Chapter 6
COWS
Sunday 21 November
26th after Trinity.
My day off, but Gladwyn to see his
father in hospital so I worked.
There's always something to do on a farm every hour of daylight, every day of the year. On a small place like Woodlands Farm, so much, with proper planning, could have been done single-handed. At most it was man-and-a-boy stuff. Yet there we were, Gladwyn and I, solemnly sharing the milking, the care of stock, the cultivations, the field work. Mind you, I couldn't have done without him when it came to the mysteries of the internal combustion engine, which to me have always been Eleusinian. All I knew, and know, is how to satisfy the liquid needs of tractor or car.
But generally the labor of the farm was shared. Gladwyn and I milked the cows on alternate days, the other seeing to the feeding of the remaining animals. We took alternate Saturday afternoons and Sundays off, and every year, scrupulously, one would have Christmas Day off, one Boxing Day. As for holidays we took, in turn, two weeks' holiday each in the summertime between haymaking and harvest.
By 1953 Myrle and I had three children — the two girls (by that date aged eight and five) and Giles, who had appeared presumably much to Father's approval (“Right sex at last, eh?”). For our holidays the five of us went — as always — to West Wales, to Tenby in Pembrokeshire.
Some time in the 1890s a great-great-uncle had been there and reported that it was a very pleasant place, so all members of the family then went there every year for the next sixty or seventy years.
Indeed it was on the Royal Victoria Pier at Tenby in Pembrokeshire that my father first saw my mother.
It was the summer of 1920, and she was recently eighteen years old. He, nearing twenty-six and with a DSO and an MC to show for his service in the Great War, was still on crutches after having being badly wounded.
Somehow he found out where this pretty girl was staying and that she was confined to her room with a cold, and he positioned himself down on the sands of the South Beach. By sheer luck, I suppose, Mother appeared at the window of a house high above, and Father, supporting himself on one crutch, drew with the toe of the other in large capital letters on the Tenby sands:
GET WELL SOON.
Even now the town exerts a magnetic pull.
Each day at Woodlands Farm started, of course, with morning milking. Sometimes, especially in summer, it was pleasant work, but sometimes it was hell.
Try this scenario:
5:45 A.M.: Alarm goes. Stumble out of bed, aware in one horrid instant that I've only had three or four hours' sleep. Whatever it was we drank last night with whichever friends, my head is splitting. Dress in the very cold dark, feeling heroic, so as not to wake Myrle. Tiptoe out and press switch of landing light. Nothing. Damn, bulb gone. Not so, no other lights work. Power failure. Blast. No tea. Open back door to let dogs out, whereupon four cats, the east wind, and a barrowload of snow come in. 6:00 A.M.: Begin trying to start tractor — to run milking-machine engine by belt and pulley.
6:45A.M.: Gladwyn arrives and starts tractor.
7:00 A.M.: Start milking (just light enough to see what I'm doing) while Gladwyn sets about unthawing various taps, cows' water bowls, etc.
During milking, these diversions occur: belt keeps slipping off pulley, therefore suctionless units fall off cows, who promptly trample them. Power comes on again. Disconnect tractor. Switch on milking-machine engine. Turn on all lights. Breathe sigh of relief. Power goes off again, engine stops, units fall off, lights go out. Reconnect tractor. Thompson, the one (giant) Friesian, stands on my toes. I thump her. She kicks me on the shin. Bout of lunatic laughter from passing Gladwyn. Hard to believe, but headache is worsening, eclipsing pain in toes and leg. Carry full small churns to dairy (twenty-four mincing paces on icy surface). Slip, fall down, top comes off one churn, four gallons of milk gush out over concrete, half a dozen more cats appear from nowhere. Belt slips off again, units fall off again. Feel sick.
Reach Midnight, notorious kicker, normally needs her hocks tied with rope. Can't be bothered, get my shoulder well under her, and lean in hard, hoping for best. Worst happens. With one tremendous wallop she comprehensively strips the machine bucket — air line, milk pipe, pulsator, teat cups — flying in all directions while I finish on my backside in urine-filled dung channel.
At last, the final cow — good, gentle Martha. Remove the units from her udder, give her a pat, and as I pass behind her, she defecates and coughs simultaneously, spraying me from chin to crutch. As I approach the dairy, I can see the milk rushing down the drain from the overflowing churn.
A jolly little voice cries, “Mummy says breakfast in ten minutes!”
“I don't want any breakfast.”
A wet snowball hits me in the back of the neck.
Of all the cows I kept, there are bound to be some that I shan't forget, the “characters.” Once they had established themselves, they remained comfortingly predictable. When Virgil says that “woman is always fickle and changing,” you can tell straightaway that he was never inside a cow-shed. I look back now on the females in mine and know that they were constant.
You knew that Buttercup, the master cow, was an eminently sensible individual who under no circumstances would commit any antisocial act. A big-boned, red-and-white animal with short curled horns and big flat feet, she led the herd through every gateway. She was universally deferred to on account of her majestic, ponderous gentleness.
Cissie, you knew, could be guaranteed to behave as foolishly as possible on all occasions. She would leap in terror at the rustle of a mouse. To make a pun, she was the butt of every other cow. At the sight of the vet, even for the humblest of injections, she would roar with fright, her bowels turned instantly to water. Every gate was a place of terror to her, for those in front hooked her as she tried to pass and those behind did too as she then held back. To go through last would have been sensible, but you could tell by her rolling eye that her conviction was that then Gladwyn or I would beat her to death with our sticks or the dogs would leap up (quite a long way for most of them) and tear out her throat.
