The Yorkshire Shepherdess

by Amanda Owen

  ‘We’re like the Mounties, we always get our man. I’ve got the deadliest rat poison ever. One grain of it can kill fifty people,’ he said.

  This sounded promising.

  He put poison in the loft, at the back of the skirting board and in the airing cupboard. The next day we noticed that this highly deadly rat poison was dropping through the floorboards and into the kitchen. I couldn’t have that so the bloody rat got another reprieve.

  It was coming up to Christmas and the children each had an advent calendar, the ones with chocolate inside the little windows. I’d even bought one for Clive. The children were only on door number three when the rat found them, and we came down one morning to discover that Roland had broken through the silver foil and cardboard and eaten all of the chocolate. Every single bit. The calendars were thrown on the fire, and I needed to get replacements, but all the local shops had sold out, because it was already December. Then we went to Barnard Castle for a dental appointment, and there happens to be a high-class Belgian chocolate shop in the town. We tramped in, past all the beautiful boxes of truffles and violet creams, and there on the counter were some vastly over-priced chocolate advent calendars. Raven spotted them and said, ‘We need those chocolate advent calendars because the rat has eaten ours.’

  The Belgian man, whose English was not quite up to this, said, ‘What? Your dad has eaten your chocolate?’

  ‘No, the rat.’

  ‘The cat?’

  I hurriedly said yes, and shot a look at Raven to shut her up. Raven was old enough to know the ‘mouse’ was really a rat. I bought the calendars begrudgingly, and vowed that the rat had to die at all cost.

  Finally, on Christmas Day, there was The Big Showdown In The Dairy: Clive Versus The Rat. An epic story, better than any of the repeated adventure films on TV that day.

  It had already been one of those days. I had woken up to find that the kitchen was decidedly cold because we had somehow managed to run out of kerosene for the Aga. This is not good when you’ve got a large turkey to cook. I always buy outsize, mutant turkeys, thirty-six pounds or thereabouts, because they’re cheap. I mean, who else would want to cook a turkey for about thirteen hours and have to mutilate it to fit it in the oven? Clive likes turkey and there are plenty of people to feed, so it all gets eaten up. Finally, after a bit of improvisation, I managed to get the turkey cooked in our other oven, put it on a very big platter and took it into the dairy to cool. As I was carrying the bird across to the stone shelf I felt something run up my thick woollen sock-clad leg. I didn’t see it but I knew it was Roland. I faced a choice: I could have dropped the turkey and screamed blue murder, or I could carefully put the turkey down and then scream. I hadn’t spent all that time cooking the enormous turkey to drop it, so I went for the second option.

  Cue Clive, and the battle with the rat. I had the video camera to hand because it was Christmas Day, so instead of the usual ritual of the family opening presents under the tree I recorded a rather more exciting event.

  ‘That’s it. I know t’lal’ bastard’s in there. I’m not comin’ out till I’ve got ’im.’

  He shut himself in the dairy and jammed the bottom of the door so it couldn’t escape. All we could hear was everything being tipped off the shelves; every bottle, every jar was moved. He even wrenched a very heavy filing cabinet out to look down the back. No rat.

  I was getting a running commentary.

  ‘Are you sure it were Roland, you dozy mare?’

  ‘Course it was ’im, I didn’t imagine it!’

  Finally, all that was left to search was the giant chest freezer. He managed to pull it out. The rat wasn’t behind it. He tipped it forward. The rat wasn’t under it. Then he got a torch and looked through the mesh grille that covered the access hole to the motor. There it was, sitting as still as could be. He could just see the eyes glinting in the torchlight.

  Clive couldn’t get it, so he decided to see if he could kill it with noxious fumes, spraying it to death with WD40, Impulse, anything we had in there. No effect at all. Then he had a brainwave.

  Clive’s friend Steve had crafted us a pair of ornate sticks for our wedding, and for Christmas he had made the children some miniature shepherd’s crooks. Clive got one of these crooks, the only thing he could find that was narrow enough to go through the mesh, and kebabbed the rat with it. Clive said proudly: ‘I just let it ’ave one.’

  His triumph, walking out of the dairy with his enemy defeated and speared on a stick, is all on film, the best Christmas video we have ever made.

