The Yorkshire Shepherdess

by Amanda Owen

  It sounds terrible when I think about it, as though Social Services should have been involved. It was complete naivety on my part; stupidly, I hadn’t thought about it but I now had a tiny baby who was entirely dependent upon me, and much as I loved running about shepherding sheep and tramping the moors, I could not do this without putting her first. I wasn’t going to stop doing what I did, but in future I needed to take her with me. So I got a papoose, a little soft blue one that I wear on my front for the first few months of the babies’ lives, then when they are able to support their heads they go into a more solid, robust front carrier until they are about six months old, when they can go on to my back, and that’s where they stay until they are old enough to climb the moors under their own steam. It works very well, and means that I can traverse the hills knowing the baby is safe and sound. It also helps to keep me fit: I think I have carried a baby either on my front or on my back continuously for about the last twelve years.

  Foot and mouth ended in September 2001, but it was months before things got anywhere near back to normal. It was only the following January, nearly a year after the initial outbreak, that movements of sheep across the county boundaries were permitted. The few lucky people who did get their sheep back, some after as much as eighteen months away, found that their sheep still recognized their heafs on the moor. But our moors, usually speckled with white dots of sheep, looked sadly depleted.

  People said to us afterwards, ‘Just buy more sheep.’

  We got compensation, but the problem is you can’t ‘just buy’ sheep like ours. They are hefted sheep, reared on land they know. If we’d put new sheep up on the boundary-less moor they’d have wandered away for miles. The only way we could recover was to breed up from our remaining flock. We reckon it took us five years to get back up to where we were before foot and mouth.

  In a normal year we keep 250 of the young sheep and sell on everything that doesn’t make the grade for us. But now we had to keep every damn last thing, so the quality and purity of breeding took a nosedive. We were no longer keeping the cream of the crop, we were keeping everything. If you factored in that we were not making any money from selling our surplus sheep, then you can see how our income suffered a major blow. It was the same for everyone around here, we were all in the same boat and we’ve had to work very hard to get the quality of the breed back to where it was. We were lucky. We have, eventually, recovered. Not every farm did. 2001 was an eventful year, a year of euphoric highs and hopeless desperation, but we, and Ravenseat, survived, and with the birth of Raven, me and Clive launched our own private little flock. She really was a beacon on a very stormy night.

  7

  Reuben Ready or Not!

  If Raven’s birth wasn’t dramatic enough, then Reuben’s birth certainly was. I fell pregnant two and a half years after Raven. I’d adjusted to life with a baby on the farm, and hadn’t found having Raven stopped me from doing anything I needed to do, so I wasn’t overly concerned about the prospect of another little one. I can’t say, though, that I didn’t feel some pangs of nervousness as to what lay in store for me with the birth. But this time it was entirely the opposite problem: a tiny baby who took us all by surprise, born one stormy night at Ravenseat ten weeks too early.

  It was a good pregnancy. I always feel bloody awful for the first three months, the ‘morning’ sickness that lasts from dawn till dusk. There’s one smell that makes me nauseous every time: chicken. Not cooked chicken, I mean the walking, clucking variety. Every day I go to the henhouse to feed them, I throw up all the way there, then all the way back. Sometimes the first clue I have that I’m pregnant is when the merest whiff of a chicken makes me quite green. On a farm, life goes on, and pregnancy is part of it. After those first grotty weeks, I feel fine and life carries on the same as usual. I haven’t got time to spend nine months worrying and fussing, there’s always so much to do.

  The night of Reuben’s birth, 2 November 2003, there was a terrible storm raging. It had poured down all day, rain was lashing the front of the house and the river was in full spate. Raven was tucked up in bed and we had planned a cosy evening in front of the fire, watching the Antiques Roadshow. Clive had volunteered to go pick up a Chinese takeaway, which might sound very normal to most people, but for us involves a twenty-five-mile round trip, including edging the Land Rover over the pack-horse bridge because the river was too high to cross the ford. You can drive across the bridge if you’ve got nerves of steel and a car you don’t care about too much.

