“Jollity Farm, Bonzo Mania, A Gorilla & The Meaning of Life (?!!)”

“Oh dear oh dear oh deary me…where on planet earth is he going to go with this one then?”

Well…’He’ is not precisely that sure ‘himself’, so hang on to your mouse’s and let’s see what happens next:



Chapter One - Trakkerrr Time at Jollity Farm.

Back in the early-ish seventies when I was in my longish, curly auburnish haired middle teens and living in a rural mid Hampshire village, I had a weekend job working on a small local farm. Come harvesting time, long before autumn turned to gold, there was always plenty of opportunity to work weekday evenings as well for a couple of weeks, straight after school, helping to bring in the straw and hay for winter.

‘Hay Baling’.

Being in the general proximity of Lord Mountbatten’s sizable ‘Broadlands Estate’ just outside Romsey, many of the neighbouring farms were engaged to collectively lend a hand at harvest time, to ensure the estates vast crop of straw was collected and baled before the early frosts arrived.

One of the biggest highlights for me with all this, was the chance to drive a tractor and trailer on a public road – or as we used to say “Trakk-errrs”. This was big cheese for a fifteen/sixteen year old speed freak boy like me. Piloting a motorised machine with four big wheels, a hand throttle and a bluddy great steering wheel. Awesome.

Fond memories of the five mile journey through the back lanes at a blistering 20 miles per hour, peering through the Trakkerrrs stinky engine smoke, willing the next ninety degree bend in the narrow lane to arrive so I could work the steering wheel at the last possible moment then hang onto the rear wheel guard as I got the Trakkerrr and its trailer up on two wheels. Much to the amusement of all the other young hands clinging on behind me.

Having wobbled and skewed out of the corner I would flinch and brace myself in readiness for the sharp but playful cuff across the back of my head by the Farmers older son who was perched on the wheel guard beside me. Then I’d turn and share a conspiritory grin with him as he slowly shook his head yet again.

This piece of fun music here, not only inspired this whole post in the first

 place, but in my view should be adopted by John Gray as his official blog

anthem over at 'Going Gently'.

That said, this is the track 'Down on Jollity Farm' from the 'Gorilla' album,

recorded in 1967 by 'The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Of which there will be

more about later in this post. This too was one of the first record albums I ever

purchased with my own money, way back then "in the day" of the year 1974.

Chapter Two - Working up a Jollity Farm Appetite

Once arrived at our designated sector on the estate, we would hastily devote the rest of the evenings light level transition to dusk, forking up brick shaped straw bales as they dropped off the back of the combine harvester, and stacking them up ever higher on the low bed tractor trailers following on behind.

It was hard physical work of course, but amongst your mates and sprinkled with a goodly dose of boyish physical rivalry, the evenings used to pass by very happily as we rapidly burned off all that healthy youthful energy that only teenage boys seem to posess in so much abundance.

Just after sundown, as our final reserves of strength were more than beginning to wane, the regular streams of sweat now persistently stinging our eyes as the dust and the pollen became well and truly matted to our faces arms and hair, we would start to glance over our aching shoulders for the first distant signs of impending arrival of the farmers wife in her old grey Austin pick up van, as it bumped and lurched into view through the dusky glow of the pale golden tinged freshly shorn stubble, just a snub bonnets nose ahead of the rolling and tumbling plumes of wheat corn dust following closely in her wake. The 'chow waggon'...always the most relished and welcome sight of them all…

Food time.

The farmer’s son would slither down from his  'grab & stack' perch high up on the loaded straw bale trailer and signal his Dad in the combine harvester, with an impressively shrill two fingered whistle. As the clatters and throbs of tractor and harvester engines gradually died away, they were soothingly replaced by the tranquil sounds of silence, interrupted only by the soft chirps of cicadas and the lively calls of nightjars busy flitting back and forth across the hedge rows as we gratefully trotted over to the back of Mrs Hunts old grey van.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinkirby/

Chapter Three - Class of '73' - The Stuff of Boys to Men

There is something deeply personal and memoriable about my vivid recollections of those very moments, during that particular summers final days in 1973, sat out there on a loose bale of straw in the middle of a sprawling freshly cut corn field, resting 'back to sweaty back' with a best mate while almost feverishly trying to push the whole of your enormous crusty fresh bread cheese and pickle roll inside your head in one complete go.