  I carry a camera with me wherever I go and sometimes get to record things happening that I would rather forget about, like the day the fire brigade was called to Ravenseat, when our precious hay went up in smoke.

  Hay has to be stacked and stored properly (mewed), or you get problems, and we lost nearly half our crop through taking our eyes off what our helpers were doing. It was a Tuesday, market day, and I was just loading up the trailer with the lambs that were going to the auction when Clive came down the yard.

  ‘The hay’s on fire.’

  ‘Are yer sure?’

  ‘Yeah, ring the fire brigade.’

  The hay had been mewed in the barn fifteen days earlier, and we knew it was steaming, which isn’t unusual. Clive had asked one of the old-timers he knows who said, ‘It’ll steam for fifteen days and that’ll be an end to it, hod thi nerve.’

  He was one of those old boys who seemed to know about these things, so we marked it on the calendar and counted off the days. Well, he was certainly right. It did stop, but unfortunately the steam turned into smoke.

  When Clive told me to call the fire brigade I was unsure as there was only the thinnest wisp of smoke coming from it, not much more than you get from a cigarette. I climbed up on top of it. It’s always warm on top of the hay, and there will sometimes be fungus because of the warmth and damp. It’s a place where the chickens like to lay their eggs. The kids like sitting up there too.

  But I could smell it when I got up there: this was an acrid smell, definitely smoke, not steam. It was a thin plume, but it was still smoke. The first thing we did was to get the animals, lambs and horses, out of the adjoining barns and into the fields.

  I rang the fire brigade under duress. I still wasn’t sure, it didn’t look dramatic enough. You think you need flames for the fire brigade, and I’d never had any experience of hay combusting. We began pulling the hay bales from the front face out, with the skid steer (a small machine with a loading shovel that we use for moving bales and mucking out the cows). As we dug into the haystack it became black and charred, and some of the bales we rescued were crisp and tinder-like. Towards the centre, everything was disintegrating. Of course, what we were doing, while salvaging as much hay as possible, was introducing oxygen and that’s when the fire caught hold and we had real flames.

  The fire brigade arrived, and we were trying to stop them dowsing everything; we still wanted to save as much hay as possible. One of the firefighters, a woman wearing breathing apparatus, rescued a chicken who was stoically refusing to leave the eggs she’d laid, even though they must have been hard-baked by then.

  We lost about fifty tons of hay, which was half of that year’s poor crop. In a good year we can harvest 300 tons. The bad weather was the cause of the hay combusting: we’d been rushing to get the hay in during a break in the weather, and the longest, wettest grass, from around the edge of the fields, which should have been loaded into the barn last, went in first. We’d had a contractor here baling and he’d made bigger bales than normal, as we’d thought this would speed up the process as we battled with the weather conditions. The bigger bales were more compacted, which meant they held the dampness more. Damp hay combusts more easily because it provides the right conditions for the growth of organisms that generate heat, and can increase hay temperatures by up to 150 degrees Fahrenheit. If it is loosely packed it can cool, and may turn brown or go mouldy, but it won’t burn. We had the double whammy: tightly
packed and damp. A catalogue of errors that cost us dear.

  The fire was in our big, modern, middle barn, and luckily it didn’t suffer any damage, apart from being blackened. If Clive hadn’t spotted that small plume of smoke when he did then all of the farm buildings could have gone up. We were left with two big piles of ash that glowed red hot inside if you poked them. Even when the hay had finally burned away to nothing, the ground beneath held the heat for a long time afterwards.

  For us, hay in the barn is like money in the bank. If we can fill our barns with hay, we can feed our animals in the winter. We grade the hay, and the poorer quality stuff is saved in case we have really bad weather. We call it ‘storm hay’. We need as much hay as we can get, we can never have too much and can even store it until the following year, when we will call it ‘over year’ hay. The lovely flower-filled meadows that we mow make beautiful, sweet, herby hay, but the ground that we have to travel to mow is at best described as undulating, at worst downright dangerously steep.

  When we had a farmers’ visit from East Yorkshire, one of them asked, ‘Where does ta mek thi hay?’

  ‘Them’s our hayfields, over there.’

  ‘Oh, my God!’

