UR TV CAST

Bat surveys are part of Heisse’s job as a conservation officer for the Environment Agency – one of the top employers attending Environmental Futures, a big environmental careers event, organised by the University of London today. The railways, of course, were to be privatised by Thatcher’s successor, John Major, but that was decades away.Nina Bawden’s latest novel is ‘The Ruffian on the Stair’ (Virago, £6.99)jonty jonathansale . There are many places a career in the environmental sector can take you. “I would hate to live in the country,” she declares, “unless I was living on a farm.”What would she have missed if she hadn’t been a farmer’s girl? “I would have missed going to Oxford,” she replies instantly. I liked the sheep well enough but I was fonder of the pigs, which I would clean out.”These days humans have largely been replaced by machinery but the farms then contained almost the equivalent of the cast of The Archers.

As well as the farm’s family, there would be someone to look after the cows, someone to look after the pigs and, in many cases, an Italian prisoner-of-war who actually lived on the premises, unlike the German POWs, who went back to their camp at night. It was not until the end of six decades of peace that sudden death came out of thin air. “I helped with the harvest.”She learnt that sheep are bright enough to recognise faces: “When I came back from university, they would all run towards me. If she told the Italian POWs what to do in a couple of words and then burst into tears, they leapt to it.
“I was tremendously happy. It was absolutely lovely to ‘calve’ a cow; I loved ploughing and harrowing.” This was ploughing practically out of Gray’s Elegy, using a “pram plough” pulled by a horse. She was paid a shilling(5p) per hour, which was more than the official Land Girls; this was because of her highly exaggerated claim to be fluent in Italian and therefore an interpreter for the foreign prisoners-of-war.

In school and university holidays during the early Forties, Nina worked as a farm labourer, first for free on the Welsh farm where she was staying and then for wages at a larger farm. In 2002 her husband was killed instantly and she was seriously injured in the Potters Bar crash. She survived, to be movingly portrayed as one of the characters in the David Hare play The Permanent Way, and to write Dear Austen, a powerful polemic addressed to her late husband, the former BBC World Service supremo Austen Kark. Potter, previously the assistant coach at St George-Illawarra, flew in from Australia and will travel with his new side to England today. The match-day duties at Warrington on Saturday will be in the hands of David Waite, Paul Donkin and Matt Adamson, the trio who have coached the club since Steve Deakin was sacked in December.
Potter will take control in time for the Dragons’ next match, at home to in-form Salford, on 25 March.Six Super League clubs are queuing up to make offers to the New Zealand Test forward, Roy Asotasi, who is out of contract at his Australia club, Canterbury, at the end of this season.Widnes have denied that David Peachey could be leaving them for Wigan.