Rarely was a word said in those first few glorious minutes as the dozen or so of us ‘men in waiting’ and a few real already grow’d ups, eagerly filled our taught and empty bellies, gulping down great big mugs of foaming bitter shandy, while spread out around the tractors and loose bales in various states of seating and recline. The aches in our shoulders and the prickly tingles caused by grip muscle strain and blister chaffing to our hands, was momentarily forgotten. The mere stuff of grown up boys pretending they were already fully trousered up men.  

As the initial impatient haste to chomp and swill your way through your ploughman’s chow and beverage slowed to a more civilised and respectable tempo, I would find myself beginning to focus my senses more appreciably on the calm and beautifully twilit environment within my field of vision, taking in the postures and expressions of my teenage peers as they too relaxed to gaze contentedly outwards at the visually arresting vista laid out before them.

In these calm and formative moments together on those warm and balmy late summer evenings out there in the depths of Hampshire’s Broadlands fields, we began to see the world around us in a broader, different light. We started to really look, take note and experience the early ponderings of a wider, deeper appreciation for this unique and special place we collectively co-exist on.

Privately, from within, there were way more questions than answers, but one thing was for certain – we all grew up a little faster in those harvest time fields and pastures that year. Me, Kemmy, Rob, The Two Steve's, Andy, Bessie and Dozer. We’d all somewhat unknowingly made a few quiet quantum leaps toward adulthood. The journey from boy to man had taken on a bit more than a mere burst, and we were quickly beginning to understand there was more to all this ‘life’ and 'growing up' business than we’d previously understood.

A bigger, wider picture seemed to beckon. We’d accelerated into a whole new phase of maturing and personal development, and nothing in our lives from those moments on...would ever be quite the same again.

Truly unforgettable, halcyon days.

Please click this link to hear one of my nature sound compositions

over on: 'naturesoundsforme' It goes pretty well with this scene.

I really love all this stuff.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/10041790@N05/

It was generally just about then that old farmer Hunt would let out an impressively loud, long drawn out belch. Let everyone know he was still the biggest cheese in the pantry. And so then to a rising chorus of competing baby belchers here and there, we’d all enjoy an extended period of hearty chuckling and jeering as the friendly sound of nightjar bird song was drowned out to a cacophony of human derivative debauchment’s and other more extreme, audible crudities.

And good old Mrs Hunt would always remain completely po faced - never even a blink of a smile or a frown, as she gazed out calmly to the fading orange glows of the distant horizon.

"Hay Baling Fun" - You've really gotta take a look at this.

Chapter Four - The Fall of the 'Cretin Birds'

Yanked back to the realities of base life once again, old farmer Hunt would cast a searching glance to the heavens, coarsely wipe his mouth with the back of one of his equally coarse farmers hands as he reached into the long wooden tool box bolted to the side of his harvester’s engine panel.

Drawing out first one, then two twelve bore shot guns, we would all hurriedly clamber up the neatly stacked bales of straw to gain a better vantage point, as he passed the second gun to his oldest son. It was ‘cretin bird’ shoot time. Late night shopping for next months lunches, dinners, soups and pies - and as if bang on cue, the first suicidally cretinous bird would appear in the skies, eyes a bulging, head and neck straining forward, dumbly flapping its ungainly way inexorably onwards, straight into the sights of farmer Hunt and his number one son. Blam Blam Blam & Blamm.

Although a life long lover of our various bird and animal cousins, I have little care for the cretinous ‘Pheasant’ species at large I’m afraid. They really did dump out to the back of the queue when our lord and creator was dishing out the dregs of the brain matter. I mean they really did miss the whole armada.

Even down the lanes near where I live now, these totally inept, dumb ass malfunctioning kamikaze bipeds, disguised as semi pretty birdies, cause more motoring incidents as well as accidents, than all the other threats and hazards’ put together.

So there we casually watched from atop our fortress of straw, while the twin guns of Hunt & son blam blam blammed away at a virtually constant stream of low flying cretin birds, hopelessly determined to fall foul to the deadly spray of buckshot waiting to pluck them out of the otherwise deserted late summer evening airways.

And so as Mrs Hunt and ‘Boy’ the welsh border collie dog, stacked and fetched a sizable pile of deceased now ‘ex-cretinous’ game birds into the back of her trusty old pick up, I would slide down off my straw bales and claim my rightful place in the driving seat of my ‘trakk-errr’ once again and prepare for the dark drive back to ‘Jollity Farm’.

Chapter Five - Bonzo Mania & "It May Be Rubbish But By Golly It's British Rubbish!"

