‘If you want hardy cattle, you should try Galloways, or Luings. Or better still, Irish Angus crosses. Anything but bad-tempered daft little Dexters.’
It seemed too prosaically agricultural and unromantic to buy Aberdeen Angus heifers out of mothers that were commercial dairy cows, when I could have something from the Scottish Islands specially bred from the hardy Highland cow crossed with a Scotch Beef Shorthorn bull, beautiful and one of the oldest English breeds. And it would allow me the excuse of a trip to the island of Luing, where the Cadzow brothers had recently developed the breed. So I phoned them one day and was so encouraged by my conversation that I set off next morning to drive to Oban to catch the ferry. All on an impulse. I was twenty, ambitious and indestructible.
I don’t remember much about the journey, or where I stayed on the way, although I do remember being excited to be off on such a trip, driving up the clanking metal ramp onto the little island ferry across the Cuan Sound from the Isle of Seil. I also remember the wild island scenery and the surprisingly comfortable stone house on what I thought of then as the edge of the known world.
The Cadzows proudly showed me their eponymous cattle on the island. The animals were hardy and hairy from their mothers and brown and deep cherry roan from their fathers, a sure indicator of succulent marbling fat running through the muscles and with a range of creamy colours to complement the red. Docile and thrifty, these were attractive cattle. Heifers were available to ship down to Cumberland. The Cadzows were enthusiastic about selling their new breed into the west Cumberland hills. I must have given the impression that I wanted to establish a pedigree herd and I remember they invited me to stay the night. I drove home the next day in sheeting rain, all the way from Oban to Lorton, only stopping for petrol, in my Renault 4 with the soft top that rolled up like a sardine tin. The little windscreen wipers barely kept pace with the deluge. I had energy to burn in those days.
I phoned my cousin next morning and told him I had decided to start a pedigree herd of Luings. I’d selected a few heifers and a bull – or rather, the Cadzows’ herdsman had told me which were the best and I had neither the knowledge nor the confidence to argue with him.
‘What? You’ve done what?’ he shouted down the phone.
‘You suggested I should consider Luings. So I’ve been to see them and I like them.’
‘What do you know about pedigree cattle breeding?’
‘Not much – as yet,’ I replied, hurt by his straightforward reply. ‘But I can learn … and they’re perfect for my rough land. They’ll live outside all year and trample down the chest-high bracken.’
His next words were the second lesson I learned in my early farming life, which I have never forgotten.
‘Stop trying to be a clever Dick. Are there any other herds of Luings in your part of Cumberland?’
I had to admit mine would be the first.
‘Do you know why?’ He didn’t give me time to answer. ‘Because they’re not the right cattle for your land. Watch what people round about you are doing and do the same, only do it better. Ring up Jimmy Connon in Dublin and order thirty of his black bulling heifers. That’s the best advice I can give you. And forget about exotic pedigree cattle. It’s the quickest way to lose a good deal of money – money I know you haven’t got.’
He gave me a phone number in Dublin and ended the call with ‘His brother has three dress shops in Carlisle and Penrith and he’s a dead straight decent fellow. Tell him I told you to phone him.’
The Irish voice on the other end of the line was courteous and delightful. ‘If John’s your cousin, that’s good enough for me. How many do you want?’
I told him thirty and he said he was off on a buying trip ‘out west’ in a few days and would ‘be honoured to act’ for me – like an old-fashioned solicitor.
About a fortnight later – it was September time – I received a phone call.
‘James Connon here. I have a consignment of fine cattle leaving Dublin on the tide tomorrow night. Your heifers will be part of it. The boat will dock at Silloth next day in the late afternoon. I’ve arranged haulage. The lorry is scheduled to deliver the beasts to you in the early evening, God willing, but the driver is instructed to phone you when he is due to leave the docks.’