  They couldn’t believe we had to contend with fields so bumpy and uneven. You need nerves of steel to drive a tractor around our hayfields – they don’t lend themselves to the massive high-tech machines used in the lowlands. This farm is suited to the old, traditional methods. We still make the small conventional bales that need to be picked up and physically lifted onto the trailers and then stacked by hand in the barn. Some of the steepest banks are still raked off by hand. My record is accidentally tipping off a load of hay bales three times on the journey back to the barn: bad enough to load a trailer once, but three times is soul-destroying.

  Over the past few years, the terrible weather has meant that it has not been possible to make as much hay as we’d like. We decided after a particularly bad year that we could no longer rely on using a contractor to make round bales of silage, which is grass preserved by being wrapped in plastic, and that we needed to invest in some new(ish) kit.

  Clive’s not into machinery, but I was on a mission, looking through the farming magazines for ads. There were three things on my wish list: a round baler, a rowing-up machine and a bale wrapper. Bearing in mind that I’m totally clueless when it comes to buying machinery, it seemed pointless going to view any of the advertised kit. I just put my faith in a man who sounded genuine, and luckily it paid off. When it all arrived in the yard Clive looked at it doubtfully, but it has proved to be worth its weight in gold as, when the rain clouds are gathering, we can rescue a field of grass by baling it up quickly and making silage.

  We had a few teething problems in the first year of using our new equipment and we learned from experience that you should be very careful where you release the round bale from the machine. There was one very lucky walker who narrowly missed being taken out by a bale in a nasty Raiders of the Lost Ark moment. We watched, horrified, as a giant round bale rushed past him at high speed, smashed down the wall and finally came to rest in the river. The walker, meanwhile, carried on walking and was completely oblivious to his near-miss. It’s not a good idea to get in the path of a half-ton round bale travelling at high speed.

  The rough ground means our machines have a shorter than average life expectancy. I had to upgrade our mower recently because Clive was halfway through cutting the Seeds, our big field of grass which takes about thirteen hours to mow, when our old drum mower began to disintegrate.

  Like a real trooper Clive kept mowing, even as more pieces fell off, until the inevitable happened and the mower snapped in half. He dragged it back into the yard and threw his hands in the air. Not a happy camper.

  ‘How thi ’ell am I gonna get mi grass cut now?’

  ‘Don’t panic,’ I said. ‘Just don’t panic. Ger’it on t’trailer an’ I’ll tek it an’ see if I can ger’it welded.’

  So I turned the ‘Cream Tea’ sign to closed and set off to see Metal Mickey, the mechanic we love because he can make do and mend.

  I pulled into his yard at Reeth and shouted. His head appeared from underneath a JCB and he blinked, rubbing his eyes with his blackened hands. He got to his feet, wiped his hands on an oily rag, and came over to the trailer for a closer inspection.

  ‘Can you mend this?’ I asked him.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Like now.’

  ‘Well, get it off t’trailer and I’ll ’ave a look,’ he said.

  As he lifted it off, it fell apart completely. Mickey shook his head, all the while sucking air through his teeth. He liked a challenge, but this was a tough one. It wasn’t looking good.

  ‘If it were a ’orse, I’d shoot it,’ he said.

  Metal Mickey’s yard is always full of second-hand machines, from forage harvesters through to ride-on mowers and everything in between. I asked him if he had a drum mower – they are bottom of the range, like really basic; good for bumpy ground, but nobody except a few hillbillies like us use them.

  ‘Nope, nowt o’ that. Tell yer wha’ I do ’ave though.’

  In the corner of the yard was a disc mower, a far more modern contraption. It was the only mower Mickey had. I’m thinking, Clive’s not going to like that.

  But what choice was there? The weather was good, dry and warm with just a gentle breeze, perfect for haymaking. We needed to keep mowing and I was never going to find another drum mower at short notice. Mickey gave me all the chat – one careful owner, you know the drill. I did what you do when you’re buying a second-hand car: I walked around it, kicked it, pretended I knew what I was doing. But even I could tell from looking at it that it had seen a bit of action.

  ‘Just cosmetic,’ Mickey said.

  ‘Stick it on the back of the trailer.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Mickey knows Clive’s reluctance to take on new stuff.

