A room with a view

Where was I? Oh yes. Terracotta roof tiles… From the balcony of my top floor flat I enjoy an unobstructed view across the Yare Valley from UEA in the East, the Norwich Research Park to the West… and to the South in the middle distance the NNUH.

This morning, as I sit at my desk and peer over the top of the blank screen of my laptop, lost for words and groping for inspiration, my gaze comes to rest upon the terracotta tiled roof of the Spire hospital on the Old Watton Road, slap bang in the middle of my panoramic view, less than half a mile away as the crow flies. Why is this relevant? Where the Spire hospital now stands used to be where the BUPA hospital once stood, and – back in the mid-1970s – before BUPA that was where the old DEV farm stood.

Bizarrely – serendipitously – I live within sight of and a stone’s throw from where I used to plod up and down hour after hour day after day come rain or shine behind Left and Right – the unheralded pioneer oxen of the original ‘old DEV Farm’ – all those (47) years ago  when I was a DEV undergraduate (1976-1979). Who’d have thunk it!? I can take my morning coffee sitting on the balcony and contemplating my past.

I was a ‘mature student’ when I started DEV. Twenty-seven. Born and bred in Hastings, I left school with 5 GCE ‘O’ Levels. I’d done lots of different jobs – from bingo-calling to chef, unskilled labourer on building sites, forklift truck driver, painter and decorator,  doorman, window fitter, … but I had never set foot on a farm. That to me was terra incognita. I knew absolutely diddly squat about farming.

I didn’t even know about the DEV farm when I applied. I found out about it by accident, really, talking to a fellow DEV First Year (Adrian Friggens). Out of nothing but curiosity I went to have a look. And decided there and then that farming was for me. Adrian – who had just returned from 2 years’ volunteering in Upper Volta (Burkina Faso) where he had learned how to train draft oxen – showed me the ropes (literally and metaphorically) and he and I did a joint undergraduate DEV Dissertation on ‘the DEV farm’.

For me, Left and Right were front and centre – if you take my meaning – of the Farm. I have fond memories of spending hours on all fours trying to find bits and pieces that had fallen off the ox-drawn equipment. And knocking down thistles in the paddocks with an old-fashioned scythe. And walking the animals across the Old Watton Road to graze the water meadow on tethers. I have nothing but fond memories of the old DEV farm. That ‘experiential’ hands-on dirt-under-the-fingernails learning-by-doing stood me in very good stead when I went to Africa to ‘teach the Dinka oxen to dance’.

Martin Wallis

21 April 2023

Norwich