by Amanda Owen
‘Stop it, Mand!’ Clive shouted from the top of the hay mew. ‘Press the bloody stopper.’
‘No, I’ll not,’ I shouted back angrily, cowering at the back of the hay trailer. ‘That chain’s gonna snap and I don’t wanna be near it when it does.’
Smoke began to billow from the engine housing.
‘Shit,’ said Clive.
‘Water – I’m gonna get water, it’s gonna catch fire,’ I shouted. One large bucket of water later, and that was the end of the elevator.
Next came an electric plug-in elevator: worked all right, not temperamental, but also not very powerful. We could only put one bale on at a time, or the chain would stop moving and the bales would slide back down. The main issue, though, was: how many outlying barns have a three-pin power socket?
After the very sad death in 2003 of our dear neighbour Clifford Harker, who lived and farmed at Pry House with his wife Jenny, there was a farm sale of all his equipment. Clifford was a stickler for keeping all his machinery in immaculate condition. When he finished using a particular machine for that year, he cleaned it, oiled it, and then winched it up to the top of his barn so that it was in perfect order next time he wanted it. We never borrowed Clifford’s equipment, because it was always in its original state, mint showroom condition, unlike anything we have at Ravenseat. We knew that if we borrowed it we’d bust it, dent it or ding it. His haybob had every single one of its original tines intact.
After his death Jenny asked us to look after Clifford’s stock trailer, which was quite new and perfect. They’re a target for thieves, who simply reverse up, couple up and drive away, sometimes even loading them up with quad bikes, generators and anything else they find in the yard. Ravenseat is more off the beaten track, and Jenny felt it would be safer with us. She should have known better . . .
It was a standard-size double-decker sheep trailer, and we parked it out of harm’s way at the top of our farmyard. The handbrakes on our trailers never work: they tend to seize up, and nobody gets round to repairing them. So it never crossed my mind to put the brake on Clifford’s trailer. A few nights later we knew a storm was brewing, a heck of a wind was picking up, and we went out to batten down the hatches. The upside of a clashy night is that the draught makes the fire draw nicely, so Clive and I were all set, curtains shut, snuggled up on the sofa in front of a roaring hot fire. The television was out of action, as the wind was moving the satellite dish out of alignment. It was very late, we were sleepy and about to go to bed when there was an almighty crash from outside.
‘What in God’s name was that?’ I said, pulling on my coat that was hanging from the beam above.
‘I’ll look after things ’ere,’ said Clive, not moving.
I pulled on my wellies, switched the light in the yard on and opened the door. There were buckets scattered across the yard; a pair of stinking waterproof leggings that had been hanging on a gate to air were now lying in a crumpled, wet heap by the wall. Anything that hadn’t been anchored down was strewn across the yard. This included one rather big thing that had not been anchored: Clifford’s trailer.
As my eyes adjusted to the darkness away from the farmhouse I saw, at the far end of the yard, the rear end of the trailer. The wind had set it moving, the gradual slope of the yard had increased its speed, and it had come to a halt against the garth wall, the front of the trailer crunched and the drystone wall down.
We were mortified, but Jenny is so kind and gentle, she just said: ‘Oh, Clive . . .’
When it came to the farm sale, everything was immaculate apart from this crunched trailer. ‘Lot number 325,’ the auctioneer shouted. ‘New Ifor Williams trailer, cosmetic damage to the front, sold as seen. Grab yerselves a bargain.’
Clive was at the sale, and he went off with strict instructions: ‘There’s only ya’ thing yer need to buy, an’ that’s Clifford’s elevator.’ It was ancient, but of course brilliantly maintained, and unlike ours, reliable. It really would be a godsend at hay time.
When Clive drove back into the yard, his mood was flat. Not unexpected: farm dispersal sales are never a happy occasion. There is a feeling you are prying and picking through someone else’s possessions, accumulated over a lifetime, and it is the end of a chapter. It feels uncomfortable, and sad.
‘They were sellin’ all t’lal’ stuff an’ I went to get a cup of tea from t’burger van an’ when I got back it’d bin sold,’ he said. He hadn’t expected it to go through the auction so early: most farm sales have hours of selling boxes of sundry bits and pieces before they get to the bigger items.
