Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home
I looked over Jordan, what did I see,
Coming for to carry me home.
A band of angels coming for me,
Coming for to carry me home.
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.
If you get there before I do,
Coming for to carry me home.
Tell all my friends I’m coming, too,
Coming for to carry me home.
As The Shepherd sang this song she felt an ever-so-slight movement in the hand she held. Had Granny heard the song? Did she know The Shepherd was there? She strengthened the depth and volume of her voice. As she continued to sing, she saw tears run from beneath her granny’s eyelids that were closed against the bright winter-morning light. The tears trickled down her pale cheeks as she lay so still. While The Shepherd awaited her father’s return, she sang her granny’s favourite song, one she’d often sung to The Shepherd and her siblings when they were children. To this day The Shepherd’s musical memory hears her granny’s voice singing this young maiden’s folk song:
I am a young maiden and my story is sad
For once I was courted by a brave sailor lad.
He courted me strongly by night and by day
But now my dear sailor has gone far away.
(Chorus) If I were a blackbird, I’d whistle and sing
And I’d follow the ship that my true love sails in
And on the top rigging I’d there build my nest
And I’d pillow my head on his lily-white breast.
He promised to take me to Donnybrook fair
To buy me red ribbons to tie up my hair
And when he’d return from the ocean so wide
He’d take me and make me his own loving bride.
If I were a blackbird, I’d whistle and sing
And I’d follow the ship that my true love sails in
And on the top rigging I’d there build my nest
And I’d pillow my head on his lily-white breast.
His parents they slight me and will not agree
That me and my sailor boy married will be
But when he comes home, I will greet him with joy
And I’ll take to my heart my dear sailor boy.
Once the song had been sung, a settled stillness of quiet calm filled the air. The Shepherd’s memories flooded back to her: being surrounded with tin buckets brimming with fresh-cut flowers from the garden, the air saturated with fragrance of all sorts, like sweet Williams, tea roses and sweet peas. Her granny had sung as they both tied bunches of flowers up with raffia to sell at the local country market the next day.
The Shepherd’s father returned to the room and told her that they would come back for an afternoon visit. They left the hospital for Black Sheep Farm to have lunch and collect The Shepherd’s mother for their afternoon visit at the hospital. As they drove into the farmyard, Mother came out to meet them: ‘I just had a call from the hospital. They told me that Mama just died. They said she died very soon after you left.’ Filled with emotion, The Shepherd felt very glad and very sad, glad that she had been able to spend time with her granny before she had died and sing her both songs.
The day before Christmas they buried her granny next to her grandfather in the graveyard of the small church where several generations of her family had been buried, where The Shepherd’s parents had married and where The Shepherd was christened. They kept that Christmas very simple. No presents were exchanged among immediate family. Many friends invited them to family feasts but they preferred to remain at Black Sheep Farm and dine upon gifts that many friends and relations brought to their house. They had brought fresh eggs, a bottle of champagne and a smoked salmon. Others brought newly home-baked bread, milk and a pot of homemade jam. Their Christmas Day began with a breakfast of toast, jam and strong Barry’s Tea. The holiday dinner was simply scrambled eggs, smoked salmon with capers and champagne. Together they walked around the farm, took in fresh air and did not fuss about a grand meal; they were just family quietly held together.
Some years Christmas can be very busy and incredibly complex as The Shepherd and I lamb sheep as well as prepare and celebrate festive feasts. With these intermixed events The Shepherd may be late to the meal because a ewe is lambing, but she always goes out between courses to check if any ewe threatens to lamb on Christmas Day. If the house is fully occupied on Christmas Day and a ewe starts to lamb, everybody puts on boots to come out to witness the new birth. After the lamb has safely entered this world and is suckling her mother ewe, the inhabitants of the house return to dine and celebrate the new life born on such a festive day.
