by Amanda Owen
We did get invited to another awards event, the Yorkshire Awards, with the producer and some of the crew from The Dales, and on that occasion I managed to conjure up an evening gown for the princely sum of £5 . . .
When the barns around Ravenseat are being repaired we have to clear out the contents before work can commence. Some of them are full of junk – rusting bits of machinery, old feed sacks, kists (storage bins) and the like. But one was full of cardboard boxes, tea chests and wicker baskets.
Clive and the gamekeeper, who was helping out, lit a big bonfire, and the gamekeeper started throwing some of the boxes and their contents onto it. I walked across to have a look and started poking around inside them.
‘Whoa, don’t throw any more of these on t’fire till I’ve looked in ’em,’ I said.
‘There’s nowt, just material, blankets, and t’mice ’ave been at ’em,’ Clive replied.
There were old papers, bolts of fabric and net, blankets and clothes. Some of it had rotted where water from the leaking roof had leached through the boxes and this was beyond saving, but there was a whole cache of what looked like vintage clothing which was beautifully preserved.
I hope we haven’t burnt owt good, I thought, looking at the parched remains of boxes already crackling merrily on the fire. I stuffed what I wanted into bin bags and carried them back to the farmhouse, and there I carefully went through my hoard, which included delicately embroidered tiny cotton nightdresses, lace baby bonnets and small crocheted baby jackets in pastel colours. I love them: the nightdresses are so much better for babies in hot weather than the modern babygros, and I have used them for the younger children. I wanted to save the blankets, some of which were woven from lambswool and were so fine and delicate, almost gauze-like, but sadly moths had got into them and I reluctantly had to throw them all away.
There was also a fringed flapper-style shift dress from the 1920s and three black taffeta and damask Victorian skirts, one with a bustle and lead weights in the hem to make it hang well. I assumed, because of the colour, that they were mourning clothes.
There were even some leather and suede lederhosen. It’s one thing putting the babies into the nighties and bonnets, but I think the children would ring the NSPCC if I tried to make them wear lederhosen. There was a collection of old gas masks, obviously from the Second World War, including an all-in-one baby gas mask, which would cover the whole child. They are stamped with PROPERTY OF THE MINISTRY OF WAR: TO BE RETURNED AFTER THE WAR.
A prize find was a wooden chest full of ancient cure-alls: pink pig powders, black drink and Osmond’s Patent Yow Dose ‘for gaseous bloat’, ‘garget’ and ‘dropsy’. It harked back to the times when people would doctor their own animals, though I don’t imagine these remedies were used with any success. Clive told me that he remembered as a child an old farmer dosing a very sick yow with an old-fashioned elixir, claiming it was such good stuff that ‘he could almost see it working’. The yow was, of course, wholly dead directly.
So when we were invited to the Yorkshire Awards I needed to lose the wellies and morph into the epitome of elegance for one night only. As I drove through Kirkby on my way back from Sandwath I spotted a boned bodice on the dummy in a Barnardo’s charity shop window. I did an emergency stop and parted with £5 for it. All I needed was a skirt. I remembered my treasure trove, and dug out the mourning skirts. The one with the bustle was a no-no – if there’s one thing I didn’t need, it was a bigger backside – but there was one that I fitted into quite nicely. The fact that it had a train meant it didn’t matter that I was taller than the diminutive Victorian lady who first wore it. All I needed to do was breathe in a little and invest in some industrial strength hooks and eyes and stitch them in: I didn’t want any wardrobe malfunctions.
The event was held in Leeds. After hiring a tuxedo suit for Clive and borrowing some shoes, we set off for the champagne reception. I couldn’t wait, it was a chance to let my hair down and really enjoy the fabulous meal and entertainment that was laid on: there were going to be acrobats, a live band and a free bar. We went into the ballroom and waited to be directed to our table.
‘Oh, you can sit wherever you like,’ said the waitress to the assembled throng. ‘Apart from you,’ she added, looking at me. She led me to a table at the front of the stage where there was my name on the place setting. I was starting to feel a bit nervous.
‘Why can everyone else sit wherever they like an’ I’ve gotta sit ’ere?’ I said.
‘Oh, the presenter wants to come and talk to you as part of the evening’s entertainment,’ she said, smiling.
I couldn’t settle, knowing that I was going to be projected on to the big screen at the back of the stage. I didn’t want my face to be red and my words incoherent through wine. I was on tenterhooks the whole evening, until finally, nearly at the end, I was pounced upon. Once the live interview was over I’m ashamed to admit I let myself go. I went round the tables collecting the golden balloons adorning them to take home for the kids, lost a shoe, drank too much and was quite ill when we got back to the hotel. I suppose you can take the girl out of Huddersfield but you can’t take Huddersfield out of the girl.
The next morning at the railway station, feeling quite the worse for wear and carrying half a dozen oversized helium balloons, I was approached by a train guard who tried, unsuccessfully, to confiscate them.
‘There is a risk that you may cause a short circuit if you let go of them, there’s about fifty million volts up there,’ he said, gesturing towards the station roof.
