llamedos
New Member
Thought you may enjoy this short Tale. 
There's about seven of us sitting around the table in the pub and someone says he knows of someone who is looking for two mudguards for a Fordson Major. Fordson Majors were built in the Fifties and Sixties so they are vintage tractors now. All of the company are interested in vintage tractors, three of them actually own various models. I don't own one, although the old tractor we use every day to scrape the concrete yards probably qualifies. But I'm the oldest here and these tractors were new when I drove them, so I am deferred to as a sort of expert.
Where I grew up, most of the farms in the area were small family farms, about 50 to 80 acres. They mostly had one tractor and that tractor was a little grey Ferguson. The next tractors up the size scale were Fordson Majors. To tractor-mad boys, Fordson Majors were the stuff of dreams. Hardly anyone had a big enough farm to justify one. We only knew of one or two, but if we saw one, we were in awe of it, and even more in awe of the person driving it.
I remember one day a group of us were waiting for the school bus when a new Fordson Major pulled up at the end of an adjacent lane and came out onto the main road and drove past us. Our conversation stopped dead, open mouths stayed open, we watched spellbound as the tractor went past us. The youth driving it seemed to look right through us as if we didn't exist. Yet two years previously he would have been standing with us to catch the same school bus. We were now a much lower form of life, whereas he had moved on to life's pinnacle. We didn't feel slighted by this, it was just how things were. I noticed that the older girls in our group had stopped talking as well. They weren't interested in tractors, but they were clearly interested in the driver.
Years later, I knew a man who owned two Fordson Majors, they were a lot older by now but not yet old enough to be vintage. One day he was driving one of the tractors down a farm track between two fields. He wasn't concentrating properly on what he was doing – I think he was trying to roll a cigarette at the time – and he got one wheel up on the bank of the side of the track and the tractor flopped over on its side. It didn't flop right over because the sides of the lane were too steep, it just came to rest on an angle against a tree.
Unfortunately, our driver was pinned in place because his ear was trapped between the mudguard and the tree. (If you remember, Fordson Major mudguards was where all this started. I like my stories to go in circles, it saves me getting lost). He was pinned there by his ear for three hours before someone went looking for him. It was a simple matter for two men to push the tractor back over upright. It all seems quite funny now and I suppose that, in a way, it is, just as long as it wasn't your ear.
A few months later, on a very wet day, I took something to be repaired at the blacksmith's. It was a good place to go on a cold, wet day, especially if he had the forge going. My man with the Fordson Major and the ear was there when I arrived and he was showing the blacksmith and I his damaged ear. Half of it was completely black and the considered medical opinion of myself and the blacksmith was that the black part was completely dead and needed to come off. I think they call it necrosis. To confirm our diagnosis, the man with the damaged ear gets his penknife out and sticks it in the black bit and doesn't feel a thing.
We assumed, the blacksmith and I, that our man would go to hospital to have his ear tidied up, but a man who doesn't have time to stop a tractor to roll a cigarette certainly doesn't have time to hang about in A&E. To our consternation and alarm, he starts sawing away at the dead bit of his ear with his penknife. Either his penknife wasn't very sharp or he hit a bit of gristle, but he could only get half way on his surgical journey. So the blacksmith finishes the job for him with the shears he uses for cutting sheet metal.
He was not without his medical expertise, our blacksmith. There was a man in our village with only one leg. He had a false leg, a cumbersome affair made of tin, nothing like the modern prosthetics we see today. His false leg was always breaking so he had two, and one was always hanging up in the blacksmith's forge waiting for repairs. He had lost his leg in a tree-falling accident, and legend had it that he was cutting a big branch of a beech tree but made the mistake of sitting on the branch he was sawing. I always thought this was a bit unfair because no one really knew if it was true and, despite his disability, he was one of the hardest working men I ever knew.
