Out of the Ashes (3 page)

I didn’t know what he was on about. So Mum told me. It’s a sort of virus that attacks farm animals – pigs, sheep, cows, and it spreads like wildfire. If you get it on your
farm, then every animal has to be killed immediately to stop the disease from spreading. But it was nothing to worry about, she said, because the outbreak was over three hundred miles away and
there was no way it could spread all the way down to us in Devon.

But I caught Dad’s eye as she said that, and I could see he was worried. He tried to smile at me. ‘We’ll be all right, Becky,’ he said, ‘but all the same, I’m
not taking any chances.’

From now on Dad says we’ve got to dip our wellies in disinfectant every time we come in and out of the house, and first thing tomorrow he’s putting down a barrier of straw soaked in
disinfectant at the farm gate, and a sign up saying ‘Keep Out’. And we can’t have any more visitors, not until the scare is over. Worst of all, he says I can’t ride Ruby off
the farm, just in case. He didn’t say just in case of what and I didn’t ask, because I didn’t want it to sound like I was arguing. I don’t like arguing with Dad because I
know it hurts him when I do. So now I can’t take Ruby galloping up in Mr Bailey’s wood.

I’m writing this sitting in my bed, and I can hear them talking downstairs. I don’t know why, because usually I love listening in to their conversations, but for some reason I just
don’t want to hear what they’re saying.

Molly doesn’t seem to have much milk of her own, just enough, Dad says, to feed one lamb, not two. So we’ve been feeding Little Josh on the bottle four times a day.
I do it before school. Dad does it at lunchtime, because he’s the only one at home, and I do it at teatime and then last thing before I go to bed. It’s great, because Little Josh treats
me like his mum now and follows me everywhere.

He followed me into the stable yesterday, and Ruby didn’t like it at all. She put her ears back and tossed her head at him. Dad said I’d better shut Little Josh up, else the pigs
might eat him. I can never be sure with Dad whether he’s joking or not. But he’s not been joking much recently. He’s still worried sick about the case of foot and mouth disease on
that farm up north.

There were pictures on the telly today of dead pigs being picked up by machines and laid on top of a great funeral pyre of railway sleepers and straw. It was horrible. They’re burning them
tomorrow. Mum keeps telling him there’s no way that foot and mouth disease can spread all those hundreds of miles down to us. But Dad says you can never be sure of anything, not with foot and
mouth disease, that it can spread on the wind, that it can get carried by people, by cars.

Internet, radio, television – he always wants to find out the latest news about it. And he’s started smoking again. He gave up last year, for good he said. I went to help him in the
dairy this evening, just to be with him. We milled the cheese together in silence. He didn’t say so, but I knew he liked me being with him.

Some good news. Some bad news. The good news first. At school today Mrs Merton talked about foot and mouth disease. She said what Mum said, that foot and mouth isn’t
likely to find its way down here to us in Devon. Last time there was an outbreak, all the cases were clustered together in Shropshire. I told Dad when I came home, but I don’t think he was
even listening. And there’s other farmers worried like he is. On the school bus, I’ve seen quite a few farms with disinfected straw mats across their farm gates, and there are more and
more ‘Keep Out’ signs. Everywhere you go now the air stinks of disinfectant. Ruby really hates it. She wrinkles up her nose whenever she smells it.

Now the bad news. I had a bust-up with Jay. I was just telling her how worried Dad was about the farm, and then she says that farmers are always moaning about something. And for no reason she
goes on and on about how I had this and I had that and how I had a horse, and how I was spoilt – in front of everyone. And she’s supposed to be my best friend. So I said
she
was
spoilt because she’s got the latest Imac computer – she’s always showing it off to me when I go over to her place. Then she says if I feel like that she won’t ever invite me
over again. Well, who cares? God, she can be a right cow sometimes.

Up until teatime it was a great day. At school Jay came and made it up. She said she’d been a real cow, and I said I liked cows. So we’re best friends again.

Then I was sitting in the kitchen having my tea when Mum came in from work. She was white in the face and I soon knew why. They’ve discovered foot and mouth on a farm less than two miles
away – on Speke Farm, Terry Bolan’s place. She heard it on the radio in the car.

I’d never seen her so upset, and it wasn’t just because of the foot and mouth. It was because she was going to have to tell Dad. He was still out on the farm somewhere. When we heard
him coming she took my hand under the table and held it tight. Then she told him. It was like the life had suddenly gone out of him. All he said was: ‘You sure?’ Then, when Mum nodded,
he just turned round and went out again. Mum went after him.

I haven’t said a prayer since I gave up Sunday school a couple of years ago, until today. I sat at the kitchen table and prayed. I prayed that this foot and mouth wouldn’t come to
us, that our animals wouldn’t catch it, that Little Josh wouldn’t catch it, that everything would turn out all right. But then as I was praying I got angry, angry with God. Why did he
let it happen? Why had he made it come here?

At supper I found out it wasn’t God at all. Terry Bolan had bought in hundreds of sheep from a market up north, where that same pig farmer had sold his infected pigs before he knew they
were infected. And the pigs had infected the sheep. Terry didn’t know it. No one did. It wasn’t his fault, Mum said. So God wasn’t to blame, and nor was Terry. But the disease was
here anyway, and now only two miles away from us.

Dad hardly ate anything at supper. He just sat there smoking and staring ahead of him. When I kissed him goodnight and hugged him just now, he hardly knew I’d done it. I’m going to
pray again when I’ve finished writing this and I’m going to keep praying every night until I’m sure we won’t get it.

Usually I do a drawing, but I can’t, not tonight. I’m too sad.

Everything’s still all right. So far. I didn’t go to school today and Mum stayed at home too. No one in the village went to school in case we accidentally spread
the foot and mouth infection. Mum says you can carry it in your hair and on your clothes, in your ears even and up your nose.

So I spent most of the morning out on the farm with Dad. I milked the cows with him, and then went off with him on the tractor checking every animal on the farm for any tell-tale sign of the
disease. We were looking for any cow or pig or sheep with blisters or sores around the mouth, or in the feet. Dad said that I had to keep an eye out for any animal on its own, or limping, or that
didn’t look right in itself, and in particular any animal that was standing unnaturally still. When they’ve got blisters in the feet they don’t like moving about because it hurts
them, so they just stand still.

I must have been into the shippen and checked Little Josh and the others a dozen times today. Sometimes I just sat in the straw with them and watched them. I felt like a shepherd trying to keep
a wolf away from my flock, except that this wolf is silent and invisible, and I can’t frighten him off.

Dad has hardly said a word all day, and he didn’t eat lunch and hardly any supper either. Mum is doing her best to cheer him up, and so am I, but foot and mouth is hanging over him like a
dark shadow, and he hardly hears us. It’s like he’s cut himself off from us completely, like he’s locked inside himself somehow and can’t get out. I’ve never seen him
like this before, and it frightens me.

It’s bad news, not the worst, but nearly. The disease has come closer, much closer. We had a phone call at breakfast. Mr Bailey’s sheep have caught foot and mouth,
so all the animals on his farm will have to be slaughtered – his whole herd of lovely ruby-red Devon cows and their calves, all those sheep and lambs I saw only a couple of weeks ago. All of
them are sentenced to die. It’s terrible, horrible.

From my bedroom window I could see what was going on across the river. There were men in white overalls rounding up the sheep. When Mum told me they were probably the slaughterers, I closed my
curtains. I won’t look again. I don’t want to see what happens. I don’t want even to think about it. I don’t want to write about it. But what else is there to think about?
What else can I write about? It’s in my head all the time, on the telly every time we turn it on. It’s in the air I’m breathing.