I should tell you that Hope Farm isn’t what you might call a ‘traditional’ farm. Oh, no. We don’t grow crops, we don’t have cows, we don’t *lowers voice to whisper* kill any of our animals for food. Instead, our residents live a life of pampered luxury. They’ve all had tough starts in one way and another and I think they deserve a little TLC and understanding. Much like the young people who come to spend their time here, too. You see, I run the farm as an alternative way of educating kids who have special needs or behavioural issues. How I came to be doing that is quite a convoluted tale. We should sit down with a cup of tea and I’ll give you chapter and verse. Now, I’ve just got to crack on.
Our next resident is our ‘pet’ lamb, Fifty, who is at the opposite end of the spectrum to Anthony. Where Anthony is more often in an evil humour, Fifty is one of life’s most affable sheep. He’s convinced that he’s a human or a dog or a pig – anything but a lamb – and, as such, he’s pretty much given the free rein of our farmyard. If you drew a cartoon sheep, you’d draw Fifty. He has a handsome brown face, ears that are quite possibly big enough for him to take flight and a doleful expression in his big brown eyes. He has eyelashes to die for.
He’s best friends with our monster-sized pig, Teacup, and usually snuggles up at night beside him in Teacup’s pen. Now and then, when I’m feeling particularly soft, Fifty beds down in my caravan. When he hears us, he comes up for his early morning cuddle.
‘Hello, Fifty. What’s good today?’ He leans into my hand for his favourite itch behind the ear.
Fifty was an orphaned lamb who came to us with a fifty-fifty chance of survival. He was weak, underfed and literally on his last legs. He preferred to nestle in my lap rather than feeding, so I spent hours with my finger in his mouth teaching him how to suck. Eventually, he thrived with warm milk on tap and me with many sleepless nights beside him in the hay under a heat lamp. His legs were bent and buckled beneath him, so I massaged them with lavender oil every day to cajole his wasted muscles into life and bandaged his spindly limbs until he was strong enough to support his own weight. He still walks with an ungainly limp now but it never stops him from bossing the dogs around.
Teacup wakes up and hauls himself to see us, always open to the offer of food. Teacup’s only issue was to grow into a piggy the size of a Sherman tank when his owner foolishly bought one he was told would fit into a teacup. Hence the name. Living in the tiny garden of a semi-detached house in Hemel Hempstead soon wasn’t a viable option, so someone told someone who knew someone who knew us and that’s how we inherited him.
‘Morning, boy. Did you have a good night?’ I scratch his cheeks and the pig gives me a cheery grunt in reply.
I feed and water them all, holding the dogs away with my foot so they don’t nick their brekky. We have two domestic white geese who come wandering into the yard, obviously worried that they’re missing some breakfast action. We keep Snowy and Blossom for their eggs which are popular and Bev likes to put jaunty neckerchiefs on them which they usually surrender to after a few protest pecks.
Next to Teacup we have two more pigs – Salt and Pepper. They’re New Zealand Kunekunes and are short, fat and hairy. Pepper, the lady pig, is very vocal and bossy. Poor old Salt mostly stands in the corner of his pen being the epitome of a long-suffering and hen-pecked husband. If you go to fuss them, Pepper barges him out of the way so that he doesn’t get a look-in – poor thing – so we try to sneak him treats when she’s not looking. They get their breakfast too.
Further along is a run with a dozen or more rabbits of all shapes and sizes who are used to being cuddled to within an inch of their life and seem none the worse for it. Many of the kids who come here aren’t used to animals at all, so they’re great for introducing them to the work of the farm and in learning to how to look after another creature. The alpacas will give you a nip or a swift kick if you do something they don’t like, but the bunnies are altogether more agreeable. They’re all content to sit quietly soothing a troubled teen in return for a carrot.
‘Do you want to stay with Teacup?’ I ask Fifty. ‘Or will you come with us?’
Our favourite lamb finds a spot in the sunshine next to Teacup’s pen and settles down. Looks as if I have my answer. Which is just as well as I have a lot to do and need to get a wiggle on.
