High Up in the Rolling Hills: A Living on the Land

by Peter Finch

Overview

In his youth, Peter Finch wove his way through a series of exploits and adventures. Travels took him to Canada, where a fateful encounter in the Rocky Mountains opened up new horizons. In midlife he and his wife Gundi made the shift to country living, ushering in a new phase in their life, as they set down roots in the hills and settled into a deliberately simplified lifestyle.

Peter relates how he and Gundi immersed themselves in ways guided by nature. As she created and sold glass sculptures, he sunk his hands and tools into pure glacial-till soils, sowing, planting, and growing culinary and medicinal herbs, heirloom vegetables and salad greens to take to farmers markets and restaurants in and around Toronto. Invigorated by the pleasures and health benefits of growing, selling, and eating fresh organic food, Peter reveals how he became a passionate advocate of traditional, small-scale, chemical-free farming.

High Up in the Rolling Hills shares the personal journey of an independent couple as they explore the vital role of nature, creativity, and healthy food in life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781475985863
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	04/22/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	204
File size:	881 KB

Read an Excerpt

High Up in the Rolling Hills

A Living on the Land

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By Peter Finch

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2013 Peter Finch
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-8585-6

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CHAPTER 1

Preambles in Childhood and Youth

I was born into this world in the mid-1950s, and my father, Jack, endured the grind of commuting daily by car to "the Big Smoke," the hectic city of London, to work for an advertising company.

His job took him travelling all over the country in his capacity as outdoor advertising site manager. After long days of work, he found time and energy to devote to the depressed and suicidal as a volunteer for the Samaritans. He seemed to be always away except on cherished weekends.

In my youth, Dad envied my footloose travels, my wanderlust. As a loving father, he always wanted me to settle into a cosy routine, into a safe marriage, into a secure career. He was always coming up with new ideas, especially for my fledgling map business and gardening pursuits. I, in turn, envied his flying and gliding exploits; he told me that there is nothing to match the feeling of hearing only the whoosh of the wind when gliding free. I also envied his bravura in taking on challenges and truly getting things done. I took on his passion for gardening, sports, poetry, maps and music, and some of his humanitarian character couldn't help but rub off on me.

In flight training in the Royal Air Force in his late teens, Jack was transported into another realm by gliding, as he later wrote in "The Untrodden Highways":

    Up in the blue-grey realms of sky,
    Unconfined by earthly constraint,
    You can move in all dimensions,
    In those wide untrodden highways.

    You're free to wheel or loop or drift.
    You can roll, climb, spin or hover.
    You can dive like a young eagle.
    You can soar like a carefree lark.

    Who cares if it's gloomy on earth?
    Climb through the cloud to dazzling light.
    Fling your craft in wide open space
    In that kingdom of far beyond.

Ashe wrote this, his world was young, as were his comrades. They all trooped off to war, and many were destined not to return to their normal lives, cut off in their prime, or their loved ones at home. Jack was left with a sense of guilt and a lingering grief that never left him despite his great humour and bubbly joviality in all his long years.

I have always been grateful that mandatory military service was abolished in my homeland when I was in my late teens. It was not for me and, had I been German and faced with the choice between military service, social service and moving to West Berlin, I would certainly have opted against the military option. Luckily for me, camaraderie was readily available from sports and school, and I could honour my civic duty without bearing arms.

* * *

My mother, born Mary Mullins, grew up in Oxford, where she was to become head girl at Oxford Girls' School on New Inn Hall Street, with just a brick wall separating her school from my university college, St Peter's, where I was to study some 35 years later. Mum worked for a while as secretary to E. F. Schumacher, who achieved fame for his marvellously insightful book Small Is Beautiful, which my sister Jill gave me in my late teens. Later in life when I threw myself into organic-food growing, the principles Schumacher espoused truly took on deep meaning for me.

As the Second World War came to an end, Mary wrote "One Day when We Were Young," on October 7, 1945. It was her story of young love and the painful decisions young lovers had to make immediately after the war, despite the promises of peace. She was 22 at the time.

