A Year in the Life of the Yorkshire Shepherdess

by Amanda Owen

  I bit my tongue. I didn’t like Clive saying such things about Queenie and Princess, but I knew what he was trying to do.

  ‘I’ll be t’judge o’ that,’ said my unwanted visitor. ‘C’mon, Billy, let’s ga an’ ave a look.’

  Billy lumbered out of the Transit, shoving his phone in his back pocket and pulling his vest down over his hairy, protruding beer gut. I looked at Clive, and he looked back at me. As the pair set off towards the gate, I grabbed Clive’s arm, pulling him back.

  ‘Yer not really gonna let ’em take ’er, are yer?’ I whispered.

  ‘Eh?’ he said.

  ‘They’re not ’avin mi ’orse, not whatever,’ I said defiantly.

  ‘I just don’t want any trouble. An’ you’re in no state to argue,’ he said, for I too had a protruding belly, but for entirely different reasons to Billy’s.

  Billy and his friend were talking and looking up the field. Queenie was now standing squarely on top of the hill, staring back, oblivious to the fact that her circumstances could be about to change – and not for the better. Princess was nestled in at her side. Clive and I went over.

  ‘My missus ’ere says that she’d rather not part with ’er ’orse,’ he said.

  I was getting angry now; maybe my pregnancy hormones were causing me to be a little more overwrought than usual, or maybe it was just the tougher side of my upbringing in Huddersfield. I flew mad at them. I swore, a stream of words coming out of me that I don’t normally use. I told them in no uncertain terms that they must leave and they’d not be taking my horse with them.

  Clive looked embarrassed as I carried on ranting.

  ‘Look lads,’ he interjected. ‘You’ll lose t’foal if yer tek ’er and don’t bottle-feed ’er and yer mare’ll nivver breed agin, yer’ll end up wi’ nowt.’

  He was right.

  ‘An’ you need to calm down an’ all,’ he said to a red-faced me. ‘Or you’ll end up foalin’.’

  He turned back to the two men.

  ‘What if I load yer up wi’ a few bales o’ hay for t’winter, and let’s be calling this matter closed.’

  After a quick discussion an agreement was reached: a trailer full of hay would calm the waters, and they would report back to their employer that Queenie was at death’s door. No hands were shaken – that’s what gentlemen do, and these chaps didn’t fit into that category.

  I stood with my hands on my hips, my eyes narrowed and a scowl on my face while they backed their trailer up to the barn. Clive threw the bales down from the mew (stack) and loaded them up. Nothing more was said, and it was only as I watched them trundle down our road that I began to feel shaky.

  ‘Yer dozy mare, you could ’ave gotten me a good kickin’ there,’ Clive said, frowning at me. Then he smiled: ‘Even I were scared o’ yer for a moment there.’

  The funny thing is that Princess has turned out to be a very good horse, really blossoming, with the beige turning black, her body filling out, with a full, thick tail and heavily set. She has all of Queenie’s attributes. Her only real failing is her ability to get dirty. Not all horses are the same when it comes to the call of nature, which you soon discover when you have stables to muck out. Josie and Queenie would do their droppings all in the same place, around the side of the stable, nice and easy to shovel out and never, ever would they lie in the poop. Meg and Princess were a different kettle of fish, both making a terrible mess in their stables. But Princess would also lie and roll in it. Every night I had to bank up the walls of the stable with straw to prevent Princess getting cast, stuck on her back during the night.

  One morning I got Princess out of the stable in a terrible state. I said to Clive, ‘I’m gonna pressure-wash Princess.’

  ‘Yer can’t pressure-wash an ’orse,’ Clive said.

  ‘Well, the sheep don’t mind their faces an’ legs being washed with it. They prefer it to the cold-water hosepipe, so I’m gonna give it a go,’ I said.

  I turned the water to warm, turned the pressure right down – and she loved it. She looked terrific, but of course it didn’t last long, and she was as dirty as ever within a couple of days.

  There have been times when the little ones have been playing in muddy places, with the mud slowly migrating up the insides of their leggings from their wellies until their whole lower half is covered, when the easiest solution is to lay the clothes out in the yard and blast the muck off with the pressure washer, one side and then the other. I have, so far, resisted the urge to do this with the children inside, but who knows, one day . . .