  We enjoyed the takeaway. I had duck in plum sauce. It wasn’t long after eating it that I started feeling unwell, then came the stomach cramps: stabbing, agonizing pain. I was bent double, sure that it was a bad case of food poisoning. But when I went up to the bathroom there was suddenly blood everywhere. This was bad: my baby wasn’t due for ten weeks. I didn’t know what to think. I yelled for Clive and he took one look. ‘Oh my God,’ he said.

  He rang 999, but we knew it would take an hour, maybe more, for an ambulance to get to us. So he rang our friends Raymond and Alison who live two farms away, because Alison is a nurse. A respiratory nurse actually, but, hey, she had a lot more medical training than we did. She and Raymond were here within minutes, leaving their Land Rover the other side of the bridge and running up to the farmhouse. They dashed upstairs, where I was sitting on the edge of the bath. There was blood everywhere. I’ll never forget the grim look on Clive’s and Raymond’s faces. At that moment, I was sure I’d lost the baby. Alison, thank God, took charge, but she, too, looked worried.

  ‘Get t’phone,’ she told Clive.

  She rang the doctor, who said he couldn’t get here and couldn’t do anything over the phone, but told her to ring the hospital and talk to a midwife. The midwife, Anne, realizing the situation, told us to try to stay calm and that under no circumstances should I push.

  ‘We’ll talk you through it,’ she said. ‘But get her out of that bathroom!’

  They were worried I’d have the baby sitting there, but at the time I didn’t understand and just refused to move because the pain was so bad, and because there was so much blood: it sounds ridiculous but I was worrying about the mess. I remember Raymond, a big tough farmer, putting his head round the door and, with a face as white as a sheet, commanding me, ‘You’ve gotta come outta there.’

  Now, as well as everything else, I felt utter humiliation that everyone was seeing me like this, but it worked. I let them get me out of the bathroom and onto the bed and only just in time because, with no effort whatsoever, something popped out. Clive was shouting, ‘It’s here, the baby’s here!’

  Then time seemed to stand still, a completely quiet moment. I was absolutely sure that the baby was dead. Alison handed the phone to Clive. The voice on the other end of the phone told him to pick the baby up, and as he did so there was a faint cry, the first sign I had that the baby was alive. I was laid out on my side with the baby still attached, not daring to look. I just didn’t want to see. I was sure this tiny slip of a thing wasn’t going to make it. Later I remembered someone saying, ‘It’s a boy,’ but I’ve no idea who actually said it.

  Alison wrapped him in a towel. Anne, speaking from the hospital, gave clear and concise instructions. Clive was told to find a hot-water bottle. Easier said than done – Clive’s terrible at finding things, and he was shouting to me, ‘Where’s the hot-water bottles kept?’

  ‘In the bloody drawer, where they always are.’

  ‘Which drawer? I cannae find ’em . . .’

  Eventually, the towel-swaddled baby was laid on a hot-water bottle and wrapped in tinfoil. He was placed on the bed in front of me, still attached by the cord. I still didn’t look at him. I’d seen the expressions on everyone’s faces; I can’t put into words how shocked and devastated they seemed. I didn’t want to see for myself how pathetic he looked. I felt as if I wasn’t there, as if all the panic around me was nothing to do with me. Instead of feeling part of it, I felt distant. I can’t explain it; it was as if I
was frightened to get involved with a baby who might not survive.

  Raymond was manning the door, watching for the ambulance lights, and eventually it came down the road, stopping at the other side of the bridge. The ambulance men ran up to the house, their heads bowed as the rain beat against their faces, clutching a holdall full of equipment. They came up to the bedroom.

  ‘Right, first things first, I’m going to cut the cord. Dad, do you want to do it?’

  ‘No, I bloody well don’t. I’m going to get a cup of tea.’

  The next challenge was to get me and the baby to the ambulance. Although I felt remarkably well I suddenly had a bad attack of the shakes, and it was decided that it would be best if we were loaded into the Land Rover and driven over the bridge to where the ambulance was waiting. Sterile it wasn’t: I sat in the back amongst the sheep droppings and general farming detritus while Alison in the passenger seat cradled the baby. Clive drove with his face pressed to the windscreen, squinting into the darkness, the wipers on full tilt as the rain fell in bucket loads and the wind whipped down from the moor. It was a fierce, bleak night for a tiny baby to come into the world.

