Showing results by publisher "Isis Publishing Ltd" in Biographies & Memoirs

To Fred Archer, born in the village of Ashton-under-Hill in 1915 and growing up in the 1920s, nothing seemed to change except the seasons. This was the age of paraffin lamps, earth closets, and the last train from Evesham at 7 o’clock in the evening. The village was a self-sufficient community with its own hierarchy, strong Church and Chapel, fierce politics and home-made entertainment.

Fred Archer grew up on his father’s farm in the Vale of Evesham in the 1920s, a time when the horse was supreme and shepherd, dairyman, and carter were kings within their callings. With wit and warmth, he describes local characters, and documents a forgotten rural life - the way an elevator pole was used to build a hayrick, how small boys were sent under cornricks to cut off with scissors hanging straws that mice could use as ladders, and how cottagers kept songbirds in cages.

The local newspaper of 1900 covered the weekly happenings of men, farming, and weather, but what of the Secret Things that were not reported in the papers that first year of the new century? Fred Archer resurrects the way of life of the village folk: how they lived in the cottages tucked away in every coomb under the hill, an outcrop of the Cotswolds that lies between them and the Malverns like a stranded whale, where the beech trees thrive on the limestone, overlooking the snaking Avon river.