A surprise house guest.

Today, an experiment. This is a chunk of one of the many works in progress. This one allows me to write when my heart is too full of family stuff to do fictional things. Basically, it’s the folklore of my family, stories passed down, mostly by my Mum so far because they’re easiest to remember but I hope to get some more of my Dad’s, if not from him, then from my uncle. Some are about me and my brother, too. I thought it would make the blog fun but also, reading Dawn French’s biography, there might be some mileage in it as an ebook. If I can make it funny enough.

If …

The appeal is more in the characters involved than in what they actually did, I think, so a lot depends on how much I can bring their personalities out in what I write. At the moment, it tends to be just the bare bones of each story. The stories are officially true yet very possibly embroidered a little. Were we a tribe somewhere, these are the tales the shamen would tell. So this week, I thought I’d share a story about a hurricane we had in Britain. Here it is:

When I was at university, in 1987 there was a hurricane in Britain. They have happened on rare occasions and in this case the hurricane hit Sussex. Obviously, the trees and the houses of the Weald aren’t really designed to take this kind of punishment so there was a fair bit of damage both to houses and trees—half of Chanctonbury Ring disappeared and huge trees were blown down left right and centre, including one in my parents’ garden. Later the tree surgeon who came to fix it (a Mr Fish) said that on the morning of the hurricane it had taken him an hour and a half to drive five miles and he could only do that because he was driving a pick up with tree lifting equipment and a chainsaw in the back!

In the months afterwards, my Great Aunt, who had married a farmer, told me this story about one of the other farmer’s wives she knew.

The lady lived on a farm that had been in her husband’s family many hundreds of years and still occupied the original tudor famhouse. Like most of these, the house had a large chimney in the centre and the rooms were built around it so the chimney kept everything warm. As the winds began to rise, the lady decided that it was probably best to sleep downstairs so she got out a camp bed and bedded down next to the chimney in the central hall, which had the fewest windows. She reckoned it was also the most structurally strong part of the house and therefore the bit most likely to stay upright, and protect her, if the rest of it fell down. The power went off but she had a hurricane lamp and she sat and read for a while and then fell into a fitful sleep.

In the middle of the night she woke up, there was a massive bang and the sound of breaking glass. She guessed it came from the spare room, which was on the side of the house which was being most battered by the wind. She thought about going upstairs to investigate but decided that if the window had blown in there was little she could do other than get herself soaked for no reason and the door was closed, so the mess would be contained in the room, so she stayed put.
In the morning, she looked out of the window and could see bits of tree, garden furniture from the neighbouring farm and other detritus strewn about the lawn and farmyard. Taking her courage in both hands, she went upstairs to the spare room to see how bad the damage was. She opened the door and sure enough the window was smashed. However, the hole was a round hole and she surmised an object of some sort must have been blown through the glass. That’s when she took in the actual room and noticed what the object was. Standing implacably in the middle of the carpet, apparently unharmed, was a sheep.

What happened to the sheep? Well, believe it or not, it was fine. The lady discovered that it came from a field a couple of miles away and that it belonged to a nearby farmer. She had tracked him down and he’d come to fetch it by the end of the day—on foot, with a sheep dog I suspect since most roads were blocked with trees. It had been blown over two miles so it must have had a few stories to tell when it returned to its friends in the fold.

It’s Sean the sheep, it’s Sean the sheep … he even hangs around with those who … actually I’m not sure who he hangs out with to look like this. He was Meditarranean chicken.