Over the Farmer's Gate

by Roger Evans

  My relief is huge. The next junction down the lane is a place we call Five Turnings, for fairly obvious reasons. Goodness knows where they would all have ended up if they’d got that far.

  The fuss I make of the dog is at a level he’s not experienced before and he’s so grateful that, returning home, he tries to sit on my lap instead of his usual place between the two front seats, and I can’t get the seat belt around the two of us.

  But it’s not quite ‘job done’ – there’s another load of four cows to move yet. This time I take a bit more care. I back the trailer a bit nearer to the gate so that I have a bit less of a gap to cover. The cattle already in the field are by the gate but I think I’ve got everything covered. Mert is in his usual place under the trailer. I open the gate and leap to the trailer ramp. On the previous occasion opening the trailer smartly wasn’t quick enough. This time my ‘leap’ is lacking in speed as well, because without a word from me the dog is into the field and has the 12 cattle out on the road quicker than I can say the F word.

  With an air of resignation I let the four cows out of the trailer to join them. At least I have them all in the same place, even if it’s the wrong place. And the dog? He’s away down the lane, still unbidden, and fetches all the cattle back with an air of self-satisfaction.

  There’s 16 cattle in this group now and it takes some bottle for a dog to pass them in a narrow lane, stop them, turn them and bring them back. I know that, the dog knows that, and he presents himself for the fuss he’d had at the previous incident with some pride.

  He gets his reward and, as I drive back, I look across at him and wonder just who is in charge here. I’m still not sure of the answer. I get back into the yard.

  ‘Everything OK?’ my son asks.

  ‘Yes fine.’ I don’t tell anyone I’ve just been on an adventure.

  THE CALVES being born here now were fathered by the Belgian Blue bull we bought last year. There is a good demand for this beef-cross calf, so we are hoping the revenue will help to alleviate milk prices, which are on the downward slide.

  We try to give all our calves a good start in life. They spend the first 24 hours with their mum and then they are put with all the other fresh-calved cows in our loose-housed shed, where there is plenty of room and nice fresh straw to lie on twice a day.

  In theory, they can stay here for several days if they behave themselves and it is luxury living while it lasts. It’s the nearest they will get to post-natal care with BUPA.

  Twice a day these cows go down to the parlour to be milked and it can be very difficult parting calves from mums to achieve this, especially if half the cows in the group think it’s their calf.

  Having persuaded the cows out of the shed, you have to persuade the calves to stay there. But usually this can be done because it’s a natural instinct for a calf to go and lie on its own while its mother isn’t about. This can be a real problem when calves are born outside in the summer, as they will secrete themselves away in clumps of nettles and the like and you can spend ages looking for them.

  Anyway, with luck the calves in the shed will go and lie by the walls until mother returns from the milking parlour, which will be only 15 minutes or so. If they go and lie quietly, you can file the mothers back there uninterrupted after being milked. But it doesn’t always work like that. Sometimes, at a signal I cannot detect, four or five calves will kick their heels up, frolic around the shed a couple of times and then it’s off down the yard at a hundred miles an hour causing chaos everywhere they go. It’s then that they get taken from mother.

  We had a good calf that would go and lie down at milking time, its mother would leave it for the short time without any fuss, and so it stayed there for about a week and grew and thrived. One day I went to get the group of cows to milk them and there was no sign of the calf. The mother was lying there chewing her cud, completely content. I walked around the shed again – there are 40 cows in this group, so I could have missed it. But experience told me where it was. I got the cow up and there was the calf, cosy and warm, flat and dead. Mother had been sitting on top of it like a broody hen trying to hatch some eggs. Sometimes animals will contrive to die despite your best efforts.

  We had a cow once that lay on three calves in succession; she’d killed them as soon as they were born and before we ever saw them alive.

  WHEN WE came to live here, in 1964, there was a man living in one of the cottages who had worked on the farm for 47 years.

  He used to tell me that his first job here, with others, was to construct a grass tennis court by the farmhouse. They had to excavate by hand into the sloping garden and then work a fine tilth on a nearby field and cart the top two or three inches of fine soil back with horse and cart to create the seedbed they needed.

  If ever you read that fine book Farmer’s Glory by A G Street, you will find that the playing of tennis was an important part of the life of a yeoman farmer, whose lifestyle brought them close to the leisured classes.

  This was quite readily achieved if you had lots of staff and paid them just enough, but only just. We’ve never used this part of our lawn as a tennis court but it has seen lots of use as a football pitch and I have constructed goalposts at one end so that my grandsons can practise their goal-kicks for rugby, as well.

  This year, large parts of the lawn resemble a war zone, as the lawn has been taken over by moles. The trouble is, I’ve never been any good at catching them. Until this week, the only mole I have ‘caught’ for years was when I spent the whole of a sunny evening sitting in the garden reading the Sunday papers with a shotgun in my lap.

  I’ve tried all sorts of traps, smoke bombs, pills, windmills in bottles, the lot. Expert mole-catchers use traps but they never worked for me.

  My heifers are away on another farm and the manager there is always catching moles successfully. Eventually, the lure of a can of cider and £5-a-mole brought him to our garden.

