Then and Now
What follows is a  brooding comparison, seen through an anonymous pair of eyes,  on how things have changed in Hullavington

Thanks to Mary Greenman for providing this cutting from a past Hullavington News 

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Who lives in Hullavington now? Who lived here a hundred years ago?
Perhaps a dozen, at the most a score, of villagers now work on the land. THEN villages were for farmers and their workers. A few would work on the railway; there were a number of hurdle-makers and, for the rest: the vicar, domestic servants, a baker, a blacksmith, two publicans, a saddle-maker, a sawyer, a seamstress, three shopkeepers and one or two other local trades.

NOW we have a small army of teachers and lecturers, most active, some retired; businessmen and reps., who daily drive to Bristol, Swindon, Reading and London, and even cover South Wales and six south-western counties; air-crew pounding along the M4 and M25 before flying to Asia, Australia or America, army personnel who alternate between Germany and Serbia. Others make more modest journeys to Malmesbury to make vacuum cleaners, or to Chippenham to bank, building society, Sainsburys or Bumpers Farm.

What prompted me to write this was a lovely, nostalgic poem by Edmund Charles Blunden , which might interest those of you who like brooding on the past.

Anonymous
 

 Forefathers by Edmund Charles Blunden
 
Here they went with smock and crook,
Toiled in the sun, lolled in the shade,
Here they mudded out the brook
And here their hatchet cleared the glade:
Harvest-supper woke their wit,
Hunter’s moon their wooings lit.

From this church they led their brides,
From this church themselves were led
Shoulder-high; on these waysides
Sat to take their beer and bread.
Names are gone – what men they were
These their cottages declare.

Names are vanished, save the few
In the old brown Bible scrawled;
These were men of pith and thew,
Whom the city never called;
Scarce could read or hold a quill,
Built the barn, the forge, the mill.

On the green they watched their sons
Playing till too dark to see,
As their fathers watched them once,
As my father once watched me;
While the bat and beetle flew
On the warm air webbed with dew.

Unrecorded, unrenowned,
Men from whom my ways begin,
Here I know you by your ground
But I know you not within-
There is silence, there survives
Not a moment of your lives.

Like the bee that now is blown
Honey-heavy on my hand,
From the toppling tansy-throne
In the green tempestuous land-
I’m in clover now, nor know
Who made the honey long ago.
++++++++

Edmund Charles Blunden  was born in London in 1896, moving with his family to Kent shortly afterwards. He was educated at Christ's Hospital and Queen's College, Oxford. Blunden was commissioned into the Royal Sussex Regiment in 1915 and served in France and Belgium from 1916 to 1919, fighting on the Somme and at Ypres. He was awarded the Military Cross.

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