As The Shepherd’s family is half-American, Christmas isn’t as big an affair as Thanksgiving, but food is still central to the Christmas celebrations. Traditionally, The Shepherd’s family begin with fresh, homemade eggnog laced with brandy on Christmas morning with friends and relations who visit. Their main meal of the day begins with smoked salmon on brown bread and their bird of choice depends on numbers of family or guests who will be coming to dinner. Some years, there’s duck when there are few for the meal, and when there are bigger numbers, a turkey, and a goose if numbers fall in between. Vegetables are roast potatoes, Brussels sprouts with walnuts, gravy and finally, a flaming Christmas pudding with lashings of brandy butter.
The family has only twice departed from their age-old traditions: when Granny died, and during the Big Freeze in 2010, when the pipes froze and there was no water or central heating. The Shepherd and the guests had to draw water from the aquifer spring across the fields and carry buckets to the house and stable. The Shepherd still remembers the sight of the steam rising from the warm spring water into the icy air when all around was frozen solid. She also remembers fondly the paper plates and cups they used for Christmas dinner that year, as washing up wasn’t a possibility. Sometimes it’s the Christmases that depart from tradition that we remember, for happy reasons and for sad.
The Shepherd often takes a party of guests to ring in the New Year at Saint Canice’s, the cathedral that stands on a hill overlooking my city of Kilkenny. They sup on a big bowl of The Shepherd’s homemade bean-and-mince chilli with rice, then set off for the half-hour drive into the city and arrive at the cathedral at about 11.30. Once inside the cathedral, they follow the bell-ringers through a small door and ascend the narrow winding stone steps worn from centuries of feet climbing up into the bell tower. They step through a door into the tolling room, where bell ropes hang down from holes in the ceiling. As midnight approaches, bell-ringers ring out the old year with padded bell clappers, which mute the tone into muffled rings at the dying of the old year. Then, five minutes before midnight, several bell-ringers scurry up more stone steps and through a narrow door, out into the open air onto the cathedral’s roof, which they cross to then descend through a wooden-slatted flap into the bell room, where they take off the bells’ leather muffles. As the countdown commences the caller counts down for the bell-puller of the striking bell, ‘Three, two, one …’, and the bell-puller pulls the rope and the bell’s wheel starts to turn as he or she cries, ‘Going, going, gone’ as the bell rings the hour. After twelve strikes, a caller calls out which bell is to be pulled next and soon the ringing music of bells can be heard across the city from St Canice’s and all other church towers that have joined, ringing into the crisp midnight air.
As the old year is rung out, the new one starts with more lambs arriving at all hours of the day and night. Some winters can be bitterly cold, but this is also when the Zwartbles’ docility and rich milk are a great boon, when one needs the colostrum, a mother’s warm golden first milk, to feed those newborn lambs in difficulty. When during Christmas 2010, icy weather froze all our water pipes and T
he Shepherd was forced to haul water buckets from our aquifer spring to the livestock, winds became so bitterly cold that fresh-born wet lambs exposed to freezing air became hypothermic quickly. The Shepherd rubbed the newborns dry with fresh straw, milked ewes and then tubed colostrum into lambs. To tube a lamb, she had to insert a thin long tube into the mouth down into their stomach and to make sure it bypassed the lungs. Once the tube was correctly inserted, The Shepherd poured colostrum into a syringe and pushed the syringe plunger so the milk went down the tube into the lamb’s stomach.
To counteract hypothermia in the lambs, she hung heat lamps in the shed and moved wet newborn lambs into the Aga’s bottom-left oven to dry and warm the lambs. At her busiest there were three lambs at a time being warmed and dried in the bottom oven and two beneath heat lamps out of that life-killing bitterly cold wind. This benchmark winter of cold-weather lambing always makes us hope for normal Irish mild weather – which doesn’t mean there aren’t other trying episodes to be had while our flock is lambing.
