by Roger Evans
People obviously didn’t travel as far to meet people in those days – no foreign holidays to meet people from wherever, no favourite daughters going a couple of hundred miles to university and coming back with a scruffy, layabout boyfriend who lived a couple of hundred miles in the opposite direction (who, in stories with happy endings, probably smartened himself up eventually, got a good job and proved to be a good husband and father – I like stories to have happy endings).
What was particularly remarkable was the fact that one of her relatives who lived on this farm had successfully reared 16 children, because all of their marriages were chronicled as well.
Last week, two brothers turned up here to stay who were on the same quest. They had the same surname as last year’s lady but didn’t know of her. For people researching their history, as they were, the copy of last year’s family tree, which she had left, was like winning the lottery. They had with them a map of our farm dated 1820 which we had not seen before, a copy of which we now have and which we will duly frame.
The fields are largely unchanged but bear names, some of which we use today, and some I’ve not heard of. I’m very tempted to try to reintroduce the old names as substitutes for what we use now. How long that would take I don’t know. Upper and lower cow pasture sounds better than roadside field, but disappointingly, in some cases – six, in fact – the fields are just called by their acreages. Contrary to the widespread views held of farmers, we actually have more fields now than when we came here, on the same acreage, because I split one very large field into three. In 40-odd years I’ve never pushed a hedge out and I’ve only cut down one live tree, and that was because it was so close to the house I couldn’t get any insurance.
The lady who came last year even had the farming diary of her ancestor. It was quite clear from that, that in the order of things as they were at the time, the last thing to be was a ‘day labourer’. Day labourer must have been another description for peasant. Horses apparently came higher up the social scale of the time. For example, Captain pulled the mower all day in the Great Clover Piece, but a day labourer, who apparently didn’t have a name, cleared the ditch around New Leasowes.
IT’S HALF past four on a Saturday morning. The milking machine pump has been going for 10 minutes now. Calves are being fed, some by torchlight. The old tractor that goes around the buildings twice a day gathering up all the ‘number twos’ that the cows have done in the night has coughed into life. It stands there in tickover mode still coughing and belching, wreaths of blue smoke spread through the shed. It’s a bit like an old man having his first cigarette of the day. It’s a scene you would find on our farm every morning in the winter, only the activity would be nearer to five o’clock.
This morning there’s a bit of urgency about everything. The two of us are going out for the day. We’ve about four hours work to do apiece before we go but on our way home tonight, we’ll probably think we’ve had a day off.
Tomorrow morning it will be business as usual, but the ‘day off’ will have left us tired. When I was young, people used to tell me that you didn’t need as much sleep as you grew older. It was a lie.
THE LOCAL population of wild turkeys is growing. ‘My’ keeper had four of these North American turkeys on the shoot. Well, there’s a quiet lane that I take to get into town that passes another keeper’s cottage that is on the side of the lane.
He’s got three of these turkeys, a stag and two hens, and they are mostly to be found in the lane itself. It’s no good being in a hurry because as soon as the stag sees a vehicle coming he takes up a position in the middle of the road and starts his display. I drive right up to him but he doesn’t move.
He goes out of sight in front of the truck and I can hear him pecking away at the bumper. As his hens move on down the grass verge, he follows slowly and I can hear him as he pecks his way down the side of my vehicle. I don’t move on until I can see him in the side mirrors and I know that he is safely past me.
To celebrate his triumph over this vehicular intruder into his territory, he usually mates with one or other of the hens. There’s not much chatting up involved, no foreplay that I can detect, and the hen doesn’t seem particularly distracted by the process.
Definitely a quickie.
WILDLIFE usually keeps its heads down in bad weather.
But this December, strangely enough, with plenty of bad weather about, there seems to be more activity than usual. I’ve seen hares about a lot more, and I hadn’t seen one for over a month.
One day, the fields were alive with fieldfares. There were thousands of them for about five days and then, just as suddenly, they were gone. I tell the keeper about them but inevitably he already knows and inevitably he’s always got a better story to tell.
He tells me that while out feeding early one morning in the dark, he put his lamp across a field and counted 62 woodcock out feeding. He reckons they feed out on the fields at night and go back into the woods in the daytime. Personally, I think 62 woodcock would take a bit of counting in the dark but I don’t question it.
I was always disappointed at how eager shooters were to bring down a woodcock and could never really understand the need to shoot such a lovely bird when there were already plenty of pheasants to shoot – now I hear of more and more shoots that leave woodcock alone.
The poor things have come a long way to get here, and they deserve a rest and some safety.
NEXT to one of my silage clamps is a patch of briars, about 20 yards by 20, and the briars are well established, offering plenty of cover.
It must be a warm, dry spot because most days there’s a large covey of partridge in there. I tell the keeper about them. ‘There should be 30 in that covey,’ he says.
