Winter forecast

[Wild-Woman]

Originally Posted by Digit

That is the official word, this is my memory of it WW. From a book I'm currently writing, (as I find the time!)


The moor and New Forest ponies were decimated.
I was seven and just starting my lifelong interest in the natural world, and the death toll amongst those species that didn't hibernate was colossal.
The smaller birds were nearly wiped out, even those we now see as common all but disappeared, and in many cases took years to replenish their numbers.
Larger birds perished from hunger, frozen to their roosts.

Firstly, I'd like to read your book when it's published. I do like recent history and I can relate to it because of my parents and grandparents stories.

Secondly, your next paragraph shows perfectly how Natural Selection works.
I would think that the species left after this terrible time were much stronger and healthier. It just goes to show how nature pulls back from the brink with just a few. It's usually loss of habitat that will ensure extinction -usually at the hands of man.

[Digit]

IF it gets published WW. I was accepted for publication of one book in the states but on terms that frankly I thought laughable.
Now I'm about to start making a list of British agents and sharpening my pin!
Any agents on the forum?
If you see any second hand books about wildlife written in the fifties you will often find mention of the losses due to the 47 winter and how long recovery took.
Hill farming was also hit with an estimated 5,000,000 sheep and lambs dying.
I'm not sure you would call what I have written some much history, of which I am a great enthusiast, as a memoir.....

It has been said of the early generations of the twentieth century that they saw more change during their lifetime than any generation before or since. The invention of the phonograph and telephone, the development of the motorcar, wireless, and manned flight, all followed each other in quick succession, every day seemed to produce something new and exciting. But for all this, life on the land changed but little. The generation that survived the carnage of the Somme and Ypres returned to a rural life little different from that which they had so cheerfully left.
But not so for the men who fought the battles of the Second World War. The men who stemmed the might of the Nazi war machine and ‘came safe home’ returned to a world that would never be the same again. The drift of men from the land that had begun in their grandfather’s time now became a flood, a torrent of humanity torn from their rural roots by the tide of mechanisation. Cottages which for centuries had echoed to the tramp of hob nailed boots now stood silent and open to the skies, condemned as unfit for human habitation. Everything was now to be new, modern, up to date. ‘Contemporary’ was the in word.
A way of life that reached back to the days of enclosure was to be swept away to make room for a land fit for heroes.
My children, like others of their generation, may know the history of the Second World War, but of that which followed, and how the working people lived, they know little or nothing. My own children find it difficult to conceive of the world of my childhood, a world of food rationing, a world without sweets, cakes, television, motor cars or central heating, and yet the period of which I write is barely half a century ago.
The countryside of my childhood was of neat little villages with white walled thatched cottages and small patchwork fields with small brown cows contentedly chewing the cud. Horses still outnumbered tractors and the combine harvester was something that the Americans used.
The period of my childhood encompassed the death throes of this rural economy, and though there is a tendency to view ones childhood through rose tinted spectacles, there is a growing belief that that the industrialisation of farming has gone too far, that the price required to produce mountains of butter and beef and lakes of wine and milk is too high.
But the days of cows standing waist deep in meadows full of wild flowers are gone, probably for ever, but like many of my generation I was privileged to know them.
This, is my story.


Roy.

[deer boy]

Originally Posted by Digit

If you see any second hand books about wildlife written in the fifties you will often find mention of the losses due to the 47 winter and how long recovery took.
Roy.

Hi Roy i've just been reading some of Hope Bourne's books & she mentions the lose of Exmoor ponies due to the bad weather.
Not to mention dead rabbits up trees
She also mentions in most of her books hill farming & how things have changed,reading it makes you want to experience it for yourself great books

[Meta menardi]

Originally Posted by coasty

I coasty of the all seeing eye do predict that winter will consist of wet cold days and cold wet days sometimes windy and sometimes still..

Fish in a barrel, coasty! What about a plague of frogs and many dying from impalation by icicles.

[Digit]

If you mean the hill farming Dear boy then maybe, but another winter like that I will happily confine to history.
Funny how people think climate change is something new.
The years immediately prior to world war two were some of the warmest on record but the winters of the forties were very cold,
With the war over we were then faced with the massive east coast floods, then the Linmouth/Linton floods.
In the early fifties I was living in Linslade, near Leighton Buzzard and my home was one of the very few that survived the Tornado that tore across the countryside wrecking all in its path.
When I lived in Berkshire some years later my home was struck by lightening!

Roy.

[deer boy]

Originally Posted by Digit

If you mean the hill farming Dear boy then maybe, but another winter like that I will happily confine to history.
Roy.

Sorry should have made myself more clear i meant to say 'makes you want to experience that time & era in the book' as you say another winter like that I will happily confine to history

[Digit]

Well I was a child at that time and to every generation I suspect that was a wonderful age Dear Boy, but the good old days exist only in mythology IMO.
Except for one thing, the sense of community that existed then, and now seems to be almost non-existent.
One London borough now suffers more robberies in a year than the entire country did in the late forties/early fifties.
Having said that I think it also depends upon where you live. In rural Wales, where I live, people still rely on, and help each other much as they always have.
In the cities it appears to be a very different story.
12 months ago I was admitted to hospital for surgery for prostate cancer, and my neighbours queued up to take my wife to see me, a 120 mile round trip!

Roy.