Over the Farmer's Gate

by Roger Evans

  I RECENTLY popped my head through the door of the hairdressers and quipped: ‘Any chance of a quickie?’ (The old jokes are always the best.)

  There were a lot of women in there – it must have been a Friday, though I’m not really sure.

  There’s a lot of sexism in a ladies’ hairdressers. Various ladies take it in turns to go behind a curtain across the end of the room. I can see a couch in there but little else.

  The curtains are put very carefully back into place after each client so I can’t see what is going on, but I note that I never get invited in. My haircut took about five minutes and cost £5 and a lot of banter, (my vet charges a pound a minute as well and I ponder on that).

  I was quite disappointed when it was finished and readily accepted the cup of coffee that’s offered. There were four women sitting in a row in a sort of halfway stage in the hairdressing process – they all have silver foil randomly arranged in their hair.

  They listened, fascinated, to the conversation between me and the girl who owns the shop: our talk was, at the same time, both risqué and flirtatious.

  As she was about 30 years younger than me I suspect it does more for my ego than hers.

  ‘How come,’ I asked, ‘I never have that silver stuff in my hair when I have my hair done like all these others?’

  ‘No need for it, there’s plenty of silver in your hair already.’ she replied. Thank you very much.

  THERE’S been a lot in the media this week about milk prices. A leading UK banker told me last summer that 30 per cent of his dairy farming clients were actively looking for a way to leave the industry.

  Last week at a conference in London, a leading European banker told us that at current milk prices, anyone who had invested in dairying recently was very vulnerable.

  As the production of the 50 per cent who have left dairying in the last eight years has been largely taken up by people who have invested in expansion, we could have a situation where more than half the dairy farmers remaining could leave quite quickly.

  There’s plenty of money between farm gate and the supermarket checkout, it’s just not shared out equally.

  We don’t produce nuts and bolts, we can’t switch on and off at will. When you switch cows off, they usually end up in an abattoir.

  WE HAD a big day out in Cardiff for the rugby. The final of the Six Nations Championship is as big as it gets – especially when there’s a Triple Crown, Grand Slam and Championship title on the line.

  The tension was building up nicely – and it had plenty of time to because it was a 5.30pm kick-off. But we all tried to make the best of it.

  I always go to the same bar, always drink red wine and always have the same meal – I’m set in my ways.

  Lots of people I know came to the bar that day and as I was to find out to my cost later in the day, too many of them bought me a drink.

  But there were also opportunities to be had. All the women that came up to my table to say hello seem to want to be kissed, some of them several times, so I had to go along with that.

  But the surgeon who did my knee operation last year was also present and he came across to say hello. I reminded him I had an appointment to see him in a couple of weeks’ time, when he would decide whether to do the other knee.

  I told him that the other knee seemed fine now that the knee that was operated on is back doing its fair share of the work. So we decided, he down on one knee by my side, and me sitting on a chair (chairs being very precious and vacated at your peril) that we would cancel the appointment for now and if the knee becomes a problem, he will put me back in to the system. I quite liked having a professional consultation amid all the noise, drinking and excitement that was going on around us.

  Many years ago there was a dentist in this area who would go around the pubs quite a lot in the evenings, and he would pull teeth in the pub should the occasion demand it.

  Payment for this service would be part-cash, part-drink, and I suppose that in some way it was a sort of predecessor of the supermarket home-delivery service, only years before its time.

  Anecdotes about this dentist were abundant. I remember one story of the farmer who had a really bad tooth but was much too busy to leave harvest to have it attended to. So the dentist was summoned to the harvest field.

  The most convenient place to perform the operation was to lie him on the bed of the binder they were using (I told you it was many years ago!) Trouble was, the anaesthetic didn’t work very well and the dentist only had enough for one injection with him.

  So the poor old farmer was lying on his back on the canvas of the binder with the dentist and various helpers sitting on him to hold him down while the tooth was removed. They reckoned that you could see the bloodstains going round on the canvas for two or three harvests before they were worn away. I just love these sorts of stories; they are a part of rural folklore.

  When I first came to live in this area I was young and fit enough not to have much need for doctors and dentists but inevitably, in time, I needed a dentist, and had no hesitation in deciding to go to the dentist I’ve mentioned. ‘You can’t go to him,’ says my wife, ‘nobody goes to him.’ But I did – I knew where he lived and so I just went and knocked on his door. There was no answer at the front so I went around the back. I knocked on the door and a voice told me to come in.

  He was sitting there at his breakfast, and I told him I thought I needed a tooth removing. He paused with a piece of toast half way to his mouth and his expression said ‘Me?’ as though he was astonished at my request.

  If he was astonished, he was also delighted. ‘How did you know about me?’ he asked. ‘Someone told me you were a very good dentist.’ And he glowed with happiness.

  He took me upstairs to a bedroom which was his surgery. The first thing that struck me was that the dentist’s chair had a certain age to it; the second thing that struck me was that the floor was littered with dental paraphernalia, most of which was false teeth.

