Something has changed in our household. Our five-year-old son is a schoolboy. He is now a veteran of two weeks in the classroom. As I wander home from the school drop-off, I reflect on the massive gulf that separates our boyish lives.
Myles goes to a cosmopolitan, inclusive and thoroughly PC Sydney primary school. The parents are mostly young professionals – the mums in leggings and trainers and the dads in rumpled shorts and designer stubble. The teachers are attentive and approachable, the atmosphere laid-back.
At Myles’ age I was attending a Victorian-era village school in Devon, south-west England. The austere building stood on the top of a hill overlooking farms and cottages. The nearby church of St John The Baptist dated from 1460. The village had a sweet shop, a pub and a lumpy playing field.
The school was divided into two large classrooms. I sat at the back and watched the clouds through a huge gothic window, yearning to be back on the farm with the pigs (my father was a pig farmer), Lassie my border collie and our obese pet donkey.
When I was eight my parents sent me to a posh independent school in town where the teachers were shocked to discover that I was illiterate. By contrast Myles has been reading for two years. Thanks to his iPad and learning apps he has already acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of the solar system, dinosaurs and the inner workings of the human body.
Prior to COVID-19 our inquisitive little boy had travelled to New Zealand, the UK and the Gold Coast. At five years old my entire world was a picturesque valley on the edge of Dartmoor, a storm-lashed wilderness famous for its small ponies and fearsome prison. Eamon de Valera, Jack "The Hat" McVitie and the Aussie bushranger Moondyne Joe were all inmates.
My days were spent doing farm chores, building mud dams in our brook, picking wild strawberries or climbing up to the old Martello tower overlooking our farm; the tower was built, it was said, during the Napoleonic wars. In summer we swam on the pebble beaches of south Devon or tramped across Dartmoor in unsuitable clothes. We shivered through winters, nursing chilblains and waiting for the soft benediction of snow on our slate roof. It always snowed on Christmas Eve.
In 1962, life in this corner of rural England had not changed much for 500 years. Before the arrival of the motorway London was impossibly far away – our longest journey was to the livestock market in Newton Abbot, about five miles away.
This all sounds very Thomas Hardy and I suppose it was. When I revisited our old farm (now a luxury country retreat) a few years ago the new owners told me that we were the last family to actually farm the property – the end of an unbroken 800-year-old farming tradition. At the pub in Marldon I was greeted like a celebrity or perhaps a ghostly apparition.
“Oi, Trevor come over here,” said the barmaid in thick West Country. “There’s a man who went to the old village school up the hill. Yes, of course, I’m serious.”
I asked if Marldon still hosted its annual Apple Pie Fair (very Doc Martin). It did. As a schoolboy I’d been chosen to be the Apple Pie Queen’s page boy. We sat proudly on a float while a horse walked us around that lumpy field.
By the 1960s small holdings like ours were uneconomic and my father became a property developer, renovating cottages for Londoners seeking a rural idyll in deepest Devon. Eventually we sold the farm and moved into Torbay – which later became infamous thanks to madcap antics of a certain Basil Fawlty.
Compared to Myles I had few luxuries. My entertainment was the farm, the woods where we found a WW2 ammo case, the apple orchard, the hay sheds, the water meadows. I have memories of moving a neighbour’s sheep down the narrow Devon laneways and hay-carting in the burning summer sun.
I don’t remember ever watching television or listening to a wireless although my mother must have tuned into Women’s Hour to keep her company as she prepared yet another family meal or baked giant slab of chocolate cake. Myles can access the digital universe by swiping a screen, but my window to the world was my brother’s copy of Look And Learn, although I preferred The Hotspur, a much racier comic.
Myles is a thoroughly urban kid with access to galleries, interactive museums, great sporting venues and a wonderful diversity of human beings. By comparison, my young childhood was narrow, white and unexciting. And yet I wonder whether he will ever feel the thrill of dancing around a giant bonfire on Guy Fawkes Night, holding a newborn piglet on a winter's morning or gazing lovingly into the eyes of a teenage Apple Pie Queen.
Yes, I was, to quote Dylan Thomas, as happy as the grass was green.
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