After Victor Dilworth drives by chance through the village where he was born in the 1920s, he starts to recall his earliest memories of life on the family farm, Hinstock Grange. In his retirement, as he concentrates on these recollections, they become so real that it feels as though he has been reborn into those times and is actually reliving his experiences.
Describing long-gone sights, sounds, smells and emotions, he employs a turn of phrase so evocative and exact that reading this book is like watching a vivid video being played in the mind, 'filmed' through the eyes of a toddler and small boy. The scenes are set in his native Shropshire and also Cheshire, where he visits the farm and watermill at Alvanley where his father was brought up. The family makes Cheshire cheese and the annual national cheese championships at Nantwich Show are a focus for their ambitions.
The youngest of a family of five children, Victor finds that his busy and hard-working parents have little time for him until he can do some useful work. Affection comes from his big sister, his grandfather and his beloved dog, Rover. Always anxious to learn, he watches the family milking cows and tending the many animals. He sees lambs being born and under threat of a whack from the cow strap he refrains from touching the baby chicks as they emerge from their shells in the incubator. He helps the farm waggoner to oil the horse-drawn mowing machine and accompanies his father to feed the sheep, on a float pulled by Dolly the pony. He learns about the cycle of life and death on the farm and comes to realise "that all creatures on earth are dependent on each other, just like the strands of a spider's web suspended on a hedgerow in the autumn."
He sets off to school just before his fourth birthday, full of trepidation about the unknown outside world...
The e-book, published in June 2014, contains a 13,000-word Part 2 which is not included in the printed version that was published in 2003. These additional reminiscences were written several years later but did not contain enough material for them to stand as a separate publication. They have been included so that readers know 'what happened next'.
Part 1 incorporates all the original text of "Happy Days and Heartbreak Days", covering Victor's life up to the age of four.
Part 2 starts with one of Victor's poems written through the eyes of a child, then takes the young lad through his schooling to the age of about 12, when he is due to start at the all-male St Joseph's College at Market Drayton. It also contains more information about the Dilworths' connection with Peck Mill Farm at Alvanley, Cheshire and further background information taken from census returns and other family history resources.
In 2003 Victor Dilworth wrote: "I'm now in my eighties but still young at heart. This book is about my memories as a small boy who was born into a Shropshire farming family. My father had been married before he met my mother so I had two stepbrothers, Charles and Bert. Their mother had died at the time of Bert's birth. When our father married my mother they started a second family: my sister Muriel was first, followed by Harold, then Cyril and me six years later. I always say I am the scratching of the pot.
"There was always a good warm feather bed and wholesome food - boiled potatoes and carrots, roast or boiled beef followed by farmhouse rice pudding, not forgetting home-made apple pies and the like. What we all enjoyed were Mother's fruit cake and crusty pork pies. Most of the food we had was produced on the farm.
"When I finished my schooling I went to work as an agricultural engineer; perhaps I was tired of farming. As the farm was only a hundred acres, my father said it would be better if I went and got my own living, for there were plenty of hands at home.
"So why not share my days of happiness and heartbreak with me?"
Victor went into a care home in Northampton in 2010, and died in April 2011, aged 88 years.
Jack's Note: As an agricultural engineer Victor was granted UK Patent 807562, (Application Date: April 3rd, 1956) for an improvement to the three point linkage used on the majority of tractors world-wide which allows load to be transferred from the implement being used, such as a plough, to the back wheels of the tractor to improve its traction and allow more of its available power to be used.
"Please send me a copy of 'Nellie's Story' and 'Diesel Taff'. If they are half as good as 'Happy Days and Heartbreak Days' they will be good" - Mrs D R, Hunstanton 3426