One Sunday when a young girl and a young boy awoke to find one of those rare glorious days in October, they decided to set out for a walk. The haze was lifting and the blue-grey sky was gradually growing blue. They set off, hand in hand, with her dog very pleased at knowing he was being taken for a walk. Now the warmth of the sun was burning their backs, now caressing their faces. As they were climbing to the top of Shotover Plain the young man, who was a flight lieutenant pilot, said that he had to decide by the next morning whether he was going to volunteer for eighteen months' ground staff duties or eighteen months with a chance of flying duties, with a possibility of the latter being lengthened to four years. Here was one of the millions of problems that were having to be solved by so many men and women, now that the fighting side of the war was o'er. As they discussed this view and that, they found they had come to the end of their climb and were now walking over Shotover Plain. The conversation had brought them closer to each other than they had ever been before in the comparatively short time since they had met each other. The magnificent morning and the beautiful surroundings made such an awe-inspiring atmosphere. And so they strolled, roaming down one field to view a copse that lay in a dell, ahead of them. The sun emphasized the green, brown and golden tints of the leaves, and away in the distance, the hills rolled into space. As they went on their way, they stopped to admire a group of beech trees with their smooth slender trunks, and their eyes looked upward to see the blue sky peeping through the dense foliage above them. Everywhere they walked they crunched over the fallen multi-coloured leaves. The red berries were thick on the bushes. Now and again, they stopped to eat a few blackberries that were warm from the sun. Before they started to descend from the Plain, they scanned the wonderful view that was spread before them. It seemed that for a few brief moments they had managed to get out and rise above the world they belonged to ... And so they left this vision they had shared and returned to the world below.

* * *

The miracle of life began for me, at home, Saplings in Mill Lane, Chalfont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire, England, in May 1956 at 9:15 in the morning, just after my two sisters, Jill and Jenny, had left to walk to school. The town of my birth had been home to famed poet and statesman John Milton some three hundred years before. His picturesque cottage, where he penned his epic Paradise Lost while escaping the Great Plague of London in the years 1664–1666, remains intact.

As a youngster, I didn't really appreciate that we lived just 20 miles from London since I was rarely exposed to the city. I inhabited an innocent realm symbolized by our sumac tree, weeping willow ("I'm the king of the castle; get down you dirty rascal") and leafy lanes we walked along to school (like Dodd's Lane, where I was scared by the appearance of "black ghosts," or nuns). We were warned to keep away from the gypsy camp on the edge of the woods, and so curiosity naturally drew us to it.

Dad was captain of Fencibles Cricket Club in Amersham, Buckinghamshire. Their ground was rather plain, and I used to long for the spectacular setting of the yearly Old Albanians away fixture in St. Albans. During the match, my mates and I made a great escape into a wooded dell which was formed into a bowl at one end of the cricket pitch. I latched on to the other boys, and off we ran into the woods for hours of self-made entertainment and exploration of imagined worlds. These were part of our virtual fantasy world all those decades before video games and Harry Potter. I can't begin to think what we got up to, but we'd return at teatime all scratched up, muddy-kneed, sheepish and breathless. After a sausage-sandwich supper served up by the cricket ladies (to whom my mum would proudly introduce me as her "son and heir") and being teased by Albert Cox (who left me gaping when he would briefly light his hairy chest with a match), we'd roll on home. As my family descended the hill in our trusty Morris Minor and crossed the stream in Mill Lane on the last leg home, in the dark, we'd all belt out our song:

    Here we are again, happy as can be,
    All good friends and jolly good company.
    Never mind the weather, never mind the rain,
    Now we're all together, whoops she goes again.

An old music-hall song, this ditty was the perfect expression of jollity and belonging. In later years, even into her late eighties in a nursing home, Mum would beam as she heard this tune.

Walks with my sisters to nearby farms and a trip to Whipsnade Zoo led me to announce one day at the age of 4 that, when I grew up, I wanted to be a farmer with five lions on my farm. The seed was already planted in my brain. The lions never materialized, but the farming did.

