We arrived at our home by the coast weighed by the thought of all the mowing and weed pulling that would be required. We’d been absent for weeks, work and city life swallowing us. Spring was well advanced on the back of rainstorms, causing an explosion of new growth.
Good neighbours in the country are invaluable. Credit: Tamara Voninski As we rolled through the front gates, a perfectly mown lawn greeted us. We knew who must have granted us this happy gift.
Our next-door neighbour, an easy-going fellow with a fine beard whose generous nature means his large back shed regularly fills with his mates for such ritual events as Thirsty Thursdays, had wheeled out his lawn mower in our absence. I called out to him over the fence. He was bashful, waving away our thanks.
We delivered him a slab of stubbies, and he was adamant he couldn’t accept such a thing until I insisted it was simply a contribution to him and the boys for the next Thirsty Thursday. Good neighbours are treasures. My grandfather learned the truth of it in the 1920s.
His father, my great-grandfather, had died in a car crash, his jalopy turning upside down and pinning him just up the road from the family farm. It meant, everyone in the district knew, that the farm would pass naturally to my grandfather, a young man then. He was only a few years returned from the Western Front where he’d been wounded twice in ruinous battles during the Great War.
.