Read more: http://www.westerndailypress.co.uk/...tory-26541001-detail/story.html#ixzz3ax8D1NvU
There's about seven of us sitting around the table in the pub and someone says he knows of someone who is looking for two mudguards for a Fordson Major. Fordson Majors were built in the Fifties and Sixties so they are vintage tractors now. All of the company are interested in vintage tractors, three of them actually own various models. I don't own one, although the old tractor we use every day to scrape the concrete yards probably qualifies. But I'm the oldest here and these tractors were new when I drove them, so I am deferred to as a sort of expert.
Where I grew up, most of the farms in the area were small family farms, about 50 to 80 acres. They mostly had one tractor and that tractor was a little grey Ferguson. The next tractors up the size scale were Fordson Majors. To tractor-mad boys, Fordson Majors were the stuff of dreams. Hardly anyone had a big enough farm to justify one. We only knew of one or two, but if we saw one, we were in awe of it, and even more in awe of the person driving it.
I remember one day a group of us were waiting for the school bus when a new Fordson Major pulled up at the end of an adjacent lane and came out onto the main road and drove past us. Our conversation stopped dead, open mouths stayed open, we watched spellbound as the tractor went past us. The youth driving it seemed to look right through us as if we didn't exist. Yet two years previously he would have been standing with us to catch the same school bus. We were now a much lower form of life, whereas he had moved on to life's pinnacle. We didn't feel slighted by this, it was just how things were. I noticed that the older girls in our group had stopped talking as well. They weren't interested in tractors, but they were clearly interested in the driver.
Years later, I knew a man who owned two Fordson Majors, they were a lot older by now but not yet old enough to be vintage. One day he was driving one of the tractors down a farm track between two fields. He wasn't concentrating properly on what he was doing – I think he was trying to roll a cigarette at the time – and he got one wheel up on the bank of the side of the track and the tractor flopped over on its side. It didn't flop right over because the sides of the lane were too steep, it just came to rest on an angle against a tree.
Unfortunately, our driver was pinned in place because his ear was trapped between the mudguard and the tree. (If you remember, Fordson Major mudguards was where all this started. I like my stories to go in circles, it saves me getting lost). He was pinned there by his ear for three hours before someone went looking for him. It was a simple matter for two men to push the tractor back over upright. It all seems quite funny now and I suppose that, in a way, it is, just as long as it wasn't your ear.
A few months later, on a very wet day, I took something to be repaired at the blacksmith's. It was a good place to go on a cold, wet day, especially if he had the forge going. My man with the Fordson Major and the ear was there when I arrived and he was showing the blacksmith and I his damaged ear. Half of it was completely black and the considered medical opinion of myself and the blacksmith was that the black part was completely dead and needed to come off. I think they call it necrosis. To confirm our diagnosis, the man with the damaged ear gets his penknife out and sticks it in the black bit and doesn't feel a thing.
We assumed, the blacksmith and I, that our man would go to hospital to have his ear tidied up, but a man who doesn't have time to stop a tractor to roll a cigarette certainly doesn't have time to hang about in A&E. To our consternation and alarm, he starts sawing away at the dead bit of his ear with his penknife. Either his penknife wasn't very sharp or he hit a bit of gristle, but he could only get half way on his surgical journey. So the blacksmith finishes the job for him with the shears he uses for cutting sheet metal.
He was not without his medical expertise, our blacksmith. There was a man in our village with only one leg. He had a false leg, a cumbersome affair made of tin, nothing like the modern prosthetics we see today. His false leg was always breaking so he had two, and one was always hanging up in the blacksmith's forge waiting for repairs. He had lost his leg in a tree-falling accident, and legend had it that he was cutting a big branch of a beech tree but made the mistake of sitting on the branch he was sawing. I always thought this was a bit unfair because no one really knew if it was true and, despite his disability, he was one of the hardest working men I ever knew.
Read more: http://www.westerndailypress.co.uk/...tory-26541001-detail/story.html#ixzz3ax8D1NvU