  He surveyed the scene of destruction quite nonchalantly and then found a run along the wall at one side and another along the fence and he put two traps down.

  I couldn’t see how he detected these runs but it was done in no time at all. Next morning there was a mole in each trap so I re-laid them and the next day there were two more.

  I’ve not caught one for several days now but there are still new molehills every morning, albeit at a reduced level of activity.

  I had a man working here many years ago who was good at catching moles. He claimed to know something of a mole’s psyche. He had a theory that it was impossible to catch a mole in the normal course of events; they were too clever and could easily detect a trap. You could catch them only when they were running away and a mole will run away only from mating and fighting. He didn’t use the word mating; he used another word, a word that connected with fighting as an example of alliteration. He didn’t know that alliteration existed but it had a certain eloquence to it. How he knew all that, goodness only knows. We can see what the birds of the air and the beasts of the field get up to, but what goes on underground is more of a mystery.

  It wasn’t for me to tell him he’d made it all up – the way he told it, it was a good story and anyway, he could catch moles.

  I had a good look at the first one I caught. They are quite remarkable little creatures, their little ‘hands’ able to dig away all that soil. I bear them no ill will; it’s just that I don’t need them on my lawn.

  Truth be told, we don’t need them in fields, either. Too many molehills in a field and your silage can be contaminated with soil and the cattle can die of listeria. Not a lot going for it, really, old mole.

  THERE ARE only two sounds to be heard at this time of the morning. The most obvious one is the non-stop tinkling of the cow bell attached to my brown Swiss cow.

  It’s a constant in our lives now; you can hear it as you go out of the kitchen door, ringing to the cow’s slightest movement, even, it seems, as she breathes.

  I like to hear it, but my wife thinks it’s cruel. ‘Wh
at,’ she says, ‘if the cow doesn’t like a bell ringing around her neck night and day, 24/7?’ She has a point, and I may take it off and put it on another cow to give her a break.

  There’s another noise and I like to hear that as well – the sound of barn owls hunting. If you see one close to, even if it is stuffed and in a case, you wonder if you ever saw such beautiful plumage.

  Some people around here call owls ‘hullards’. I’ve no idea why – perhaps it’s a sort of dialect name – but it doesn’t stop there. If your name is Howells, and there are a goodly number of Howells about this area, Jimmy Howells, for example, can end up being called Jimmy Hullard!

  I used to be in a group of pheasant shooters and one of the members used to bring a guest regularly who was ultra-conscious of a step he mistakenly thought he had taken up the social ladder, and he used to attach an ‘H’ to all sorts of words as he tried to posh himself up.

  We would often see owls when we shot away in the woods. The first time he saw one it was a ‘howl’, and that’s what they all became after that.

  Just to complete the bird theme, when my brother first started school there were two girls in his class who caught his eye, one called Hazel Pigeon and one called Hazel Dove. He thought they were sisters. But then life has always been a struggle for him.

  IT IS OFTEN brought home to me the strange phenomena of people in towns and cities who don’t talk to each other. They may not know them, but surely they see the same people every day on the same train, so what’s the problem?

  Talking to the people I meet daily is an important part of my life and I struggle to imagine a life without it.

  But sometimes it can be a bit of a nuisance if you are in a rush. Once, memorably, I was sent into our small local town on Christmas Eve to get some chestnuts. I came back three hours later with one chestnut!

  This week I had a similar experience. I’ve been busy with my dairy co-op work lately and although a recent day involved a drive to the top end of Lancashire, there were a couple of jobs of my own I needed to do before I went.

  So I set off a couple of hours early and my first stop was the shoe shop. The shop keeper is in his late 60s, owns three or four shops, does a bit of farming, and is a third-generation cobbler and proud of it.

  I drew his attention to the black shoes I was wearing with a broken shoelace and a sole showing a bit of a gap from the upper.

  We had a bit of banter about the shoes still being under guarantee, but eventually he told me to get them off while he put soles and heels on them.

  I pulled up a chair and watched him at his work. It took him about 40 minutes and in this time we had a good chat about farming and shoe-mending.

  He told me how he spent most of his National Service mending army boots. He still has examples about his shop of footwear of yesteryear, including those old football boots with leather nail-in studs, and hob-nail boots for a small child, all of which he made himself.

  I’m always telling him he should make more of this memorabilia with a small display area within the shop but he doesn’t seem to be motivated to do that.

  Throughout his life he envied farmers, thinking they made a fortune, so he bought two farms. He’s not found it as easy as he thought, but he still thinks he’s missing a trick somewhere.

  Job done, I drove a couple of hundred yards up the street to get my new glasses. There was a time when my glasses were quite safe within the breast pocket of my shirt, where they lived with my mobile phone. I seem to have several shirts now without this important accessory and my glasses became seriously damaged in my trouser pocket.

  They’ve spent two weeks held together with Sellotape and I’ve had to drive with my head tilted on one side to keep my world level.

  My daughter suggested holding them together with Elastoplast, saying: ‘Then you’ll really look like Jack Duckworth.’