As we all know by now, the keeper is big on counting things, although how he counts them goodness only knows. When I drive past in the truck they explode out of the briar patch like shrapnel from a hand grenade, and are impossible for me to count anyway. Still, he’s not to know that. ‘There were 31 there this morning,’ I reply, ‘they flew down into the wood.’
He thanks me for the information. I’ve no idea where they flew, I wasn’t watching, but he’s not to know that, either.
I’VE JUST spent ten minutes watching the goldfish. On a scale of sadness that comes up as quite sad, but for me, at least, I found it quite interesting.
He, she, or whatever, was moved from a long rectangular concrete cattle drinking trough to a round plastic one and I took the time and trouble to teach him to swim in circles after he had spent most of his life swimming lengths. The boys had wanted to move him back to where he was, but there’s more activity around the round trough and I think he enjoys it. He’s quite a fine fish, probably nine inches long, and the first thing I noticed during my observation was that when a cow goes to drink, he swims right up to the cow’s muzzle.
The cows usually go to drink just after they’ve been feeding and there are always some particles of food clinging to the hairs and whiskers around the muzzle. While she is drinking, the goldfish carefully picks this debris off to eat, even lifting his little head an inch or so out of the water for a particularly tasty morsel.
The cows that use this particular drinking trough are what we call our high-yielders. The diet that the fish shares with them is very high-calorie stuff, and I expect to see an increase in his size in a very short time. But there is a darker side to this goldfish (I can feel a name coming on for him, but I’m not quite there yet).
Part of the moulding of this plastic tank includes the recess where the ballcock sits. It’s set into the side of the tank where cows can’t rub it off. The plastic balls that float up and down, regulating the water level, are bright orange. Goldfish are bright orange as well. So where does our fish spend his time when he’s not feeding off cows’ muzzles? Rubbing himself up and down against this orange ball.
I can only assume that he has fallen in love with it. This has got to be a cry for help and next time I am in town I will get him
a companion from a pet shop. This fish came from the fair, but I don’t think he should have to wait until May for the fair to turn up for a real companion.
I’ll be doing him a favour and I’ll probably be doing the new fish a favour as well. While I’m at it, I might as well buy three, one for the round trough for company and two for the long concrete trough, and then all the cows will be clean around the muzzle.
HERE WE go again. A new year, a new A4 pad, same old fountain pen, same old kitchen. It is inevitable that I write reflectively on what has happened recently.
Well, Christmas happened. To start with, I was asked to do one of the readings at the carol service in our local church. This was a surprise request for me, and a surprise for quite a lot in the congregation, too.
There were seven readings and it was a bit like the Royal Command Performance when you wondered who would be on next, as various readers made their way to the front to do their turn.
After, we had mulled wine in one of the side chapels and several people came up and said they were surprised to see me there and surprised that I’d done a reading. Whether they were surprised at my presence or that I could read, I’m not sure.
The next night was Christmas Eve so I went to the pub for an hour. It’s strange, but no one said they were surprised to see me there.
The tanker driver gets a full English breakfast on Christmas day but this year he was haunted by the sight of a man and a little girl walking through a town centre at four o’clock in the morning. It troubled us both and the only comfort we took was that he was holding her hand and she seemed quite content. It’s the world we live in sadly. And it is sad.
It was my intention to just stay for an hour but we all know what happens to intentions. I knew I had passed the point of no return when I asked someone for a half-pint of mild and they bought me a large scotch.
One thing about our local, you can always find someone to drive you home. A young girl in her early 50s drove me home in my car and I was home by midnight, which was just as well as it’s up again at a quarter to four as the milk tanker is here just after six.
MOST OF my sheep-keeping neighbours have been scanning their flocks recently. It’s a process where a contractor comes and produces a scan that determines how many lambs each ewe is carrying.
This is very useful management information as the flock can be subsequently divided up into groups that are carrying singles, twins, triplets or are actually barren.
Lots of farmers let the ewes with a single lamb out of doors where they can protect just the one lamb from the weather and predators.
A friend of mine was so pleased with the results of the scan he showed me the printout in the pub. He’s a bit of a local legend; got sheep everywhere and no-one knows exactly how many. I didn’t look at the results of the scanning, as I was busy adding up the numbers of his various flocks.
‘Always wondered how many sheep you had,’ I said. The piece of paper was snatched away with such force I had to check my fingers.
TODAY WE will consider, if you will, public conveniences. And in particular, gentlemen’s public conveniences. They are a facility in which I take a special interest, as I will explain later.
Last week I had occasion to use the gentlemen’s facility in our local cattle market, which is provided by the local authority. I knew that these toilets had been refurbished recently but had not yet taken advantage of them.
What a revelation, without going into particular detail; they were a celebration of stainless steel. It was everywhere. There were places to wash and dry hands and somewhere in the background there was classical music, it sounded a bit ‘tinny’ but then I suppose with all that tin, it would, wouldn’t it?
