The Secret of the Hidden Fireplace!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

I saw a ghost, but it didn’t scare me in the slightest, as I was unaware it was a ghost.  As a lad of 16 I’d hitched to a farm down in  Somerset with my mate Bruce, to help with the harvest. Throughout my childhood we’d taken family summer holidays there. The farmer’s wife produced gigantic breakfasts, after which we filled the mornings with walks, playing with the farm dogs and acclimatising to the overpowering pong of cow pooh.

On afternoon drives to places we rarely found, we pootled lost along tiny roads, the countryside completely hidden behind the towering hedgerows of England’s South-West.

Far too young to consider notions such as ‘city soul’ and ‘country soul’ at the age of seven, I announced I wanted to be a farmer. Twenty-five years later, when I lived on the first of three farms, I realised that my country soul had been alive and kicking back in 1967.

Sixteen in 1976, fired up with the romance of the road, I somehow persuaded my understandably cautious parents that I really need to hitch to the farm. Bruce and I felt so adult, arriving at the farm to work, rather than lounge around as guests.

Work we did, and it came a something of a shock to this suburban middle class boy. We sweated and swore at the barley, which sticks to your clothes, pierces bleeding holes in your fingers and fills your lungs with dust.

We tried our best to work as hard as the grown-up men, and by then end of the day we were ready to relax like men.

Off to the village with the whole crew, schnecking pints of rough cider: dark, cloudy as the Crab nebula and way more chewy.

By god it was good, but after two pints the landlord pointed out that we were under age, so he really couldn’t serve us.

To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.

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