The Gift and a Journey

As we sat in the offices of Huggett, Bellows & Wilde, a firm of solicitors just down from West Hampstead Tube station, I could hear the dull hum of the Underground rumbling through the bowels of the building. It could have been mistaken for a recurring stomach complaint for it came and went every couple of minutes, then settled down until the next train passed beneath us. We had dressed for the occasion: my brother Jack and I were both wearing ties, and had even polished our shoes. This was not a natural look, and neither was Jack's hair, flattened down with Brylcreem. It was an attempt at smartness that didn't suit us. No matter how hard we tried, neither of us could ever achieve the appearance of someone well groomed.

Eventually Mr Bellows came in and sat down: wispy white; unlike us naturally neat. With a tight-lipped smile he looked at us benignly, opened the file, and in ecclesiastical tones told us we had each inherited £6,000. It did feel as if we were receiving a divine gift. We had only met this generous spinster aunt Elsie as children. She had lived on some outer branch of the family tree; I couldn't remember her name being mentioned, recognising her only in faded photographs in the family album. I suddenly felt a tremendous warmth for her, regretted that I could not express my thanks. For little though we knew it then, she had changed our lives.

Jack and I didn't speak about it, not at first, as we walked along the Finchley Road. The money, what we were going to do with it.

That's what I was thinking about when we got to the Cosmo, a café run by a rotund Italian called Giuseppe who operatically shouted orders back to the kitchen where his wife and children slaved. He knew us well; since he was still open at midnight, we would often end up there after the late night film in Swiss Cottage. He slid two plates of baked beans across the table in front us.

'Grazie.'

'You boys, you're so Italian.'

We buttered our toast without speaking, turning over in our minds the possibilities that now presented themselves.

For the past year I'd been drifting from job to job. The lowest point had resulted from replying to an advert in the Evening Standard, filling a vacancy to work in the warehouse of a sausage skin factory. I lasted three months.

I was twenty-three, married to Ros, a Welsh girl, once a children's nurse, now bringing up our six-month-old twins, Sam and Lysta. Jack, fifteen months younger than me, worked for our uncle, a film producer. I never knew quite what he did apart from running around all over the place picking up people from airports and taking them in taxis to various locations.

'I want to leave London, get out into the countryside. Start a new life. Jack,' I said, while he seemed to be counting the baked beans on his toast, 'this is what they call a karmic moment.'

'You sound like a hippy.'

'Can you finish your baked beans? It's annoying watching you eat them one by one.'

Since meeting Ros I'd become involved with the followers of Rudolf Steiner: 'anthroposophists', they called themselves. They cared about the earth, practising farming methods free of chemicals and pesticides. I started to attend seminars, and the more I heard the more I wanted to know. So in the summer I went to work on a Steiner farm down in Sussex, going home to Ros at weekends. I absorbed it all: phases of the moon, companion planting, the waxing and waning of everything. I lived in a sun-swung zodiac believing I'd found the answer. We even played Beethoven symphonies to a herd of milking cows, convinced it would increase their milk yield.

'I wouldn't mind being a shepherd,' said Jack, spearing a couple of baked beans with the end of his fork. 'But what I'd really like is a dog. A Border collie.'

'Let's buy a farm ... Yes, let's buy a farm!' I shouted, bringing my fist down on the table. After all, we were country boys at heart, brought up in Dorset. Ten minutes later we realised what a ridiculous idea it was. After all, we only had £12,000. That wasn't going to buy us a farm.

'It would up in the hills of North Wales,' Ros told me later.

Her enthusiasm about it all, and her parents in Caernarfonshire, made it a real possibility.

A few days later, Jack and I made a pact to put our money together and get out of London. We washed it down with a bottle of Niersteiner, a cheap German wine. Ros was delighted; she would be returning home, and Sam and Lysta would be growing up close to their grandparents.

Jack bought books on sheep farming, absorbing himself in the shepherd's way of life.

'What have you discovered, Jack?' I asked.

'Looks like it's seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.'

'You can say goodbye to your weekend lie-ins, then?' Not once did it occur to us that knowing the theory is one thing, putting it into practice quite another.

Gwyn, Ros's father, rather than saying, 'You don't know anything about farming,' was right behind the idea. A consultant paediatrician at Bangor hospital, he was a kindhearted Quaker whose generosity showed itself in every act. Estate agents' leaflets of hill farms and smallholdings began arriving in the post. Every day Gwyn was out in his VW Beetle to take a look.

A month later we drove to North Wales to stay with my inlaws in Caernarfon for the weekend. By Saturday afternoon we had put in an offer on Dyffryn, a remote hill farm of forty-eight acres above the village of Penygroes, exchanging contracts within a month. We had bought it for six thousand quid!

Through the weeks that followed we talked about nothing else. Ros wanted to grow vegetables, Jack was going to have a flock of sheep, I would look after pigs. Gwyn bought us a Morris Traveller, and I started to learn to drive around the streets of London. I said to Jack that as soon as I passed my driving test we should buy a Land Rover. 'We're farmers now. Straw bales in the back, a sheep dog sitting between us on the front seat.'

'Yes, wearing braces and a flat cap.'

'What, the dog?'

'No, us.'

Jack watched One Man and His Dog every Sunday. I had to endure his endless attempts at getting the whistle just right, the one where you stick two fingers in your mouth and a piercing shrill rips through the air. He couldn't master it, but unfortunately never stopped trying.

Jack grew a beard, wore collarless shirts and combat jackets. He got rid of his denim cap. We both bought waistcoats in the Portobello Road, and those old leather braces, the sort farmers wear. Shirt-sleeves rolled up, we were dressed to fill the part.

We counted down the days, making plans, and decided to make the move on the first of January 1970. What better time to begin a new phase in your life?

Every night after the twins had gone to sleep I told Ros what we were going to achieve in that first year. I couldn't wait for it to be...