COUNTRY LIFE
OLD Dafydd has never moved with the times. He has farmed in the same place for about forty years, and I am told things are muCh the same now as when his father had it. He gets the tractor in to do his ploughing and harvesting, but he has no car, and that fact alone surely sets him apart these days. I meet him often on the road when he is driving into town with his pony and trap. He wears a ready- tied tie and a white shirt-front and cuffs, a tight-legged tweed suit of 1914 cut and a tweed cap, and is not a bit conscious of being out of fashion. When he talks it is of people long dead, tenants of farms who have given up and gone away "before your time," big snows and short corn and ten-mile walks to school or chapel. I put in a word about such out-of-date things as two-furrow horse-ploughs, and he goes on to tell of the beer-brew his mother produced and of a pond that once stood where there are houses now. I enjoy meeting him. It is hard to get history from his neighbours. They go past at thirty miles an hour faster and live in the future.
Previous page