It’s nearly twenty years ago now, but if I ask her, The Shepherd will try to remember the early days at Black Sheep Farm. A few months after Granny died and spring had arrived, The Shepherd decided that she would return to Ireland and try to live permanently on Black Sheep Farm. When she first returned she was still too weak to farm but she could walk into the overgrown garden, which was a jungle of brambles, nettles and self-sown ash saplings, and where she found the abandoned rhubarb patch and picked stems to stew. She discovered self-sown ragged cabbages to harvest, which she would fry in butter with caraway seeds and toasted sesame seed oil. She also picked young nettles, which she steamed or made into soup. During that year’s summer months she found soft fruits – raspberries, gooseberries, loganberries and black- and redcurrants – were hidden beneath years of overgrowth. All berries were eaten or cooked into jams, or stewed and frozen for later use. In the autumn, apple, fig, pear and plum trees were laden with fruit and the hazel tree branches weighed down with nuts. Again she grazed her way among the plentiful ripe fruits. She picked, cooked and stewed her bounty to stock the freezer and make jams. After a while she gathered enough strength to start to clear areas of the garden. She pruned trees that had not been pruned in over twenty years. She chopped out dead wood as she had learned from her grandfather.
Since she had returned to Ireland during the late spring, The Shepherd had only mild-weather clothing to wear. As winter approached, old friends kindly gave her their cast-off winter clothing and she began to settle into life on Black Sheep Farm. The Shepherd had learned the skill of photography during her many years away from the farm. After eighteen months of continued slow recovery and modestly increasing vigour, she managed to get a job teaching photography in Kilkenny city and Thomastown. The following spring, the curly-haired farmer gave her the first of his triplets of pet lambs from his ewes’ spring crop and her new ovine life began. At this stage, the farm fields were rented by a neighbouring farmer and so, using pallets, she fenced parts of the garden and lawns around the house to make grass paddocks for the new sheep to graze in. As her strength slowly continued to increase, she returned to the seasonal rhythms of farm life. As her flock enlarged, the farmer who had rented the land eventually departed and she took up the reins, managing all the green small fields around the house, the farmyards and the orchard.
12
The Virus Threatens
January is the time for winter lambing. The Shepherd has many years’ experience of lambing and often tells me about the period in 1982, which I mentioned earlier, when she spent time on a farm in Wicklow, working seven days a week with only one day off during the entire time she was there.
An au pair lived on this farm, too, and one day, she invited The Shepherd on a trip to Dublin, announcing that she planned to have a manicure there at a posh shopping centre. The Shepherd looked down at her hands, ingrained with dirt, the lines and crevices grubby from weeks of lambing ewes, but she agreed to go. A manicure might be just the thing, she thought, to repair the damage of many weeks’ hard work. When she got there, she showed the manicurist her hands, asking, ‘What can you do with these?’ The woman blanched. ‘Oh, I can’t do anything for those hands! The only thing I can recommend you do is cover them in Vaseline and wrap them in plastic bags while you have a good hot bath.’
Vanity has never been part of The Shepherd’s makeup – life on the farm doesn’t require much in the way of stylish clothing and so she wears practical, warm clothes, her grey mane tied back in a ponytail and well out of her way while she walks the fields with me as we check the flock.
As lambing progresses through the month, I can be found out in the sheep shed sitting on a round bale of hay. It is calm out of the wind and weather, but the shed fills with fresh air as it has an open side facing a hill. Our shed has slowly taken form over many years. When The Shepherd came home, it was a mucky corner of our Wind-Charger Field with old stone walls on two sides, rotten wooden posts, knitted together with spiderwebs, holding up a tin roof; ’twas more like a colander than a shelter from wet weather. Beside it was a towering pile of rubble, stones, bricks, rusty pipes, fencing wire with rotten stakes attached, and rusty pieces of old shed roof. It was covered in thistles, nettles and clumps of tough coarse grass, but lambs still loved to dance, run and romp up it to play ‘King of the Mountain’.
