My Animals (and Other Family)

by Phyllida Barstow

  Both fields immediately below the house were absolutely carpeted with stones, which had worked their way up through the thin soil and did machinery no good at all, and clearing these became our hated holiday task. It was very simple. A grownup drove a tractor and trailer out to the field. Each child was given a bucket and told to clear a certain area. Grownup then walked up to the house to confer with builders/ drink coffee/ plan farmwork, while the sullen, bolshy, complaining child labour-force toiled back and forth tipping buckets of stones into the trailer for what seemed hour after hour before the grownup finally sauntered back to see how the job was going.

  Our French cousins, whose work-ethic had always been suspect in Mummy’s eyes, downed tools on the second day of their visit and declared that this wasn’t their idea of how to improve their English. Nor would they wear the denim jeans they were given to work in. ‘Ca fait paysan,’ they said contemptuously. Maman wouldn’t approve.

  In this they were undoubtedly correct. There was always a degree of needle between Mummy and her intensely chic, beautiful French sister-in-law, a high-maintenance female whose Gallic love of self-pampering went almost beyond parody.

  Temperamentally, they were chalk and cheese. You could see Mummy grit her teeth when Marianne wafted down to breakfast in full make-up and a lacy negligee when everyone else had been up for hours, drank a leisurely cup of coffee, nibbled a piece of toast, then announced importantly, ‘Alors, je vais me soigner…’ and that was the last you saw of her until lunchtime.

  I guess that by inviting her nephews and niece to visit us without their parents, Mummy hoped to instil in them the love of outdoor life and hard unremitting toil which she was attempting to impose on her own brood, but found to her disappointment that their resistance was, if anything, stronger than ours. I only remember them risking a single visit, and thereafter the Christmas card from their little chateau near Rouen tended to be inscribed, tongue-in-cheek, From the Castle to the Farm…

  Burning rushes was much more fun than pucking stone, and equally necessary. After years of neglect grass had more or less given up on the sour acid soil, and in its place reeds had spread from the many small boggy patches into great camouflage splodges, covering most of the lower fields.

  Neither sheep nor cows eat reeds with any enthusiasm so their grazing value is nil, but in July and August they were as dry as they ever would be in the damp climate, and we found that a long dribble of TVO – Tractor Vaporising Oil or, as Mummy called it, Life-Blood of Modern Farming – judiciously spread along the windward edge of the reed clumps and ignited would flare thrillingly into a wall of flame. Too thrillingly, sometimes. If the wind changed, the flames would veer with it, threatening vehicles, dogs or, on one very frightening occasion, surrounding the sheltered spot where two-year-old Miranda had been parked to sleep off her lunch.

  In the nick of time, Mummy remembered her youngest daughter and Gerry, with great heroism, dashed through the billowing smoke to rescue her, leaving the rug, Thermoses and rest of the picnicking equipment to be blackened and burned. It was, as everyone remarked, a near thing.

  It took several years of intensive burning to bring the reeds under control, after which my parents embarked on an ambitious programme of ‘mole-draining’ – dragging a small anvil-shaped block of metal just below the turf to create lots of small tunnels diagonally across the slopes, to remove the worst sogginess, and at the same time slathering the starving grass with a black powder called Basic Slag, to correct the chemical balance. Spreading – or, as it was known, ‘sprodding’ – basic slag was the dirtiest job we children were ever asked to undertake, beside which moving the muckheap paled into insignificance. From hair to feet the fine silky-feeling powder blacked you up like a Nigger Minstrel, and the rim round the bath afterwards was a grim sight.

  However the result of all this effort was deeply satisfying, as even a child of my in-built laziness had to acknowledge, because quite rapidly the khaki fieldscape which had so appalled me on first sight turned a beautiful delicate green, and when the few depressed cows were replaced by a carefully selected handful – you could hardly call them a herd – of Uncle Geoff’s highly-bred Guernseys, the Fforest looked well on its way to becoming what Daddy (in imitation of Uncle Remus) called, ‘A sho’nuff farm.’.

