by Amanda Owen
‘I think that t’radiator’s knackered, I could do wi’ some water,’ I told the man who answered the door.
He begrudgingly nodded and, putting on his wellies, ushered me round the corner to an outside tap. He became a whole lot friendlier when he saw the Land Rover, realizing that we too were farming folk. I explained my predicament and he quickly had the radiator replenished, and filled bottles for me in case I had to stop again.
I wound my way home, the roads becoming ever whiter with snow. I stopped a couple of times to top up, and it was such a relief to reach Ravenseat. Under instruction from the hospital we had a room that was constantly warm for the baby. The farmhouse relies upon the most basic of heating systems and an open fire. So we had bought an oil-fired radiator with a thermostat, and put it in the least draughty room, the shower room. We put the Moses basket on top of a large chest of drawers in there, raised the heat to tropical levels, plugged in the monitor that set off an alarm if he stopped breathing, and that was it: Ravenseat’s very own SCBU with its very own small patient.
When Raven came home after her birth nobody could visit us because of foot and mouth, but this time people came from far and wide to marvel at this tiny chap. He pretty much lived in the shower room for the first few months of his life. Unlike my others, who have been out and about in the papoose within a matter of days, Reuben was not strong enough or big enough: his legs would not stretch wide enough and his head was just too wobbly. In the end I had to buy an inflatable neck brace to prevent his head falling forward and him suffocating in my bosom. He was the most difficult of all my babies: from not being able to feed at all he progressed to being a glutton and was sick constantly, to the extent that we were sent back to hospital to test for cystic fibrosis, which can cause sickness. The test was negative, thank goodness.
There was always one worry at the back of my mind all the time I was coping with this sickly little chap. What about the brain bleed? At a doctor’s appointment I finally plucked up the courage to ask: ‘I was told tha’ he had a Category 2 brain bleed. What does tha’ mean, ’ow will it affect him?’
‘Well, there are four levels of brain bleed, and we will just have to wait and see. We won’t know until he is older if there is any residual damage.’
That was as clear as mud to me, so I never asked again.
Reuben is now a big, healthy lad with a brain that is fascinated by anything mechanical, which he will fiddle with and fix. I think he has inherited this streak from my father. It certainly doesn’t come from Clive, whose idea of fixing things is copious spraying with WD40, and if that doesn’t work, hit it with a hammer.
Of course, it had been a very worrying time, but I think that, being farmers and particularly dealing with animals, we tackle things methodically. We see the job we have to do and we do it – we don’t sit around crying and worrying. It doesn’t mean that we don’t care, but we could see that the baby needed to grow and we needed to do certain things to allow that to happen, so we just got on with it. Clive still blames that Chinese takeaway and I have been forbidden from ever having duck in plum sauce again. They never did find out what had caused Reuben to have been born prematurely but I am sure the duck had nothing to do with it – however, it’s off the menu at Ravenseat now.
It was in the months after his birth that we lost two of our dear friends. Clifford Harker died on Christmas Day 2003, and sadly Jimmy Alderson passed away the following spring. Jennie no longer lives at Pry House but is still close by, in the village of Muker, where I see her often and still ply her with questions about Ravenseat in the old days.
Reuben stayed a floppy baby for what felt like ages: the other babies have all grown out of the soft papoose after three or four months but Reuben was in it for a very long time, because he just didn’t have the strength to support himself. I have never been a competitive mother, mostly because I have never been in the right places to be one. You don’t meet many new parents at the auction mart or on the moor. But on one rare occasion I was in the playground at Hawes with Raven and Reuben.
‘How old is yours?’ asked another mother.
‘Eleven months.’
‘Oh . . . mine is, too.’
You can imagine the look on her face: hers was walking, bouncing around, picking things up, just about bloody well juggling. Reuben couldn’t even lift his head. When I finally did get him into the backpack he literally disappeared, his head didn’t peek out over the top.
So I don’t take them to the swings, ball parks or to the swimming baths, but I feel that my children have a great, busy outdoor life and, I hope, an idyllic upbringing in a million ways. They eat properly, rarely watch television and have lots of freedom. I’m proud of the way they are all turning out. But I am ashamed to say that I committed a terrible mother crime with little Reuben . . .
I’m not an expert at this business of being a mother. Who is? I believe that everyone has a scare story in their past, when it comes to bringing up children. I have a couple, and this is one of them. I still go cold when I think about it.
It was late afternoon and we’d been outside marking lambs all day. It had been a tiring day and we were filthy from working in the sheep pens. Raven had been sitting on the wall watching us work and Reuben had been on my back in the baby carrier. One of the last jobs of the day is always to get a bucket of coal and an armful of logs for the fire. Clive had gone to feed the dogs and I had fetched the coal and logs and put them in the porch. The front door was in a sorry state and in order to shut it you had to give it a bloody good slam. I leaned forwards to pull it towards me, slammed it really hard, and then, at the same moment, looked sideways. Just as I was pulling the door closed, little Reuben, who was about eighteen months old at the time, had extended his arm towards the door and his fingers were in the hinge. There was a frozen moment but it was too late.