Presumably frustrated by his job, Dad took on part-time gardening jobs tending the rambling back garden of a client in Gerrards Cross, planting flowers in a car-sales display in Marlow (where the pungent aroma from the steaming brewery nauseated me), and caring for long flower beds along the frontage of a noisy and smelly plastics factory in Slough. I was privileged to help water the plants and dig beds, being treated to hot savoury steak pies at the transport caf en route.

When I was 7, our family made a big move. Dad officially quit the rat race, and he and Mum became joint wardens of Little Pond House Convalescent Home for Children in Tilford, Surrey. Into thin air went the nuclear three-child family, walks through the woods to school and weekends of cricket. For several years I cycled a good few miles through the lovely Surrey countryside to prep school at Barfield. When the time came for both my sisters to leave home and pursue higher education—Jill in Aberdeen and Jenny in Portsmouth—I was left to lonely nights filled with gnawing angst about the transience of life and the awful void of death as I lay awake in our cottage while my parents were over in the main house tending their flock of holidaying children. No more comforting and delicious bacon omelettes from my big sister, except on her infrequent visits home. On the flip side of the coin, as an active young boy I relished all the organized games, races and activities I shared with an ever-changing cast of playmates. The children came mostly for two-week holidays, setting aside the trials of wretched inner-city conditions of grim housing estates, poor respiratory health and, in many cases, abuse at the hands of a bullying parent or two. Many children came back for several holidays and clearly benefited from them, though I wondered how it was to have to dive back into their sad lives. Helpers to deal with the kids came from all over, and I have fond memories of lovely young women from Holland, Switzerland, and Italy. I was smitten by holidaying girls my age from Berlin, Hamburg, Paris, London and Birmingham and had innocent trysts with them, stealing wet kisses behind the ironing-room door and writing them letters, unbeknownst to my parents.

* * *

The two weeks I spent on a Mediterranean cruise at the age of 15 was the longest I had been away from home without parents. It offered a fabulous itinerary—mostly wasted on mid-teens like me—at the fabulous price of £69, inclusive! We were 20 or so classmates, flying to Venice and joining up with the SS Nevasa, along with 1,000 or more other schoolchildren. From Venice, we sailed down the inky-blue Adriatic to Corfu and then docked at Piraeus for an unforgettable day in Athens. This first visit to the Acropolis and the Parthenon is an experience that remains etched vividly in my memory as a highlight of all travels (along with a visit much later in life to the Alhambra in Granada, Spain). We sailed on to Heraklion, capital of Crete, and took a bus tour to Knossos. Then it was west across the open Mediterranean to Bizerta in Tunisia. North Africa seemed highly exotic, especially the wild day trip by rickety bus to Tunis. The route of our crossing north to Italy was altered to accommodate the eruption of Stromboli on Sicily. Too bad we missed it. We docked in Napoli and had another whirlwind day scooting around Rome by bus for a few hours. Our final port of call was Livorno, base for a day trip to the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which we gleefully and dizzily mounted, as this was still allowed then.

When my parents upped sticks and moved to seaside Ramsgate in Kent to found Chilton Farmhouse Children's Holidays this same year (1971), this 15-year-old was decidedly not a happy camper. To my horror and amazement, I was told students at Chatham House Grammar School played rugby, not my beloved football. This was catastrophic, and I took to sulking around for months. I took on a newspaper round, summer bingo hall change-giving and pre-Christmas postal delivery, and, in subsequent years I spent many a boisterous, late night with school friends in Margate, pubbing and drinking beer till it overflowed out of me. I earned pocket money helping Dad on tree-planting expeditions at a sprawling garden on the clifftop overlooking the English Channel outside Deal. He maintained a market garden, making weekly deliveries of vegetables and cut flowers to local hotels.

My first trip to Berlin was to West Berlin, at the impressionable age of 16. I was visiting my sister Jill, who at that time lived with husband Jürgen in Kreuzberg at the end of the subway line (Schlesisches Tor) at the Wall, which concealed the river Spree and the Russian Sector beyond. In the 1970s, West Berlin was a decadent, vibrant magnet, and I took many trips there over the next few years, travelling by cross-Channel ferry to Oostende in Belgium then either by train or hitched rides, even on the last tortuous leg of middle-of-the-night passport checks through security-obsessed East Germany. I worked on landscaping jobs all over the city and twice over several months as a gardener in a lovely cemetery in Schöneberg.