  Not long after this incident, Josie foaled prematurely. The weather had improved, so we had turned her to the moor bottom, bringing her into the stable every night. One day we saw her looking over the wall into the High Bobby Dale, taking great interest in Queenie’s foal. We didn’t realize the significance until teatime, when there was no sign of Josie at the moor gate. She usually made her way back here knowing that her warm, cosy stable was waiting, with a bowl of soaked sugar beet and a full hay net. The weather was fine and I had no worries about her spending the night outside, but it did seem a little odd, as the other horses were all in the vicinity.

  ‘She’ll ’ave broken away from t’others to foal,’ said Clive.

  ‘She’s not due yet,’ I said. ‘I’ll go on t’bike an’ see if I can see ’er.’

  Up the beck and then climbing out on the top of Robert’s Seat, I looked down upon Ravenseat, scanning the hollows and ghylls for any sign of Josie. The only places that I couldn’t see were the steep edges below me, and in order to survey them I had to go right up to the High Force waterfall and the Graining Scars and cross onto the other side of the valley. Traversing the steep slopes carefully, about two miles from home I found evidence: a fresh placenta, still slightly warm to the touch. At least I now knew that she’d foaled and that she must be in close proximity as obviously she couldn’t have travelled far with a newborn foal in tow. Switching the bike’s engine off, I looked around, but all I saw were sheep moving here and there, and rabbits darting in and out of the bracken patches, occasionally raising a pheasant that chattered as it took to the sky. On a hillock some distance below was a circular stone stell, where once sheep would have been gathered to shelter from a storm – some stells even having adjoining little stone buildings where a shepherd, too, could sit out bad weather.

  In this stell I could see Josie. I was amazed she had managed to squeeze through the small wicket gate, but there she was, right in the middle. I was looking down on her skewbald, tabletop back, and occasionally she’d put her head up, look around, then duck down again out of sight. I assumed she was tending to her foal. Off I went, down the hill, on foot now. When I reached the wall of the stell I peeped over the top. Josie stood guard over a beautiful bay foal with black points which was sitting in front of her, long legs neatly folded under, a slender neck and a contented expression on her neat little face. She was certainly before her time, premature, a lot smaller than she should have been. The giveaway was her dome-shaped head, common in premature animals. Slowly and quietly I made my way into the stell and towards the foal, who now got to her feet falteringly. Josie, completely ignoring me, nickered quietly to her, all her attention on her newborn. The foal, a filly, had suckled, and Josie, although a first-time mother, was clearly doing well.

  I knew that it would be impossible to walk them back to the farm: it was much too far for the foal, and over difficult terrain. After taking a picture of mother and daughter to show Clive and the children, I set off back uphill to the bike. My advanced state of pregnancy meant that it tired me plenty, and I was puffing and panting. I decided that the best course of action would be to take Raven with me on the bike the following day and let her slowly walk the mare back to Ravenseat while the foal (which we named Della) followed on behind.

  It took two days to get the pair back home: when the foal got tired we’d stop, then return a little later and walk a bit further. By the time we were all back in the yard, a welcoming commit
tee had assembled.

  ‘Ooh, now she’s a bit smart . . .’ said Miles.

  ‘She’s gotten a white foot,’ said Edith. ‘There’s a poem about that, but I can’t remember it.’

  ‘One white hoof, buy it; two, try it; three, suspect it; four, reject it!’ I said, smiling. ‘That means Della is a keeper.’

  ‘Nah,’ said Clive. ‘One white foot, keep her not a day; two white feet, send her far away; three white feet, sell her to a friend; four white feet, keep her to the end. Looks like we’re gonna sell ’er,’ he said smugly.

  ‘A good ’orse is nivver a bad colour,’ said Raven, who can be annoyingly wise beyond her years sometimes.

  At one point we almost lost Della thanks to Keith the Beef’s destructive behaviour. One day Raven reported that the pony was missing. A full search party of children set off, and eventually they found her laid out in a seave bed, one of her hind legs caught up in a wire fence that Keith had brought down. Quick-thinking Raven sat on her neck talking to her and calming her, preventing her from struggling, trying to get up and injuring herself, while Reuben ran back to the farmhouse for wire cutters.

