Death of a Shropshire Lad

On a morning of a fateful day in May 1984, Mary Brookshaw came running round crying ‘its Cyril, its Cyril’. I followed Mary into the familiar kitchen of Forge Farm. Cyril had fallen off his chair, Mary said. ‘He just said I’m feeling a bit dizzy.’ Cyril had fallen, ramming his head against the radiator. I pulled him back. He was dead.

This was the only time I had ever seen or touched a dead person. After that I remember nothing more. It was quick, it was painless. It was all over by the time I got there. An uncomplicated death for an uncomplicated man. He had been a lifeline, a conduit, a connection to old Shropshire. 

I remember working with him in the garden, talking about his work on the farm, Preece’s Farm in Cressage where he had worked for 53 years, his father before him. He was talking about hedging and hedges, the layering of hedges, a difficult slow job. I suddenly realized that he was working on a twenty five year cycle. I thought, this man talks as if he has lived forever and will live forever. 

Another memory was the story of how he used to drive sheep to market from Cressage through Eaton Constantine to Wellington.

I knew nothing about Cyril’s father, not even his name, but I do know that he planted the apple tree outside of Cyril’s cottage. Now the tree provides us with delicious apple crumbles through the winter, and feeds a host of birds, mainly blackbirds and thrushes, on the fallen deliberately uncollected apples. This was the tree that on the day we first brought our animals to Glebe, Marnie one of our cats ran up on arrival as if she had come home.

Cyril had been our entry key to the old, ancient Shropshire of farms and farming on which the village is fundamentally based. I see him now almost in a mythological light, an embodiment of Housman’s A Shropshire Lad