Patty Cakes

When Helen Begely settled on a new farm at Simpson in 1970 with her husband, Max, and their two young daughters, she was pregnant with their third child, and there was no electricity. Water for washing was boiled outside over an open fire and carried into the house in a bucket, and the meals were cooked outside too. ‘It felt like the end of the earth,’ she says.

The Begelys were part of the Heytesbury Settlement Scheme, an ambitious government progr