I was disappointed with the hand-driers, to which I pay particular attention, as they were located in a sort of recess in the wall.
Let me explain. Many years ago I found myself spending the evening in licensed premises. There was nothing remarkable about that, but what was remarkable was the weather. It was January and we were in the middle of a spell of freezing fog. It was a raw, damp cold that chilled your very bones – not weather to linger in.
I got into conversation with a local character, a young man given to spending his time in hostelries as well. Such was his consumption of alcohol that one of our local doctors bet him £20 he wouldn’t live to see 40. On the day of the appropriate birthday he made an appointment at the doctor’s, waited his turn, and duly drew the £20, which he had converted into drink and consumed by lunchtime.
To return to our story, he told me that for reasons associated with excessive drinking, he found himself homeless and had slept the last three nights on the steps of the cattle market and was shortly to spend the night there again.
I was appalled, given the weather as I described, that a young local man should find himself thus. I took him home with me and made him a bed in the attic above our kitchen.
I had him out from there early next morning and he actually spent three nights there without my wife knowing. By then I had bought him a caravan, we moved him in and he lived there for 12 years, after which time I found him a council flat.
It was a roller coaster ride of 12 years. There would be a job for a few weeks, an accumulation of some money, a two-week binge, no job, no money, a few odd jobs in return for some food and away we would go again on the same cycle. But there was an unexpected bonus. Everything in life is relative and, in comparison to his lifestyle, my own seemed relatively sensible. For a time, my wife sensed that she had married a relative paragon of virtue.
The link between gentlemen’s conveniences and this latter story? I’ve always been interested in other people and how they live their lives. This was the only person I ever knew who had found themselves homeless, so I was always interested in the detail.
‘You should always,’ I was told, ‘seek out a toilet with a push-button hand drier.’ These buttons come in two sorts, one can be wedged into place with a coin, the other needs some sticky tape to hold it in. Having done this, the warm hand-drier will run all night and the homeless person can curl up on the floor underneath.
I always find myself checking this detail – you never know when you might slip through life’s safety net and be in need of this skill. The hand-driers in the new toilets cannot be used in this way, located as they are in a recess in the wall. I thought this to be inconsiderate.
I USED to have a Transit van and there was a spider living behind the rear-view mirror that was fixed on the outside of the driver’s door.
We drove thousands of miles together, the spider and I, and I often used to wonder what he was thinking about as we drove along.
In hard times, I used to catch him flies and put them in his web. He used to scuttle out and drag them back behind the mirror. I always thought he was grateful for that.
When I sold the van, I tried to catch him so I could transfer him to the next van, but he wasn’t having any of that.
When I sold that van, I was given £1,000 cash and a cheque for £400 – drawn on a bank account that had been closed for a couple of years, so I’m £400 and a spider light on that deal.
As that took place about 10 years ago, I don’t hold out much hope of ever seeing either again.
I miss the spider more than the money.
THE RECENT cold dry spell has allowed us to spread chicken muck on the 100 acres of grassland that provide our first-cut silage.
A dry spell is essential if we are to avoid tractors damaging the grassland, which is a pet hate of mine.
Chicken muck is a wonderful manure and used regularly it raises worm populations considerably, improving soil condition remarkably. It has the added bonus that it contains the grit that was fed to the chickens, so we are topping up the calcium at the same time.
Before we had poultry we would put five hundredweight of fertiliser on our first cut silage ground, now we put poultry manure plus just one hundredweight. On 100 acres, that means we reduce our fertiliser use by… I’ll l
et you work that out for yourselves, you can do that instead of the crossword. Some time soon I will take the chain harrows over it, just to spread it about a bit better, plus the mole hills, and then put some nice stripes on it with the roller. You can smell the chicken muck for 24 hours after it’s spread, but its all part of life’s rich pattern.
I was feeding the dry cows with silage soon after we’d done the muck-spreading and I could see two ramblers hesitating on their journey. As I drove home they were still there – it’s at a place where they often seem to lose their way. The path is rarely used so there is no clearly defined way and the next stile is out of sight down in a dingle.
‘Is this your field?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why have you removed the stile?’
‘I haven’t, it’s down there by that black and white cottage’.
This is win-win stuff. They quite obviously have enjoyed taking the opportunity to take me to task and I in turn have taken some pleasure in pointing out that they are at fault with their map-reading and not me with my farming.
So, the atmosphere quickly turns to be quite friendly and we exchange pleasantries about the weather and the view.
‘Your silage has a strong smell to it this morning.’
I think they are referring to the silage I have just fed the dry cows. I sniff the air, but couldn’t smell it, but then I’m used to it.
‘Sticks to your boots.’
I look down at their feet and see traces of chicken muck stuck around their boots from crossing the grass fields where we were spreading it yesterday.
‘It does, doesn’t it?’
And on they go. If they are happy thinking they’ve got silage on their boots, who am I to tell them what it really is!