Tristan de Cunha -2

Harold mentioned potato patches : that's about a mile down the road the road, the only road. And, of course, there's a bus. The potato patches are the island’s farm. Every family owns several fields to grow potatoes and other vegetables, but as Harold pointed out this is really one big family and everyone helps out when there's work to be done. The islanders also keep cows sheep, ducks and chickens; but numbers of livestock are strictly controlled to prevent over-grazing of the islands; there is limited pasture. It really feels like a beautiful old fishing and farming village: obviously a working villages and really it seems to me that it could just be a piece of England, cut out and thrown down in the middle of the South Atlantic. Except of course for the volcano, and that volcano is still active. It erupted in 1961 and came close to destroying the village. Lava flowed out onto the coastal plain: and climbing above it shows how close it came to Edinburgh before it stopped, just a few tens of meters away. It was a terrifying experience for the Islanders. Do you also remember the volcano erupting. Yes it erupted in October. And what was it like during the eruption, when the volcano was erupting just down the road? It felt like – I thought it was a deep shake, like that...at any rate, and it shakes so much the volcano starts to open. There was nowhere to retreat to on the island: the only solution was to evacuate the islanders to safety. We went to Cape Town for dinner and by the ship Stirling Castle we went up to, we went to England: when I return back to England they took us to coaches: this was the first time we ride in a coach or a car in our lives! You only ride on donkeys or Tristan, that’s it! So what was your time like while you're were in England? British people I will say once and I'll say it again: you wouldn't wish for better people to live with, not... I say it; and any foreigner can say the same thing I'm saying. And we stayed eighteen months and we always wanted to come back to Tristan again. And so what made you want to come back to Tristan? Well, Tristan’s so special to me it's , it's so calm, it's peaceful , it's so quiet. Because I don't like the noise, a lot of noise you know, but I just like the quietness. It’s so quiet on Tristan you can hear the grass growing.