Chapter Three
It’s not yet eight o’clock, but the sun is climbing high and it looks set to be a warm day. Big Dog wanders ahead as we meander up to the field, sniffing anything he comes to with an intensity that’s admirable. Little Dog stays contentedly by my side, my constant companion.
As always, when I’m striding out across the farm, I feel my soul settle. This is my home, the place where I belong. It’s only here that I can be myself and am truly happy. I should tell you some more about it as we go. Hope Farm was left to me by my aunt Hettie, my godmother and my mother’s older sister. I spent most of my childhood at this place and she was more of a mum to me than my real mother ever was. I don’t remember even calling my mother ‘Mum’. It was always Joan. And poor Joan was an alcoholic and never really had the time or the ability to look after a child. Her mothering skills could best be described as erratic. By the time I was born my father had long gone, so he was never in my life.
Hettie was the one who was always there for me. Joan saw me as an unwelcome interruption to her social life and made it abundantly clear. So Hettie would sweep me away from our awful, loveless home and take me to the farm where I’d tell all my troubles to the animals and find my comfort in caring for them all. Hettie was always patient, nurturing and showed me what to do. I looked after her small flock of sheep, her menagerie of pets and her rag-tag brood of chickens, learning what feed they needed, how to collect the eggs from the hens and what to do when they weren’t well.
When, eventually, my mother cared more about the bottle than anything else in her life, Hettie took me on permanently before Social Services did. Just after I started secondary school, she installed me in her run-down caravan on the farm, making me take the only bed while she slept on the sofa-cum-bed in the living area. I didn’t know that the best word to describe my aunt then was ‘recluse’. I just thought she was shy. The truth of it was that for years she’d pretty much shut herself off in this green and pleasant part of Buckinghamshire, shunning neighbours, family and friends – pretty much everyone apart from me. I never thought to question why. It was more of a case of ‘why wouldn’t you?’ After all, I was ‘shy’ too.
We never had visits from friends or neighbours and I never thought it strange. If Hettie didn’t miss contact with the outside world, then neither did I. Going to school was torture. Every day, I used to sit at my desk and count the hours until home time. I wanted nothing more than for the lessons to be over so that I could run straight back to the farm. The other girls might hang around in the village or have play-dates for tea at each other’s houses, but not me. I was a loner, the odd one out, the one who didn’t get invited and I didn’t mind at all. Hettie taught me a lot about animals, but nothing about social skills. The idea of being up here surrounded by all this beauty with creatures that didn’t judge you or expect anything of you was more appealing to me as well.
When Hettie died I took over the running of the farm and the mantle of family weirdo. Not that I see any of our relatives now. When my mother and then Hettie passed away, I lost any tenuous contact I had with the remaining cousins and whatever. The few phone calls I did get from them after Hettie’s funeral I never quite managed to return and, eventually, they stopped. What did I have to talk to them about, anyway? They had normal office jobs, families, holidays in Majorca. I had my animals and, beyond that, no discernible life. Trust me, there’s only so much mileage in talking about alpaca poo.
We cross the stream on our well-trodden path, both dogs running ahead of me now I check and feed the animals three times a day: once early in the morning before everyone else arrives, then again late afternoon and usually I do another round again at sunset, jus
t to make sure that everyone’s all right.
My aunt was young and strong when I joined her here. I was eleven, self-sufficient out of necessity and a willing helper. I helped her to feed the animals before I went to school and when I came home, I’d throw off my uniform and race back out into the fields again, usually finding her up to her elbows in muck somewhere. At the weekends, I rarely left the farm. It won’t surprise you to know that I never spent my Saturday afternoons shopping for eyeshadow or at the cinema in giggly groups. I could count the number of friends on one hand. Well, one finger actually.