‘Oh my Gawdddd!’ I shrieked.
Then silence, a momentary pause, before he let out a piercing scream.
I pushed the door open to see blood smeared onto the paintwork. Reuben’s finger end was hanging off, held only by a stringy piece of flesh. The wailing started – mine. Reuben was strangely muted now, and gazed at the bloody injury with interest. Clive came running, bound it up in a clean tea towel and, scooping Raven up, we all set off for the hospital. Reubs slept, while I cried for the whole two-hour journey. I was mortified by what I had done. The journey seemed to take forever, but finally we reached the Friarage. I rushed in while Clive parked the Land Rover. I was a jibbering mess: I couldn’t remember his name, my name, how old he was.
All I could get out was, ‘I’ve . . . chopped his . . . finger off.’
The doctor looked at him, the finger, then me. Looking me in the eye he said, matter-of-factly, ‘Mrs Owen, I think it would be best to amputate the finger off to the nearest joint.’
He explained how Reuben would be fine, and would adapt, especially as he was so young.
‘You cannae do that, I’d feel guilty forever every time I looked at his hand AND he won’t be able to be a concert pianist AND he won’t be able to give two fingers to anyone . . .’
‘I tell you what. I will take a photograph of his injury on my mobile phone and send it to a friend of mine. He is a specialist hand surgeon, I’d like his opinion.’
Who knew there were surgeons who specialized in hands?
We had the most tremendous luck. It appeared that his doctor friend had dashed up to Middlesbrough that day to operate on the hand of someone who had been involved in a car crash.
‘Send them over to Middlesbrough and when I get this guy done I’ll operate on him,’ he said.
So we loaded ourselves back into the Land Rover and set off again. It was late in the evening when we arrived in Middlesbrough, another half-hour’s drive away. We were taken up to the children’s ward, where they were expecting us. What they weren’t expecting was a family of scruffbags covered in sheep muck with wellies caked in mud. There were one or two disapproving looks.
The next morning the surgeon operated and saved Reuben’s finger. What a brilliant, wonderful man! He repaired it so well you can’t see where the injury was. He told us after the op that Reuben could still one day become a concert pianist. (Not that any of my children show any interest in the piano we have. Clive saw it advertised as free to anyone who could pick it up, and he got it for me because I can play a bit, but only very badly.)
We drove back into our yard almost exactly twenty-four hours after we left in such a hurry, and Reuben still had his finger. Calm was restored.
As well as adding to our brood, we increased our responsibilities in a different way: we took on the tenancy of another farm. Sandwath is a much smaller farm than Ravenseat, 120 acres compared to the 2,000 up here. It’s on the other side of Kirkby Stephen, twelve miles away. We wanted somewhere to over-winter some of our sheep. It is in the Eden Valley, which is synonymous with fertile, good-growing land, with lots of quality grass for rearing animals. It can be farmed more intensively than up here, and much as Clive and I prefer the Ravenseat way of doing things, it helps us a lot to have this other land available to us, and the two farms work together well.
Clive’s son Robert runs Sandwath day-to-day. Every morning we speak on the phone to compare problems and decide which are the most pressing. Clive or I will go down to Sandwath when we are needed, or Robert comes up to Ravenseat.
We keep the majority of our cattle there in the winter as Sandwath has modern buildings which are ideal for cattle, easier to muck out than our traditional buildings at Ravenseat. We bring them up here for the summer months. We have about a hundred beef cattle which we rear up until they are nearly two years old, and then sell them on to other farmers who either fatten them or breed from them. We have in the past bred fancy continental-style cattle and on a few occasions won prizes with them, but we’re moving back towards traditional cattle for much the same reasons that we love Swaledale sheep: it’s more natural and we encounter fewer problems. We had some difficult calvings with the continental cattle, which occasionally necessitated Caesarians, and there were a few fatalities along the way. So now we are establishing a herd of Beef Shorthorns, a traditional, hardy breed.
Sandwath gives us another, unexpected, small income. Every September, Kirkby Stephen hosts its annual Cowper Day Fair, which is a big horse sale. For one day every year, Kirkby Stephen becomes cowboy country and all hell breaks loose. The fair originated with hill farmers selling their young Dales and Fell ponies but now a whole range of horses turn up, from heavy Clydesdales through to donkeys, but the majority are gypsy horses with more than 500 changing hands on the day.
One of Sandwath’s fields is close to the auction mart, and we open up the field and charge people to park their cars in it. When we first came up with the idea a few years ago friends warned us that everyone would refuse to pay and we’d get beaten up for even asking. Clive had a cunning plan: he put me on the gate taking the money, because he believed (correctly) that they wouldn’t beat up a girl. The only problem we have ever encountered on Cowper Day has been entrusting our car park money with the children. On one occasion they snuck off and bought a pony . . .
We once acquired twelve Galloway cattle, not by choice but in settlement of a bad debt. Galloways are those dark brown shaggy cows without horns, rather cute looking, like little teddies, which come originally from Scotland, hence the name. They are often a bit wild, so we decided that instead of trying to tame them we would run them into the Close Hills allotment at Ravenseat, where no walkers go, and we would be able to watch them from a safe distance.