John had warned me not to talk money with Connon because he might be insulted, so I didn’t dare ask the price. I was told later that he worked entirely on trust. Nothing was ever written down. The amount he charged was based on the medieval notion of the just price. He paid a fair price for the cattle he bought from small farms all over Ireland and added a percentage to cover his costs and leave him with a reasonable profit. But he was concerned to ensure that his customers also made a profit. ‘You should be content with your share of the profit and always leave the next man his share’ was one of John’s maxims that his Irish cattle dealer friend applied scrupulously.
The haulier phoned two nights later, just as it was getting dark. I knew him well. He was one of the brothers who owned the business. He had been carting livestock to and from farms all over Cumberland and Westmorland since he had been old enough to drive a wagon, and he knew every farmer for a hundred miles around. He even knew the layout of their farms and the field names. He had loaded two artics with black cattle from the boat at Silloth and estimated that he would be with me about ten o’clock on his way to Penrith. I told him which field I wanted them in and said I would keep an eye out for him so I could give him a hand.
It was after ten when the heavily laden lorry pulled up on the roadside beside the field gate with a hiss of brakes. The driver climbed down from the high cab and came round the side of the huge two-tiered lorry, cattle breath steaming from the vents in the sides, to let down the ramp.
‘I put yours on last so they’d be first off. They’re a nice quiet lot of heifers.’
We opened the folding gates inside and stood back in the road with our sticks and arms raised to make sure that when the animals ventured out they would turn into the field. One or two, braver than the rest, put their heads down and snuffled at the ramp with wet noses; once one had put a tentative hoof on the shiny metal, some of the others followed, startling themselves with their own clattering, jumping the last few feet onto the soft earth. Then the rest of the bewildered and bedraggled heifers came out of the dark recesses of the lorry and gingerly stepped onto English soil for the first time.
Once they had all been unloaded, they milled around, confined by the stone walls of the lane that led to the field that was to be their new home. They still had enough energy to trot round the boundaries in the moonlight and inspect the extent of their domain before resolving themselves into a herd on the hillock in the middle of the field. Their eyes flashed in the beam of my torch as I left them for the night.
Early next morning I slipped into yesterday’s clothes and hurried up the field to inspect my new responsibilities. It was a still late-summer morning. Mist hung about the fell tops and the nip of autumn was in the air; a heavy dew had drenched the coarse tufts of foggage that had grown uneaten since I had taken a crop of hay a couple of months earlier.
A few of the heifers had found their way through the open gate into the bottom field and were grazing methodically, but the others had not dared to leave the familiarity of the higher field where I had left them the previous night. Some were still sitting down with their front legs neatly folded under them like dogs. Others were standing, conscientiously licking themselves clean of the muck and sweat and sawdust of their ordeal. They stopped what they were doing and stared at me as I approached quietly. I didn’t want to alarm them. Considering what they had been through, they were surprisingly calm, self-possessed even.
Half a dozen sported big yellow flexible plastic ear tags with black numbers painted on them, and I presumed they had come from the same farm. Others were untagged, while one or two had a neat hole, about the size of a five pence piece, punched through one ear. This was in the days before it became compulsory to tag calves at
birth in both ears.
Looking a bit closer, beyond these first obvious distinguishing features, I began to see them as individuals. This one had a wide muzzle and broad head – a sign of a good milker, John claimed; that one had a narrower muzzle with more of a tuft of black hair on the top of its head. Another was shorter in the leg than the others. Yet another was thicker set, with big soulful brown eyes. One thing they all had in common was that they were smaller and thinner than I had imagined – ‘clapped like kippers’, as John had warned me they would be. But they clearly formed a herd: all polled and black, some with little patches of white here and there – a blaze on the forehead, or a sock, or a few white hairs in the tip of the tail.
I was immensely pleased with my new purchases – they were the first cattle I had ever owned and the beginning of my herd. As I tiptoed back to the house for breakfast, relieved that, so far, they had all survived the journey, the sun was coming up on a new world.
I returned a couple of times that day to see how they were getting on, and each time they had spread out a bit further. The grass was still flattened in the places where they had lain all night, but there were signs of more of them venturing into the bottom field during the day: here and there tufts of grass had been cropped, there were tracks in the grass left by their hooves, and sloppy cow muck.
