It should go on record that I am hopeless at all things horticultural or agricultural or in fact at anything relating to gardening. A good friend suggested, years ago, that my annual new year’s resolution should be to do less gardening. I have stuck to it ever since.
With those thoughts in mind, I have for some time been chronicling (in the Harrowing Times - a magazine produced for Norfolk Smallholders) the life and and calamities of Smallholder Sid who shares my level of incompetence and is truculent with it. If the spirit moves you, you can find out more by downloading my Kindle book: The Small World of Smallholder Sid.
This piece is not about Smallholder Sid (though it might have been) but it introduces the further element – of fire – into the narrative. You may already have read my account of our flood.
This happened the summer before last.
The story started in August 2000. No, I tell a lie. It started much earlier than that. I don't have the exact date, but it was about 1952 when a 5 year old boy lived with his family in a house next to a canal near the village of Elm in Cambridgeshire (England). No doubt due to the tram line that then ran down the road on the other side of the house, the canal had fallen out of use but it still had water in it. It was also an excellent habitat for sticklebacks and the little boy’s father had built a little pier into the canal so that he could catch sticklebacks in a jam jar. One day, while he was fishing for sticklebacks, the little boy watched as, on the other side of the canal, a large man (at least he appeared to be large, but all men were large then) was cutting the grass with a hefty machine that was clearly hard to manage. The machine ran out of control and into the canal. The large man jumped up and down a bit, then went to find another large man. Together they heaved the machine out of the canal while the first large man spent a lot of time referring to it as “that bloody machine”.
“Bloody” seemed a good word to add to the little boy’s vocabulary. Times were more innocent and this word, probably not even banned on children’s TV now, was then regarded as a very bad word indeed. The little boy used “bloody” at every opportunity for the next 24 hours until his father forbade its use, with threats of the kind of punishment that these days would have had the little boy taken into care.
I have to bloody well admit that the little boy was me. Because of that bloody event, the existence of an Allan scythe (for that is what it was) became ingrained in my psyche. When, in the year 2000, the grass in our shambolic holding of land defeated the efforts of our other lawn mowers, thoughts went back to the canal incident and I decided to seek out something similar, particularly as we have no canal for it to be driven into.
The result was a BCS cutter bar mower that looked like this.
It was delivered one hot August day in 2000 and cost me £1100, money which I could ill afford then and certainly cannot afford now.
With a few setbacks, mainly due to damage to the blades if I was trying to scythe through metal or flints, or indeed savage our annual crop of Alexanders, it served us well and it had just celebrated its 21st birthday when……
But let me explain further and keep you in suspense for a little longer. Coronavirus lockdown changed many people’s lives, sometimes in a large way, sometimes more insidiously. We did things we had never done before, like make a wild-life pond and tidy parts of the house that had not seen a broom or vacuum cleaner in decades. And we didn’t do things that we did before, like cut our acres of pasture. We vaguely made the excuse that we were rewilding and contributing to the environment, while the grass grew tall, and the thistles grew taller. Soon they were up to shoulder height. Lockdown came and went, and the thistles still kept getting higher. Our surviving sheep (see my last piece - they were down to 5 then) would disappear into this prickly jungle for days before we found them again, contented but bewildered.
I decided that perhaps there could be a small compromise, at the same time making life a little easier for the sheep. I started with ambitious plans to create a thistle maze, but I knew the sheep would be far too intelligent and would find their way out in no time; so instead I cut paths through the field, giving them a chance to explore new territory.
One August evening (the day of the jackdaw as it happens - yes the same day that a jackdaw with bowel problems came down the chimney and managed to crap on almost every object in our living room) I was cutting a new swathe through the field. The mower stalled when attacking some particularly robust thistles. I cleared the obstruction and pulled the starting rope. The mower backfired and shot out a little flame.
It was small, about the size of the flame from a match. Easy, I thought. Just blow it out. Wrong. Blowing on the flame made it ten times larger. I blew again with all my breath. The flames liked that and started to lick around the engine. In next to no time the whole mower was in flames, with a fountain of fire shooting several feet into the air from the petrol tank. It was spectacular, resembling a Roman candle.
Like Corporal Jones in Dads Army I said (to myself) “don’t panic”. But the flames grew larger. Although it was a big fire to me, did it justify calling out the fire brigade? After a few more silent “don’t panics” I noticed that the flames had started to spread to the thistles and grass. And I was also aware that there is a pair of thatched houses at the edge of the field.
OK panic then. I dialled 999 and told them the sorry story, asking if it was worth them coming out. “You bet” they didn’t say, but clearly it had been a quiet evening at Norfolk Fire Service.
Still panicking I called my wife at the house and asked her to bring a fire extinguisher. She misunderstood (or I did not correctly explain – more likely) where I was in the field and she was cross and hot by the time she arrived. By then, like an oversized firework, the mower fire had begun to die down, but a couple of squirts with the extinguisher put the fire out completely. I called the fire brigade again and said the fire was out.
