Families and Friendships Read Online Free

the city of Newcastle. The skyline of Northumberland was dominated by the symbols of the coal, iron and steel, and shipbuilding industries – the winding gear, slag heaps and the tall factory chimneys – that had made the region an important centre of the industrial revolution. But the landscape was predominantly rural, and within sight of the collieries with their rows of miners’ houses there was green pastureland and pleasant farms and villages. Parts of the coastline were beautiful, with long sandy beaches and rocky cliffs around which the seaside resorts had developed. Whitesands Bay was such a one; a pleasant place to live, the nearest colliery being several miles away.
    Many of the lads who had attended school with Stanley had become coal miners, or had gone to work in industry or at the docks. But Stanley’s parents, Bill and Dora, had not wanted their son to go down the mine. Bill was a miner and suffered every so often with bronchitis, until he died in his early sixties with emphysema, soon after the end of the Second World War.
    Bill and Dora had been blessed with only the one child, Stanley, and they had been anxious to do the very best they could for him. They lived in a mining village in a two-up, two-down cottage in a row that opened on to the street. At the rear, however, there was a small piece of land, communal to the row of cottages, and Bill loved to work on his plot when he was not too weary after his shift at the colliery. He grew vegetables – potatoes, carrots, cabbages, onions, lettuces – as much as the small plot would allow; and even managed to grow flowers in tubs – marigolds, Sweet Williams and night-scented stock – grown from seeds. Stanley enjoyed helping his father in what they liked to call their garden, although it was hardly worthy of the name. It was soon clear that Stanley had a natural bent for working with the soil, and his parents agreed that when he left school he should, ideally, work in the open air instead of down the mine.
    Stanley and his father sometimes cycled out into the surrounding countryside on a Sunday afternoon, on a pair of rusty ramshackle old bicycles. There was hardly any traffic on the roads, especially on the country lanes, and they looked forward to their brief excursions into the green and pleasant farmlands, not all that far from the soot and grime of their own cobblestoned street.
    There was one farm they passed that was more of an arable farm, concentrating on growing crops rather than rearing livestock. They kept a pig, and hens and a cockerel. Some of the hens were fattened for sale at Christmas time, and they also sold their own new-laid eggs. Bill and Stanley sometimes called at the farmhouse and bought a half dozen eggs, and so they got to know the farmer and his wife quite well.
    The land was cultivated for the growing of potatoes, sugar beet, Brussels sprouts and other kinds of vegetables in their season. There was also a small orchard with apple and pear trees, and greenhouses where they grew tomatoes and cucumbers and flowers for sale, mainly chrysanthemums and dahlias. The farmer, Alec Pritchard, employed only a few full-time workers, but several more on a temporary basis when help was needed with the potato harvest or for picking the Brussels sprouts for the Christmas market. But some were permanent; and so it happened, fortuitously, that when Stanley was fourteen years old and ready to leave school, a vacancy occurred at the farm. One of the farm hands was getting married and moving away from the area. Alec had known Stanley for a couple of years and realized how much he loved the land and the open air. When he offered him a job at the farm Stanley and his parents were overjoyed at the turn of events.
    He started his employment at the farm in 1929, and continued working there for eleven years until, in 1940, he was called up for war service. By this time he had married Vera, the girl he had been courting since their