April 11th, 2000

It is nearing Easter again. I am thinking of Easter Sunday when we were children.
Eggs were sold to buy the groceries, so it was seldom a child got an egg to eat. Now the shops are full of chocolate eggs, but that was a long time in the future.
On Easter Sunday we could have as many eggs as we liked to eat. When we went back to school, we asked each other, "how many eggs did you eat for Easter?" "Three from the shell and two from the pan." An old man called Thomas Breham lived near us, he always gave us eggs for Easter. He would say to us, "Would you like an egg, or would you like two?"
We never refused. Simple times, nice people.
Further along the road, there lived a man, John Morrison. He made up poems all the time, as he went about his business on the farm. Anything out of the ordinary that happened in the village, there was a poem about it the next day. There was many a red face after neighbours had been quarrelling about trespass, etc. Sitting in his cart going along the road, he'd have a smile on his face, and you wondered, "who is catching it now?"
Ours was a thriving village. Big families and such a lot of young people. There was a crossroads, with a bridge across a little river. On St. John's night, 23rd June, we lit a bonfire at the crossroads, all the young people congregated, somebody would bring a musical instrument and we would dance for hours. Now ours is a deserted village. Empty houses.
Ours was a great house for visiting. Lots of our neighbours came nearly every night. It was very informal. They just lifted the latch and bade you bless, pulled a chair up to the fire. They told ghost stories. We kids listened with big ears and big eyes and then were too frightened to go to bed. You couldn't imagine anything as dark as the middle of the country at night. We had no electricity then and the rooms were dark, indeed.
When we were coming home from the shops on a winter evening - I don't mean the shop next door, I mean the shop three miles away - we were so frightened, passing by all the places that were mentioned in the ghost stories, that when we got to the gate, we walked backwards to the front door, in case the ghosts would get us.
On winter evenings it was always dark when we got home from school, so we didn't cross the fields.