At Cider Mill Farm

I remember my uncle’s farm

Still in mid-summer

Heat hazing the air above the red roof tops

Some cattle sheds, a couple of stables

Clustered round a small yard

Lying under the hills that stretched their long back

Through three counties.

I rolled with the dogs

Among the hay bales

Stacked high in the barn he built himself

During a storm one autumn evening

Tunnelled for treasure or jumped with a scream

From a pirate ship’s mast into the straw

Burrowed for gold and found he’d buried

Three battered Ford cars deep in the hay.

He drove an old tractor that sweated oil

In long black streaks down the rusty orange

It chugged and whirred, coughed into life

Each day as he clattered across the cattle grids

I remember one night my cousin and I

Dragging back cows from over the common

We prodded them homeward through the rain

And then drank tea from huge tin mugs

Feeling like farmers.

He’s gone now, he sold it

But I have been back for one last look

To the twist in the lane that borders the stream

Where Mary, Ruth and I once waded

Water sloshing over our wellies

And I showed my own children my uncle’s farm

The barn still leaning over the straw

With for all I know three battered Ford cars

Still buried beneath it.

From The Works 4

chosen by Pie Corbett and Gaby Morgan

for Macmillans Children's Books