Hettie never said so but, as the years went on, I think the land was becoming too much for her. Although she was as strong as an ox for her age, there are twenty-five acres here which is not a lot in farming circles, but is more than enough to manage for two and is almost impossible to cope with single-handedly. Until I arrived, Hettie would never have anyone here to help her – she wouldn’t have considered having strangers on her land – but somehow she kept it going. When I joined her, we divided up the tasks between the two of us. As I was younger, I took on the heavier labour and, in my teens, became a dab-hand at tractor driving while she tended the animals, always preferring to be with her beloved beasts. Yet, as Hettie aged, I gradually shouldered the bulk of the work and happily so. My aunt never owned the land, but rented it from the neighbouring farmer and when she’d gone the arrangement continued seamlessly.
I did once have a job in the real world. Hettie insisted. When I left school I trained as a teacher as I had no idea what else to do and Hettie wanted me to continue with my education. I’d have happily stayed on at the farm, but one of us needed to bring in some money. Hettie had largely funded us both out of money left to her from her parents and I knew that was becoming increasingly sparse.
Teaching was the obvious thing, I suppose. I liked the idea of helping children. At school, I’d had no one to turn to when times were tough at home and I thought I’d like to make a difference to kids who might be suffering in similar ways. So, very reluctantly, I left the farm every day and went off to the local college and completed a City and Guilds course in teaching, fitting my studies in around looking after the animals. After that, I landed a job at a local secondary school. It wasn’t as I’d imagined and, to be honest, I felt as much out of my depth there as I had done as a pupil. I don’t easily fit in.
I had no idea how noisy schools had become since I’d been at one and I’d disliked it then. My experience of it as a teacher was little better. The class sizes were enormous and somehow turned children who started out with real potential into surly, badly behaved monsters. I felt ill-equipped to deal with it all. I couldn’t connect emotionally with the children when they needed it and I couldn’t make a difference as I’d wanted to because I was bogged down with the curriculum and exam targets. The workload was never-ending and the bureaucracy of the state school system was too constraining. I found it all so stressful. I began to wonder if there was another way to educate those, like me, who were square pegs in round holes, the ones who had difficult home lives, as I had, the ones who didn’t conform to the ‘norm’.
Then, one day, I’d just finished a lesson where I barely had control over a small but foul-tempered, foul-mouthed rabble who were riding roughshod over any desire the other pupils might have had to learn and was so disheartened and disillusioned that, instead of walking to the staffroom for a group moan and a restorative cup of tea, I just kept walking, down the corridors, out of the door, beyond the bounds of the playground and never went back. Some might call it a breakdown. Some might call it coming to my senses. Whichever way, I wasn’t required to work my resignation.
So that was it. I simply retreated to the world of the farm and found that, like Hettie, I was so much happier surrounded by animals rather than people. But I worried about those children. The thought of the ones who were lost or angry with no one to turn to kept me awake at night. I wasn’t cut out to deal with kids en masse – I’d learned that quickly enough – but I did want to help. Surely there had to be a better way?
I found it. Eventually. And quite by accident. It seems ironic that Hope Farm is now the home to an alternative school for some of the most challenging youngsters in our society. With me, the most reluctant of teachers, as the founder, principal and chief dogsbody. Who’d have thought? Yet I love my job and find it so rewarding. This square peg forged herself a square hole.
But I’ll have to tell you all about that later as I need to press on with my tasks and high-tail it back to the yard before today’s students arrive.
Chapter Four
Up here in the big field we have two enormous Shire horses, Sweeney and Carter, both ex-police mounts. Sweeney suffers from anxiety. One riot too many, maybe. Carter has Seasonal Affective Disorder and is a nightmare in the winter months. Talk about grumpy. If he could stay huddled up in his stall and never venture outdoors, he would. Thankfully, he’s a different boy altogether during the summer and loves to be out in the paddock. They’re both fine, handsome lads and, other than being a huge expense, give us little trouble.
I fill two buckets from the shed and feed them both their breakfast. When they’ve finished, I give them each a sneaky carrot I have in my pocket as an extra treat. Bev, my assistant, comes to the farm pretty much every day and she rides them regularly to keep them exercised. I miss sharing the task as we used to, but I never seem to have the time to ride any more. There’s always something more pressing demanding my attention. I can’t think when I was last on a horse. I still have no idea what possessed me to take on these hulking great beasts, but someone asked me to and so I did.
