by Amanda Owen
‘Edward’s comin’ down t’road,’ Clive had said that winter. ‘Skidaddle them kiddies into t’ouse.’
They were happy to go in and thaw out, for there was an icy wind already blowing, the precursor of what was to come. They sat on the sill in the living room, peeping through the window and occasionally giving me the thumbs-up sign.
The mile-and-a-quarter single-track road into the farm is only partially visible from the farmyard, but the sheer size of the tractor and trailer meant that its orange flashing light could be followed as it steadily made its way towards us. Clive and I scurried off to make our preparations; I moved the Land Rover, Clive shifted the wheelbarrow and picked up the children’s scooters.
We regrouped in the yard, having made enough room to afford Edward free passage to the barn, but it seemed that the flashing light had stopped moving some half a mile away. Reuben and Miles appeared from nowhere and joined Clive and me in staring up at the road awaiting the tractor’s arrival.
‘’T in’t movin’,’ said Miles, stating the obvious.
‘Summat must be wrang,’ said a disgruntled Clive.
It was. Edward had only one more steep hill to negotiate before reaching Ravenseat but, as he’d lightly applied the brakes before the descent, he’d skidded on some black ice and come off the road. The tractor was still facing in the right direction, but the trailer had slewed across the road, its two nearside wheels sunk up to the axles in the soft roadside verge. The trailer was now tipped sideways and the tractor immovable. Edward was mortified; he’d travelled for thirty miles at a snail’s pace without incident, and now, within sight of the drop-off point, he’d come a cropper.
Big and broad-shouldered, ruddy-faced and with a thatch of auburn hair, he was a man of few words but a great thinker. As sharp as a needle, he could convert kilos to tons, acres into hectares, talk about crop yields and work out dilution rates in the blink of an eye, but, unfortunately, in this case there was to be no mathematical solution. Problem-solving might have been his forte but the answer to this setback was simple. He stood, hands on hips, and surveyed the scene.
‘There’s only one thing for it,’ he said stoically. ‘Them beets, we gonna ’ave to handball ’em off.’
The trailer would have to be lightened before the tractor could pull it out. Miles sighed loudly.
‘Can’t we unload ’em wi’ our tractor and loader bucket?’ asked Reuben hopefully.
That would have been the labour-saving way to do it, to open the back door and scoop them out, but the hydraulic trailer door was heavy enough that to raise it entirely endangered the stability of the whole trailer. We gave it a great deal of thought as we went to get our tractor and another trailer, but we came back to the same conclusion. For safety’s sake, the fodder beets needed to be unloaded by hand.
What a day that turned out to be! We took it in turns, forming a human chain, little ones rolling the beets forward whilst bigger children threw them onto our trailer. In lighter moments, the jokes came thick and fast.
‘Yer knaw what they say . . . if you cannae beat em . . .’ said Clive.
We all groaned.
‘Going back to mi family roots,’ I said, evoking a similar response.
The frustrating thing was that the pile of beets never seemed to diminish. The fact that they were roughly spherical meant that as quickly as you moved them, others from the considerable heap rolled into their place. Eventually, hours later, when we had shifted the majority of the load and were thoroughly fed up of the sight of fodder beets, Edward decided to have a go at freeing up the trailer.
‘Time for Edward to beet a hasty retreat, dun’t you think?’ said Clive, trying to raise a laugh.
We all nodded. There are times when reverting back to the old-fashioned way of doing things does not suit, and this had definitely been one of those occasions.
The snow arrived as predicted on 27 February. That morning, the sky took on a heavy, leaden appearance. The cold wind that had blown for the previous few days calmed, an almost eerie quiet descended, and the landscape took on a singularly bleak, sterile appearance. You could smell the impending storm in the air. The children didn’t go to school; there was no reason to risk them being trapped there, unable to get home.