‘I’ve carried ’em this far, I’s not partin’ wiv ’em now.’
And I didn’t, despite his protests. The children loved them.
The person who really deserved an award that night was my friend Helen, who babysat all six of the children.
The children technically all have speech problems: their pronunciation is a bit slurred, and when they go to school they are inevitably assigned a speech therapist. They have their own language, and they can understand each other and we can understand them. It’s just a question of tuning in. When Edith was interviewed on The Dales, they subtitled what she said, in case viewers couldn’t understand her, which made us laugh. I’m going to keep a speech therapist in work for the next few years. I believe that if they were left to get on with it, their speech would come right in time. I had a letter from school about Miles’s speech, asking me to practise saying ‘p’ and ‘f’ with him. He says them the wrong way round: ‘I want to be a parmer,’ he says.
‘I can’t see what all the puss is about,’ says Clive.
When the teachers send letters home, they Sellotape them to the front of the children’s school jumpers: they know that’s the only way we will get to see them. There’s such a rush when they arrive home, dumping their school bags, pulling on their overalls and heading for the hills. I don’t believe that school is the be all and end all. The children learn many things at home: common sense, to be polite and respectful, and plenty of the basics like mathematics, reading and writing, which are better learned if applied to real-life situations. Going to the auction teaches them to count, recording pedigrees and filling in entry forms covers the reading and writing, and as for physical fitness, there’s nothing quite like chasing sheep about to get you fit.
In the winter, when the nights are drawing in, they watch the television for an hour after tea, but in the summer it never goes on at all, unless there is something special on that we want to watch. They read a lot of books. Raven reads about horses, Reuben about tractors, and Miles likes dinosaurs. They make their own amusement and games. Recently I saw Reuben pretending to auction off all the farm equipment to his siblings. He was really giving it some: ‘Who’ll gimme a hundred pounds for this tractor? Fifty pounds? Where d’ya wanna be?’ Then he went up in increments. What better way to learn arithmetic?
They have a collection of toy farmyard animals and it always amuses me to watch them farming in a realistic, true-to-life manner.
‘Knacker wagon’s comin’ for that yow, it’s died,’ says Miles, pushing a toy lorry towards an upturned toy sheep. ‘I don’t knaw what ailed ’er.’
‘Scannin’ man’s comin’,’ says Raven. ‘This un’s ’avin’ three,’ as she puts a tiny felt-tip-pen mark on the toy yow’s back.
Then the gelding and dehorning of the toy cows is done with the hot fire poker.
They grow up understanding the facts of life, because they see animals reproducing all around them. The other day Edith came in shouting that the stallion had grown an extra leg. I just said, ‘No, that means he wants to get into the field with the mares. And we don’t want him to do that or they’d be having baby horses.’
‘I’d like a baby horse.’
‘Well, Josie’s ’avin’ one, isn’t she? What do we call a baby horse?’
‘A foal.’
They see new life, and they also see death. Edith very much wanted two pigs and so for Christmas we got her the two Tamworths, Dandelion and Burdock. We were all fond of them, but when Easter came she accompanied me and the pigs to the abattoir, accepting that we got them back as chops and sausages. If we’re having a leg of pork from the freezer there will be a big discussion about whether it’s from Dandelion or Burdock. When we had Gloucester Old Spots it was obvious which of them was on your plate as you could still see the coloured patches on the larger joints of meat. People may be horrified to think that we could look after, nurture and rear a lamb, calf or pig and then eat it, but I honestly don’t see it like that. If you are a meat eater then you should take great pride and be wholly confident that the animal you are about to eat led a healthy and happy life. What better way to be sure than to have looked after it yourself?
They’ve got a good work ethic, our children. I think Clive and I between us have taught them that you don’t get owt for nowt, you have to put the effort in if you want something. When they grow up they may move away from here completely, or they may want to stay. I just try to make sure they can all turn their hands to whatever job needs doing – the boys will bake and Raven will drive the tractor. If nothing else, Ravenseat teaches you to become more self-sufficient and able to deal with whatever situation life throws at you. Nothing must faze you. It’s not just about physical strength, it’s about mental strength and a willingness to have a go at anything, whether that be plumbing or building or maybe struggling with the forces of nature and trying to save the life of an animal. What could be more exciting and exhilarating for a child?
A walker passing through Ravenseat once said, ‘You can’t keep these children cooped up here, this isn’t the real world.’
I was indignant, because this is a very real world – maybe not the same as everybody else’s, but just as real. I get my fair share of people who feel they can tell me what I should be doing for my children, and it bothered me for a while. But now I think they are having a good childhood, it’s just different. My great hope is that they will look back on their childhood as a happy time. It’s just a different, more old-fashioned way to raise children.
Raven’s taxi arrives at 7.10 a.m. to get her to the school in Richmond. It can be particularly tough during the winter when she leaves for school in the dark and returns in the dark. Raven actually had a place at a state boarding school in Keswick, as a weekly boarder. We took her to look round, she had an interview with the headmaster, and she was offered a place. At first she wanted to go, but I let her have two weeks to think about it, and during this time she changed her mind.