  ‘I don’t bloody know. But what choice is there?’

  When I pulled into the farmyard, Reuben and Robert greeted me with sheer joy. Rubes loves anything mechanical. Robert was very pleased that I’d upgraded our ancient mower. Clive, needless to say, looked at it suspiciously.

  I said, ‘Everyone’s using them, they’re unbreakable.’

  He gave a snort. He knows there’s nothing that can’t be broken on our fields.

  ‘Look, I could understand you being annoyed wi’ me if I came back with a designer handbag. You cannae possibly black me for buying a mower.’

  I got the feeling that he almost wanted it to fail. But it worked well, and we cut all the grass with it.

  I think it would be safe to say that where machinery or equipment is involved neither Clive nor I are well versed in their use or maintenance. When a piece of equipment leaves Ravenseat, the next destination is the scrapyard. We’ve had a succession of knackered trailers. I once drove over to Martin’s in terrible weather with a trailer that had one locked wheel and was leaving a black smudge and a trail of smoke along the road behind us. I decided that the only remedy was to stop looking in the mirror and keep going. When I got to Martin’s farmyard the previously round wheel was worn flat at the bottom and Martin, who had been watching my approach down Ash Fell, said, ‘I thought it were a fly past by t’bloody Red Arrows.’

  On another occasion I took a trailerload of lambs to the evening sale at Kirkby Stephen auction. I missed the ballot and was late through the ring so I called for fish and chips on the way home, rushing back at high speed before they got cold. Later that evening a friend rang and said, ‘When I walked back through Kirkby tonight there was ’ell on. The glass window in t’newsagents’ had been smashed, summat ’ad gone thra it, vandalism they said.’

  The next morning when we went out into the farmyard we noticed that our livestock trailer now only had three wheels. We never did find that wheel – and if it was at the newsagents’ then we certainly weren’t going back to claim it.

  The one piece of kit that we rely on
most is our quad bike; we use it and abuse it. We feed sheep, we chase sheep, we carry sheep and carry food for sheep, not to mention carting posts and wire around the farm. We depend upon it. We also sometimes bog it, sink it, tip it and drown it. It has been fished out of the river upside down and on one occasion was even pulled from a bog with a pony. There’s one thing that is for sure, I wouldn’t like to be the buyer of a second-hand quad bike that had been at Ravenseat.

  12

  Free-range Children

  Life at Ravenseat revolves round children and animals, a difficult combination at times. We are up at the crack of dawn every morning. Life here is about routine, and as long as the rhythm isn’t disturbed then things run smoothly. Clive usually makes a start on the bullocking up, the feeding of the animals in the yard, but NEVER horses: they are my domain. I attempt to get school children into uniforms and breakfasted, babies fed and back to sleep and then, hopefully, children into waterproofs and off outside to do their jobs. They have responsibilities and I am a stickler for them not shirking their duties, come rain or shine.

  Reuben revives the fire, emptying the ash from the grate and chopping his sticks for kindling, while Miles fills the coal buckets and the log box. Violet makes paper dogs by rolling up old newspapers, for the bottom of the grate underneath the kindling.

  We have two flocks of chickens, an orderly managed flock in one of the outlying barns, and a maverick flock of about fifteen unruly chickens of dubious parentage. Some hens were here when I came, and sometimes we put eggs under a broody hen to hatch, leaving the offspring to join this rainbow family of chickens. They reject domestication and live semi-wild in and around the farmyard. Edith and Miles are on permanent egg duty; no chicken nest goes undetected. Every chicken is kept under close surveillance, and Edith is very accomplished at tracking down the secret nests. Miles is her accomplice; his job is to risk life and limb retrieving the eggs. The wearing of a hat is compulsory, used to throw over a protective chicken who does not wish to give up her eggs easily. While she is temporarily blind, Miles snatches the eggs from under her (leaving one, so that in theory she will come back to the same nest tomorrow), then whips the hat away and uses it to transport the eggs back home. This operation can be fraught with difficulties: sometimes eggs are dropped or sometimes a very, very old egg will find its way into the kitchen. The sulphurous fumes that you get from cracking an old egg are guaranteed to take away your appetite for an egg butty.