OUR FRED

Jenny Lucas remembers a farmer of East Sussex

We live in a village not far from Lewes, the County Town of East Sussex, with the Sussex Downs and the Long Man of Wilmington overseeing the fields in one direction and the busy A22 thundering its way to London in the other. It used to be exclusively farming country, but nowadays most of the farms and cottages like our own, are owned by incomers and commuting folk. But there are still those who work the land and Fred Pettit was born and bred to a life in farming.

When he died last November, our rural community lost one of its most respected countrymen. You may never have met him or even heard his name, but you will have seen his likeness behind the wheel of a tractor down country lanes: a lean and wiry figure in work-worn tweed and countryman’s cap, walking the fields, his border collie leaping round his feet.

Until the very end of his life Fred Pettit, managed his small farm on the A22 at Chiddingly with expert judgment and hard lessons learned from his farming family.
When we came to live down his lane, he pottered along one day and asked if he could put his cattle in our field and use whatever hay there was for winter feed.

In return, he would cut our field hedges, and so he did - for forty years. He wasn’t a man for time wasting small talk, and in those days we were off and away to other kinds of work for most of the daylight hours, so conversation was mostly a nod and a wink from his passing tractor or a cheery greeting punctuated by a steely command to Ross or Scamp.

Once it was “Gertyer!” roared across the hedge one drowsy summer afternoon when he spotted two of his saucer-eyed calves ambling through a hole in our hedge and across the lawn to where baby Dan and I were having a picnic under the apple tree. Both baby and calves seemed delighted by this unexpected brief encounter.

We came to know Fred a little more when he heard we were looking for a cat. He took us across his fields to an old hay barn where, high up, backing determinedly into a crack between the hay bales was a tiny grey kitten, its silvery sheen explained by the fact that someone along the A22 had been breeding Russian Blues.

He always chose our cats’ names (there were five from Fred over the years). This one was Tinker (or Tinker-Bell when we remembered Peter Pan’s scintillating friend). And that was the closest we came to Fred, because like most young families we were always busy with this and that. But out of the corner of ourselves we saw the rhythm of the farmer’s year, the cows marched to milking, the rolling and harrowing and the turning and baling of the hay, Fred’s sister helped him until she was too frail for the heavy work.

Fred’s slender frame became more bent with the years but his energy seemed undiminished until the winter of 2004, when he had an after-dark collision with one of his own cows resulting in a serious fracture and an enforced spell in hospital; the first real illness of his life.

He hated being away. The minute you walked into his Eastbourne ward you could see terminal frustration etched on his face. There is no birdsong on a hospital ward and he could barely sleep for human clatter. While he was away, his good friends and farming neighbours did devoted work from dawn to dusk to keep the farm in good order.

It was the same good friends who set him free to return home and made sure he was supported at all times. They organised a neighbours’ rota for cooked meals and company. And that is when we came to see more of Fred on his home ground.

His friends helped with milking; one helped with shopping; another made sure the chickens were locked in at night, safe from the foxes that had massacred several of his broods over the years.

The wall above the mantelpiece was papered with drawing-pinned prize certificates for his own ploughing triumphs and there were at least two silver cups including one for the Best Bale of Hay at the Laughton Agricultural Society Show. I only learned recently from one of those crack of dawn Radio 4 farming programmes that there is Hay and Hay! Fred’s was obviously Serious Hay, packed with wild flowers and super grass (hence the rich golden cream) I think that silver cup meant more to him than the Crown Jewels but he dismissed all the accolades with a shrug & that sandpapery crackled laugh of his.

In his long life he saw the agricultural life of England struggle and survive two world wars, and be hailed as one of Britain’s most successful industries. But towards the end he and his fellow farmers had to suffer the gradual contraction of all they had worked for.

His steely strength of body and character kept him going, even after the stroke he suffered at the end of 2005. Once again he was supported back to health and by last summer, when friends modified his tractor footplate he was back on board and mowing his fields again. He even managed the milking – from his wheelchair.

At the beginning of November he celebrated his 84th birthday. Two days later, he died in his sleep, at home on his farm, where he belonged.
 

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