When you lose your village milkman, you lose more than milk
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Version 0 of 1. “He’s been absolutely wonderful. If you were stuck up a ladder, he’d always stop and help.” Having delivered her paean to the departing milkman of the village of Weedon, a woman in an Aran jumper, I’d guess in her 70s, took off at the speed of a gazelle before I could ask her name. I couldn’t imagine her getting stuck up a ladder, and I couldn’t imagine anyone who, seeing a person stuck up a ladder, would not stop and help. But that’s not the point: the point is that, when you lose your village milkman, you lose much more than milk. Saturday is the last day Bond Brothers will deliver milk to this and six other Buckinghamshire villages. The family business was established in 1901 and the crowd gathered to say goodbye on Friday morning was extraordinary. Tables heaved with madeira cakes, while underneath was the raw truth of dairy with which we are all familiar. “Supermarkets are currently selling four pints of milk for under a pound. We sell milk for 62p a pint. The recommended doorstep price is 75p, so we were already absorbing a cost,” Guy Bond explained. Bond Brothers are not the only ones – John Woodfield, the farmer down the road, is getting 20p per litre when it costs him 30p to produce. It’s one of those Thatcher depth charges, destined to detonate 30 years down the line: after she abolished the Milk Marketing Board in favour of a free market, supermarkets started underselling and have been doing so ever since. “What people forget is that it’s not just the cost of milk,” Bond continued. “It’s a social service, we look after people. We know their habits. We know if the curtains are closed and aren’t usually. “I’m not a hero. I’m only one of thousands who do this every day. We’re unsung heroes, if you like. We’re not expecting knighthoods. Although I wouldn’t mind meeting the Queen.” We were sitting outside the village hall at this point, basking in the loveliness of Weedon, but also bang opposite the erstwhile village shop. That shut down in the 90s, when Tesco opened nearby and started running a shuttle bus from – of all the crowning insults – a stop directly outside the grocer’s door. Dick Bignell had to watch all his former customers standing in a queue to take their money somewhere else. “And then,” Bignell said, without apparent hard feelings, “a kid would be sent up on Sunday morning, knock on the door: ‘Can Mam have 2lb of sugar and pay you Thursday?” Claire Macdonald has lived in Weedon since 1982, and remembers Bond when he was 18: “He used to come round with his pink rosy cheeks. He’s never on time.” Trevor Bowman-Shaw agreed that they were wont to call him the late Mr Bond, but his wife, Joanna, interceded (in case I walked away with the impression that the punctuality was a problem). “He’s a very special person. He always looks out for people. I wanted to put him in for milkman of the year, but I haven’t heard a word about it in years. There aren’t that many milkmen, I suppose.” Related: The angst over milk is about the future of our countryside | Simon Jenkins Margaret Askew, 72, likewise notes Guy Bond’s social value. “If someone’s not feeling very well, he feeds that into the system,” she said. Collectively, these residents make Weedon sound like the most perilous village in Britain, even while it looks like the healthiest, prettiest, most robustly social place you’ve ever seen. I commented on the prettiness, and Askew replied: “We entered best-kept village and lost out to one with 600 people. There are only 300 of us – we were just in the wrong category. So we were crushed by that as well.” Her eyes are alive with self-parody. The real death knell for the milk round was that none of the children of the Bond Brothers want to take it over. “You know when it stops, don’t you?” Bond said, cheerfully. “When we die. I wanted to retire before that.” I can’t believe he’s really going to retire. “No, part of my other job is that I’m a shooting instructor. I run a shooting school, people come from all over the world for my expertise …” A pause. He didn’t want to brag. “I’m actually manager of the England shooting team.” The atmosphere all round was extremely festive, which must have been partly cake-related. But really, the thing the villagers weren’t saying, in that peculiar British way of not being able to, was that they didn’t like Guy Bond because he changed their lightbulbs. They just really like him: affection, always fig-leafed in duty and odd jobs, as quintessential as the ubiquitous thatch. |