Steam engines and horses

Let me take you back to the early 1940s, to an unimportant little farming village in Shropshire called Hadley. Shropshire, for most English people, is a county they hurry through quickly on the way to somewhere else. Nobody stops there, or didn't when I was a child. Let me introduce you to a village character: Ike the roadsweeper. Ike was a dour man who never had a surname to my knowledge, you mostly saw him with cart and brooms keeping the pavements (sidewalks) and the roads swept.

But from time to time he became transformed, putting aside his cart and brooms, putting on a different jerkin and a different hat, and mounting a gleaming steam roller, which would rumble and roar through the village like something from the Book of Revelations, a riot of chrome and steel and steam and Brobdingnagian roaring. Huge wheels, huge roller at the front, huge pistons, shrieking whistles - we children would follow it round the village, cheering till we were hoarse. And Ike, a cadaverous man who never smiled, would look down on us from his majestic height and briefly acknowledge our presence with a sort of sideways nod of his scrawny head. And then on, along the High Street, round the corner past the Bush Hotel and down towards Trench, trundling to we knew not where and for a purpose that we could not guess at (Trench, the next village, was Ultima Thule to us: only the most foolhardy Hadley child would venture there).

So now you know why I adore steam traction engines: they are part of my childhood. Today, all over Britain, there are individuals and societies dedicated to the preservation of these wonderful machines. This weekend, as every September, in my fen-edge Cambridgeshire village, the Haddenham Steam Engine Rally takes place

And there's a bonus: on the first morning, there is a ploughing contest. Old style: ploughs hand held and pulled by workhorses. It is a glorious parade of Percherons and Surrey Cobs and Suffolk Punches and Shires, heavy horses whose pelts gleam, whose mains and tails are braided, whose harnesses are burnished till they glow, a symphony of rich leather and sparkling brass.
Please come with me: it is a feast for the eye and the ear, horses and ploughs and all kinds of steam engines. What is more, God has laid on an Indian summer this year. What more do you need to be happy?