He has never been allowed to forget it. It’s not just me who says it; everyone who is up here at hay time, struggling to load the bales at the top of the barn, repeats it, like a litany: ‘Yer should ’ave got Clifford’s elevator.’
There is a sense of jubilation, a feeling of immense satisfaction, when the last hay bale has been brought in from the field and mewed into the barn. Hay in the barn is like money in the bank: it is the insurance that we need for the dark winter months when the ground is thick with snow and there is not a bite of grass to eat, when life is hard for both man and beast.
We have a small celebration after hay time, everyone tucking into a good meal, usually outside on the picnic tables. A collection of people who have been involved in the process with bronzed arms, blistered hands and the children with freckled faces all join together to eat and drink while the smell of warm hay on the breeze reminds us of the efforts of the previous weeks.
A couple of years ago, I noticed during our little harvest festival that Sidney didn’t seem to be his normal chirpy self. He’s a stoical, determined little chap normally, but on this occasion seemed quiet. Maybe he was just tired, I thought, or perhaps the sun had got to him. Nothing that a good night’s sleep wouldn’t put right.
He spent the next few days pottering around the farm, playing with the other children, but I could tell that something wasn’t quite right. I made up my mind that if he didn’t rally over the weekend, I’d have him to the doctor’s surgery on the Monday. Sunday was a wet day; the children were confined to barracks and feeling the cold after their days out in the sunshine. As the rain poured, they played quietly, drawing and reading. Sidney was still very withdrawn. I picked him up, cradling him in my arms.
‘Oh, Sidney, what’s up?’ I said. ‘What’s bothering yer?’
He said nothing, but he is never particularly vocal. He put his head back into the crook of my arm and that’s when I saw it: something bright orange right up his left nostril. I walked towards the window to get a better look.
‘Ga’ an’ get yer father,’ I said to Miles. Clive was studying a show catalogue in the kitchen.
‘Tell ’im to bring ’is glasses . . . and a torch.’
By now the children had crowded round to have a look. The foreign body was neon orange, spherical, smaller than a marble and high enough to be invisible without tipping Sidney’s head back. But, thankfully, it had not gone far enough to slip down his throat or windpipe. Clive had a look, glasses perched on the end of his nose.
‘Do yer know owt about this?’ he said, glancing at Reuben, who was shining the torch up Sidney’s nose. Sidney stayed still, occasionally blinking.
‘It . . . erm . . . looks like one o’ them beads frae tha’ necklace,’ Reuben said. He was right: the girls had broken a necklace a few days earlier, and multicoloured beads had showered the living room floor, bouncing this way and that and rolling under the sofa. I’d reckoned I had hoovered them all up . . . but clearly not quite.
‘We’re gonna ’ave to tek ’im to t’hospital,’ Clive said, taking off his glasses and rubbing his forehead.
‘I wonder if we could suck it out with a syringe,’ I said.
‘We could give it a try,’ said Clive.
I laid Sidney on the window seat and fetched a new syringe – we have a supply of them for injecting animals. Sidney stayed still while Clive shone the torch, and I tried to suck the bead out. It was a
doomed mission, as I couldn’t get any suction because there wasn’t a flat surface on the bead.
‘Do you know what?’ said Clive. ‘I reckon yer could work it down from t’outside o’ ’is snout wi’ yer finger.’
Sitting Sidney up, I started by nipping his nostril on the bridge of his nose. Sure enough, with a little manipulation, the bead was dislodged and dropped out onto Sidney’s lap.
‘There, Sidney, look at that,’ I said, picking it up and rolling it around on the palm of my hand. ‘’Ow long ’as that been up there?’
‘A gay while by t’look o’ it,’ muttered Clive, his eyes on the dirty, snot-encrusted bead.
Sidney looked at it, picked it up with his chubby little fingers, clambered down from the window-seat-cum-operating-table and threw it with some force onto the fire.
