Recently I shared a true story I had written sometime ago; here is another true story… or maybe it’s not completely true… or maybe part of it’s true… or maybe it was just a story…
My uncle used to tell a story of when he was a boy… or maybe it was when his father was a boy… or maybe it goes back before that, or maybe it was just a local story he heard… He thought it was true, and had much more detail than I now remember.
A man who lived in a village near Cambridge in the early part of the twentieth century, or maybe it was the last years of the nineteenth, or maybe it was even before that… had a windmill… He was a miller, and maybe it was the mill he’d had for a long time, or maybe it was one he had bought to begin a new business. This mill needed its sails replacing and cost a lot of money and time and effort to do so… in fact the miller nearly brought himself to ruin by doing it.
After much hardship, and trouble for him and his family to replace the sails on the windmill, the day came when they could unlock the sails and let them turn gracefully and beautifully in the east wind. The sails began to gently turn and then disaster! Some miscalculation had been made, something went wrong, but the tip of the sail struck the ground with a juddering blow and became embedded, stuck.
The miller looked in horror at the end of his dreams, his future shattered before his eyes. Distraught he turned away, left the mill, left his family and went away somewhere and then the greatest tragedy of all, he took his life. I don’t know how he died, maybe he hung himself among trees, maybe there was a flourishing watermill nearby and he went and drowned himself in the mill-race, but I imagine his ghost walking, walking back to the mill to see if the sail was still stuck in the ground.
I don’t really know if this is a true, but it makes a terrific story.
The windmill in the featured image was in Cambridgeshire.
Filed under: True stories Tagged: Cambridge, Reigate, Surrey, windmill