  It was time, Mummy decided, that we all learned to milk. A gaunt, patient, elderly cow named Eva was chosen for me to practise on, but it took me so long to extract enough milk even to cover the bottom of the bucket that Sal, an agricultural student from South Wales who had come for a few months’ work experience, usually took pity on us both and finished the job. When hand-milking, you have to squat awkwardly on a stool, tucking your head right into the angle of the cow’s leg and flank, simulating the posture assumed by a calf, so inevitably your hair smells powerfully of cow for the rest of the day. Once settled, you have to work away with a firm steady rhythmic pressure, never pausing in case the cow thinks you have finished, pulling and squeezing until hitherto invisible veins spring up in the backs of your hands and never-used muscles in your forearms begin to ache intolerably.

  If you are rough, or take too long, the cow is quite within her rights to swish a heavy and frequently muck-laden tail across your neck and cheek, or even resort to the ultimate sanction of kicking over the bucket that you hold between your knees, and there is not much you can do to prevent it. Though I loved bringing the milkers in from the field, seeing them choose their accustomed places, tying them up and feeding them, I was never a competent milkmaid, and where Sal would hang a foaming full bucket on the cow-shed scales, my own contribution would seldom amount to more than a few pints.

  Guernsey cows were not well suited to the cold wet conditions in Radnorshire, and had to be cossetted with rugs and special rations in a way that swiftly ate up any profit from the sale of milk. Mummy persevered with them for years, because they looked so pretty and their butter and cream was delicious – bright buttercup yellow, glistening with beads of moisture, well worth baking bread to go under – but even she had to acknowledge that milking cows, particularly in winter, was long-term servitude.

  No matter how early you started, it seemed that no sooner would you have fed, milked, washed up and mucked out on a dark November day than a distant bellowing would give notice that the cows were queuing at the field gate, wanting to come in and restart the whole cycle. After that first experimental summer twice-daily milking gradually and inexorably slid into the hands of a succession of landgirls, found in the Situations Wanted columns of The Farmers’ Weekly and Horse and Hound.

  Their employment followed a predictable pattern. A honeymoon period when they were hailed as perfect angels – cheerful, efficient, energetic, eager to work – would be succeeded all too soon by a slow slipping from favour as their weaknesses were discovered and productivity tailed off. Few of them stood it for long. Finally they would do something completely unacceptable, miss a milking, top up the churn with water, be found hitting an animal or in a compromising position with a local Lothario. Tears and recriminations would follow, off they would go, and soon a new advertisement would appear in the Situations Vacant columns of the farming press.

  Mummy was an optimist and always hoped the new girl would be better than the last, but Daddy, whose approach to the servant problem was the classic mixture of fatalism and sloth, knew that if any real paragon was answering advertisements in the agricultural press, it probably meant some other employer had discovered a pretty intractable Achilles heel.

  Some had intriguing backgrounds. There was Rosamond, a nun who had lost her vocation, found life as a telephonist too stressful, and sought the supposed peace of a Welsh farm – little did she know, and precious little did she learn before deciding on a further career change. There was the unfortunate DP (Displaced Person) named Anna, a gloomy middle-aged Ukrainian peasant with no English and just a smattering of German, who wore heavy boots and a triangular headscarf in all weathers. The war had driven her from one country after ano
ther until she fetched up in England in 1946. She had no friends, no homeland, her family was scattered and she had no-one at all to love except our Wessex saddlebacks on whom she lavished titbits and affection, treating them more like dogs than pigs.

  ‘Komm spazieren,’ she would say, opening the doors of their sties and leading them off for a walk in the wood as no doubt she had done before she was chased from her home. We all did our best to cheer her up, but when she developed a hacking tubercular cough the doctor sent her to hospital in Hereford, and we never saw her again.

  Sadder still was the history of Valerie, thin, tense, and brittle, who had been married to a German and trapped in Berlin throughout the war. In a terrible week of violence that nearly unhinged her mind, her husband had been killed, her baby murdered and she herself raped by the invading Russians.

