As a child I had never been shy of working; I rogued for wild oats, picked stones from fields, shovelled grain into dryers, edited the local parish magazine, and even had a paid column (parish council news) for the Cornish Times. I’d done voluntary work in a school for children with additional needs, which I had loved. At fifteen I’d read palms at Elephant Fayre for 50p a time and earned over £30, enough to buy myself a dress which was a staple of my wardrobe for over twenty years.
From the age of fifteen I’d also been Tideford Second’s head of catering, creating teas for twenty-two hungry cricketers, plus umpires and scorers, thus becoming masterful at the art of making and serving quiches, sandwiches, cakes and hot drinks. (I couldn’t have done it without Mum taking me to the shops and the cricket pitch, as well as often being roped in to help, a detail generally overlooked whenever possible.) At college I had done bar and kitchen work, plus a never-to-be-repeated summer in Little Chef, where I made some really good friends. However I had given very little thought to the prospect of a career, and my degree in Music and English was far from vocational.
Feeling at a loss I finally consulted an advisor, courtesy of the job centre. They referred to notes that had been passed on by the school careers service. My ambition had been to forge a life as a professional poet. The career advisor was somewhat amused by this. In the end I can’t remember what advice was suggested, but with zero experience in metalwork, I’m fairly sure it wasn’t to go and work for Dave.
Dave had always been passionate about farming. His interest started when he was taken to ride horses at Trehill farm in St Dominick. Dave became very good friends with the farmer’s son, Jeremy Daw, who was a similar age, and quickly discovered he preferred farming to horse riding. From a young age he would cycle to St Dominick to help Jeremy and his family on the farm.
His interest in all things farming led Dave to study for a BSc (Hons) at the National College of Agricultural Engineering at Silsoe. Dave then spent a year working for Exeter Council, quickly coming to the conclusion that the civil service was not for him. A life of self employment beckoned…
Dave set up his business, ACRE Engineering, in 1986 with the help of the government’s short-lived Enterprise Allowance Scheme. It was necessary to be unemployed for eight weeks, then a payment of £40 a week for a year was paid to help out while the business got off the ground. The Enterprise Allowance Scheme was immortalised in one of my favourite Carter USM songs, Sherrif Fatman. It was a very good scheme, and in the late ’80s we had several friends who set up their own businesses in the same way.
Dave started with a tiny workshop in the yard of a elderly friend, Mrs Pearce, who had a small holding called Smallacombe in Botus Fleming, near Saltash. He and his sister Helena kept their horses there when they were younger, and Helena’s horse Marina was still there at the time. Mrs Pearce had a huge tribe of rescue dogs, one of which ended up in the care of my parents, which is a story in itself. Smallacombe was muddy, chaotic, and down a tiny twisty Cornish lane, but Mrs Pearce was always very kind and glad of Dave’s company, so it was a great place to begin.
The workshop was small, but Dave was ingenious in his ability to complete jobs that would have been far easier in a much bigger space. Every inch of the premises was used, including the concrete outside. When I first meet Dave, he was driving a Bedford van for work, which can be seen to the right of the workshop in the picture below. In front of the workshop is an incinerator, one of several Dave was commissioned to make. These proved good practice for when we needed stoves later.
At the time I met Dave Dad was the farm manager for the Bonds, whose farm was over a thousand acres in size. They also had lots of other business interests, from golf courses to plant hire. Dave very quickly found himself doing a lot of work for them. This inevitably led to needing a bigger premises.
In 1989 a large old piggery building at Bake Camp was offered to Dave by the Bonds. It had easy access and lots of hardstanding yard space. It worked out so well it was to be Dave’s base for over twenty years.
Bake Camp had been built as an army camp in the war. Its final use was as a muster camp for American Troops for the D-Day landings. Dave occasionally had visitors who had been based there during the war, including a group of Americans who came over for the 50th anniversary of the landings. The bases for the Nissen huts were still extant, as was the brick built water tower. (Nissen huts were prefabricated steel structures originally designed for military use during the First World War by the Canadian-American-British engineer and inventor Major Peter Norman Nissen.) Dave’s workshop building was still used for modern jet practice; planes swooped over regularly, lining up their path with the contour of the roof.
Dave had a plethora or varied and interesting jobs. Dad was in his tree planting phase, and while working for the Bonds planted over fifty acres of trees. One of Dave’s many jobs was to create a tree planter from a potato planter, a conversion that worked extremely well and speeded up the tree planting considerably.
,Along with anything bespoke, from decorative gates and fences to one-off pieces of machinery, Dave’s mainstay was yard scrapers, which he supplied to various farm machinery dealers. This led to regular trips to Barry to see Arnold Caten, who sold Dave rubber scraper blades made from damaged dump lorry and aircraft tyres. We were well versed in the art of repurposing long before we started on railway carriages!
We decided that I would work for two or three days a week for Dave and spend the other days working on the house, scraping, sanding, painting and generally keeping house; tasks misguidedly considered within the capabilities of a poet.
One of my early jobs was to create a large mural from copper, aluminium and brass for St Mellion Golf and Country Club, which was owned by the Bonds. I really enjoyed this, as it used my artistic skills. I created three images from Arthurian legends; Arthur, Merlin and Camelot (pictured below, with Dave just about to fix it on the swimming pool wall) and gained some useful experience in how to use a jigsaw.
Having little patience for repetition I was less talented when it came to sanding and planing, and even less at pop-riveting gates and drilling holes in steel girders. Curiously I have no boredom threshold for music and can, and do, repeat the same few bars countless times without loss of enthusiasm.