“Don’t spoil our fun” they didn’t say. “We are coming anyway.” And indeed just at that moment the brave fire fighters from Mundesley rolled up with lights flashing and siren blaring.
They felt duty bound to spray some water around which made the mower hiss and which I am sure the thistles appreciated. Then, in about 10 minutes flat they packed up and left, leaving me with the wreck of the cutter bar mower. Dispirited I trudged back to the house.
Later: “You can’t leave it in the field. It will poison the sheep. They will nibble at it and die,” she said.
Remember the bloody machine in the canal. These things are heavy. Its motor was wrecked. One tyre was destroyed. There was no way I could pull it off the field.
“Ah but use the trailer,” she said, sounding a little like Dear Liza. She had bought a rusty trailer about 25 years ago. Now it was not only rusty but rusting through.
“But there’s a hole in the trailer” I replied.
“Mend it, dear Richard, dear Richard”
“With what shall I mend it Dear Liza, dear Liza, with what?”
“Try straw dear Richard, dear Richard, try straw”
I ignored that and hitched the trailer to my reluctant car. It (the trailer) had one flat tyre and went thump thump thump as I drove into the thistles. Somehow I managed to get the bloody thing onto the trailer and drove it off the field, depriving the sheep of their meal of freshly barbecued mower.
And there it sat forlornly while I wondered what to do next, and depressed myself at the cost of a replacement (many times more than the original £1100) until……
The last President of the Law Society but five (who happens to follow me on Instagram and read the first version of my sorry tale) said that it should be possible to repair it. When the last President of the Law Society but five says you can do something, then you snap to it and do it, or try.
I prepared an inventory of what was needed – a new engine, a new tyre and tube, several control cables, several assorted plastic items that had melted to a black gloop.
First thing first: the engine. If I could not get an engine, then there was no point in buying anything else, but where to find such a thing without breaking the bank (or at least sending the bank computer into paroxysms)?
I had to find an engine that fitted in terms of mountings, shaft size and power.
I made some measurements, then turned to Ebay and eventually located a brand-new engine that seemed to fit. It was advertised as being suitable for a wacker (one of those machines that bounces up and down compressing tarmac). That seemed the right kind for me as the mower is needed to spend a lot of time wacking thistles. It would set me back £130 but would it work? The only way to find out was to try.
A few days later it arrived half out of its box and with no instructions. Gingerly I attached the mounting plate to it. Yes, the holes lined up. Then there was the clutch – a heavy object shaped a little like a pineapple or a large potato. I struggled to remove it from the damaged engine. It was a solid lump of metal that did not look as though it would do anything but it had a warning on the side that said, in effect, do not tamper with this or a mighty big spring will come out and grab your goolies.
So far so good but there was a long way to go. I sent the list of parts to the dealers. Their estimate was more than £500, a lot for some bits of wire and plastic.
I looked further. I could get a tyre elsewhere for half the price. Much of that £500 was made up of the emergency stop mechanism, to cut the engine if it ran away. The sight of jet skiers bouncing on the waves up and down the coast of Bacton gave me an idea. How about a kill switch to clip to your belt and which activated as soon as you pulled it out of its socket and it cost about a tenth of the cost of replacement parts for the same purpose.
I chopped the parts list down to a more manageable £200. They arrived a few days later in something the size of a shoe box.
And so to put it all together again.
It went surprisingly well, though it was very time consuming. Much of the gloop could be chipped away and all the new bits fitted where they should be, but then came the tyre. I had bought some expensive tyre levers. Easy to remove the old tyre but the new one was very stiff. It tested my levers to the limit, but eventually I inserted the tube, put the tyre on the rim and set out to inflate it. And I inflated and inflated. The tyre remained stubbornly flat. Bloody defective inner tube I thought – until I removed the tyre again to find a perfect tyre-lever-sized hole in the tube. I had perforated the tube with my tyre levering efforts. When I replaced the replaced inner tube I applied the kid gloves and now I have a tyre that stays inflated.
It looked good and ready for launch. The new engine started first time. And the mower set off towards the sunset. The clutch would not disengage. Fortunately the kill switch did its stuff and the mower stopped. I was not sure what to do next, but the only hope was to take the engine off AGAIN. Nothing seemed wrong but I did what most ardent DIYers do in the circumstances: drenched the clutch with WD40, put it back together again, squeezed the clutch cable hard. With a clunk it gave – and hey presto I had a working mower again.
And now I have resumed cutting swathes of thistles. True it does not look quite like new. It has many battle scars and I have used cable ties instead of the official (expensive) fixings. But it now works better than before. The ‘wacker’ engine is more powerful than its predecessor. The mower is clearly now good for another 20 years, which is more than I can claim for myself.
But if it does misbehave and I am in the presence of a small child, would readers please advise me on the best way of describing the mower. “Bloody” is a little tired now. Any thoughts of an epithet that is not only appropriate but also guaranteed to offend the small child’s parents?
Well done, Richard! My son spends many ‘happy’ hours mending his ever increasing itinerary of machines. However, he does know exactly what he is doing and is forever getting bargains from eBay!