A Farmer's Daughter

I was born on a farm which nestles into the slopes of the beautiful Quantock Hills in Somerset in the South West of England. Huntstile Farm is mentioned in the Doomsday Book which was written in 1067 and the house which was once a Monks’ Rest House is five hundred years old. The village of Goathurst was run on feudal lines until the 1950s when the estate of Lord Wharton was broken up to pay for gambling debts and death duties.

My childhood was idyllic and my earliest memories are of milking cows, planting potatoes and picnics in the fields while helping bring in the harvest. The smell of freshly mown grass on a sunny day still takes me straight back to those hayfields. One of my first jobs was to go and check the sheep at lambing time to see if any were on their backs. They are silly creatures and would die if we did not roll them over.

Goathurst village is a mile away from the farm and only has a church and a village hall – no pub as King John banned us from having one eight hundred years ago! There were forests and rivers and we played hide and seek around the dilapidated Halswell Estate House. There were less than two hundred people in the village and the school had closed so we had to the school in the next village which only got electricity when I was ten!

As much as I loved my home I was determined so see the world. I left the village when I was seventeen and went to Jamaica where I taught in a secondary school in Montego Bay. I returned to England to do a B.Ed at Sussex University and then taught in the East End of London for a year before starting on a world trip. The year turned into years and more than sixty countries later I settled in Australia where my children were born. I have taught English is some very different environments. Teaching monks in the courtyard of a Himalayan monastery with no chairs, books or black board is very different from teaching top executives at Mitsubishi Bank in Tokyo or immigrants in Australia. The most motivated students that I have ever had were Vietnamese boat people in a refugee camp in the Philippines.

I have now lived in Abu Dhabi for ten years and I am very happy that my children are growing up here. They are getting a fantastic education; they have numerous friends from so many different ethnic backgrounds and have a great social life. Where else would a mother be able to have a good job, not have to do any ironing and get to relax on the beach every weekend knowing that her teenage children are safe and having fun.

Every summer we go home to the village. My brother is still farming at Huntstile. However, times are changing. Farming has gone through some tough times. John has had to revert back to organic farming and the farmhouse is once again a rest house – a Bed and Breakfast. My mother and father and three sisters all live less than two miles from the house where we were all born.

Thus, although my children have a mother who was bitten by the wanderlust bug, they are now totally at home in three completely different environments, Melbourne, Abu Dhabi and Goathurst. Every summer they return to the village and spend time with men and women who have been caring for the land for more than seventy years and they love to lie on the same grass and climb the same trees as I did when I was their age.

http://www.quantockonline.co.uk/quantocks/villages/goathurst/goathurst1.html
http://www.touchtaunton.com/business/website/value/1882659
http://www.halswellweddings.co.uk/thehouse.html