1975 autobiographical notes

These notes were written fifty years ago and are my particularly significant as the ye@r our son Charles (Dobby) was born.

1975 Age 36/37 - from my notes.

Early in 1975 we saw our old friend John Newbery, now living (rather unhappily we felt)in Bull Cottage, Battle. He had had a series of strange misfortunes. On one occasion he had been standing in front of a log fire when their had been a loud explosion and he collapsed to the ground.Apparently a tracer bullet had embedded itself in the tree, presumably during war time, and not gone off so the wood had grown round it and beenmissed when the logs were sawn.

A piece of shrapnel went right through John’s chest, piercing his lung before coming out the other side. As he lay gasping for breath he had no idea what had happened. Fortunately he was quickly taken to hospital and recovered. A few months later,however, he got out of his car one dark night for a pee and fell into a deep roadside hole. There was a piece of corrugated iron in the bottom of the hole sticking up horizontally like a stake in an elephant trap and it cut an enormous gash on the upper part of his thigh which needed many stitches.

Not long afterwards we heard that poor John, still only in his late 30s, had contracted cancer and died. He was a strange rather restless man who never seemed to be able to settle and have a family, maybe because his own parents had divorced. An enthusiast for cricket and sailing, he had been a good friend on and off since our schooldays at Lancing and it would have been nice to have known one another into old age.

On 16 January our old tom cat Big Bill died and we buried him in the front garden with a young bird cherry, Prunus padus, from the Yorkshire Dales on his grave. This seemed a singularly appropriate choice as Big Bill was a great bird hunter. On one occasion hewas curled up, a dark, shaggy, Persian shape on the ground in the back yard when a sparrow flew above him rather too close. Like an exploding spring he propelled himselfinto the air and brought the hapless creature to earth with a perfectly aimed paw.

In early April I went to Oxford and from there to Kirkby Stephen in Cumbria and on tto Holmrook and Skinburness where I learnt that remote Grune Point overlooking the Solway Firth might have been associated with the Green Knight of Sir Gawain and The Green Knight.

Dobby born on 18 May this year in the Buchanan Hospital, St Leonard's. He was named Charles Patrick Sebastian, but became known as ‘Dobby’ because as a newborn baby he had a band round his wrist saying ‘DOB 18/5/1975’ meaning ‘date of birth M18/5/75’. 

I was in Paignton at the time, staying in the Livermead House Hotel where Charles Oswin and I were scheduled to give one of our lectures called "Turning on the Off Season" to hoteliers.

Four days later we were giving the same presentation at the Grand Hotel, Grange-overSands, Cumbria

Tana started going out with John Foster.

Twenty-eight years later in 2003, this was a good sized tree in our front garden at South View. With its low branches it was great for climbing and our grandchildren and great grandchildren spent happy hours in its upper reaches like people in the Carmina Burana.

Charles Oswin was a long-standing colleague at the English Board with whom I was very friendly for many years.

This year I visited Oxford, Kirkby Stephen, Skinburness, Whitehaven, Maryport  I worked on a chapter on pub food for Michael Jackson's book on English Inns. 

I was now starting into the Wild Service Tree survey in earnest and spent much time visiting the Lindley Library of the Royal Horticultural Society. In summer we had a field trip which Paul Hughes joined.

On 8 October the board of the English Tourist Board gave approval for the Taste of England scheme, initially known as the ‘Good Taste of England’. I was very closely involved with this for the next ten years and got to know people like Delia Smith, Robert Carrier and Egon Ronay, all of whom were on the committee, quite well.

In late October I travelled to Southampton, then on to Whitehaven in Cumbria.

On 11 November I made my first live TV appearance planting a Wild Service tree on Pebble Mill at One in Birmingham. Inspired, perhaps, by this I worked on a script for ailm about truffles which was made in France by a chap called Ray Daffurn (with whom Becky eventually had a job for a while). I think I even got paid.

I was also in mid-November that I interceded with George Cooper, the managing director of Thames Television, to save the ‘Wish you were here’ holiday programme. My old friend, the director Peter Hughes, had said that Cooper intended to drop the programme because overseas work could not be afforded and no one was interested in domestic holidays. We wrote to point out that ETB had always had a good response to its advertisements and thereby managed to get the series reprieved. This stood ETB in good stead for many years and we were always involved in programme planning. I was also able to persuade them to feature Alton Towers when all efforts from the executive there had failed and it was this perhaps more than any other factor that led to my eventually becoming marketing director there.

Skirret 19 October 1975. The first of the skirret was brought in from the garden. Skinny roots like long, greyish white worms. Not quite as difficult to clean as I had feared. Raw they taste something like carrot or parsnip, cooked they are soft and sweet with an interesting flavour, closest to salsify out of other root vegetables. Tana put them into a chicken pie – a useful addition; the pie was excellent, with particularly fine, crisp pastry; it seems so short a time since she was a baby like Dobby