text: When Matthew was at school he was considered a bit on the slow side, but in the country town where he was born, situated dead in the centre of Devon, many people felt that being quick witted was not essential for a good life. There was a Devonshire saying that strangers would soon be told that went, ‘Devon born, Devon bred. Strong in arm and Weak in ‘ead.’ It was expected by his school friends that he would work on a farm and maybe make a reliable herdsman one day. His teachers, seeing there was no harm in him, mostly left him alone with his thoughts and so at fourteen he left with no qualifications and with no real skills except that Mathew knew he was all right with his hands and had made one or two useful boxes and such gifts as a pipe rack for his father and a row of coat pegs for his mother. He also knew that he wasn't a coward. A few times he had stood up for himself when picked on by bigger boys showing off to their friends. It wasn't really bad, like the day when big John Pennington broke a boy's jaw on the school bus and got suspended from school. When Matthew returned home with his face bruised and blood on his shirt his parents said nothing, but he noticed Mother made his favourite dinner on Saturday and that Father let him help fill in the football pools with him in his shed at the bottom of the garden. As a young man he worked hard for little money on various farms that needed extra help, for lambing, harvest and hay making. He loved the crowded meals in the farm kitchen, the cider and the larking about. Once or twice, at the end of the War, he followed the Home Guard men up on Cadbury Castle to look out by night for planes and parachutes. They never saw any and generally left their Enfields at Tom Lee's place and took shotguns instead, to shoot rabbits by torchlight. In his twenties Matthew switched to milking and looking after stock, as his school friends had predicted. He would cycle to work in the dark and by five he would be getting on with the job. He was thorough in washing the teats and flushing out the pipes with hypochlorite and would leave the parlour as spotless as a block shed with a cracked concrete floor could reasonably be, and smelling like a swimming pool. The cows liked him as he didn't hurry them and was happy for them to come into the parlour with their friends in their chosen order. Live and let live was his motto. This approach was not always shared by his employers. A farmer in a good mood might grudgingly accept that, maybe, happier cows might give better milk. A farmer in a bad mood; caused by a breakdown, or a stillbirth, or a calf getting tangled in a fence, thought Matthew was an expensively slow cowman and would curse him to his face. As they cursed him, Matthew's features would echo their expressions and he would neither get angry nor answer back. It was like weather passing over the face of the sky. Soon they would stump off to find a more satisfying argument elsewhere. He gave his money to his father who passed half to Mother and spent the rest of his son's wages at The Railway Inn, where he stopped for a few pints of half and half on his way home after work. Returning in the dark to their terrace cottage over the railway crossing, Father would come in the back door and turn off the wall switch in the kitchen, where the extension cable was plugged in. The front of the house was never wired up, so Matthew and his mother Kitty, sitting under the standard lamp in the front room, would be plunged into darkness with the sound of the radio slowly fading out. With a fairly unconvincing cheerfulness Father would shout out 'Bedtime!' and climb up the stairs and would be asleep before the taste of his Eucryl smoker's toothpowder had subsided. Kitty and Matthew were prepared for this, and she would switch on the big ever-ready torch and light their way to bed. Every summer Mother and son went on the train to Dawlish for a day at the seaside, where they loved playing on the slot machines. Mathew’s favourite was the machine that tested your grip. Standing with his legs apart he would put his hand into what looked like two brass knuckle dusters and squeeze. By the age of fifteen, the needle went three quarters of the way round until it said he had the grip of a fisherman. He noted with pride that at the very end of the dial, after all the other professions, was engraved the word, ‘Farmer’. The only thing he and Father did together was going to get their hair cut, where Matthew could read the scandalous papers, Reveille and Titbits, while waiting for his turn. When still a boy, Matthew would be sat up on a board set over the tatty red leather arms of the barber's chair and sit still, feeling embarrassed and unused to an adult’s attention. If he was unlucky and got a nick from the electric razor doing the back and sides, the barber would dab the cut with a styptic pencil to stop the bleeding. It would sting a bit on the way home, but he felt happy all the same. Father died when his lungs gave out. It was a common enough death at the time, from a mixture of Navy Cut cigarettes and feed dust at the factory where he had worked for forty years. Matthew, who was with him as he lay drowning in the middle of his big bed, held his hand as he died. At dawn he let his father's hand go, and for two minutes he listened to the breaths slowing, until the gap before the next breath grew longer and longer and Matthew realised it would never come. Money was a bit tighter after that, so Matthew took on a bit more work and Kitty helped out in the shop a few doors up. All the years that Father had worked at the mill she never knew what her husband's small brown wage packet had contained. He gave her money for the housekeeping and that was that. Despite running pretty low on food by Friday she had managed to put a little by every week in her savings account at the Post Office and somehow she made sure that her family were well turned out on special occasions. By the time Mother died, Matthew was working for a family up on the ridge and riding back home on his Honda 70 after work. One wet night he found her asleep by the telly that was still powered by the extension from the kitchen. He sat next to her until dawn not wanting to believe she had gone, and went and told the Doctor in the town. During the short conversation the Doctor noticed that Matthew's gaze never once lifted from the floor to look him in the face. He was never able to settle in the house on his own after Mother went and would often sleep up at the farm. The farmer had died years before and the place was run on a fairly relaxed basis by his widow Anne and her two sons who had never wed. Old Miss Bedford, living in her bungalow down the hill, once exclaimed darkly, while talking of her neighbours on the ridge, that, 'They are always a-enjoying of