I felt really bad that I hadn’t noticed it before. But he’d given no indication that there was anything up there, and I can only guess how it got there in the first place. Not long before this incident we’d had another foreign object wedged in a nostril, but on this occasion it was Violet who had a yow roll up her nose. It was a lot more obvious because it was slightly protruding. Yow rolls, made of a mixture of compressed cereals, like sugar beet, smell delicious, but smells can be deceiving and they taste awful. Violet had been sniffing the rolls, maybe a bit too enthusiastically, and had hoovered one up. She was busy extricating it herself when I saw her. It came out easily enough, but we had a conversation about animal food being for animals and not for consumption or inhalation by her.
We make all our own hay and silage, but buy in animal feed and straw. We use the straw to bed up the barns for the cattle, horses and any sheep that are inside in the winter. There are different types of straw: pea, wheat, rape and barley, which is the one we choose because it is more absorbent. We usually buy the straw from a hay and straw dealer called Edwin, who buys it off the field from the arable farmers who bale it and load it directly onto his lorry. Living remotely, it’s often the haulage costs that are the biggest expense but it’s better to buy it at harvest time and fill the barn, rather than wait, as prices can increase as the season goes on. When the weather is good and we are haytiming, the arable farmers are also harvesting their crops, so we usually get a phone call at lunchtime from Edwin to say that there’s a load of straw coming our way if we’re interested.
Edwin is so busy at this time that he calls in other hauliers to help out with deliveries. One glorious summer day a few years ago, one of these hauliers was given the job of delivering a load of big square bales of straw to Ravenseat. We’d met the driver before, a chap called Reg. He was a big hulk of a man, tall and strong, with thick-rimmed glasses, green wellies, a collarless shirt and an old suit jacket, topped off with a very battered straw Panama hat. He wasn’t in the first flush of youth and neither was his lorry, an ancient, faded maroon Foden with ‘Reg, the king of hay and straw’ emblazoned across the front in gilt lettering. We always saw it approaching – or rather, we saw the straw approaching, as the lorry was almost completely hidden under its colossal and precarious-looking load. Reg didn’t do half measures: when he brought you a load of straw, it was always a load and a half.
We’d ordered straw Hesston bales – the big oblong bales about three feet deep, four feet wide and eight feet long, terribly heavy, each weighing about half a ton but relatively easy to stack tightly in the big barn. They are good to split, with layers of straw coming away in canches that can be carried or moved around to the stables in the wheelbarrow.
Reg slowly brought the fully laden lorry into the farmyard, and parked up. Climbing down from the driver’s seat, he took off the straw hat, lobbed it into the cab and mopped his brow with a cotton hanky. ‘Warm enough for yer?’ he said.
‘Grand,’ said Clive, appearing from the barn with Robert, who was helping out that day.
‘I’m gonna get t’kettle on,’ I said, ushering the children into the kitchen. ‘Looks good stuff, by the way.’
‘Aye, it’s as dry as snuff,’ he said, starting to loosen the first of the ratchet straps that held the bales on.
Clive and Robert both stood at the side of the lorry releasing more of the ratchet straps, talking with Reg about the summer, the crop and the weather, and taking time to coil the straps up neatly so they fitted snugly into a box on the side of the lorry.
I went back into the kitchen and started to assemble a tea tray, pouring glasses of cordial for the children and rummaging through a few tins for cakes and biscuits. The kitchen door was open, the children were squabbling among themselves and as I stood chiding them with my back to the door, I heard a muffled thump. I felt the reverberation through the kitchen floor, but I wasn’t alarmed: we usually push the bales off the lorry with the skid-steer loader, then stack them in the barn when the lorry has gone. Then I heard Clive shouting. Turning and going to the door, I saw the bales from the right-hand side of the lorry were now strewn across the yard, but there was no sign of the loader – and there was no sign of Reg. Clive was bent double and yelling at Robert, who was standing, quite dazed, amongst the scattered bales. It didn’t take long to work out what had happened. I stood at the door open-mouthed while Clive and Robert scurried between the bales, shouting: ‘Reg, Reg, where are yer?’
They were moving bales like they weighed nothing, shoving them over and pushing them aside, until eventually they heard the stifled groans of Reg from under a bale.
‘’E’s under this ’un,’ shouted Clive to Robert, as they frantically moved the bales that had pinned Reg to the ground. Finally the last bale was moved to uncover Reg, who was in a terrible state.