We brought down the moor sheep as the flurries of wintery flakes turned into a driving mass of blinding snow. I drove the quad bike headlong into the blizzard, whistling for the sheep. Miles sat on the back, entirely covered from head to foot in layers of clothes, only his eyes visible from under a balaclava that was topped off with a woolly hat. He ducked down, sheltering behind me as I drove upwards and out through the moor gate. It was intolerably raw. My knitted hat was unfurled and pulled down to flop over my eyes. The wool was heavy with a layer of crisp solid ice crystals that left my forehead beneath numb. I was breathing through a cotton scarf that was pulled over my mouth and nose; it was soon wet on the inside through condensation.
Stopping the bike, I got off to walk to the ruins of the Robert’s Seat watch house. I was unable to look up into the maelstrom of snow being whipped up, but on foot I could walk backwards and occasionally glance over my shoulder to see where I was going. Miles came along too, walking with his back to the howling easterly gale, his chin buried in his coat and head dipped down as though looking at his feet. We kept close but didn’t speak to each other, it was trouble enough just to breathe. Even Kate, my sheepdog, with a never-ending source of energy, could not keep her face to the weather. She would run for a while, then turn tail to the wind and scrape her snow-smattered face repeatedly up and down her front legs in an attempt to defrost her encrusted brows.
Robert’s Seat was the highest point of the moor and where we had been feeding the sheep daily prior to the bad forecast. In normal conditions it was a great vantage point commanding an unparalleled view across the broad acres of moorland upon which the Ravenseat heaf of sheep roamed. That day, visibility was poor, down to just a few feet in front of you. I whistled, the piercing noise partially drowned out by the tumultuous roaring wind and muffled by the snow that lashed down upon us. It was the most extreme conditions that I had ever encountered, it was debatable as to whether we should really have ventured out into the eye of the storm, but if there was to be no let-up and the blizzard continued then there was every chance that the flocks would be buried.
We stood beside the ruined building, crouching down to gain a moment’s respite from the bitter weather and to assess the situation. Out of the swirling white void that surrounded us, came sheep. There was no depth to the snow as yet, so they had no trouble with mobility, but they seemed to have taken leave of their senses and were disorientated, their vision impaired by the snow that clung to their faces. Kate had gone to gather them but there was little point in me trying to communicate any commands for I could not see either her position or indeed any of the sheep that needed guiding towards home. I would have to hope that her natural instinct to bring the sheep in my direction would suffice.
I leaned in close towards Miles.
‘You alreet?’ I asked. I could see in his eyes that he was cold, frozen, but probably, like myself, the adrenalin was pumping, and he felt exhilarated, alive. He nodded vigorously.
‘C’mon then, we need to be ga’an, movin’ towards hame,’ I whispered, pressing my mouth up to where his lug lurked beneath the hat. I grabbed his arm and, raising ourselves to our feet, we turned through three hundred and sixty degrees. A sea of sheep besieged us, the only soupçon of colour amongst the multitude of whites and greys that made up the flock was the crimson mark that distinguished them as being from the Ravenseat heaf. We couldn’t count them, it was impossible to even hold your gaze in one direction for more than a few seconds before you had to raise your hands to shield your face from the brutal onslaught of blizzarding snow. I signalled to Miles that we should leave. Kate had reappeared and was now standing resolute and determined at the back of the flock. With her fur blown backwards and snow balled up beneath her belly, sh
e appeared to be twice the size of her normally wiry frame.
We set off back, arm in arm, downhill this time, the sheep, all tightly flocked together, revolving around us. Occasionally the tight-knit group would almost swamp us, and individual sheep that had been temporarily blinded would run into the backs of our legs almost knocking us to the ground. It was a blessed relief when we reached the bike and could get ourselves and our entourage moving quickly down to safety.
We crossed the beck, the sheep following obediently, and finally we had the flock in the sheep pens. Kate went back to her kennel to thaw out whilst Miles and I congratulated ourselves on a job well done.
‘Let’s have tea an’ warm up,’ I said, ‘while Dad ga’as for t’next heaf.’
‘Aw think we should give Kate a treat,’ said Miles. ‘She’s done good.’
He was right, it was sometimes easy to overlook the loyalty of our sheepdogs. Never sick or sorry, they would always be on standby at the kennel doors desperate to accompany us and head out into the worst of weather. They took their duties seriously.
