Plough

Pulled by horses
Long ago
Old
Useless
Grass
Harbour

© Celia Warren 2011

(I don't often write acrostics.)

My husband's grandfather won ploughing competitions in the heyday of these tools. He was a market-gardener in South Devon where he and his wife raised their 11 children, the eldest daughter of whom was my mother-in-law. A hard-working Methodist preacher, he often wished they could push the walls out a bit, to make more room in their two-up, two-down home.

His wife, my husband's grandmother, was well into her 60s when she taught my husband, by demonstration, how to vault a five-bar gate. And when I first met her, when she was widowed and in her 70s, she was still riding her bike to Newton Abbot market with flowers and eggs and so on, and still visiting the local 'old folks' with homegrown gifts. What a wonderful generation!