‘I’d really miss mi ’orse,’ she said. No mention of her nearest and dearest . . .
I would have missed her terribly if she’d have gone, but she does now have to cope with a ten-hour day, from leaving home to getting back at 5.10 p.m. If she ever complains about me digging her out of bed at six o’clock on a cold winter’s morning I remind her that she could have stayed in bed until 8 a.m. at boarding school.
Reuben, Miles and Edith leave an hour later. Reuben splits his time between both Reeth and Gunnerside schools. Miles and Edith are at Gunnerside and each is taught in a classroom on their own as there are no other children of their age group at that school. There was talk at one stage of sending all the children to Reeth but this didn’t make sense to me, nearly two hours of travelling every day for the little ones and driving right past a school. No way. I threatened to home school them, and a lady from the County Council education service came from Northallerton to see me. She was supposed to be here mid morning but it was after midday when she arrived.
‘Sorry I’m late, I can’t believe what that road’s like,’ she said.
‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Now do you understand the problem?’
So she went away and sorted it.
One of our biggest nightmares is when they have to do things after school, or even sometimes when they are asked to arrive early to go to a swimming lesson in Richmond. It’s a logistical nightmare, impossible to co-ordinate. It certainly acts as a deterrent for the children when it comes to after-school detentions, just the thought of how unhappy we’d be having to drive nearly sixty miles to rescue someone who wasn’t on the school bus. We had a letter the other year saying that ‘due to climate change we are encouraging the children not to send Christmas cards this year’. I wanted to write back and say:
‘Don’t you think that owing to climate change it would be sensible to make sure they all finish school at the same time? That would save a lot of unnecessary driving around, which must be more damaging to the planet than Christmas cards.’
I can see many more battles ahead as the younger children start their schooling.
14
Annas Makes Seven
The kitchen table was laden with food, there were people everywhere. Some had brought their own deckchairs and picnics, some were dressed in their Sunday best and others had turned up in overalls and wellies. Random walkers were passing through – and stayed. There were people from as far away as South Africa whose names I don’t know and who I will probably never see again, but for just a short while we all gathered together in celebration.
The occasion was a mass christening for the children. I had asked Caroline, our local vicar, if it was possible to have the children christened in an informal way, perhaps in Whitsundale Beck at Ravenseat, and she’d agreed.
It was the summer of 2012, and for no particular reason we felt it was the right time, and the right thing to do. I made it an open invitation, Caroline put a notice in the parish magazine, and I put the word out down the dale that there was to be a relaxed, informal do at the farm. I spent a couple of days preparing food, baking a ham, making pastries and biscuits and, of course, baking a christening cake of epic proportions. I wasn’t the only person slaving over a hot oven though: many people had baked and cooked and brought their home-made creations with them, so there was a magnificent spread.
We pictured the sun shining and everyone sitting in the grass on the riverbank while the children waded into the river, but, of course, it rained, so all thoughts of al fresco dining evaporated and we decamped to the house. The ceremony was performed in the ford, upstream from the packhorse bridge. Caroline donned her cassock and wellies and one by one the children were doused in the beck water. The smaller ones were quite reluctant to participate in proceedings and Clive had a firm grip on Miles, who had half a notion to do a runner when Caroline loomed large with a jug full of icy-cold, peat-stained river water.
We specifically asked that there should be no christening presents for the children. We don’t believe in presents for their own sake: not because I’m particularly miserly but I believe that a well-thought-out gift at the right time is much more sensible. Of course, at Christmas the children get presents, but not enormous amounts. We try to think of exactly what they want, a practical present, whether it be a couple of pigs for Edith, a bicycle for Reuben or a saddle for Raven. They have a little gift in their stockings to open when they wake up, but for us Christmas Day is like any other: the animals need feeding b
efore anything else. Present opening might not start until lunch-time.
The one thing the children enjoy more than anything is the dash at midnight on Christmas Eve across to the stables to see whether the horses are bowing down in reverence to He who was born in a stable. I admit that one year I put the children to bed and then altered the clock, bringing it forward to get them up to look. So far we have only managed to catch Meg and Little Joe kneeling (and that was probably because they are slow at getting to their feet, as they are getting on and a little arthritic).
I always make a cake for the children’s birthdays, although perhaps not on exactly the right day. When they are too young to know the dates of their birthdays, we may postpone the special day until we’ve finished lambing, clipping or whatever is happening. They don’t know the difference, they still feel special for a day. Again, they get presents but sometimes these are amalgamated into one big shared present, say a go-kart or even a pony. Raven is old enough to know her own birthday, of course, and it falls right in the middle of lambing time, which is a nightmare. My good friend Rachel always brings birthday presents for the children – she remembers their birthdays better than I do. I say to her, ‘Quick, let me ’ide it. We’re not doin’ the birthday till next week, when things will be calmer.’
It’s not a question of getting our priorities wrong, it simply means that a nicer day is had if we are not so madly busy.