Richard Frederick Challis spent his childhood and teenage years living in a mining village on the edge of the intensive heavy industry area of the midlands in England. This area is called the “Black Country” because of the amount of soot that gets deposited out of the air.
The type of country is illustrated by a painting by Constantin Meuniere.
Richard’s annual holidays from the time he was ten to when he was fifteen were spent in the idyllic countryside of Suffolk in the southeast of England, staying with his grandmother. The holidays provided him with welcome interludes from the rather grim area he lived in. These six stories are based on these holidays, and give an insight to the country society of the 1930’s. This was during the depression, but the economic conditions are rarely mentioned in these stories, possibly because the author has described how his father was able to feed his family and keep his men employed in his novel “The Old Firm”.
Interludes
Richard F. Challis
Copyright Richard F. Challis 1986
Published by Steve Challis
Publishing at Smashwords
The Book was published by Steve Challis with the permission of the copyright holders.
The cover is based on the picture, “Cottage in a Cornfield” by John Constable; the painter grew up in Suffolk, and is best known for his depictions of its countryside.
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be resold or given away to other people.
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Thank you for respecting the author’s work.
Steve Challis
"INTERLUDES"
by Richard F. Challis (1986)
2. WELL, WELL!
3. MISS FLETCHER AND MISS EYRE
Another book for young people by Richard F. Challis is
"HOME IS THE HUNTER"
Each summer, from the time I was ten until 1939, when I was fifteen and started work, I spent a month at my grandmother's, on the Suffolk coast near Aldeburgh. My home was in the Midlands, in a mining village on the edge of the Black Country. There must have been farms, as well as factories and mines but in my recollection they comprised sodden areas of potatoes, turnips and cabbages, whereas Suffolk seemed to have field upon field of waving grain, ripening in perpetual sunshine.
And for a month I had all time at my disposal. So, I could afford to spend whole days in fields seeing the golden grain harvested and the sheaves clustered in stooks. As the reaping machine consumed the field, working inward from the perimeter, all the wild life, trapped in an inexorably shrinking universe crept ever closer to the centre, until their nerve broke and they started to run from the still standing grain.
Always, there were men and boys waiting - partly- for the sport but also for the value of the rabbits as food. Field-mice scuttled off unmolested. The occasional hare galloped off like a racehorse for the distant hedge and no one attempted pursuit.