A Job for All Seasons

by Phyllida Barstow

  It was, as the neighbour remarked, ‘A proper farmer’s job.’

  The thick walls bulged, the mullions over the windows were fractured, and these were randomly placed where they cleared the metal cross-ties. It was easy to see why the estate agent’s photographer had found it difficult to settle on an attractive angle for the brochure pictures. The whole property had a battered appearance, reinforced by crumbling stone walls round the garden and yard, against most of which wooden poles and long branches were propped to dry for firewood.

  We exchanged a glance. ‘No central heating,’ I murmured.

  Nor was there. But the stone-flagged kitchen was warmed by a four-oven Aga, and smelled of coffee and fresh-baked bread, and though most of the rooms were small and low-ceilinged, there was a large sitting-room with a handsome wooden floor and a wide stone hearth in which was set a wood-burning stove exactly like the one we had installed at Bromsden.

  The atmosphere of benign neglect extended to the garden, fields and outbuildings. Only some fourteen acres remained of the hundred or so that the farm had owned in the 1930s, but in my eyes this was enough and to spare. What did it matter that the pasture was thick with buttercups and, on the banky field below the wood, nettles and thistles flourished in rank, head-high grass; that gates sagged on their hinges, the fences were a rusty tangle, and the one big barn was waist-deep in musty hay?

  ‘It’ll do,’ we agreed, driving home. Two months later, after the briefest of negotiations, we had bought it and were planning our move.

  Merciful oblivion now obscures most details of the three-day horror of packing up and moving the mass of furniture, livestock and equipment we had accumulated over twenty-four years. It was late in the autumn and seemed to rain continuously as we shuttled back and forth on the M4. We first transferred Nutty, the Dartmoor pony, as being the least likely to break through the little farm’s vestigial fences then, leaving me to follow with the horses in my sister-in-law’s lorry the next day, Duff extinguished the boiler for the last time and drove to Gloucestershire with his dog, the Land Rover stuffed to bursting, and a trailer full of screeching hens and peafowl.

  Arriving after dark in pouring rain, his heart sank as he realised that he had left the key to the new house behind, and would have to break in. He opened the back and let out the dog, who ran a few steps towards the house, widdled briefly, and jumped back into the vehicle, her demeanour saying as clearly as if she had spoken, ‘OK, that’s enough of this place. Now let’s get back home.’

  But this place was home now. It was a bleak moment. As he sat in the dark car, wondering what to do first, a torch-beam came flickering towards him, and he slid open the window.

  ‘You don’t know me,’ said the man with the torch, ‘but I’m your new neighbour. That’s my house over there, backing on to your yard. It struck me that you might be tired and hungry, so I took the liberty of cooking a second supper, and thought you might like to join me.’

  Talk about the kindness of strangers! A strenuous hour later, after unloading the fowl and breaking into the house through an upstairs window, Duff was feeling more dead than alive as he walked the few steps down the lane and found Bernard’s house warm and welcoming.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to ring your wife while I put the things on the table.’ And as Duff sat at the telephone, reassuring me that he had arrived safely, a hand came over his shoulder to deposit a very large, very brown whisky and soda at his elbow. It was the start of a long and harmonious friendship.

  Bernard Braithwaite was a county court judge on the western circuit, whose long experience of human villainy had not, miraculously, extinguished his faith in human nature. He was a lifelong bachelor, in earlier days a keen yachtsman and rider to hounds, gregarious and cheerful by nature, and socially much in demand. He at once took us under his wing and introduced us to his friends, which considerably softened the blow of leaving Oxfordshire, and many a happy evening did we spend in his company, one side of the yard or the other.

  The field attached to his house had formerly belonged to a couple who had erected seven very large glasshouses, in which to grow carnations on contract for the Cunarders Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth but, since the strip of ground faced north, the heating costs must have been astronomical even in the days of cheap fuel oil. Whether the business folded because the marriage failed or it happened the other way round is unclear, but the result was that when we arrived nothing but the skeletons of the last two glasshouses were still standing, roofless, and filled with tangled brambles, nettles and ash saplings.

  The remains of all the others had been ruthlessly bulldozed to the edges of the field, where they formed a higgledy-piggledy redoubt of concrete blocks, shattered window-frames, metal reinforcing rods, and cats’-cradles of barbed wire – a truly horrible dump. To make matters worse, the entire field was carpeted with broken glass, so no animal could graze there in safety. It was an agricultural nightmare, but for the moment it was Bernard’s headache, not ours, and he ignored it as far as possible by allowing Nature to take over in a mass of tangled greenery.

  Though practically devoid of fences, the pasture in our own three fields just the other side of a ragged hedge was in better order, and after twenty-four years of eking out my grazing, almost to the point of counting blades of grass, I was in seventh heaven to have five whole hectares to accommodate my livestock.