  Without seeming to pause he made his way to the chair, one leg seeming to do all the walking while the other made sweeping motions as it cleared a path through the debris for me to make my way to the chair.

  The syringe for the anaesthetic was also old, older than anything we used on the farm, and stuck a bit. I wondered for a moment if he would have to apply WD40 to lubricate it.

  But he took the tooth out skilfully without much trouble and I made my way home none the worse for the experience.

  We were out that evening and my wife was telling everyone that I’d had a tooth out that day; they didn’t show any real interest until she told them where I went.

  Everyone was amazed. ‘But no one goes to him,’ they said. And for a couple of hours, well, I was something of a hero.

  I’M WRITING this on Sunday morning. The milking is nearly finished and I’ve snuck into the house for another cup of tea. My demeanour this morning is best described as disconsolate. If I had to put it to music, it would be called ‘The Pissed-off Dairy Farmer Blues’.

  I switch on the television and the main news item this morning tells the story of a hard-drive containing the personal details of prison officers. It has been lost, or stolen. You’d have to have a pretty sad life to want to read that on a Sunday morning. Now, if it were the bank statements of some of my neighbours, that would be very different.

  Yesterday afternoon, before I went out to milk, I checked our ‘close to calving’ cows. They are put in a shed for the purpose, with plenty of room and plenty of nice clean straw – the bovine equivalent of having a baby with BUPA.

  Two of our best cows have calved since this morning, unaided, obviously without too much difficulty, and now the calves are up suckling their dams. They are by a dairy bull and are beautifully marked.

  I didn’t go any closer until this morning and, as I approached the calves, I thought they would make really smart cows. But they won’t, ever, because they are bull calves and have no sale value whatsoever.

  But that is not
the real loss. We aspire to have a healthy herd of cows that are all home-bred, self-contained and not exposed to any disease risks that might arise from bought-in stock. To do that, we need to have about 40 heifers coming into the herd every year. For the second year running, we look like getting only 20.

  Nature usually sends a 50/50 split of heifers and bulls and we ensure we always have at least 90 cows in calf to the dairy bull to achieve our target.

  As nature is still probably sending along the equal-sex split, who, I ask myself, is having all my heifers?

  OUR VILLAGE blacksmith passed away a couple of years ago. He lived to a good age and in his latter years he only did a bit of pottering about, which was fair enough.

  But you did see the door to his small shed open, so that you knew he was about. His blacksmith’s shop has stood empty and quiet now for those two years but recently it has been sold with planning permission to convert to a dwelling.

  It is the start of these new works, fencing a garden in and altering the access, that has a finality about it that is, in a way, more eloquent of the end of an era than his passing away.

  They were never very auspicious premises, the first part where he kept most of his equipment, just about large enough to take a small car but that led in to the forge proper which was a treasure trove of forge, bellows and traditional blacksmith’s kit that was a joy to see.

  All that, they tell me, is still there and supposedly there is a condition of planning permission that it must remain so. It would be a devil to dust! It would be far better to put it somewhere where everyone could see it on a regular basis.

  It’s the passing of an institution. Years ago it was an important meeting place where you met your neighbours while you waited your turn to have something made or mended.

  We would all contribute to the job at hand, with advice or actually assisting in the mending, if it was harvest machinery that needed mending urgently.

  Employees would enjoy the social side of the visit and employers would get tetchy about how long they were there.

  There was always an unspoken rule that you could jump the queue if your job was urgent and depended on the weather.

  Our late blacksmith’s great skill was in wrought iron work and I know of several great country houses where his gates grace an impressive entrance.

  I often wondered what he thought about having this great skill, yet spending most of his life looking in the scrap pile in the nettles for a piece of broken sheep hurdle to mend someone’s mower.

  When I first came to live around here there were two blacksmiths, father and son. Father was in his 70s and thought they should make their living shoeing horses. Son wanted to make gates and mend farm machinery and there was great competition between them. It could be quite scary at times.

  If there was a horse to be shod, equipment had to be fixed outside, even if it was pouring with rain. All that wet and all that electricity made me twitchy, but it wasn’t that much safer inside in the dry, with the old man fixing a shoe front end of a horse and all those sparks flying about at its back end.

  The father (sounds better than old man) was a great prankster and would love to tease serious horse owners, especially if they were a bit on the novice side.

  One day he had me holding a horse’s head while he trimmed its feet prior to shoeing. It was a young lady’s first horse and the first time she had had it shod. She watched what went on, wide-eyed and fascinated. He did all four feet and then stepped back to have a look.

  ‘Do you think the horse is level now, Roger?’

  I gave the halter to the owner and joined him to eye the horse up.

  ‘I think it’s a bit high on that one corner.’

  So he lifted the one hoof up and took just a token sliver of hoof off. We stepped back and had another look.

  Just to be sure I fetched the spirit level and we did several checks with it on the animal’s back before we were satisfied. By now the owner’s jaw was well dropped, but she never said a word.

