embedded in East Devon, England.

At that point my Great Granddad was still alive.  I have a vague memory of a very old, but very robust gentleman leaning on a stick watching me enter the house.

The house was behind the brook where we would search for small eels, caddis fly larva and snail.  Perhaps, on a good day, there might be a small fish—a stickleback, with luck.  Incidentally, if you fell in the brook you would become a ‘proper East Budleigh Boy’, which is where my cartooning name, EBB, comes from.

It wasn’t until much later in life that I learnt that this gentleman was my Great Granddad.  He was referred to, in the family, as ‘Granfer Harris’.

Granfer used to enjoy irritating my Gran, his daughter, by calling her youngest son ‘Jack’.

“His name is ‘John’.” She would respond.  Irritated.

He would poke people with his stick and, during the war, would eat everyone’s entire butter ration in one go.

He was described, variously, as ‘difficult’ to a ‘nasty old man’.

It may be that he had ‘Alzheimer’s’.  We shall never know now.  Certainly he was going off in his head but in those days people just shrugged and said, “He’s old.  What can you do?”

When he was a young man, Granfer Harris would go to the dance in Sidmouth every Saturday night.  Sounds like a simple plan, there being no TV, radio, etc.

Sidmouth is eight miles away.  Nearly, if you like, fourteen kilometres.  There were no buses or taxis.  He had no car or motorcycle.  He would come home from work, wash, change and then walk to the dance.

Then he would walk home.

And be at work the next morning.

He worked in the sawmills.

Let’s just set a scene here.  East Budleigh is famous for being close to ‘Hayes Barton’, the birthplace of Sir Walter Raleigh.

Walter did the same as Francis Drake, really, but Francis got to be very high and mighty but Walter was beheaded.  Not much justice then, just the whim of the Crown.

Hayes Barton is in the shape of an ‘E’ when viewed from above; such was the architecture of the Elizabethan period.  It is almost exactly one mile from the centre of East Budleigh.  The sawmills are nearly halfway between the two.

Originally, the saw was water powered by a leat (man-made channel leading to a mill) off East Budleigh brook but they modernised and put in a steam engine.  The saw was a very large circular piece of metal, which was, in those days, unprotected.  Health and Safety at Work was not even a dream in then.

Granfer saw himself as a fortunate person.  He had a shade over half a mile to walk up Hayes Lane to get to work.  Some people would have to walk two, or three, miles to get to their jobs.

The mentality of the villagers was that you work.  To be successful you went off with a lunch pack and a bag of tools to do a ‘proper day’s work’.  Work they did.  ‘Fun’ was rationed out to, perhaps, once a week and consisted of playing cards or sitting around the fire with the family reminiscing.

If it was light you worked.  In the house, in the garden or at your job.  That was life.  It was the best you could expect.  If you had enough to eat, a roof over your head and a wife then you were fortunate.

One day, at the sawmill, Granfer had an accident.  Somehow he managed to slip, the saw sliced his skull open.  Through the bone.

No problem.  He walked home, put a bandage on it.

Then returned to work.

My how we whimper at the slightest trial or tribulation that comes our way.

“Oh, I simply cannot write today.  I just don’t feel motivated, Dahling!”

“Call an ambulance, quickly—I think I’ve split a nail!”

“Someone has just called me a nasty name on ‘Facebook’.”

Oh, poor dear!

Now we have so much to lean on.  There are professional carers and medical people who will poke, prod and analyse our every move both physical and mental.  Ever ready, they are, to supply us with an excuse why we should not function as a member of society.

When you feel least like writing—write.

Get some discipline and just do it.  Life is too valuable to waste on self-pity and boredom; the older you get the less life you have remaining to you.

“Oh, I really cannot write today, Dahling.  My head is just splitting!”

Yes.  So was Granfer Harris’ head but he went back to work.