Eventually I had a fairly spectacular off. I was working at the pillar drill, but had failed to clamp the steel girder I was drilling properly. It span out of the clamp with force, crushing a bottle of cutting fluid I had unwisely positioned between the steel and the pillar, twisting it into an angle that meant the full force of the contents hit me straight between the eyes. Luckily I was wearing goggles at the time, but as I wiped the rather unpleasant emulsion of oil and water from my face it was decided it would be safer for everyone if I were to step down from the job and find something else.
In November of our first year at the station I was approached by a neighbour, Nigel Collins, who had been a teacher at Callington school and lived in a house just over the railway. He was looking for a piano teacher for his daughter Becky and could I teach her? I felt a bit unsure at the time, as I’d not had any experience teaching, but said yes. Becky was ten at the time and just the loveliest girl: gentle, attentive and always cheerful. She made a perfect student and I’m sure I learned far more from her than she did from me.
After Becky followed more. I responded to an advert in the village shop and taught four-year-old Helen and her brother Michael. Friends of my students, and other children and adults from the village joined in, until I had a good number of piano students. I also got a post at the village school for two terms teaching recorder, which was the instrument I had studied at college.I didn’t charge much for two reasons; other than a BA(Hons)in Music and English I had nothing in the way of qualifications, and I also felt music should be affordable for everyone, something I still hold by today.
I returned to my wonderful piano teacher Gillian Adams, and finally passed my grade eight piano, having failed it twice during my sixth form years; nerves always got the better of me. I also did grade five singing with Gill, which improved my terribly aural skills and has been very useful since.
Gill a wonderful teacher; talented, charismatic, funny and a real life-force. As a child I was terrified of her; she had very high standards. Although I played constantly at home I was never very good at following orders. So when sent home to learn Bb major scale and some Handel I would come back the following lesson with a fine rendition of Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag, or an arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s Valse de Fleurs. She must have at times despaired. It was a joy to return to lessons as an adult, playing duets and sharing a deep love of music, including Bach, who is now probably my favourite composer, but as a child was definitely my nemesis. Gill is in the centre of the photo below.
In the early days I viewed teaching very much as a part-time hobby and continued to look for other work. Eventually I decided to focus on railway themed employment.
Because the signal box in St Germans seemed a jolly place to hang out, I decided that maybe I could become a signal-woman and work at St Germans station. I applied and got an interview in Penzance. There were two interviewers, a man and a woman, who were friendly and positive. I was offered a position, with training starting in a few weeks, but before the meeting closed they asked what was to be a decider of a question. “You do know that you could be assigned any signal box in Cornwall. How would you feel about spending night shifts alone in St Blazey signal box?”
I have to admit to being something of a coward, and even more so when in my early twenties. The prospect of hours spent in a dark isolated building with the only action, other than my imagination, being the occasional passing of a freight train every few hours was less than appealing. I slept on it and declined the post.
The next railway job I went for was a part time admin job drawing up timetables for train-driver shifts, which was held in the tower block behind Plymouth station. This interview was in direct contrast to the signalling job. This was held by a panel of three men, one sporting a somewhat aggressive manner. It was an inquisition. At one point Mr Grumpy said “So if a driver phones up and tells you he’s at home, how are you going to respond to that then?” When I asked “Do you mean the home signal?” he was distinctly ruffled; he’d clearly hoped to make a fool of me. I can’t say I was too sorry not to be offered the job.
In the end self-employment won. I took on more music students. I tackled the problem I had with performance nerves by playing regularly at a local residential home. The nerves didn’t become less, but I became better at handling them. I became the regional organiser for the European Piano Teachers Association and put on a few events. Having studied the recorder at college, I was the only teacher in the area able to offer advanced recorder tuition and had some fantastically talented students who went on to play in the National Youth Recorder Orchestra and study at Trinity College.
I went on courses and just before Walter was born got an LTCL (Licentiate of Trinity College London) in Music Education. This on the second attempt, having got lost in the rambling building on my first, then let nerves get the better of me. For the second exam I played Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D Minor as my first piece. The second piece was to demonstrate a teaching technique, so I opted to play Schumman’s Of Foreign Land and Places while reciting Walt Whitman’s I Hear America Singing over the top. I played my first chord only to discover I couldn’t reach the pedal, because my rather huge Walter-bump was in the way. After a bit of expedient shuffling all was fine.
I also took lessons in jazz and pop with the charismatic American jazz musician Cecil DuValle, a composer who in his youth played with Teddy Pendergrass and the OJays. This was great fun. Cecil changed the way I taught, teaching me to be far more inventive, which in turn meant I had some really interesting students who came to me because conventional methods hadn’t suited them.
Eventually Railholiday work requirements and raising a family became too much. I needed flexibility to be able to go to Hayle at anytime, and have freedom from routine. I gradually wound my teaching hours down, not replacing students when they left for university.
For years I’d dreamt of volunteering as a music teacher at Livewire Youth Music in Saltash, a charity that offers free music lessons and counselling to the young people of the area. However I never had enough time to do so. Eventually I concluded I would never have the time, so got on and volunteered anyway. It was the best decision I have made. I love working at Livewire for the young women’s session. I have my own studio, no paperwork and a wide variety of students doing a great variety of things (those singing lessons definitely came in handy). Railholiday is my day job, and teaching is my hobby. Which suits me just fine!