  ‘Bloody bull,’ I muttered as I cut through the wire, with Josie standing close watching us.

  So that is how we came to have seven horses – well over quota, as Clive tells me to limit them to two. The number was soon to increase when we took pity on a small, undernourished colt yearling that had been abandoned in a field belonging to one of our friends. We called him Bert. He came to us as a ragged, pot-bellied, timid little chap and left us a year later as a lithe, fit and frisky fellow – leaving his mark in more ways than one. After an initial wormer dose and a few weeks of intensive feeding, we turned him loose into one of the allotments, the rougher grazing suiting him well, and he fairly blossomed. Every day we’d look across from the bottom of the farmyard and see him, a solitary figure, grazing amongst the tussocks contentedly. Then one day there was no sign of him. It didn’t take long to locate him, as the commotion could be heard from the kitchen door, a cacophony of squealing and whinnying. Bert had either found a gap or made a gap in the wall and had decided to investigate what lay beyond the confines of the allotment. The old adage about the grass being greener on the other side was true for Bert, because he found some new companions: Queenie, Josie and the foals, old Meg, Little Joe and Folly.

  It wasn’t an easy job persuading Bert to leave his new friends, but eventually we corralled him and put him in a stable until we could wall the gap and make the allotment secure again. The whole episode was forgotten until about six months later, when we began to notice that both Meg and Queenie were looking rather rotund. Bert’s foray into their territory was the only possible explanation. A visit from the vet confirmed what we already suspected: Meg and Queenie, both of whom should have known better, were in the family way.

  ‘I din’t think that Bert ’ad it in ’im,’ I said to Clive.

  Meg hadn’t bred for six years: Josie was her last foal. She had run with stallions since then but had never got in foal, so I had decided that she was past it. Queenie, meanwhile, had a foal at foot but she, too, was long in the tooth and was going to be retired from breeding. Somehow Bert had impregnated them both in the half a day that he’d spent with them.

  ‘I don’t know how he physically managed it,’ I said to Clive. ‘No way is he tall enough to . . . yer know . . .’

  ‘Where there’s a will there’s a way,’ said Clive, and he reckons to know these things. ‘He’ll ’ave cornered ’em both on an ’ill end somewhere.’

  You’d have thought that the two ladies-in-waiting would have got on well together, but that was not to be. Meg hated Queenie, and the feeling was mutual. When I first introduced Queenie to the herd I fully expected bickering and in-fighting, a power struggle of sorts until the pecking order was established. But what actually happened was that Meg, the sweet and gentle mare that she was, morphed into a malicious, biting, kicking, downright nasty piece. They’d both pull terrible faces, baring teeth, ears flattened back to their heads. All-out war would be declared. Meg won every time, because she was the matriarch, the leader. Poor Queenie was completely ostracized. This could have caused endless problems if they had been confined to a small field, but fortunately where they grazed in the allotments and at the moor there was plenty of room for both of them to go about their daily business without coming into close contact with each other.

  Meg foaled first, a colt we called Spirit. She milked him well, and the mischievous little chap has always been a character. The children rode Meg bareback around the farm, and Spirit followed along, occasionally nipping at the children’s heels when Meg stopped for a bite of grass. When Sidney took a scoop full of pony nuts into the field for Meg, she hoovered them up before Spirit ever got a look-in. But he would take great delight in picking the empty scoop up in his teeth and tossing it into the air, over and over again. As Sidney tried to retrieve the scoop to take it back to the feed store, Spirit moved it further from his grasp.

  We knew that Queenie, too, would foal at roughly the same time, so we were on the lookout. We put her into the Low Bobby Dale, right in front of the farmhouse door so we could monitor her. Sure enough, the following Sunday we saw the telltale sign of an imminent foaling: tiny drops of waxy colostrum on her teats. It was a glorious June evening and the air was warm, just a gentle breeze keeping the midges at bay. We ate our tea outside on a picnic bench, watching Queenie over in the field, her tail swishing as she traipsed around, never settling. There could have been no finer time or place for her to have brought new life into the world. We lingered outside until dusk, just talking.

