And I can drive a tractor

Printed in the Cray Wanderers matchday programme on Saturday 10 December 2011 v Bury Town

Bury St Edmunds will always hold a lasting memory for me. Aged about 5 years old, I went with my grandparents, parents and one of my brothers on the long coach trip from near my nan and grandad's home in East Dulwich to visit my mum's extended family in the Suffolk town.

Back in those days, long before England hosted and won the FIFA World Cup, Bury wasn't anywhere near as built up as it is today. There were lots of open fields and the roads were sparsely populated with cars and very little other vehicular activity. The coach trip seemed to take hours from when we first started out, taking in both Victoria Coach Station in London and a halfway house somewhere along the way, until we reached our destination.

Like today, however, there were no motorways into or out of East Anglia, the M11 never existed and most of the roads en route didn't have dual carriageways. One of the biggest memories that has stuck in my mind for over half a century was the farm that my uncle owned (or possibly rented) in Bury St Edmunds and the day I climbed on board and into the driving seat of his blue tractor. To be totally honest, and things haven't changed much for me height wise since then (I thought I'd get this in, before somebody else did!), I couldn't reach the control pedals and so my uncle controlled those whilst seated beside me on an overturned oil drum. Oh, the wonders of yesteryear, not having to worry about health and safety back then!

The steering wheel was a bit larger than I was used to at the time (well, my pedal car had a tiny wheel in comparison!) and my uncle may have had a hand in helping me to steer the machine but, hey, afterwards he afforded me the accolade of saying how well I'd driven the tractor for someone of my age. A compliment is a compliment after all.

My brother, who is 7 years older than me, wasn't as careful a driver as me when it was his turn to drive the tractor and he managed to run over one of the free-range chickens that had dared to get in his and the tractor's way. We all knew what had happened, by the way the hen squawked and the way the feathers immediately fluttered skywards before floating downwards again to adorn the ground in the farmyard.

I can't remember now if we had chicken for our dinner that evening...

Trevor Mulligan