Scots the world over celebrated Burns Night on Tuesday. They and their guests gathered to commemorate the life of the Ayrshire-born poet Robert Burns and enjoy an annual Burns supper on the 263rd anniversary of his birth. There were gatherings in Watford when the swirl of the kilt, the Selkirk Grace, the Address to the Haggis and the Immortal Memory were the evening’s special focus.

You may be wondering where I’m heading. Well, Ted Parrish, my father, was an active member of Watford Cine Society for several decades and made award-winning documentary films of Watford, Bushey and Oxhey. But in the early 1980s, with a kilted Ayrshire-born son-in-law, he decided to look further afield for subject matter and shot a film called ‘Border Country’. He asked Bob, who had grown up within walking distance of Burns’ Cottage, to be the narrator.

Here is my father’s film script: ‘We know Rabbie Burns cast covetous eyes in many directions and at many bonnie lassies, but few of us will remember the lyrics he wrote some 200 years ago. They went like this:

‘Out over the Forth, I look to the North

But what is the North and its Highlands to me;

The South, nor the East gie ease to my breast

The far foreign land, or the wild rolling sea’

Burns, turning his back on Bonnie Scotland? Who would have believed it? Well, I do. I think I know how he felt when he penned those words. Passing from one to the other, north to south I mean, necessitates crossing a border of some kind. It’s not like crossing a frontier then there would be a demarcation line in barbed wire or concrete or both. But not here. The manned towers, machine gun posts, barriers, the ‘no-man’s land of fiction or reality are missing. Who can say where the order really is without reference to an Ordnance Survey map? There is nothing alien in the landscape no wire fences to keep people out or perhaps to keep them in.

Watford Observer:

This and the two pictures below show Attenborough fields in 1980

In more recent times at least, British borders have become an invisible part of the landscape. After all, God created man, man unfortunately created borders. The Welsh border castles, Hadrian’s Wall; that sort of thing. Abandoned farm buildings suggest evacuation of the land, but not for political ends. More likely, another sign of economic decline of agriculture, in general, and milk production in particular. There is no definition by which we would recognise border country. Perhaps it is a sixth sense, but the atmosphere is unmistakable.

The undulations are probably a bequest of the Ice Age. It took a little longer to reduce primeval forests to arable land. Now, the migration away from the countryside is almost complete. Soon the machine will take over. Aye, border country is unique.

Watford Observer:

So, allow me to take a last look at the north; a last look for the sake of Auld Lang Syne, afore I turn to the south.

Farewell border landscape

Castles in the autumn air

Silhouettes in a clear blue sky

Can anything be set more fair?

 

Mansions and homesteads

In the shadow of the trees

Clinging to the hillsides

Under multi-coloured leaves.

 

We’re told we get what we deserve,

In any year of grace

And today is no exception

You’re right, it’s Charter Place!

 

Walk across the fields to Bushey

If you think you’ve been deceived

Get to know your Watford Better

Then ye’ll no’ feel so aggrieved.’

‘My apologies, Mr. Burns.’

Whenever my father showed ‘Border Country’ at film competitions or to local groups, unsuspecting audiences assumed they were seeing rural views of beautiful Scottish border country, after all the film had a Scottish-sounding title, there were Highland cattle in view and a Scot was narrating the soundtrack. But they were hoodwinked! Tongue in cheek, he had shot the film in Attenborough’s fields and the surrounding countryside, just a short walk from his home in Wilcot Avenue, Oxhey. He had been careful to capture shots that did not give the game away and audiences were completely misled, until a sudden distant glimpse of something grey came into view at the end of the film. In stark contrast, it was the concrete block of the then newly-built Charter Place in Watford High Street. Viewers were suddenly shocked into realisation that the countryside in the film was not all it had seemed!

Watford Observer:

My father hoped that those who saw ‘Border Country’ would look at their local fields with fresh eyes and fully appreciate the beautiful countryside on their doorstep; fields in which he had enjoyed cross-country running as a boy. Attenborough’s fields were indeed a special place for him; a place he wrote about lovingly to his then-pen friend Peggy Hunt whilst serving with the RAF in India and Burma during World War Two. When he returned to Oxhey at the end of 1945, he took Peggy there. Three weeks later they were engaged. And, as history follows history, Bob, my future husband, proposed at a nearby spot overlooking Attenborough’s fields.

Lesley Dunlop is the daughter of the late Ted Parrish, a well-known local historian and documentary filmmaker. He wrote 96 nostalgic articles for the ‘Evening Post-Echo’ in 1982-83 which have since been published in ‘Echoes of Old Watford, Bushey & Oxhey’, available at www.pastdayspublishing.com and Bushey Museum. Lesley is currently working on ‘Two Lives, Two World Wars’, a companion volume that explores her father’s and grandfather’s lives and war experiences, in which Watford, Bushey and Oxhey’s history will take to the stage once again.