  Mummy treated her with great kindness, but I used to hear her sobbing at night in the room next to mine, and very early one morning she appeared staring-eyed at my door, telling me to wake my parents because she had taken poison by mistake.

  I think that in fact she had tried to commit suicide, deliberately swallowing a number of the bright blue tablets containing arsenic which were then used to protect the turkeys from a disease called blackhead. These tablets were so big that you couldn’t possibly take them by mistake – or, as she later claimed, confuse them with aspirin. Whether she then regretted what she had done, or whether it was simply a cry for help was never clear, but the hospital flashed into action with a stomach pump, and she survived, but the incident had broken Mummy’s nerve and Valerie, too, vanished from the farming scene.

  Now and again, though, a girl would take to life at Fforest Farm like a duck to water, marry into the neighbourhood, and become a friend for life. One such success story was sweet-natured Liz, who came to work for us less for love of farming life than the tempting words ‘own horse welcome,’ in the advertisement in Horse and Hound.

  We all goggled when the horse in question backed stiffly down the ramp of the enormous lorry Liz had hired to transport her, because unquestionably no less suitable animal for riding on the hill had ever been seen at Fforest Farm. King’s Bounty was an enormous bony dark-brown thoroughbred mare of impeccable lineage, incurably lame, and disfigured by a swollen hock with a weeping, granulated wound on the front of it. With a cynicism which did him (or her) no credit at all, the stud owner who had been Liz’s former employer had made her a present of this poor wreck of a once-great mare.

  ‘They were going to put her down, so I said I’d have her,’ Liz explained, but Mummy said to me privately that she thought it disgraceful that anyone should have foisted such a burden of worry and expense on to a girl of eighteen.

  Bounty took up residence in the temporarily empty bullpen, standing there patiently all winter with her aristocratic head propped on the gate, and her bony rump protruding from the biggest New Zealand rug the saddler in Builth could provide. Every day Liz would carefully dress the wound on her hock, but it never healed, nor did the swelling go down. She was a sad sight. One holidays when I came home from school it was a relief to find that Bounty was gone from the bullpen, and I guess that at last either Mummy or the vet had managed to persuade Liz that it was kinder to have her put down.

  With four children at different schools and another on the way, Mummy needed help indoors as well as out, and for five years a loosely-connected string of Swiss au-pairs, each of whom introduced her successor, did much to keep the show on the road.

  Neat, bustling, downright Hanni, first of the line, had a strong sense of self-worth. ‘Madame, dans la maison, je sais tout faire,’ she announced unequivocally when questioned about her domestic skills, and we soon discovered this was no idle boast. She could cook, wash, iron, clean, teach, draw, knit, sew, whip up a costume for the Nativity play or a souffle for supper with equal ease, and speak four languages fluently.

  A hard act to follow, we all thought, but her willowy brunette friend Lisa who replaced her was nearly as competent and a junior ski champion to boot. And so was lovely lively Engadin-born Nellie, and her more bookish cousin Anita who came the following year.

  The only Swiss au-pair who didn’t quite come up to scratch was Dora, clumsy and short-sighted (or perhaps clumsy because of her short sight) whose major drawback was a problem with BO – she was what Daddy described as ‘a bit pouffy.’ But by the time Dora was due to leave, Gerry and I were away at school and childcare had returned to an acceptable level, so she was not replaced and thereafter both Gaytons and Fforest Farm were nanny-free zones.

  While reconstruction work went on in the farmhouse, we camped by the Colwyn brook, which was agreeable but midgy. Hours were spent damming the narrows with stones and sods of turf, expending vast amounts of energy in the hope of creating trout-pools, but in vain. No matter how carefully the dam was plugged, water always managed to find a way through and the level remained unchanged.

  So much time is spent in simply maintaining life – by which I mean keeping warm, dry, clean and fed – while camping, that there never seemed to be a moment’s peace. Toiling up the steep fields between camp and the farm buildings in order to fetch milk and other supplies was a chore which we were supposed to do in rotation but all tried to escape, with the predictable result that Gerry, who was not only the strongest but had the keenest sense of duty, ended up doing most of the fetching and carrying.