A time came when our ancient lean-to shed was pulled down. The dirt floor was dug out, a gravel drain and gravel floor put in, new steel piers were erected and a new tin roof hammered into place. That first year of the two-bay shed was wonderful for ewes and lambs to shelter in. A small retaining wall at one end had been built so there could be a level floor: it held the uphill side of the field at bay. Lambs loved to run about inside and out of the shed, race up the small rise, then jump down off the retaining wall into a bed of clean dry straw. They would gallop in circles and frolic whenever their mothers ate their meals. The Shepherd would lean back against the wall like a flamingo on one leg bent at the knee, her foot flat on the wall, making a purrrrrfect half lap-cat shelf for me to jump up on to watch lambs frolic without the danger of my tail being mistakenly stomped on.
Over the years the shed was extended and a cement floor laid out with a small fenced yard to work with sheep when vaccinating, dosing, shearing, tagging, weaning, selling or treating them for any ailments. So now, with two solid walls, a wind-break slatting made from wood on its far end, I help to oversee The Shepherd. ’Tis the purrrrfect location on the farm for lambing in winter months. With enough fresh air no sheep will overheat, and as long as no biting wind blows directly into the shed from the northeast, the lambs stay cosy in deep straw near their warm woolly mothers.
There used to be a comfortable old chair in the shed, with wooden arms and legs covered in ancient, green horse-hair-stuffed upholstery. I could curl up in it during lambing time or share it with The Shepherd while we waited for a ewe to lamb. One summer a visitor fell in love with it, so The Shepherd’s mother gave it away. She didn’t realise ’twas our well-loved comfortable lambing chair as it just looked sad and neglected, dust clinging to spun cobwebs in a corner of the shed’s shadowed light. There is a photo somewhere of a young Pepper seated on it as he took his turn to watch over sheep in the days when our lamb pens were made out of salvaged wood pallets.
Way back, when lambing used to happen later in spring, we were feeding sheep in the field when The Shepherd noticed that a Suffolk Texel cross had no interest in food. She continually licked her lips, a clear sign that she was about to lamb. Now, if you’ll remember, this large white ewe was our famous Great White Yoke, because of her independent mind. I helped The Shepherd to separate her from the main flock in the field and we brought her into the shed. She would become our first of the flock to lamb that year, so we all hoped birthing would go well. The Shepherd had bred this ewe to my Zwartbles ram and so we expected twin lambs at least. Over the previous few years this particular ewe had always lambed without problems. She always la
mbed down on her own, had at least twin lambs and raised them with distinction.
After a few hours we saw the first lamb sack begin to appear, so we knew birthing was imminent. Half an hour later, the birth bag burst, but we could still see nothing. The Shepherd inspected the birth canal and found two hind legs inside. This birth position is quite dangerous. When a lamb comes out backwards, it often breathes in before it has fully emerged from the ewe’s birthing canal. The danger is the lamb may drown itself by inhaling its birth fluid. So The Shepherd grabbed the lamb’s two hind legs and pulled it from the birth canal as quickly as possible. Sadly, the fine-sized ram lamb had died.
In a flash The Shepherd swiftly reached inside to look for the twin, who was also presenting backwards. She promptly pulled out the live spluttering twin, then cleared the second ram lamb’s face of birth fluid and put him in front of the ewe so she could start to clean and bond with it. Then she eased her hands deep into the ewe’s uterus to check if there was yet another lamb – and discovered a triplet. The Shepherd felt it wriggling, definitely not a good sign because the triplet might drown by breathing in birth fluid. It was backwards, too, so as fast as she could, The Shepherd rapidly extracted the third lamb. She hastily cleared its airway and then gripped its back legs, spun herself around and swung the triplet like the end of wheel-spoke to thrust more inhaled fluid out of its lungs. After a few spins we saw the last lamb was a baby ewe and she began to breathe well. The Shepherd rubbed her and her brother vigorously with fresh clean straw to dry and stimulate them to move. She left them both breathing easily, with heads up and making small bleats while The Great White Yoke licked them clean and happily muttered to them in a motherly bonding way.
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