Clive hollered to me to ring for an ambulance and then bring some towels. Reg clearly had a head injury: blood was pouring down his face. As he’d been smashed to the ground his scalp had been peeled right back by the roughness of the concrete in the yard, and we could see his skull (‘degloved’ is the technical term I later learned). His face was awash with blood and the obvious thing to do was to push the skin back into place and hold a tea towel over it. This seemed to work, quelling the worst of the bleeding. I tried not to look at it. Reg was conscious, and anxious to be up on his feet. But any movement made him scream out in pain. It was clear his injuries included broken bones.
‘Lie still, Reg,’ Clive said. ‘There’s an ambulance on t’way.’
‘Gimme mi ignition keys,’ demanded Reg. ‘I wanna go ’ome, I don’t need no ambulance.’
He tried again to get up, but the searing pain forced him back down, and I think he finally accepted that he was going nowhere without the ambulance. All we could do was wait. We talked . . . a lot . . . about all sorts, anything to take his mind off the situation and hopefully keep him conscious. How long did your mother live, Reg? How’s the crop this year? Have you any brothers? We covered him with a blanket, because we knew from experience that it takes a long time for an ambulance to reach Ravenseat.
‘What ’appened, Reg?’ asked Clive gently. ‘It didn’t look to be leaning.’
‘Nivver known that to ’ave ’appened before,’ said Reg. ‘The whole side fell off.’
‘One of ’em ’it me in mi back,’ said Clive. ‘Sent mi flyin’.’
One of the top bales had hit Clive hard enough to propel him onto the grassy bank at the side of the yard, but thankfully had not actually landed on him. Robert had been standing nearer the lorry cab and had been out of harm’s way, although he was shocked. I kept going backwards and forwards between the house and Reg, having put the television on for the children to distract them from what was going on outside. Clive was on nursing duty and told me: ‘He says he’d like a drink o’ watter.’
‘Noooo, he can’t ’ave one,’ I said. ‘I think they’ll be wanting to operate on him as soon as they can.’
I was so relieved when I heard the ambulance siren drawing near. It had been a very long forty minutes.
‘Now then, what’s been going on ’ere?’ said the paramedic. Clive explained while Re
g insisted that he just needed patching up and then he’d be on his way.
‘Yer not going anywhere yet, Reg,’ said the paramedic in a matter-of-fact fashion. ‘Yer going to have to lay still whilst we slide this board under you, and only then are you going to go anywhere . . . and that’s to the hospital.’
Manoeuvring him onto the board was clearly a painful procedure. Reg was swearing and ranting whilst Clive tried to keep him calm. Once he was loaded into the ambulance I went to say goodbye and ask him if I needed to ring anybody to let them know what had happened.
‘Noooo, don’t tell our Mavis,’ he said. ‘She’ll do ’er nut.’ He started getting tetchy again.
The paramedic turned to me, frowning: ‘Just stay there an’ talk to Reg for a minute whilst I take his wellies off,’ he said.
I thought he was going to pull them off, but he reached for a pair of scissors.
‘Whaat yer doin’?’ squawked Reg. ‘Don’t cut mi wellies.’
Even I could see that the wellies were cheap ones that set you back a tenner at a garden centre, but Reg was adamant.
‘Oi, I only bought ’em last week.’
Nobody was listening. The wellies were cut off. One was full of blood, and through his sock poked a glistening white ankle bone. That was as much as I could take, and I scarpered. As the rear door of the ambulance slammed I could still hear Reg’s shouts and complaints.
‘We’ll look after thi lorry,’ shouted Clive, as the ambulance pulled away down our road.
‘Clive, I’m goin’ inside,’ I said. ‘I’s not squeamish or owt, but I really need yer to pick them teeth up an’ wash t’blood away, I just can’t look at it.’
The teeth, luckily, were just Reg’s dentures. Clive and Robert moved the bales into the barn, and then Clive drove the lorry down to the car park at the other side of the bridge. The events of the afternoon had shaken us, and when everything was back in order we sat down to talk about what had happened, and how lucky we’d been that nobody had lost their life.