  Inside the tents was cool and dark and after a morning milking or pucking stones I would have liked nothing better than to lie on my campbed and read for the rest of the day, but that was not an option. Though Mummy’s maternal ancestors had been glamorously bohemian artists and craftsmen, on her father’s side she descended from a line of sporting parsons and missionaries, and it must have been one of these who instilled in her the conviction that reading novels in the daytime was so deeply – even wickedly –self indulgent that it amounted to a sin.

  This was a problem, since I was already hopelessly addicted to reading. Books were my feste Burg, my certain refuge when real life became boring or difficult. Quality didn’t matter. I could be just as happy with the most unutterable rubbish as with a good novel, but without a book on the go I felt – and still do feel – incomplete and uneasy.

  ‘All right, darling?’ Mummy had once asked when I was quite small, coming to tuck me up when we were staying in a strange house.

  ‘Yes, but I aren’t awfully interested in the Oxford English Dictionary,’ I am alleged to have answered, so evidently the rot had already set in. Now I was eleven she would have much preferred me to spend my holidays engaged in vigorous physical activity rather than lolling about reading.

  ‘Just going to clean my saddle,’ I would mutter, stuffing a fat Enid Blyton under my jersey and heading for the dark stables. Above the stalls was an old loft with a few musty haybales, and there I would take refuge, ears pricked for a scrunch on the chippings which had replaced the mud round the house, and keeping a wary eye on a knothole which commanded the yard.

  Sometimes several of us went up there to play Monopoly, a game for ever associated in my mind with grit and hayseeds, but this was risky because any outburst of giggling or chat might give away our position, and there weren’t many secret yet relatively comfortable hideyholes about the farmyard. It was a wet summer, and reading out of doors was hardly possible, while reading by torchlight after dark soon made my eyes ache.

  Our camp by the stream came to an abrupt conclusion. After a day of relentless drizzle, it was Mummy’s agreeable habit to check the money in her bag, say decisively, ‘When all else fails…’ and bundle us into the Hillman shooting brake for an evening of smoky, blissfully warm entertainment at the Castle cinema in Builth, then a fuggy fleapit of the first order but with a good line in cowboy films.

  Munching fish and chips off our laps, we would sit in the prim and proper single seats of the third row, occasionally turning to watch the antics of snoggers in the double-seated back rows, where stifled squeals and wild bursts of hil
arity were referred to in family-speak as ‘slap-and-tickle in the two-and-ninepennies.’

  The programme started with a warm-up B-film of extreme banality, followed by a roll of drums heralding, The Gaumont British News – presenting The World to The World! Stiff, clipped, voices would then deliver a few uplifting stories – new tankers launched by Royalty, politicians on the stump, the result of major sporting events – the pictures accompanied by a series of dreadful puns to show the Gaumont news-editors were not entirely devoid of humour, then the lights would go up in the auditorium, the back-row snoggers would adjust their clothes, and we would race down the aisle to be first in the queue for ice-creams and Smith’s Crisps. At long last, when the lights dimmed again, the main feature would begin to roll.

  That particular evening, there were water-splashes across the road in several places as we drove home, but it wasn’t until Mummy’s torch picked out the shine of water below us that we realised quite how much it had rained since we left. All the tents were awash to the brailing, with our bedding, clothes, books and campbeds floating about, and what had been a tranquil meandering brook had turned into a raging white-capped torrent.

  Soaked and shivering, we grabbed armfuls of possessions and stumbled back up the hill to the Fforest, where we slept on sacks and car-rugs on the bare boards of the upstairs rooms, with the spaniel puppies, Punch and Judy, curled in the angle of our knees like hotwater bottles.

  Another blissful year at Old Dalby followed, but alas, with no-one older to squash me I was growing ever more bumptious and naughty, and every term was marred by at least one disgraceful episode.

  At Hallowe’en I waited until everyone was in bed, then stole out to the stables, draped Taffy in sheets with a pillowcase with holes in it over her head, and led her up the dimly lit wide shallow double-staircase to the half-landing.