  I can’t remember much of the two-hour journey to the hospital. I still felt very detached. I couldn’t believe that within a couple of hours I had gone from relative normality to this. Only the day before I had been talking to a lady in Kirkby Stephen who had asked whether I was pregnant because there was hardly a bump to be seen: a multitude of sins can be hidden beneath waterproofs. I finally looked across to the baby when Steve, the ambulance man, was struggling to put an oxygen mask on him. He was so small that even the tiniest mask covered his whole head, so Steve had to scrunch one up and hold it over his face to get as much oxygen as possible into him.

  After what seemed like an age we pulled into the ambulance bay at the Friarage Hospital. Anne, who had talked us through everything, was waiting at the entrance. She ran out, took the baby in her arms and took him up to SCBU. The next time I saw him he was in an incubator, covered with tubes and on a CPAP machine, which stands for Continuous Positive Airway Pressure. This pumped oxygen into his lungs at constant pressure, to keep the lungs inflated between his breaths.

  His tiny head was about the size of a tennis ball and bandaged to hold the tubes in place. He lay there, his matchstick legs splayed, an oversized nappy rolled down, his skin waxy and transparent, and his body covered with a fine dark downy hair. He sported a monobrow complete with mutton chops that gave him the look of a tiny wizened old man. He weighed just under four pounds, which was a decent weight for a baby born so early.

  When she got a moment, Anne congratulated me. She was full of praise for how calm we had all been and how well we had done to get him to the hospital in such good condition. I rang Clive and gave him an update on what was happening and told him that we needed to think of a name quite quickly, and that we’d talk again in the morning when I knew more. I was physically fine, but still in shock. I was given a room next to the unit and spent the night wide awake trying to come to terms with the evening’s events.

  The next morning I rang Clive to see if he had come up with any baby names. The staff kept asking me for his name, which, reading between the lines, made me think that they thought he wasn’t going to survive, although they never said it. We decided that we needed a lucky name, and because the previous day Ruby Walsh had been riding the winners at Chepstow, I said, ‘How about Reuben?’

  We agreed it was an excellent name as we wanted our little boy to be a runner. I felt cautiously optimistic as they seemed to have everything under control. This was the second time that I’d had a baby on the unit, so I was familiar with the layout, which was small, with maybe half a dozen babies in separate rooms. Two nurses were assigned to each baby. Everything seemed so orderly, safe and controlled, and I had every faith in those specialist nurses. It almost felt as if I wasn’t needed, and in a way I wasn’t, as there was nothing I could do except let them get on with their job.

  I went home from hospital the next day, without my baby. I know some people think this is odd: I have read stories in newspapers about people who keep long vigils by the side of incubators. But what can you do, sitting there? I didn’t know how I should be behaving or what I should be doing. I am such a tall, strong person and this helpless, tiny, jaundiced baby was so different from me. Some people believe that their presence helps, but I wasn’t convinced, and I felt I should stand back and let the experts do their job. Sometimes on the farm we have to temporarily take sickly lambs and calves away from their mothers and give them a helping hand, and this was just the same.

  Clive brought Raven with him when he came to pick me up and they both came to have a quick look at Reuben. Clive seemed shocked at his frailty, while Raven seemed intrigued. A plan was hatched with the nurses: I would try to express some breast milk at home and come back to the hospital every other day. This would mean a four-hour round trip, but there was no other way of doing it.

  It felt strange returning home; it felt like a part of me was missing. I set about busying myself on the farm and convincing myself that everything was going to be fine – all Reuben needed was time to grow. On my first night back, when we were in bed asleep, the telephone rang. Bleary-eyed, I reached for it. Dr Damann, a soft-spoken South African paediatrician, told me Reuben had suffered a pneumothorax.

  ‘What’s one o’ them?’ I asked, suddenly completely awake.

  A collapsed lung apparently. They had put a line into the lung, reinflated it, and that was the panic over. There was nothing we could do, he had rung just to tell us what was going on.