When working in the cemetery, I was intrigued by my peace of mind, compared with my customary irritability and ill ease in the hustle and bustle of the city. Here, I entered another realm outside the grind of my reality, and I lavished upon this realm a loving affection. What was it that empowered a cemetery to gain such a grasp on my soul? I thought I got it: The straight lines and clearly defined compartments, the oblong coffins and gravesites lent shape and pattern to my seemingly random undefined existence; the rapid, unfussy transition from life into death, the timeliness and tidiness of the whole operation of burial began to obsess me. Here I was, struggling away with my own conflicting desires and attitudes, seemingly conspiring to reduce life to one uphill struggle toward an appalling void. The appeal of a clean, painless death, suddenly giving meaning to life by comforting straight lines and clear-cut decisions, was great. Impermanence in my own life and the aura of death around me yielded to a heady air of spiritual rebirth. Physical degeneration of the body after death troubled me not at all, and I was rather lusty in handling the decayed human bones that I dug up in my occasional grave-digging. The happy discovery of an intact skull enraptured me, and the falling apart of a whole skeleton into fragments struck me as entirely natural. The cemetery was life and I the skeleton in my little box of life. I raked up endless mountains of dead leaves; it was as if the world's hair was falling out all around me, yet it all went to provide rich soil for whatever came after on that plot. A calm flowed in and waved in the wind, lingering, and drifted away. It told no lies and made me feel a mystic warmth way down inside.

Shortly after I began university studies at Oxford in 1975, I found that the rarefied atmosphere of the ivory tower was not my element. Academia was too stuffy, the syllabus too confining, and my intellectual appetite lacking. However, I do have Pot Hall (St. Peter's College) to thank for lifelong friends in Neil, Andy and Jeremy. And I did get to appreciate certain literary luminaries, electing Nietzsche, Montaigne and Molière as special authors for in-depth study. But I was a lazy oaf, skipping lectures, attempting to bluff my way through one-on-one tutorials with Reg Perman and Gilbert McKay. Reg was more easily duped, steeped in the fog of his own cocktail of arcane literature, chain-smoked cigarettes and sherry. Gilbert was much more particular, discerning and demanding. In later years, I would still jolt awake, having dreamed that I really did have to confess to Reg why I had not prepared anything for his tutorial and had been avoiding him and all studies for years.

What to do with life? Not fall into the conventional trap but find my own way. No straight-ahead path to middle management or intellectual pursuits (that graduation from Oxford prescribed) for me, but a perennial study of whatever grows naturally and is good for body and soul. I pondered becoming a gardener, park ranger or travel guide exploring foreign lands and cultures. Shocking to me was the fact that, moved from primary school in Chalfont St. Giles to (private) prep school in Runfold, to grammar schools in Farnham and Ramsgate, and right through university I was exposed to single-sex education from the age of 7 to 23. Barfield, Farnham Grammar, Chatham House, St. Peter's College—learning devoid of females in any form, except one teacher, the sweet Miss Winnie Egan in Farnham.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from High Up in the Rolling Hills by Peter Finch. Copyright © 2013 Peter Finch. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface....................     ix     

Chapter 1 Preambles in Childhood and Youth....................     1     

Chapter 2 Migrating to the New World....................     15     

Chapter 3 A Sense of Arrival....................     27     

Chapter 4 Into a New Millennium....................     35     

Chapter 5 Echinacea Planting....................     61     

Chapter 6 Co-operative Years....................     71     

Chapter 7 A Health Scare....................     81     

Chapter 8 Trust Nature....................     93     

Chapter 9 Hoop Houses....................     103     

Chapter 10 Into a Second Decade....................     117     

Chapter 11 Looking Back, Moving Forward....................     139     

Epilogue....................     173     

Appendix....................     179