Tommy bought three tractors in case one wouldn't start
Tommy Arch was the last in his Welsh valley to get a tractor.
All his farming life he had worked with, and loved working with, horses, and put his faith in them.
So when during the 1950s he finally bought a tractor, long after everybody else had had one, he took no chances, as his son Charles relates in a new book which tells the story of his growing-up years in the hills of Mid Wales.
Charles, who has been ringside commentator at the Royal Welsh Show in Llanelwedd since 1980, says: "He took me with him to the tractor centre in Aberystwyth.
"No two people ever knew less about tractors than father and I. We looked at the tractors on show and father decided on a Fordson. But, just in case it happened to fail to start some morning, he decided he needed some insurance. And so he bought three."
The tractors duly arrived on lorries, with the lorry drivers unable to comprehend why the two of them needed three tractors.
In any event, the insurance policy had an immediate test.
"The following morning we couldn't start even one of the three," writes Charles.
They called in an unsung local engineering genius called Danny Rees who got them running, but was loath to reveal what the mechanical problem had been.
Charles was brought up at Strata Florida Abbey Farm, among the hills of Ceredigion between Llandrindod Wells and Aberystwyth.
Charles' early years autobiography, Life Beneath The Arch (published by y Lolfa, £9.99), is a fond evocation of a disappeared era of mountain farmers and their unique way of life, and a self-sufficient farming community in which everybody knew each other and socialised, and there were many local "characters."
It was before the days that Forestry Commission planting imposed a drab uniformity to tracts of landscape, and captures the twilight of the horse-drawn era for farms as mechanisation took over.
Charles tells how when he returned to the area half a century after leaving, he found only one shop remaining when there had been eight in his days, and many other changes which made him feel like a stranger.
"This was not the place I had left. I had returned to a community that was in its death throes," he writes.
The book is an extended translation of the original version in Welsh.
