Self-Sufficiency in Style

Self-Sufficiency in Style

starting out

In Financial Support the pros and cons of combining paid employment with self-sufficiency were examined.

Self-sufficiency comes in many shapes, forms and sizes.

Sometimes one of you, sometimes another, sometimes a whole community - even an employer.

The writer, when first married, lived in a village called Stone.

Then a semi-rural part of North Kent, it is now squeezed between the River Thames the Dartford Crossing, the M25 and Blue Water.

We lived in a little lane close to the railway station "Stone Crossing Halt" and the pub "The Lads of the Village."

It was then the dirtiest place you have ever seen. Cement dust was everywhere. The trees were white, the roads were white and even the inhabitants were white.

It was reputed to be the most polluted place on earth - and I can well believe it.

We could see eleven cement factory chimneys pouring out dust and steam 24 hours a day

Polluted?

Still sheep on the marshes

But it was still a village. There were sheep on the marshes and fruit on the trees and it hid a well kept secret.

After a few months of living there, you failed to see the dust, in exactly the same way as we get accustomed to sunlight or darkness.

To us the trees were green, the earth fertile, the sky blue and the world lovely.

The dust was inert and harmless.

When others shuddered and asked, "How can you live there?" we didn't argue, just smiled and kept our secret.

The little village and its factory was a self-sufficient world clinging to the banks of the Thames, ignored and abused a little by passers-by.

It was a company village. Everything revolved around the company.

It had its own private railway passing under the roads and public railways, far into the country through mysterious and tree clad quarries. Chalk was carried back as the raw material for cement.

It had its own ships and barges and tugs, busy on the river carting raw materials in to the works and carrying the cement away to rebuild London.

It had company cars and company lorries, and company roads by the mile.

Barge-work

On occasions when explosives were used to break cement clinker - they were rather too many experts for comfort.

In war, it had its own army unit, "Kent Fortress" - explosive experts who engaged on hit and run sabotage raids on the coast of occupied Europe.

In peace, the oldsters relived their days of glory in the company rifle-range next door to our cottage. The beer afterwards was bought in the company club.

The Works Manager sat on the local Council.

The workers lived in company houses. When they retired they lived on there with company pensions.

The electricity came from the work's power station. There was a company fire service and company security.

You could get a meal twenty four hours a day at the work's canteen.

You could get a hair cut from the company barber and watch bowls on the company bowling green opposite the office.

Well it grew in company time!

Pigeon racing was popular.

It was a paternalistic and protected way of life, long gone now, like the factory and the men.

They kept pigeons and chickens in their back gardens. Grew potatoes and peas each year and went on a coach trip for their annual holiday.

It was a frustrating, safe and unexciting life. Sleepy and conformist, it was an exercise in a kind of self-sufficiency taking place less than twenty miles from the centre of London.

I guess the miners and engineers that shared the Welsh mining valleys must have had a similar experience.

Love it or hate it, it was something not to be missed.

Sometimes when I see white dust on the road, I imagine again the wail of the factory siren across the white cement caked roofs.

We rented a cottage from the company and, in the usual way of things, we both worked for a time.

The cottage was cheap to rent, heavily subsidised by the company, but the salary was poor and, truth to tell, the prospects too.

Mrs P actually earned more than I did at a power station a few miles away.

Then, of course, the children came. First one then another. We were down to one wage.

Self-sufficiency was no fad, it was an urgent necessity.

But we were aided by two things. The natural self-reliance of my workmates and neighbours...and a stroke of luck.

I had married into the business.

Black and white memories from a cottage in white dust.

"Ginger", in the front supervising, has three children now

and her sister - five.

Married into the business

My wife's father, grandfather and uncle were all seeds-men by trade.

As a girl, she always had to empty the bath of exotic species over-wintering before using it, so was not over- enamoured with the idea of gardening.

Although I had seen my father hoe in hand, I was no more enthusiastic than she.

My new in-laws had quickly defeated any ideas I had for ignoring the pile of soil-less block chalk and abandoned coal yard that we had inherited from the out-going tenant.

In solemn deputation, they arrived, each bearing some plants, inspected the yard and announced that "with work, it will do."

It would have been churlish not to have scratched a hole and planted the gift - and foolhardy to have failed to water.

But they came back time after time with more and more plants.

My courtesy had been mistaken for enthusiasm.

Some of the items brought seemed never to have been grown before in England and were certainly unknown to the conservative palate of the cement fraternity.

They would lean across the fence, doubting that it could survive and, even, if it did, would be unfit to eat.

Unenthusiastic gardening

Definitely foreign.

Kohlrabi, I recall, was viewed with considerable suspicion, as was Sweet Corn. Garlic was kept a dark secret. Garlic could start rumours.

The techniques of husbandry also were greeted with some scepticism despite their pedigree. "We don't do it that way round 'ere" was the doubtful comment.

Then came that stroke of luck...a hot dry summer.

The tomatoes, that I had failed, in my ignorance, to pinch out grew into small trees and ripened in the hot weather.

My neighbour's runner beans dried on their sticks, whilst mine, pinched out and grown on the ground, survived.

My credibility took a turn for the better as the ache in my back became more acute.

I tell no lie - tomatoes like apple trees - I had to stake the branches

It is who you know that can count.

Mrs P, while this was going on outside the window, was learning to handle the sometimes strange produce from the garden.

We had no refrigerator, just a cooling device known as an "Osocool."

She became a friend of the butcher, gaining his admiration for taking the less expensive, less popular cuts and learning that slow cooking can transform meat from tough to mouth-wateringly tender.

And then just as suddenly as we had arrived, it was time to leave for pastures new...

A new more prosperous and mainstream life, leaving self-sufficiency behind, but not forgotten.

That story can await another day.

You can return to the question of Financial Support, or find some more autobiographical stories on the Writer

On the move.

...looking back

- from the gloomily named Hangman's Cottage, just to the south of Misery Corner.

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