  The new shoes were duly fixed but there was more to come. The owner had ridden the horse to the blacksmith’s and the saddle had been removed for shoeing.

  So Father Blacksmith enquired of the owner which way she intended to ride home. He went to great lengths to determine that she was going to return the way she came and not take a ride around the village first.

  Having determined that she was going back the way she came he picked up the saddle and put it back on the horse, facing the wrong way round. He explained that this would save her turning the horse around.

  His parting shot was to enquire, indicating his son welding outside, if she wanted to buy some sparks to make her own Christmas decorations. An old blacksmith’s joke, but always amusing the first time you hear it.

  THERE was a time when I was given to drinking on licensed premises on Saturday nights. There was a group of us who would congregate in the same pub, in a particular area of that pub, where we were all sitting in close accord on three sides of a small bar.

  It used to be quite a competitive issue, laying claim to this bar area, because there was another group that used to seek it out as well.

  They used to irritate us because they used to smoke what we called ‘funny fags’ and would take up valuable, and coveted, bar space for the whole evening while only drinking a couple of halves of mild, their relaxation coming from whatever they were inserting into their rolling fags.

  Ours was a good crowd of real country people, farmers, farm workers, and some who didn’t work on the land, but came from a rural background; for example, lorry drivers who would help you shear or cart bales at weekends. The landlord would sometimes put a 78 wind-up gramophone on the bar and we would end up with a singsong.

  It all disappeared when the pub closed for a couple of years and we all went in different directions on Saturday nights.

  What I took for granted at the time and which also disappeared was a lift home. For years I would pick up a neighbour and drive him in the four miles to our local town and at 11 o’clock, as good as gold, his wife would take us home.

  Drinking and driving was strictly a no-go area around here at the time. We were possessed of a very driven local policeman who had a mission in life to clear the roads of cars. He would lurk about on the outskirts of the town while the two local ‘specials’ would watch pub car parks and radio him when a prospect left to go home.

  Not for a minute am I condoning drinking and driving, but he would breathalyse people sleeping in cars. He got my son while he was relieving himself against a barn wall as he set off to walk home one night, just because he had his keys in his pocket.

  He would breathalyse farmers in the early hours as they drove in Land Rovers to go around their sheep at lambing time.

  A lift home was very precious and still is.

  Times change and we all move on, but sometimes I do fancy a visit to the pub on Saturday night. If I’ve been away a lot during the week I’m not bothered, but now I occasionally go to the pub in the village.

  It’s only a mile-and-a-half away and, in theory, I reckon I’m safe to drink four halves, but I’ve usually drunk them by nine o’clock. It’s not far and the roads around here are very quiet and the incentives to have ‘just one more’ are very tempting.

  I don’t think I’m much of a danger on a road where I am unlikely to meet more than one car; it just needs a bit of common sense, because the same rules apply to me as those to someone driving at 70mph down a motorway.

  Going back to the times when we had that good crowd together, central to our fun was a great character, now sadly departed, who farmed in the hills outside town. He would be in the pub by seven o’clock every night of the week and taken there by his wife who would fetch him home at 11pm.

  His vulnerable time was lunchtime at weekends when he would drive in for a few pints on his own. The vigilant policeman referred to earlier, started to take interest and actually chased him home a couple of times, but didn’t quite catch him.
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br />   My friend, a resourceful man, made a plan. For most of us the plan would have involved staying at home at lunchtime, but he had other ideas. Halfway home for him, down these narrow lanes, was a sharp 90-degree bend. There was a gateway on the angle of the bend and inside the gateway, but also at an angle, was a large barn.

  The theory was that if he thought the police car was after him, he would drive straight through the gate and take a right-angle turn at speed into the barn and be out of sight, where he thought he would lie low until he decided it safe to go home.

  He even practised this manoeuvre a couple of times to perfect it. I came upon him one Saturday evening in the pub in reflective mood. We were on our own and I could sense something had gone wrong: ‘That Lewis, the policeman, was after me at dinnertime.’ There’s a long pause now while he tends to the need of his pipe. It’s up to me to drive the conversation on.

  ‘Did he catch you?’

  ‘No, I’ve been ready for him for some time.’ He gets quite animated now as he tells me the story. ‘You know that sharp corner by Davies’s barn, well I’ve had my eye on that for some time. I went straight through the gateway at about 30mph and whipped round into the barn and out of sight. About a minute later Lewis came roaring up the road, blue lights a-flashing, never saw me. He went back 10 minutes later and I walked home across the fields.’

  He puffs on his pipe and takes about half a pint out of his glass.

  ‘Well that’s all right then,’ I say, ‘you got away with that.’

  ‘No it’s not, they’d parked a bloody baler just inside the shed and I drove straight into it and wrote my car off.’

  His cars were never very valuable; probably third-party, fire and theft, so there would be financial loss to undermine the moral victory. ‘He thinks he’s going to take my licence off me, but he never will.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Never had one.’