themselves up there.' Anne's two daughters were jolly souls and had married into local farms, and were as important in the community of Church and young farmers and shows as their parents had been. Frank, the oldest son worked away from home some of the time helping out a friend who supplied generators. His younger brother Ian mostly ran the farm and also showed no sign of marrying, though in his case shyness was the explanation. It soon seemed foolish to keep up the rent on his mother's house and so Matthew moved his few belongings and his beloved television up the hill and was allowed to do up the shippen that had always propped up the end of the long thatched farmhouse. He put a rug or two on the thin lime concrete, which in places showed the cobbles underneath and would sit in his father's armchair watching the telly every night. A paraffin heater would keep the chill mostly off except in deep winter when he would sit under a couple of blankets in his pajamas with his cap on. He kept his pale blue Honda in the shippen with him and when he had to go out he would wheel it across the Platt, through a narrow path in the brambles, the sharp little tendrils scratching the faded black panniers as he passed. In the past the Platt had been used for the odd animal in lamb or calf that needed to be kept near the house, but now there was a newer tin barn for that. The brambles, with a few young blackthorn bushes, filled the small field right up and over the sliding stones of the walls. Someone had once told him that the thorn was mother to the oak but there weren't any oaks yet that he could see. On windy nights in the shippen the draughts were so strong that, when a gust hit, the bare bulb would swing and the tassels on the rug would move where the lime had rotted them thin. Sometimes the whole oaken frame would shudder like a blow had landed on the roof from a giant hand. One of the family would generally bring him out a cocoa to see how he was doing, feeling that they must one day get around to doing the place up a bit, but as he never complained, nothing was ever done. Every now and then, in the winter, the television would lose signal and Matthew would sit in the dark. He knew better than to check the aerial as it was always the transmitter going down for a few hours. It made him shiver to think what the wind was like for the engineers working to fix it, up on top of Stockland Hill. He would still go down into town a couple of times a week and even in to Exeter a few times a year when beasts were sold or if he felt he had sufficient excuse to hang around the Saturday cattle market. Everyone knew him as a reliable and even occasionally cheerful man. Cheerfulness being highly rated in the country when it is a bad night with the rain blowing sideways enough to blow out your hurricane lamp, and the cows have got out. It was generally thought that Matthew would never marry. He could tell a slow joke to the men in The Market House, but he was far too shy to have ever chatted up a girl, and not enough of a catch for one to have bothered scooping him up either. Anne would call him in for his meals with the family and for special high teas after Church where he would sit on a side chair near the fireplace and nod but say little, balancing a tiny floral plate, loaded with scones or Dundee cake, on his knee, and holding a cup and saucer, filled with sweet milky tea, in his wide hand. As he reached his seventies he slowed down and did less and less farm work and it became accepted that he would end his days up on the ridge saying little and generally nodding or smiling when asked a question by the grandchildren or neighbours. His pension was more than enough for his baccy and clothes and the odd present or sweets for the children. When one day his Honda wouldn't start he switched to getting lifts from Anne in her Subaru and appreciated how much more comfortable it was in a car. In reasonable weather Matthew would put on his black wellies and slowly tour the fields and the woodland with a big hank of orange bailer twine, fixing gaps in the wire fences or tying down thorn branches to fill any hole in the hedge big enough for a sheep to push through. His father's antler handled penknife was always in his baggy trouser pocket on the other side from his baccy tin. He kept it razor sharp and every year would harden the edge with a peening hammer when the steel grew too soft. By the time Mathew was in his eighties, the blade had worn into a hook with a dangerously thin shank that showed a gap even when closed up. Year by year the field edges decorated with fresh twine shrank back closer and closer to his home and Mathew was aware that he no longer knew exactly where the badgers were or where the vixen laid up with her cubs. The hard work he had done all his life meant his bones were still strong but his joints were painful and his back worn out from the two hundredweight sacks and heavy bales that he had shifted in the years before dumpy bags and forklifts had replaced them. He never knew a plump farmworker in his youth and felt sorry for the lonely unfit machine drivers that had now replaced so many men. Even now his grip would still have reached the end of the dial on the penny arcade machine at Dawlish. Anne herself was now over eighty and she had had her knees done by the time they moved Matthew into a spare room and got the old commode out of the attic. One day he decided to stay in bed and Anne told her friend Alison that Matthew was off his legs now. There was a pause in the conversation as each thought to themselves that it wouldn't be long before he would be buried next to his mother in the cemetery on the hill above the town. Matthew wanted to rest by his mother and had reserved the space years before. Now the plot was overlooking 'Tarka Meadows', the new houses crammed in where a cider orchard had grown. It had provided the sour little red apples that gave the cider it's bite. 'It was real stuff', he said to himself as he lay in clean white sheets on the steel framed bed, 'not like that Somerset, Kingston Black fizzy pop, everyone drinks now.' Matthew imagined the taste in his mouth, bitter and sweet at the same time, with the fume of the alcohol reaching up into his nose from the back of his throat. He tried to swallow but couldn't. At sunset the nurse looked in and found him. All the family came up to see Matthew for the last time and it was Anne and her daughters who washed him and put his best suit on, though it was a bit of a struggle at times. In a way his life was perfect. Like a stone thrown high in the air over the river, with just the right spin to keep it straight, so that it would enter the water with a quiet deep note and cause hardly any ripples to spread steadily across the pool to the small sandy red cliff on the other side.