  ‘He’s OK, we’ve scanned him. He has had a bit of a brain bleed, but don’t worry.’

  Clive and I sat up in bed for a while, trying to absorb what we’d been told. Should we get dressed and head off to the hospital? Should I go on my own? What would it achieve? We didn’t talk about the big issue, whether or not our little scrap of a son would make it.

  I went the next day and there he was, now with yet another tube, this time into his chest, but he was still clinging to life. Once again, that night at home, we had another phone call: Dr Damann again. Reuben had suffered another setback, his other lung had collapsed, and again they had reinflated it.

  ‘A double pneumothorax is unusual but it’s OK, we’re handling it. We’ll ring you if we feel you need to come to the hospital. But if anything else happens we’ll have to transfer him to James Cooke Hospital at Middlesbrough where they have more specialized equipment.’

  I didn’t like the sound of this, and Clive and I had the same conversation as the night before. Should we set off for the hospital regardless?

  But again, we didn’t rush to his side because we didn’t see what good we could do. Fortunately, he then started moving in the right direction: he came off the CPAP and the head bandages came off to be replaced with sticky tape. His ears had no cartilage due to his prematurity and could be moulded into any shape so they needed to be held in a normal position. If I’d been mean, I could have rolled them up and made them into Shrek ears. As it was we just stuck them down to the side of his head with nothing more complicated than a roll of sticky tape.

  It was a momentous day when he moved from the fully enclosed, all-singing, all-dancing, high-dependency incubator into a normal fish tank-type one. He lay on a heat pad to keep him warm, under a blue light to deal with the jaundice which made him so yellow. It was at this point, when he was a week old, that I held him for the first time, sitting beside the incubator while a nurse deftly handed him to me. I expressed my milk into little pots and then he was fed via a stomach tube, only one millilitre at each feed. I tried to put him on my breast, but his mouth was so tiny that he could not latch on. It was another couple of weeks before the feeding tube came out and I was able to get him feeding as nature intended.

  I was told that he would not be allowed to come home until his due date, which was well into January. But the weather was drawing in, with the temperature below fr
eezing many mornings, and there had already been the first flurries of snow. We knew it wouldn’t be long before I wouldn’t be able to get out of Ravenseat to make the trip to hospital. I was facing not being able to see him for weeks on end if the snow came down. He needed to come home, and they knew it as well as I did. They could see our predicament, and they adapted the rules for us.

  It was agreed that he could come home when he was four weeks old, six weeks before his due date. He weighed four pounds. We had to agree to create the right conditions for him and I went to Middlesbrough where there was a shop that sold specialist premature baby equipment: a Moses basket, minute little vests, extra-small nappies. With Raven I’d completely relied on people giving me things, but none of her old baby clothes would fit, everything swamped him: she had been literally more than twice his size. The hospital League of Friends who provided the cardigans I wore after Raven was born also knitted and crocheted clothes in miniature sizes for premature babies. Everyone who has a very premature baby is caught out, nobody expects it to happen, so nobody is prepared. Bless those women: I was taken into a stockroom to choose mini matinee jackets, hats, etc. I still have them, as a reminder of how tiny Reuben was.

  To take him home I had the babyseat on the absolute bottom setting, and then I had to pad it with a rolled-up fleecy blanket in order to make it small enough to strap him in. It was snowing as we left the hospital, and I knew this was a bad sign, that the snow would get thicker and heavier as I drove towards home. I turned the heater on to its highest setting and we were soon on the A1 northbound heading for Ravenseat. We hadn’t gone far when I noticed the engine temperature gauge going up and up and up. I’m no mechanic but I had a nasty feeling that the radiator had cracked and was spilling water behind us. I didn’t know whether to stop and ring for help, or to try to get home with my tiny passenger. The A1 is a busy road, and there aren’t many exits, but eventually I came to a turning with a sign for a B & B. I pulled off and drove down a single-track road and into a red-brick farmyard. I left the engine running while I went and knocked on the door. I figured that if the radiator was leaking slowly enough I could fill it with water and get home.