By the 25th March we were the only one left, all our neighbours had gone, and we wondered why we hadn’t got it. This stopping up at home, you know, and keeping away from everybody else, seemed to be working. Anybody that we knew that was going down with it, had all been out, they’d either been out for the shopping, they’d had workmen in and out with their own cars, so we put it all down to this, so we just never dared move after that, we didn’t dare go out because everyone that was going out was getting foot and mouth.
And the thing is you see, we have another farm where me brother farms at, and he was exactly the same. By then, he’d had lost all his neighbours as well and then he was the only one left, so we began to wonder if it had passed, and then there was a few, it started up again and started coming down towards the end of April beginning of May, and cleaning one or two up that it had forgotten the first time. And em, it swept us past again, at both places, and er, like we thought well, you know, and then as we got in towards June, it started to quieten even more around here.
[Community]
Some parishioners were having their Golden Wedding and we were
having a service of blessing and then they were having a do in the
pub, at one of the pubs in the village. The night before, . . . the farm opposite the pub. . .. I had been out and I’d been to lock the church and I popped in the pub for a pint. . . . . . It was on the 21st [August 2001], about quarter past nine, and there was a vet and I thought, hello trouble. The vets don’t come at quarter past nine unless there was trouble.
And we got this golden wedding and people coming from all over the country and all over the world. They didn’t close the village off. We had the blessing and I asked people to leave their cars by the church and walk up to the village, it was only 500 yards, wherever possible and they were very good about that. So there was this celebration going on and I just couldn’t be part of it, we couldn’t be part of it somehow. And it was just wrong. We went and sat outside, the sun shone and the guns went off, you could smell the blood on the air and the wagons came. Unbelievable, it was just unbelievable and we just couldn’t celebrate. Villagers came and stood on the cross by the post office and we just stood.
[Farm]
There was a ploughing match we’d went to and I thought, “God this is the first time I’d seen farmers”, there’d be no shows nothing to go to, no meetings, nothing and like I say, it weren’t till September that we’d just realised how bad it had been, when there were all these fires just sitting on the roadside and in the middle of villages and this sort of thing. The one just up there, was only about a hundred yards off the school playground. We came out as if we were coming out after like a bombing raid, and you were just seeing what had been, what had been bombed.