Chewing the Cud (7 page)

“The pullets!” he cried in ringing tones.

“What? Oh Lor', what with having to fetch Sister and one thing and another, I forgot to feed them.”

“You needn't bother now, see,” said Gladwyn.

A couple of weeks before, I had bought a dozen fine Light Sussex pullets on the point of lay. They were housed, out in the orchard, in a homemade ex—Mobbs run that
could be moved about over the grass. It was quite a stout contraption with a roof over it, and because it had a floor of chicken wire, I had no fears for the safety of the birds.

What I had not bargained for was that the five-centimeter mesh of the floor netting would admit part of a long nose. A fox had scratched and scrabbled away to make a tunnel under the run and had worked his way beneath the birds. Carry them away he could not, but he had forced his muzzle through the wire time and time again and pulled and bitten at anything that came within his reach, a wing tip, a leg, a throat, as the wretches blundered about in the moonlight. Nine of the twelve lay sprawled and dead, of loss of blood or limb or of shock.

“Look at these three, boyo,” said Gladwyn softly. “Poor buggers.” The unhappy survivors squatted with outstretched wings, their beaks wide, the nictitating membranes agitating over their reproachful eyes. In their breasts, part plucked by the urgent fox, there were gaping holes.

“I'll hit 'em out, shall I?” said Gladwyn.

“Yes. No, wait a minute.”

We carried them to the kitchen, for the inspection of professional eyes.

“What d'you think, Carty? Any chance of saving them?”

“Easy as wink, dear. Get some newspaper on the table here. And put the kettle on.”

And out of her little black bag came needle and surgical thread and dressings and antiseptic.

Monday 1 March.

St. David

Carty arrived, sewed up three pullets.

Fox had the other nine. To Chipping Sodbury to register Betsy's birth.

If the Mad Hatter and the March Hare had put their heads together and planned the stocking of Woodlands Farm, the results could hardly have been more higgledypiggledy than those that I achieved all by myself. It was so when we were children, and we had graduated from
bur collections of toy farm animals to actual livestock, in fact to breeding budgerigars.

Myrle had practiced color breeding, green or cobalt or sky-blue birds confined to their separate compartments, or flights, each pair creating budgies in their own image. Male and female created they them, and all was order and neatness, Virgo-style. But in Aries' aviary, I mated everybody happily to everybody else to produce offspring of unconventional shades, rather as a child indiscriminately mixes various-colored sticks of Play-Doh and ends up with a muddy mess. Green being dominant, my flock became a collection of greenish birds with bits of blue about them, not to be compared with those Virgoan budgies. Unable to match the competition, I went in for foreign finches.

But at Woodlands Farm I had the field, or rather the cowshed, to myself. I began to acquire a body of cattle of all shapes and colors. Anyone with any sense would have decided upon a breed and laid out every penny to fill the twenty-four standings with down-calving or freshly calved heifers, or at the oldest, second calvers; would have bought good-quality commercial beasts from carefully selected dispersal sales or through a reputable dealer; would have concentrated every effort and all available money towards getting back a decent monthly milk check just as soon as possible. Not me.

You must believe (I must believe, my diary tells me) that by 10 March 1948, having had possession for four months, I had the apt number of thirteen cows in milk. They were of all ages and sizes and bore as little resemblance to each other as was bovinely possible.

True, a number of them were Shorthorns of one type or another (pretty colors, you see, all different, not like boring old Friesians), some being first calvers bought from Tytherington for old times' sake. But in addition there were a couple of Ayrshires with horns like hat racks, a blue-gray beast, the second cousin of a Jersey, and a very small short-legged animal of unknown origin that had been someone's house cow, kept in his garage. I fell for her because of her cute size and pretty mottled markings; she gave as much milk as a goat.

Take Auntie. She was a good example of my technique. I bought her from Bill Tanner, whom I'd known since I played around his farmyard as a small boy. Thinking about it, Auntie was probably there then, she was so old. A smallish Ayrshire with a kind, sad face and lovely long white eyelashes, her overgrown hooves curled like pairs of Turkish sandals, her back dipped like a fairground gondola, and her drooping hairy bag, its four great teats like bananas, was just what a dairy cow's udder shouldn't be. But she was so gentle and quiet (not having the energy to
be otherwise) and so cheap, a real bargain. The bargain of course was Bill's, since I paid him much more than he'd have got from the slaughterhouse. Before the year was out, that's where poor Auntie went, dry, barren, and bony.

I fancied myself as a good striker of a deal. Buy or sell, I must have been everybody's sucker.

Look what my thirteen cows were producing.

Wednesday 10 March

New moon.

Sent 30 gallons away.