There were many stories of sheepdogs and their bravery and unfaltering dedication – or maybe dogged determination would be the most apt phrase. Like a good horse, the name of a good sheepdog would live on and their feats of endurance would be talked about for decades.
‘’Ave I ever told yer about Ken?’ I said, gripping a mug of steaming tea in the kitchen.
‘Joiner Ken?’ asked Miles, leaning against the kitchen range.
I shook my head.
‘Farmer Ken, from Thwaite yonder?’
‘Nooo, Ken the dog,’ I said, rolling my eyes.
The tale is set during the great storm of 1947 when it snowed, snowed and then snowed some more. The shepherd whose name hasn’t gone down in the annals of history but was from the locality had set out early one morning, just as we had, to bring his flock down from the moor during one of the blizzards. He had just reached his flock when there was a break in the storm, visibility had improved, and four sheep were spied in the distance. The shepherd had sent Ken to go and round them up and bring them back towards the moor gate. Ken set off away into the distance – a decent fell dog will think nothing of taking the widest of arcs in order to get to the back of the sheep before they have a chance to notice and make a break for freedom. Then the snow began to fall heavily again.
‘Stowerin’, it was, Miley,’ I said. ‘All’s white, a complete hap up, could see nowt.’
Miles nodded, we’d just walked right out of exactly that same situation.
The shepherd and the main flock of sheep walked back down off the moor top, all the while shouting and whistling for Ken, but his calls were drowned out by the raging winds and he duly accepted that, for the moment at least, he was alone without his faithful colleague. Ken was missing in action, as were the four sheep. It was after darkness fell that the shepherd began to worry for his dog’s safety and decided that he would take a lantern and retrace his steps back to the moor gate in the hope of finding him. He trudged for an hour through the snow until he got to the moor gate where the light from his lantern reflected eyes looking back at him, four pairs belonging to the sheep that he had originally sent Ken to rescue. Beside the sheep lay Ken, just his head showing, his body covered with a foot of snow. He had done his job, carried out his instructions and gone above and beyond his duty by bringing the sheep to safety and standing guard over them.
Miles had tears in his eyes, I swear he did. He said that he hadn’t and that it was just that being out in the cold wind had made his eyes water.
‘Ken weren’t dead,’ I added. ‘Shepherd carried ’im ’ome an’ ’e made a full recovery.’
‘I’m gonna cook up some warm gruel for t’dogs,’ said Miles. ‘Is that all right?’
It was absolutely fine. On days such as these the sheepdogs were what made our tasks doable.
Clive and Raven went for the Birkdale Common heaf of sheep. These sheep lived on perhaps the most dangerous ground of all, spread as they were over such a wide area that we would stand no chance of finding stricken overblown animals if they were buried under the snow. They would have to come right down from the moor and into the West End fields, where there stood one of our bigger stone barns that could house them all should the weather not improve.
The doors were thrown open and the hayracks inside filled with our precious meadow hay, of which we had so little. It was at times such as this that the little bales really were worth their weight in gold because they could be carried on our backs to the outlying places. The fodder beets were also most welcome, though we could not deliver them to all of the sheep as by the time it had finished snowing, two days later, the fields were inaccessible other than on foot.
As the blizzard raged on into its second day, Clive and I set out to deliver rations of the concentrated sheep cake to all the sheep who, although now safely down off the moortops, were mightily hungry. With not a blade of grass in sight, they were entirely reliant on us bringing them their nourishment. Two bags of cake, each three-quarters filled, were tied at the top with baler twine, ready to be carried. This mixture of cereals and molasses would be compensation for the lack of hay. I took one bag, Clive the other. We each hitched a bulging bag onto our shoulders and, after a bit of readjustment, we got them roughly balanced and set off. It was slow going. In some places the snow was barely covering the frozen earth but in other areas we were wading knee-deep. The flock were in sight when it all became too much.
‘I can’t do this anymore,’ I said, leaning forward and letting the heavy bag drop onto the snow. ‘I’m freezin’. Mi hands is agony ’cos of mi split finger ends an’ I can hardly move ’cos of all mi layers o’ cleaths. I’m knackered.’
