Two dogs and a little snow...

So one lot of snow has come and gone with more forecast before the New Year - how inconvenient.

This is my Great Grandfather William, out in the bleak midwinter, ankle deep in snow, firmly capped and gaitered, forking the hay from the stacks he would have made by hand the previous summer from hand-seeded hay grown in his field and harvested by hand. I don’t know who the dog is, it can’t be Patch that was my Grandmother’s dog, my Mum’s, Mum, and the Great Grandfather I’m writing about is my Dad’s, Dad’s, Dad – so not Patch, but so much like him that if I didn’t know better… I could swear…

Could Patch be in two places at the same time, pet to two families separated by a half dozen counties? No, impossible and anyway, this isn’t about Patch.

I’ll save Patch for another time. But for now here’s a picture of Patch at the bottom of the post, he’s so similar to my Great Grandfathers dog that he could be Patch – how strange that both my Mum and Dad’s family should have two such identical dogs.

I’m not sure when the picture of William was taken – probably the forties, maybe the Great Winter of 1947, but at some time either during or just after the war when Lincolnshire was all airfields, airmen, and Americans from over there, over here. My Great Grandfather was a blacksmith, I come from a long line of blacksmiths, blacksmiths and farmers – my Great Grandfather William was both. Strong, quiet, a man built to ‘just get on with it’ despite the weather, whatever hand fate decided to deal.

He was married three times, his first two wives dieing around him. Things were hard back then – the winters, the living, childbirth. Things were hard, particularly in the countryside, particularly in the winter. No central heating, no running water, no electricity – how inconvenient.

He was married three times, he killed his own pigs, he could shoe a shire horse and ride it home, he could lift an anvil, he could make fire from a tinder-box, and he could marry an eloping couple – or so he claimed.

William, the son of a Dutchman and a Dutch woman who sailed from Holland across to the fens to build their canals and windmills, farmers and blacksmiths, milling corn, churning butter, making cheese, slaughtering the winter pig, tending the Smithy.

William, married three times, he could iron-rim a cartwheel, hammer a horseshoe, make a furnace with bellows, wrought black-steel coffin handles, and as a boy whittled wooden ice skates to skate the canals of Lincolnshire like his family had done for hundreds of years before him on the long canals of Holland – wool capped, leather strung clogs hung across shoulders, under the grey, speeding sky, swish-swashing to the ice fair in far away Amsterdam.

On the night that he died I was at my Granfather’s, he was a blacksmith too, a forge a few miles down the road. On the night that he died, ill for a long time, losing the sight in his eyes and the strength in his hammer arm - on that night that he died, me in bed, the light from the washhouse illuminating the ceiling of my darkened room, quiet and waiting, knowing that something was passing - on that night, as he died, at the moment he passed, a shadow crossed the ceiling of my room and for a moment stopped, was still, and then moved on. On that night that he died, as soon as the shadow sighed goodbye, the shiny, black, bakerlite phone in my Grandfather’s front room started to bring, bring, bring and I knew William, my Great Grandfather, son of a Dutchman, was gone.

William, my Great Grandfather forking hay in the snow and just getting on with it, his mismatched mongrel looking on.

I wish I knew his name, maybe it was Patch.