Surely I didn't record that out of pride? Probably it was the first time we'd reached such a figure. Of course I never could see, still can't sometimes, that if you want a pair of decent shoes, you have to pay good money for them. I prowled around the local sales and markets till I'd filled the shed with mongrel mediocrities. Not that they seemed so at the time. Each, I thought, was in some way remarkable. They all had carefully chosen names, they were well cared for and generously fed, their mating and their calvings properly conducted, their slightest ailment promptly treated. Sometimes the vet seemed practically to live upon the place, so solicitous was I of the health of my herd. In large measure, they were pets. Too few
cows giving too little milk — not the ideal start to dairy farming.

We compounded this first basic shortcoming because of this pet-loving mentality — the miscellaneous collection of painted lead animals proudly set out upon the nursery floor — and filled every spare space at Woodlands Farm with one or another bird or beast. On farms, we knew, you could keep all kinds of creatures. We kept them.

Leaving aside the household animals — three dogs soon to be many, two cats soon to be a legion, and counted in with them the rabbits, the guinea pigs, the mice, the budgerigars (all these we still had), the tortoises set to race on the lawn (first to fall in the flower bed wins) — we wanted to and did keep every kind of living thing that took our fancy. They'll earn their keep, we thought, producing eggs or meat or salable young. They mustn't just be passengers.

We never in fact kept sheep, because a public footpath ran through the middle of the farm and we feared harassment from local dogs, but instead we bought goats and
tethered them all over the shop. They were to provide milk for puppy rearing. Though they were as varied in their origins as the cows and, proportionately, as unproductive, there was hardly one that hadn't been an absolute bargain. And there are few sights so attractive as that of newborn kids skipping around.

We didn't have horses, if you don't count Bob and we didn't count him for long. As a colt (a very long time ago), he had put one eye out in a thorn hedge, and this affected his idea of a straight line, whereas the Ferguson tractor was young and didn't move diagonally or grind its teeth. Bob was given one last good gallop among the blackberry bushes in the woods and then sent to Doyle the slaughterman, who, to our horror, turned up later that day. He carried two large, still-warm lumps of meat.

“Oi thought ye moight loike a bit for the dogs.”

I can't think why we didn't have any donkeys. Delightful creatures, I feel sure we should have made some excuse for keeping them.

But we kept a great variety of poultry. Chickens — growers, layers, table birds, of a host of different varieties — game birds both full size and bantam: pheasants, guinea fowl, geese, ducks; again, why no turkeys?

Last of all there were the pigs, supposedly second only to the cows as a commercial enterprise, but for my
money — which is what they gobbled up — far superior in native intelligence, good common sense, and beauty of form and feature.

And all these mooing, grunting, bleating, squawking, quacking things were of surpassing interest to us, characters with names and personalities.

There was always something fascinating going on. But did they pay their way? I hear you ask. Sorry?

This motley conglomeration of creatures that you seem to have surrounded yourself with'were they commercially viable?

Well, we got a lot of fun out of '

Surely you kept proper accounts?

Yes, of course. After a fashion.

Well, did they show a profit?

Oh dear.

The play had only just begun, the curtain hardly risen, but, had we known it, the fateful figure of that bank manager already stood in the darkness of the wings, awaiting his entry at the end of the second act.

T
here's always something to do on a farm every hour of daylight, every day of the year. On a small place like Woodlands Farm, so much, with proper planning, could have been done single-handed. At most it was man-and-a-boy stuff. Yet there we were, Gladwyn and I, solemnly sharing the milking, the care of stock, the cultivations, the field work. Mind you, I couldn't have done without him when it came to the mysteries of the internal combustion engine, which to me have always
been Eleusinian. All I knew, and know, is how to satisfy the liquid needs of tractor or car.

But generally the labor of the farm was shared. Gladwyn and I milked the cows on alternate days, the other seeing to the feeding of the remaining animals. We took alternate Saturday afternoons and Sundays off, and every year, scrupulously, one would have Christmas Day off, one Boxing Day. As for holidays we took, in turn, two weeks' holiday each in the summertime between haymaking and harvest.

By 1953 Myrle and I had three children — the two girls (by that date aged eight and five) and Giles, who had appeared presumably much to Father's approval (“Right sex at last, eh?”). For our holidays the five of us went — as always — to West Wales, to Tenby in Pembrokeshire.

Some time in the 1890s a great-great-uncle had been there and reported that it was a very pleasant place, so all members of the family then went there every year for the next sixty or seventy years.

Indeed it was on the Royal Victoria Pier at Tenby in Pembrokeshire that my father first saw my mother.

It was the summer of 1920, and she was recently eighteen years old. He, nearing twenty-six and with a DSO and an MC to show for his service in the Great War, was still on crutches after having being badly wounded.