  The long bank that ran the full length of our territory on the lower edge of a steep wood we named Top Field; this was ideal summer grazing for sheep and, being dangerously precipitous, had never been cultivated. In its old turf were the deeply indented remains of a cart-track running diagonally across to the top corner, showing the original route of the road to Tetbury. Just beyond the gate at the far end, inside the wood, was the cavernous entrance to a badger sett – really a badger city – with countless pop-holes and secondary exits stretching deep into the hill. A white terrier bitch belonging to a neighbour was last seen heading for the sett’s main entrance not long after our arrival. She never returned home, and there is no doubt in my mind that she encountered Brock below ground and was summarily despatched by those great grinding jaws.

  Below Top Field stretched the big triangle known as Nichol’s Piece which provided the cream of our grassland. As a parting goodwill gesture, our predecessor had provided for it to be ploughed and reseeded with a long-lasting mixed ley, which included useful varieties such as red and white clover, timothy and fescue. Because the last small field had originally been an orchard, a few surviving stumps lurked amid the docks and thistles which infested it, and rusty barbed wire of many vintages was stapled to a mixed bag of posts – round, rectangular, thick and thin – of which many were snapped off at ground level and held upright by the wire alone. This suggested more than the field’s fair share of livestock breakouts.

  Our most urgent task was to re-fence the entire property using squared sheep netting with two strands of barbed wire on top, expensive but necessary, and very fine it all looked when the job was complete. The deep rich loam washed down from the escarpment over many centuries made post-driving an entirely different affair from the back-breaking chore it had been in the Chilterns. Instead of having to excavate flints from clinging clay before the crowbar could penetrate the ground, here a couple of downward drives followed by a rotating movement would give you a hole so deep that you risked losing too much post below ground level.

  There was a downside, of course. There always is. Posts that go in easily come out with just as little effort, and we soon discovered that fencing our fields was like repainting the Forth Bridge – no sooner completed than the first section required attention again. Only when the whole property was stock-proof did we consider acquiring farm animals, and naturally enough our thoughts turned first to cattle.

  In the 1980s, before the successive plagues of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE or Mad Cow Disease) and Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) ravaged the national herd and left a legacy of tight regulation and frequen
t ministry inspections, it was perfectly possible to rear a few calves for home consumption with minimal hassle from bureaucracy. You bought the weaned calves in spring, introduced them carefully to grass, then watched them grow to a suitable size before taking them in a trailer to the local butcher’s abattoir. He would, for a fee, hang the meat in his chiller, then cut it into suitable joints, and hey, presto! you – and probably your nearest and dearest as well – had a freezer full of the best beef you could wish for.

  Freezing it all before it went off was tricky. If the meat was piled in too quickly the temperature would rise, causing the plastic bags to clump together, which presented a problem when you wanted to get them out again. The whole operation could take 48 hours before everything was safely rock-hard, and I found it was as well to shuffle around the frozen contents so that we didn’t end up with all the stewing beef at the bottom and mince at the top. No one wanted cottage pie four times a week because the cook couldn’t find the fillet steak.

  Home-reared beef is so very much more delicious than any you can buy that, despite the work involved, we persevered in keeping our own steers for a few years, but the epidemic of Mad Cow Disease which took devastating hold on the national herd in the 1980s, forced us to abandon our cattle enterprise.

  Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy was caused by the disgusting practice of feeding cattle with a protein supplement made from the ground-up meat, bone and offal of other cattle or sheep, effectively forcing cannibalism on herbivores. This caused holes to develop in the brains of affected animals, which lost their sense of balance and slowly became paralysed.

  Unethical though it was to feed meat derivatives to herbivores, it would have been safe, technically speaking, if the cattle and sheep remains had been sterilised at high enough temperatures to neutralise the particular proteins called prions which damaged the brains of the beasts which consumed them. With shameful – but typical – parsimony, however, cattle-feed manufacturers saved on their energy bills by rendering the material at lower temperatures. Seldom has there been a more false economy. As ever more cattle were affected, slaughtered, and sent for disposal as meat and bonemeal, the disease snowballed out of control, and the cost to British agriculture and the cattle industry was horrifying.

  Between 1988 and 2003, more than 170,000 cattle in England, Scotland, and Wales contracted BSE. Over a million unwanted calves were slaughtered, and over two and a quarter million older cattle were killed, their remains dumped in landfill in case they harboured infection. It is not surprising that regaining public confidence in the safety of eating beef proved a long, hard slog.

  Though BSE was primarily a disease of milking cows, who were fed the contaminated meal to boost their milk production, beef consumption plunged as pictures of stricken animals filled TV screens and made headlines around the world. One country after another banned imports of British beef, and the sale of offal and beef on the bone were banned in the UK. Cattle markets were closed; the movement of cattle was severely restricted; agricultural shows could not exhibit cattle, and the cost to the taxpayer was estimated at over £4bn.

  It was a financial disaster for livestock farmers – a tragedy that could and should have been avoided, and a wicked waste of cattle, money, and food. It was a long time before countries such as France, whose livestock producers barely bothered to conceal their glee at the removal of British competition for world meat markets, could be coerced into accepting British beef again, and in many ways the consequences of the epidemic are still with us for, predictably, authorities in both Brussels and Britain responded with a flurry of new regulation.