The art of keeping domestic animals is to work with their natural inclinations, to guide their instincts and not to try to dominate or force them into unnatural courses; lead, don’t drive, as John was at pains to advise me. Calm handling is the key to a relationship with any animal.
As the days passed, my herd settled down. I got to know them and they got to know me. Some would come when I walked amongst them and try to rasp me with their great slobbering black and pink tongues; others wanted to have their backs rubbed with my stick just above their tails. That’s what a stockman’s stick is, an extension of his arm. Others kept their distance but began to trust me, and no longer looked alarmed when I walked into the field. What was more gratifying was that they began to accept my collie dog when she came with me, so long as she stayed at my heel. If we got separated, some of the cattle would trot after her and try to chase her away. She resented this but was too clever to run off. She would lie still until they ventured close enough for her to bite them on the nose.
Gradually I came to realize that these were special cattle. John was right: they were just the ones for me. And if I hadn’t had him to guide me, I don’t suppose I would ever have known to buy them.
We had an unusually warm autumn that year and the grass grew well into October. After supper, I would put on my wellingtons, light my pipe and amble across the fields to see how the heifers were doing. They came alive in the early evening after a couple of hours resting to chew the cud, and started to graze with some determination. They seemed to enjoy cropping the wet grass after a day’s rain. It must have tasted as good as it looked: clean and fresh, particularly when the late-evening sunlight reflected off the droplets of moisture making them sparkle like jewels. It was pleasure almost too painful to acknowledge just to stand in my field, leaning on my crook, collie dog at my feet, and watch them curling their tongues round the grass, tearing at it in great mouthfuls, as the last autumn light faded across my farm.
CHAPTER 10
To Hereford, to Hereford, to Buy a Big Bull
IF THEY WERE ever going to fulfil their purpose and breed beef, I had to get a bull for my little herd of heifers. They were sucklers, cattle kept for rearing calves for beef. These are distinct from dairy cattle, whose calves are a by-product of their main purpose, which is to produce milk. The dairy cow has to have a calf every year or so, to stimulate lactation, but it is reared separately from its mother. Almost immediately after birth, dairy calves are trained to take milk from a bucket. If they are left to suckle their mothers, it becomes the devil’s own job to get them onto the bucket afterwards.
But my heifers were going to rear their own calves. They would grow much quicker suckling their mothers and would make much better beef. Besides which, being beef cattle, the mothers would only have enough milk for their own calf but none to spare.
‘These are good heifers. What were you going to do about a bull?’ John asked when he had pronounced himself satisfied with Jimmy Connon’s consignment.
‘I thought I’d use AI,’ I replied a little tentatively. ‘I want to use a decent bull on them and I can’t afford fancy prices.’
Not for the last time, John scoffed at one of my suggestions.
‘Catching these things bulling isn’t going to be easy, but it’ll be a piece of cake compared with getting them into the yard, on your own, to wait for the AI man. Forget it. You need a bull. A Hereford bull. They get small calves, which makes for easier calving.’
With typical generosity, he said he happened to be going to the bull sale in Hereford next week, and asked whether I might like to go with him. I never knew whether he was going because he wanted a bull, or whether he was doing it for me. He might just have wanted an excuse for a trip away. He loved travelling all over the country to sales and shows and NFU meetings. He went every year to Smithfield fatstock show, where he had exhibited cattle and sheep over the years; he knew just about every British farmer worth knowing from his days as NFU county chairman and he had an astonishingly wide circle of friends, national and international.
So it was that I found myself on the way to Hereford early one autumn morning, with John driving at his usual furious pace in his overheated car. I’ve noticed, over the years, that many people who work outside seem to like a hot car – and a hot house – and John was a notable example. He had booked us into a B&B. The only thing I remember now about our stay was being slightly perturbed by the sight in the morning of John’s hairy, muscular white torso with his strong forearms and neck coloured deep brown with a farmer’s tan, and his white pate leaning over the washbasin while he was shaving. He was over thirty years older than me and I hadn’t been so close to an older man’s naked torso before. My father was rather fastidious about nakedness, and he was blonde anyway, and much less hairy, so seeing John with his shirt off made a strong impression on me.