Quite who and of what circumstances got me into the record shop that day in 1974 to burgle myself a copy of ‘Gorilla’ by the comically avant garde jazz-rock group ‘The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’, colloquially known as ‘The Bonzo’s’ …I cannot recall.

Although a distant cow bell is telling me that it had something to do with two tracks:

a)      ‘The Intro’s and the Outro’s’ which sits at the top of this blogs sidebar, serving as the appropriately named musical ‘Intro’ to this whole fun blogger den – and

b)      ‘Down on Jollity Farm’ because it was just plain good old jolly childish fun.

Originally formed in 1962, The Bonzo’s gathered an impressive and loyal fan base, eventually launching their most successful album ‘Gorilla’ in 1967. ‘Jollity Farm’ was originally conceived and written by the singer song writer - Leslie Sarony - back in 1929 and thus adapted by the band for ‘Gorilla’.

During WW2, Leslie Sarony’s voice came to the public’s wider attention as one half of the duo who recorded the popular and jaunty wartime song – “We're Going to Hang out the Washing on the Siegfried Line”. Interestingly, the other half of the duo was also another ‘Leslie' with the surname 'Holmes’.

‘From Wikipedia’:

As the Bonzo Dog band's popularity increased, they were asked by Paul McCartney to appear in the "Magical Mystery Tour" film at the end of 1967, performing "Death Cab For Cutie". Around the same time, they were hired as the resident band on Do Not Adjust Your Set, a comedy show notable for starring several future members of Monty Python's Flying Circus (Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin) and David Jason in the cast. The band performed every week as well as sometimes participating in sketches.

They had a hit single in 1968 with "I'm the Urban Spaceman" produced by Paul McCartney and Gus Dudgeon under the collective pseudonym "Apollo C. Vermouth". The Beatles were great fans of the group.

Here's some further accreditations and mentions of the Bonzo's lesser known achievements:

The Sunday Times [may 25, 2008]
The band get  special mention in Robert Sandall's look at 'comedy music'.

" As the decade wore on, and pop started to take itself more seriously, along came the funniest band of the lot, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. A surreally attired ensemble led by Viv Stanshall, a foppish fellow with big glasses, they mercilessly teased rock’s earnestness with songs such as Can a Blue Man Sing the Whites? - and so hip were they in their day, Paul McCartney, no less, co-produced their hit single I’m the Urban Spaceman."

Sunday July 2^nd, 2008.

The Bonzo's appeared today on BBC's Sunday AM programme. Over 1.5m viewers watched the band perform Jolity Farm to Andrew Marr and his guests; Tessa Jowell, William Haig, Cathy Lett and Chris Patten. In the breakfast that followed, the band did offer William Haig a speaking part in the upcoming UK tour. Sadly (?) he declined!

The appearance was organised with Barney Jones, Editor of Sunday AM and a life long Bonzo's fan. Barney commented "the Bonzo's made such a contrast to the rather serious politicians we normally have on the show, it was a delight that they could join us."

Interestingly, the original songster to "Jollity Farm" - Leslie Sarony, was later to appear as an elderly Insurance company clerk in 'The Crimson Permanent Assurance' sequence, from the 1983 Monty Python film 'The Meaning of Life'. What a small and funny world we chortle around in then don't we.

Humour has always been central to my life. Weaned on a regular barrage of ‘The Goon Shows’, Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Saturday night TV with the eponymous Morecombe & Wise shows, it was no great wonder that I would eventually gravitate towards other comedic genius’s such as Monty Python and Billy Connelly. Oh the laughter and the pain.

Especially when you’re unfortunate enough to be sat just two rows back from the front of house at one of Connelly’s ‘Banana Boots’ concerts in the late 70’s. Spent most of that one in total seizure, and even when I somehow managed to wriggle my way out to the aisle to try and slink off for a momentously needed pee, while in the middle of another full on rampantly hillarious delivery, Connelly suddenly paused in mid rant and glared alarmingly downward with his eyebrows ominously raised - at which point all the ceiling spotlights instantly lit me up like a bug eyed frozen rabbit - as he blammed down at me...“And where the f**k do you think you’re going!!!”

Very soon after, having successfully escaped from Connelly's merciless ire, I singularly overindulged myself with the bestest, loudest, monumentally longest ‘pee’ I have ever had by far...and believe me, I’ve had a wee few more than most !

"I'm the Urban Spacman"
1968

Okay John...You'd better blogga off now and go milk your goats.