  ‘When’s t’foal gonna come?’ asked Edith, perched with Violet on the wall, watching Queenie.

  ‘Not long,’ I said.

  ‘Likely tonight,’ said Clive.

  Eventually I chased the children off to their beds, ignoring their arguments that they weren’t tired.

  ‘School in t’morning an’ mebbe a new foal too,’ I said.

  When all was quiet, everyone in their cots, in just my nightdress and bare feet I took a stroll across the field to see Queenie.

  ‘A foal for you in t’morning,’ I said. ‘And I promise it’ll be yer last.’

  It had never been the plan to get her in foal again, but I saw it as a blessing rather than a misfortune. I left her to it.

  The bedroom curtains are never closed at Ravenseat. The sun rises in the east over the Close Hills, the early-morning shafts of light radiating the long length of the arched staircase window and into the house, rousing us all. I padded across to the bedroom window, rubbing my eyes. Queenie stood in the corner of the field, her head lowered.

  ‘No foal,’ I said to Clive. I was worried.

  ‘Really? Well, I think that we need to be ’avin a look,’ he said, rapidly pulling on his clothes. We were both dressed and downstairs in minutes.

  ‘Fetch a halter,’ he said. ‘We need a hod of ’er.’

  We hurried across to her.

  ‘Shove ’er towards t’wall, I don’t wanna get kicked,’ he said. ‘Yer gonna ’ave to hold her tight whilst I feel what’s goin’ on.’

  I slipped the halter over her head; she never moved. We were both well versed in complications of labour, but only in bovine and ovine patients – never before had we had any trouble with an equine labour. I held the end of Queenie’s tail aside, and the halter too, whilst Clive investigated.

  ‘Nay, things ain’t as they should be,’ said Clive, frowning. ‘It’s comin’ wrang. It’s definitely backwards – I can feel a tail.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ I said. I knew that this was a bad thing where horses were concerned. A breech presentation of a calf or lamb was manageable, but an unborn foal has particularly long legs, making for a difficult delivery. Unborn lambs and calves can also tolerate being stuck for a while, but an unborn foal quickly succumbs to stress.

  ‘We need a vet . . . and sharpish,’ Clive said.

  ‘I’ll ring
’em, it’s out o’ hours but there’ll be a vet on call,’ I said, loosening the halter, slipping it off and putting it on the wall top. ‘There’s nowt we can do until t’vet gets ’ere.’

  Queenie was still standing dejectedly by the wall as we both hurried back to the farmhouse. Sarah, the vet, said she would be with us in half an hour. In the meantime the older children, dressed ready for school, were sworn to secrecy about the problem. The little ones breakfasted in their pyjamas, oblivious to the tragedy that was unfolding.

  After what seemed like forever we saw Sarah’s estate car coming down the road. Clive filled buckets with warm water and the three of us set off back towards Queenie, armed with ropes and a tack box full of different implements. Queenie hadn’t moved since we’d left her. Once again I put the halter on her, and Sarah began her examination.

  ‘Yes, yer right, it’s coming backwards,’ she said, adding that it would be extremely unlikely that we’d get a live foal in this situation. ‘But we don’t know for sure. I’ll do my best.’

  The foal needed to be pushed forward so that the rear legs could be brought up from below and unfolded into a position in which it could be delivered. There was not a lot of room for manoeuvre, but working very skilfully and bringing one leg up at a time, Sarah eventually managed it. Tying a rope to each of the hind feet, she started to pull. A lot of strength was needed, and Clive took over pulling on one of the ropes. Queenie lay down at this point and I knelt beside her head, stroking her gently as she pushed in silence. Clive and Sarah pulled; I concentrated on her morale. ‘C’mon, Queenie,’ I said. ‘C’mon.’

  Moments later, the foal arrived. Pulling it quickly away from Queenie, the filly was laid out on the grass. I hoped beyond hope that there would be signs of life, but Sarah hunched over the newborn, then turned to me and shook her head. Clive stood, hands on hips, looking down on what could have been. Queenie exhaled and sighed. Tears welled up in my eyes.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Sarah said. ‘The foal was already dead, been dead a little while.’