‘Naw I know,’ said Clive, depositing his bag onto the snow too.
We commiserated with each other for a few minutes whilst taking a breather, then set off again. The snow had drifted and been sculpted by the winds into awe-inspiring perfect waves that followed the lengths of the walls, the crests of snow glistening in the sun.
We reached the sheep and they seemed most grateful, following us around as we put out little piles of cake here and there in the vicinity of the building.
‘We’ll be back wi’ a lal’ bit o’ hay later, lasses,’ shouted Clive as we set off back to the farm and then the next flock of sheep.
The barns served their purpose, keeping the weather at bay. The slitted windows allowed a minimal amount of light inside and, although the majority of the sheep did venture into the barn to nibble at the hay, plenty of them refused point blank, choosing to keep out of the wind at the back of the barn rather than take shelter inside.
One heaf of sheep had been moved into the Big Seeds pasture, which also had a barn that they could use for shelter. The sheep were physically nearer the farmstead but getting to them involved crossing the valley bottom where the snow just kept piling up. Commando crawling across snowdrifts that were waist deep at their shallowest was insanely fatiguing. Shimmying on our bellies, resting our weight on the full feed bags whilst pushing them in front of us must have looked particularly graceless, but we were left with no choice.
Reuben and Miles were tasked with thawing out water troughs in the cowshed after the pipes froze.
‘Fourteen kettles so far, Mam,’ said Miles flatly. ‘An’ the trough’s still frozen. I hate snow.’
The smaller ones were banned from venturing outside at all, it was just too dangerous, and as long as the snow kept falling, they were assigned the very important job of feeding the fire and keeping the house warm.
The horses, who were used to being turned out every day, were restless in the stables. They were happy enough to stand with their mangers brimming with chaff, a mixture of chopped hay and straw that I could buy at the feed store. It was a good substitute for the precious hay and meant that I could avoid any arguments with Clive over the value of horses, seen as an expensive hobby compared to sheep, which were deemed profitable. But for a
ll the food put in front of them they still took badly to being incarcerated. The sound of stamping hooves and snorts of disgust emanating from the building wore me down, until finally I capitulated.
‘Reet, yer wanna ga outside,’ I said crossly as Josie pulled yet another excruciating face when I went in the stable to poo-pick. Princess, a more sober character, stopped chewing and hung her quivering bottom lip. Her dark eyes peeped out from behind a thick forelock that was strewn with chaff and wisps of tangled straw bedding.
Josie paced to and fro restlessly. She was an uneasy horse, mainly of good temperament as her mother Meg had been, but she could be irritable on occasion. She was now the matriarch of the herd and with that came the responsibility of keeping the others in check. She would scowl and shove her way about, jostle for position with Della the bay, and Princess the piebald, and even back up to Little Joe and give him half-hearted kicks with both back hooves.
I opened the stable door, slipped off Josie’s halter and watched as she manoeuvred her ample apple-shaped behind through the opening. Princess looked on anxiously until I unclipped her from the stall. After grabbing another mouthful of chaff, she too limbered off, though with no sense of urgency.
‘Let Della and Lal’ Joe out,’ I shouted to Edith and Violet. ‘Yer might ’ave to dig out the door a bit.’
They were in the farmyard messing about with what they optimistically called a snowboard. It was one of Reuben’s car-boot sale purchases and the fact that it had a rudder attached to the underside made me think that it had actually started out life as a waterskiing board.
I carried on tidying the stable, sweeping the floor and banking the clean reusable straw up against the walls. The wet, dirty bedding would go into the rubber skep, a low-sided wide bucket that I could carry to the midden. The wheelbarrow was not going to travel through this depth of snow. I was in my own little world, thinking of all the horses I’d ridden, looked after and loved. Meg, Queenie, Scattercash, Beau, Bruno, Ember and Stan. I smiled, being in the stables was a tonic. I loved the smell of the horses; to push their manes aside and bury my nose into a horse’s neck and breathe in the scent was therapeutic and good for the soul.