Chapter 1
1.THE BEGINNING
Hi there, I am Carmen, I will start my story from when I was around eight years old, bit difficult to assign happenings to ages though since my Uncle John and Aunt Maud who I lived with didn’t celebrate birth dates. I never did get the reasoning behind the lack of celebrations at the farm, since they were not overly religious or anything. Perhaps it was because of the hardships of running a farm from back in the day, every ploughed field, fence post and every building on the farm had uncle John’s sweat on it, so I was told, and believed as Uncle John knew every inch of that property.
I had lived on the Castleview farm all my life as far as I knew, although it was never talked about, I had picked up that my parents Pat and Philip were killed in a car accident when they were bringing me home from hospital after I had been born, possibly another reason birthdays are not celebrated. I heard Aunt Maud telling a friend that my mother, her sister, had protected me in the accident and I was found cradled in her lifeless body. Fortunately, to me it was just a story, I had no memory of my parents to bring on feelings of guilt or sadness. There had been talk between John and Maud that dad was drunk, but it was also true that Maud had a low opinion of Philip as she, the older sister, had been engaged to him when he got Pat pregnant with me, hence a quick change to the wedding plans and he married my mom apparently with some haste.
Aunt Maud was very prim and proper and wanted me to be brought up likewise, I had tutors who came and went as they one after another failed to live up to Maud’s expectations or were “too liberal”. There were also several maids in the house who I was taught to respect but not be overly communicative with, but of course several of them, over the years, took pity on me and befriended me, we shared fresh baked cookies and secrets together, when out of Maud’s sight.
Uncle John, on the other hand was more down to earth, and at his side doing tours of the farm was where, in my early years I received my sex education, watching bulls shag cows and rams shagging the ewes, as well as watching Uncle John pee against a tree, or even on occasion watch him shaking it rather vigorously, which he explained when he caught me looking, was “something that men needed to do”. Around the house too, much to Aunt Maud’s frustration he would walk around with his fly undone, and with no underwear there were things to be seen. The maids were used to him and cast their eyes to the side when he walked past them. They did giggle with me about it and Marcia, who was more of a mother to me than Maud, admitted that she did “help the Master out” on occasion and was financially rewarded for it, though I really only understood what she meant by it some years later.
The farm name “Castleview” was rather a misnomer, the farm was sheltered by an embankment which towered over it, I suppose somewhere along the embankment was a formation of rocks which resembled a castle, but it certainly wasn’t apparent to me. The embankment did however provide a stream which originated from a spring close to the top of the embankment, this stream provided a source of water which ran the length of the farm, in one section it was dammed to provide a small pond which became one of my favourite “chill” spots.