I remember it was raining when we left the guest house and drove to the mart. Inside the building, steam rose from the wet cattle and damp farmers and gave a pungency to the air that permeated the whole building. We made for the stalls to inspect the bulls tied up there, being pampered and brushed. The parts of a Hereford that ought to be white, principally the face, dewlap and socks, were being washed, blanched and preened. There was a buzz of excitement.
John was hailed loudly in Welsh by a florid, powerfully built farmer in late middle age, dressed in a fine tweed three-piece suit and highly polished brown boots. He said he had been a friend of John’s for years and they were clearly delighted to see one another. He offered John an untipped Player’s cigarette from a flat silver case, which John refused saying he’d given up because his body couldn’t take it any more. But he would have a whisky with him if he were to offer. This was the first (at about nine o’clock) of many whiskies pressed on John and me by a cast of farmers and livestock dealers, most of whom greeted John as a long-lost friend.
Whiskies downed, we went back to the cattle, moving slowly behind the bulls, inspecting more closely those that took John’s interest. Some he patted on the rump; he gently lifted the heads of others by crooking a finger through the ring in their nose, exposing their lower lip to inspect their teeth. He seemed to have a knack of calming them, because none put up much resistance. We picked our way amongst the muck and sawdust and people rushing around with buckets of hot soapy water, curry combs, brushes and towels.
One breeder in a long brown coverall coat approached John smiling. ‘Well, well, John Scott! What the hell are you doing here?’ He clasped his hand and wrapped his other arm round his shoulder.
John explained that we were looking for a decent, quiet bull, not too expensive, as this ‘lad’ was just starting out a
nd he hadn’t got much money.
‘You’ve come to the right man. I have just the boy to do the job for you!’
He strode off expecting us to follow him, and stopped behind a bull that was sitting quietly chewing the cud with his eyes closed. He spoke gently – ‘Come on, boy …’ – and pushed at his rump with a boot. With some snorting and blowing the bull reluctantly got to his feet. There was nothing aggressive about this beast. He was as laid-back as a sultan.
‘His father was like that. As quiet as a lamb. But he was very effective.’
John squatted behind the bull and weighing his impressive loose-hanging testicles, one in each hand, palpated them gently. As he straightened up he nodded to the owner to indicate his satisfaction and pushed between our bull and the one tied up next to him and, avoiding a frightening-looking downturned horn, grasped his ring and inspected his teeth.
‘Have a look at these.’ He motioned me to join him at the bull’s head.
Gingerly I pushed through between the other side of our beast and the next one. Our bull’s sleek muscled shoulders came up to my chest and he shifted his weight from one foot to the other as I pushed past him. John held up his head by his ring and pulled down his bottom lip to expose two big teeth in the middle of a row of six smaller ones, all of which evenly opposed the upper dental pad. He pronounced himself impressed.
While sound teeth are important in all grazing animals, they are not as crucial to cattle as they are to sheep. Sheep nibble off the herbage they eat, whereas cattle twist their tongues around the grass, pull it into their mouths and either tear or nip it off. A cow can feed satisfactorily without front teeth so long as the grass is long enough to wrap round its tongue.
Cows also feed relatively quickly, and with their sharp molars roughly chop the grass into pieces small enough to swallow into the rumen, the first stomach, which is a huge factory where billions of bacteria set to work to break down the cellulose into digestible substances. Once its rumen is full, a cow will find somewhere to lie with the rest of the herd and chew the cud. That involves regurgitating the partially broken-down contents of the rumen, and, using their chisel-like molars, grinding the material with a side-to-side motion, mixing it with up to 25 gallons of saliva and alternately swallowing and regurgitating again over a period of hours.
Till the Cows Come Home Page 16