We would go up the road, into the Black Howe pastures, and look across into the Close Hills, count them, and say, ‘Yep, there’s twelve, that’s fine.’
Then one day, we counted and got to eleven. Counted them again, still only eleven. We set off to search for the missing bullock. We looked everywhere. There is a lot of ground to cover, but there was not a sign of it. It was only as we came back down towards the gate that we looked inside the hog house, one of the barns. A quick glance in the downstairs barn bottom revealed nothing, but when we looked on the upstairs floor we found him. The door had been left open, probably by a lost rambler who had perhaps gone in for a wee. The nosy bullock had gone inside and was trapped when the door closed behind him. It’s the last place we thought to look.
We opened the door, and it took a moment for our eyes to adjust and see into the darkness. He was standing in the middle of the loft, wild-eyed, looking towards us. He backed up towards the wall, considering a charge, snorting all the while. Just as we were thinking that we needed to dive for cover he disappeared as the stone-flagged floor suddenly collapsed. He crashed down onto the ground floor of the barn and, shocked, stood stock-still for a few moments, surrounded by debris. Remarkably, he was fine, just a few scrapes here and there, and as soon as he gathered his senses he set off at a rate of knots out of the lower door and up into the allotment.
We thought that would put an end to his inquisitiveness, but only two or three days later we looked across to the Close Hills, and there were only eleven again. Clive counted them, then said, ‘You count, I can only get eleven.’
He was right, one was missing.
‘Flippin’ ’eck, we’d best go and see what’s going on.’
Away we went again, checking the hog house en route, just in case. It wasn’t long before we spotted him: he was stuck in a bog. When he’d fallen through the loft floor he had grazed his legs and although they were only minor wounds he had clearly been bothered by flies. The first thing an animal does when it’s got fly problems is head for water. It’s what nature tells them to do, to go in the water to get rid of the flies. But in this case it was a stagnant, reeking bog, and he was up to his belly in it, and he couldn’t move in any direction.
‘He’s not ’avin a good week, is he? Go back down to’t farm and get a halter an’t Crovect.’
Crovect is a special fly repellent that we use on the sheep and lambs; one stripe down the back and no fly will come near. As well as a line of Crovect, we gave him an injection of penicillin to ward off any infection. We knew he wouldn’t stand for any of this treatment once we got him out so it was a question of treating him while he was unable to put up a fight. We got the halter on him, tied it to the back of the quad bike, drove slowly and pulled him free from the mire. There was a great squelching noise as his chunky body freed itself from the swamp. For a moment he was prostrate on the ground, still attached to the quad bike, and all that was needed was for someone (Clive) to remove the halter and release him. I suggested that a penknife might be the answer, just cut through the halter and let him go. Clive was having none of it.
‘Nivver, I’s not cutting it unless I ’ave to, we’s short o’ halters.’
The bullock clearly blamed us for everything. To say he was angry would have been an understatement; he was livid. Once Clive had taken the halter off and the pressure on his head was released he was on his feet and heading in Clive’s direction. I’ve never seen Clive run so fast. In fact, I’ve never seen a bullock run so fast. It was like watching a cartoon, Clive running with a furious bullock literally inches behind his backside. Luckily, Galloways don’t have horns, or it might have had him. Clive legged it, then jumped over a wall, leaving the bullock bellowing on the other side.
It was a lucky escape. Speaking from bitter experience, having a cow on top of you, trying to grind you into the ground, is not good and best avoided at all costs. Clive recovered from this
near-miss and, physically, the bullock did. But from then on he was a complete head case, a real psycho cow. He was totally unhandleable. He was OK out in the wilds of the allotment, but with winter approaching there was no way he could remain out there. The only problem was: what to do with him? He wasn’t going to adapt to being housed in the barn, and taking him to sell at the auction was a no-no. There was only one place he was going, and that was into my freezer. We have never had any problem eating our own animals – you can eat meat with confidence if you know that the animal has lived a happy life and been well cared for.
He’s not the only animal we’ve had in bogs. We’ve had to winch the occasional cow out, but more often it’s bogged sheep. The sheep are usually very good at avoiding the bogs as the hefted sheep know their own land and follow the trods (sheep paths) that have been used by their mothers and grandmothers before them. Sometimes in very hot weather you get one who will go looking for water to cool down, and if they are ill they might wander off the trod. But normally you see them ‘bog sniffing’, with their noses to the ground to be sure where they are walking.
The main reason we find them in a bog is if they’ve been panicked, for instance if a military helicopter has flown over very low. We once had to pull twelve sheep out of a bog on Ravenseat moor. It was sheer luck that a walker had come across them, as they were in up to their chests. They were so heavy and claggy with the weed and the mud that they could not stand. We brought them down into the farmyard in the bike trailer and put the pressure hose on to wash them, then left them in the garth, the little field opposite the house, in the sunshine to dry.