  One infamous rule forbade beef from any animal over thirty months entering the food chain, which meant that slow-growing breeds like Highland Cattle or Welsh Blacks had to be killed before they reached maturity. Another decreed that the spinal cord and thymus had to be removed from all carcasses and, to the dismay of many gourmets, it became illegal to sell certain specified offal.

  Hygiene regulations were stringently tightened. Butchers were obliged to sell cooked and raw meat from separate counters, washing their hands between handling each to prevent cross-contamination, and abattoirs were ordered to undergo such extensive and expensive upgrades of washing facilities and alterations of layout before being awarded a licence that many small local slaughterhouses were forced out of business.

  Instead of meat inspectors, fully qualified vets were required to attend at abattoirs while animals were killed, which added enormously to butchers’ costs. Movement licences had to list in triplicate the departure location, times of loading and unloading and destination, as well as identify the livestock being transported, and the washing and disinfection of lorries and trailers before and after visiting the abattoir was strictly enforced.

  Just one year of adhering to all these rules was enough to convince us that the carefree days of rearing and eating our own beef were gone for good.

  There was, besides, another sound reason for abandoning cattle farming. Gloucestershire is, like most of south-west England, heavily populated by badgers, and the fact that bovine tuberculosis is rife in this area is no coincidence. Both species are susceptible to TB, and the question of whether badgers infect cattle or cattle infect badgers has never been satisfactorily resolved.

  Even though we seldom saw them, their labyrinthine network of setts, their sliding tracks down banks and straight up the other side, their communal lavatories and scooped-out passages under fences gave their presence away, and keeping them separate from cattle was, in practical terms, impossible.

  Badgers may look slow, but they can bundle along at a good speed and cover a lot of ground with their nocturnal foraging. They climb stacked bales, and ooze their way into silage feeders with ease. Their powerful paws and claws help them burrow under buildings, destabilising the foundations; but their greatest crime is to drip urine continuously as they move about, polluting the grass so that grazing cattle cannot avoid contamination from tubercular badgers.

  Two owners back, we were told, this smallholding of ours had been much bigger, a proper farm with a flourishing dairy herd. They sold milk, and made butter and cheese in the stone-flagged, east-facing room which is now my kitchen; but all that ended when TB testing became compulsory, because every animal in their thirty-strong milking herd reacted positively and had to be slaughtered. Sick at heart, that owner sold up and emigrated to Australia.

  In the past, farmers were free to kill Brock by any means they could – digging out, shooting, snaring, or poisoning – and there is no doubt that some very cruel methods were employed even by people who would never resort to badger-baiting. All that changed radically in 1992, when badgers became a protected species, and ever since then arguments for and against reducing their numbers in bovine TB hotspots have been raging, while the cost of compensation to farmers for cattle slaughtered because of the disease has climbed to frightening heights. In 2010-11 it cost the taxpayer around £90m in England alone.

  Even if agreement could be reached between farmers and wildlife conservationists, implementing a cull of diseased badgers would be fraught with difficulty. For a start, who would carry it out? Each badger would have to be trapped and tested individually, which would require enormous resources in manpower, traps, and veterinary inspection, probably against a background of covert resistance and subversion. With their attractive striped faces and clumsy, toylike gait, badgers are instantly recognisable and much loved by the non-farming public. It is hard to imagine that a weekend walker who discovered a badger in a cage-trap would not immediately release it.

  Badgers are nocturnal feeders, usually just glimpsed in the headlights as they trundled across the lanes in the dark, but the ones we did see in daylight were frequently in a bad way. Emaciated, and raw with mange, they would sometimes take refuge in our buildings, looking for a quiet place to die. Even the most fervent bunny-hugger who saw one in that condition might have agreed that a cull was called for, if only to put sick ones out of their misery.


  One summer evening I sent a five-year-old granddaughter into the woodshed where I knew that a hen had been laying, and wondered why she stayed in there so long. ‘Any eggs there?’ I called at last.

  ‘No, Granny, but there’s a badger…’

  ‘Leave it alone. Come out of there at once.’ I guessed what kind of a state it would be in, and sure enough it had hardly the strength left to snarl when Duff went to investigate.

  Barring a radical cull, the best hope of re-establishing a healthy population would be wholesale immunisation by means of baited vaccine, but even then there would be the problem of over-population. Besides, the emergence and licencing of an effective vaccine is still at least four years off – four years in which many more cows will be slaughtered, beef and dairy farmers lose their stock, and it will be necessary to import even more milk than we do now from France, where badgers are regarded as vermin, and The Wind in the Willows is not a children’s classic.

  So we decided to forget about rearing beef for the table until a reliable vaccine against bovine TB became available and, as our first spring turned into summer with acres of luscious new grass crying out to be eaten, we turned our attention to sheep.

  First came the question of choosing a breed. On such a small acreage it obviously made sense to concentrate on quality rather than quantity, and keep pedigree animals which could be sold for breeding rather than simply for meat. But which should they be? Horned or polled? Long-woolled or short? Large or small? White or parti-coloured? The British Isles is home to over sixty distinct breeds, as well as many crossbreeds chosen for the best points of their pure-bred ancestors, which confronted us with a real embarras de richesses.