  My new glasses had arrived and the optometrist and her assistant were all over me as they determined that the new glasses fitted correctly.

  I found the close proximity to these two women a bit disconcerting, because when I say close, they really were close. It’s probably because I’d showered and got clean ‘going out’ clothes on, whereas when I came to have my eyes tested I was in my working clothes and rather ‘mucky’.

  It is not such an enjoyable experience when they touch me for £260 for the new glasses and the bits they have bought to mend my old glasses, which will now become my working glasses.

  As I went out of the shop I tried to evaluate the elements of cost that I had to pay for the traces of perfume that still linger about me, so I decided that the glasses were quite reasonable.

  Across the road from the opticians is the florist and the florist, who I know well, is outside the shop talking to another woman, who I also know.

  Spotting me washed and tidy they came across and wanted to know where I was off to. I took the opportunity to get the florist to come and turn the volume up on my new sat-nav. I could do it on the old sat-nav but haven’t worked out how to do it on this.

  The florist remarks on the nice female Irish voice I have on it. I told her I chose it because it reminds me of the lady who kept the pub in Ballykissangel – I think I’m falling in love with the lady on the sat-nav.

  The florist told me she’d done the flowers for four funerals already this week but my love for the sat-nav lady was about the saddest thing she’d heard. Suitably put down, I finally set off on my journey.

  IT WAS A lovely sunny Sunday morning and the sumptuous breakfast I prepared – beans on toast – had been consumed and I was back out in the yard.

  There’s only me about at the moment and my first job was to let out the group of lower yielding cows who, for a week now, have been going out in the daytime to lie in the field in front of our house. This left two separate groups of high yielders very envious, and I could see them contemplating a bit of gate-jumping as they watched their colleagues make their way out.

  It was such a nice day (it could easily have been May) so I decided to divert the low yielders on to a fresh field of grass. I let one group of high yielders on to the field in front of the house and the other group of high yielders out into what used to be a two-acre orchard.

  None of them needed any bidding to embrace this new regime and within just a few minutes the buildings were empty of cows.

  One group was soon busy grazing and the two others were lying down, soaking up the sunshine.

  It was the first time for more than six months that the buildings had been empty of cattle and there was strangeness about it. There’s been births, deaths, cows mooing against gates, ringing their bloody bells, and now just silence.

  I’ve noticed this before in a lambing shed. Two months of activity and then it’s all gone. Just the debris is left; bits of wool, the empty isolation pens, a dead lamb slung over a gate. The flock, and their incessant bleating, move on to the next stage of their annual cycle and, like the cows, they are pleased, as it takes them back to the fields where they belong.

  THE FIRST bunch of cows we milk in the morning – they are the group we optimistically call ‘high yielders’ – have to be fetched home by torchlight.

  The second group is usually further away and fetched in a sort of half-light, not quite light, but, then again, not really dark enough to take the torch, especially if you’d rather fetch them with your hands in your pockets.

  When I arrive at the gate of their usual night field – they have the run of 12 acres going up to the wood – I can only see the very white cows. More importantly, I can’t see the dog.

  Mert can be a bit hard on cows but he is also easy to stop. I send him off into the gloom and watch carefully. Up by the wood fence, a white cows bolts about 20 yards so now I know where he is. ‘Steady.’ After that, they all come in a very leisurely fashion, many of them pausing as they cross the stream to have a drink.

  I like to see cows drinking out of a stream. The water is provided free by gravity – it doesn’t cost over
a pound a cubic metre like the water in the troughs on the yard. Within the 10 minutes or so it takes to clear the field, it has become perceptibly lighter and I can take one quick scan around the field to make sure it is clear of cows. All around the field are little columns of vapour marking where the cows have had their first pee of the day or their first number two.

  We, the cows and I, make our way home up a stone track that is softly carpeted with thatching straw, which I had salvaged from a cottage which was being re-thatched. It makes for very comfortable walking for men and beasts. The dog is thirty yards away. He doesn’t use the track – it’s bordered by an electric fence and he’s inadvertently brushed it with his tail on occasions.

  Among the straw are a lot of the hazel stick spars that had been used to hold the straw in place on the roof, but that’s not all. There are just a few pieces of a newspaper that must have found its way into the roof at the last thatching. I pick up a piece to read as we make our way slowly home. It’s not easy to read because I think some mice have read it first. It is dated 1 February 1954. It tells me, among other things, that the country is carpeted with thick snow and that there is more on the way.

  The big political issue of the day, as in really big, was should Britain trade with Germany or Japan? To be fair, this is less than ten years after the end of World War II, but it’s a question that seems bizarre today. I’m writing this and you are reading it surrounded by products of both countries in abundance. I can, I am told, buy a new English electric cooker for £37 12 shillings and sixpence. I bet that was a lot of money in 1954. Surprising what you can find out in the early morning just fetching the cows.

  I shut the gate behind the cows and sneak off for a second cup of tea. Around the taller trees in the garden a buzzard and two carrion crows are involved in one of their perpetual dogfights. Both species seem to spend the hours of daylight in a constant squabble to the extent that I wonder if they ever manage to get anything else done, like breeding, laying and feeding their young.