I make a note that the top plank of their fence is broken – again – and will add it to the never-ending list of jobs that need doing. All these boys have to do is lean their weight on it and the wood snaps like a matchstick.
‘You’re very naughty,’ I tell them. ‘You’re always breaking your fence.’ But I stroke their noses so that they know I’m not really cross.
At the other end of the scale we have two miniature Shetland ponies, who look as cute as you can imagine. Ringo, however, suffers from permanent sweet itch as he’s allergic to his own hair. I tell you, I spend half of my life hacking at Ringo’s fringe with my kitchen scissors – much as I do with my own hair. I try to keep his mane brutally short so that it doesn’t touch his face and am constantly rubbing him with antihistamine cream which seems to help as well. He’s a dear little soul, though, and bears his horsey eczema stoically. His companion is Buzz Lightyear who fancies himself an escape artist. Despite being short in the leg, he’s always trying to jump his fence to get out to infinity and beyond. He very rarely manages it and, when he does, we always catch him before he gets too far as he’s easily distracted by butterflies, flowers and streams.
‘I bring breakfast and your friends,’ I tell them and dish out the feed buckets I brought from the shed.
While Ringo and Buzz are eating, I put the goats in the ponies’ paddock. They have a complaining bleat – I’ve never known goats with separation anxiety before – so I fuss them for a bit longer. They’ll be fine when they settle and the goats and ponies do love each other’s company.
Once everyone in the top fields are fed, I whistle for the dogs and they come hurtling towards me. We stride out back down the hill and I can already see from the cars parked in the yard that Bev and Alan have arrived. They are my stalwarts and I couldn’t manage without them.
Bev and Alan are the main people who help me to run this place and, generally, keep me on track. I make a mental note to tell Alan about the broken fence. He can go up there later and knock a few nails in – something he does on a weekly basis, if not more often. The rest of the time he systematically works his way through all the jobs written on the chalkboard in the barn.
‘Morning, lovely!’ Bev shouts as she closes the gate. ‘Nice day for it!’
‘Glorious,’ I agree.
Bev Adams is in her mid-fifties, an ex-body build
er who is still in great shape. She has muscles that pop up everywhere and is as fit as a fiddle. I think I’m quite strong after years of physical work, but I’ve never seen anyone chuck hay bales round like she can. If you saw her, you’d think she was quite hard – her face always bears a ‘don’t mess with me’ expression – but she’s a total softie. Her skin is tanned and quite lined from working outside – don’t ever tell her I said that. God, she’d kill me. Her hair is long and home-bleached, but spends most of its time scraped back in a ponytail. And, as she’s as busy as I am, it’s not often that she gets time to bleach it so she usually has an inch of grey roots peeping through. She too favours my minimal style of hairdressing. My hair is short, brown and, as I mentioned, I cut it myself with the kitchen scissors. I like to think I’ve achieved a funky, choppy cut. A professional hair stylist might think otherwise. But when I’m showering outside under a bucket, the last thing I want to do is fiddle with my hair. I’m seriously low-maintenance all the way. I’d rather groom a horse for an hour than titivate myself.
‘I bet you’ve been up and at it since the crack of sparrows,’ Bev observes.
‘Pretty much.’
‘I’m knackered.’ She yawns. ‘I was on the lash last night at the Queen’s Head. Open mic night. Poets and shit. It was wicked. Everyone was there. You should have come along.’
Bev knows that I’d rather stick pins in my own eyes than spend an evening in a pub, but she never gives up trying.
After Hettie died, I lost my way a bit, let myself go. Turning to drink was always a worry given my mother’s history. I didn’t know if a tendency to that kind of addiction would be in my genes. You never know, do you – and I certainly didn’t want to risk it. Even now I rarely touch the hard stuff and, when I do, I’m usually cajoled into it by Bev. I enjoy a sip or two but, to my eternal relief, I can always take it or leave it.
Happiness for Beginners Page 2