I bought a small rusty black sharp-horned beast of Kerry blood and toyed therefore with the notion of giving her some Irish name like Siobhan, but she named herself the first time I milked her. Some cows let fly when you put the teat cups on them, some while they are being milked, some when you remove the clusters. Kicker did all three. But unlike most kicking cows, who object to the act of milking for reasons of innate nervousness or previous ill-usage or sore teats, Kicker, like a professional footballer, practiced the art for its own sake, so that to pass between her and her neighbor was not something to be done absentmindedly. Worse, like a mule she could kick through an arc of 180 degrees, and to stand or walk too close behind her was to invite trouble; immediate, lightning-swift, deadly accurate. You could rely on Kicker.
You could rely on Thompson for unshakable placidity. A huge pedigree British Friesian, bought as a third calver, she was the first of that breed to enter my cowshed. Bred on the chalk, she had bones like a rhinoceros, a bag like a barrage balloon, and feet that made old Buttercup's seem almost dainty. All her actions were carried out with monumental slowness, her walk, the business of getting up or lying down, the turn of her head, even the movement of her jaw when chewing the cud. Her reactions were as sluggish. If Thompson stood (accidentally: she hadn't an ounce of vice in her) on your foot, no amount of angry swearing or agonized yelling or frantic thumping of her massive sides would release you until the snail-paced message reached her brain to say that something was amiss.
You could depend on Polly for a laugh, sometimes a wry one. Like all good comedians, she had a look about her that made you smile, without a moo spoken. Part of the reason for this was that she was a purebred Ayrshire, a breed with a big spread of horn, but had been dehorned — polled — as a calf, hence her name. In those times this made her appear quaint. She also had an extremely long giraffe
neck and a face that seemed more mobile than the rest, and therefore more comical. People smiled when they looked at Polly and seemed half to expect in return a nod of recognition or a wink of complicity, so knowing did she look.
If she had spoken, it would have been about food, for her other hallmark was an insatiable appetite. It was Polly who always finished her cake or hay before anyone else and was then busy contorting that long neck to steal her neighbor's. It was Polly you kept the most careful eye on if the herd was turned out onto something a bit lush, for she'd be the first to be blown. It was Polly who found gaps in hedges, made holes in fences, and even, I sometimes thought, lifted the latches of gates to get at the grass that was greener on the other side.
One night she nearly ate herself to death.
Since I'd turned part of the cowshed into a fodder store, we always kept the connecting door closed in case a cow should get loose overnight. Because Polly had no horns, a chain would not hold her, and she always wore a leather collar, buckled as tight as was possible. On this particular night, three mischances coincided. Her collar was slack, the door had been left ajar, and in the store were a number of bags of raw linseed, the harvest of one of my experiments with growing esoteric crops.
In the morning I could hear the groans before I was halfway up the yard and ran, and there was her stall empty. For once there was nothing to laugh at about Polly. She lay like a foundered whale in a shallow sea of linseed, gorged with the oily stuff, her belly blown out to twice its normal size so that the giraffe neck seemed unnaturally thin. Her ears drooped, making the bony boss of her poll stand up like a little bowler hat. Pathos and comedy were joined, as though Stan Laurel's head was stuck on Oliver Hardy's body.
God knows how much of the linseed she had eaten. All one could say with certainty was that it couldn't have happened to a greedier cow. I ran to phone the vet.
For three days and nights she lay there, covered in sacking to keep her warm, turned from one side to the other with ropes and enormous effort, emitting rivers of dung rich enough to grow Jack's beanstalk. A lesser beast would have died, but not Polly. The vet and Gladwyn and I may have contributed something to her recovery, but what got her to her feet again was undoubtedly the thought of the next square meal.
Finally, for sheer meanness, you could rely on Midnight.
Of all the many purchases I made, Midnight's was the most impulsive. A local farmer was selling up, it was a lovely day, there was nothing that absolutely had to be done for an hour or so.
“Come on,” I said to Gladwyn. “We'll just pop over and have a look.”
I hadn't thought seriously of buying anything, hadn't been round the cattle before, hadn't even set eyes on the magnificent wild animal that suddenly ran into the ring. In a flash the scene changed for me, from Gloucestershire to Granada. There was sand in the ring, not straw, and round it not bales but the barrera. Behind that sat the aficionados, farmers and dealers no longer, who stared down with eyes narrowed against the blazing Spanish sun.
The cow (it was almost a shock to see the evidence of its sex) stood there, the blackest cow you ever did see, coal black, raven black, black as midnight, and I suddenly said to Gladwyn, “What d'you think of that one?”
“Not a lot.”
“Nice tackle,” I said. “There's some milk there.” And indeed she had a well-hung udder, deep, square, flat-soled, the good-sized teats well placed.
“Got a funny look in her eye, boyo,” said Gladwyn.
The cow shook her small sharp horns at the drover, who was moving her round the ring.
“And I wouldn't like one of those antlers up my arse.”
“I shan't go above fifty,” I said. They were making a good bit more than that. She'd be a snip at fifty, I thought.
Funnily enough, nobody seemed much to want her.
“I bought a cow up at Goose Green,” I said to Myrle when we got home.
“What sort of a cow?”
“Well, no particular sort. She's black. Second calver. Rather a beautiful beast.”
“How much?”
“Forty pounds.”
“Three-quartered is she, or three-legged, or what?” “No. Just a bargain.”
But I got more than I'd bargained for.
The hauler brought Midnight in time for the afternoon milking, and what a milking that was. At the first touch of the first cup on the first teat, she put on a performance that relegated Kicker to the fourth division. It wasn't just the kicking, explosively violent, a burst of heavy machine-gun fire instead of Kicker's little pistol shots, a fusillade that stripped the machinery into its component parts and left Gladwyn and me battered and bruised and breathless. It was the sheer ferocity that accompanied the act as she leaped and pranced and bucketed, blaring and bawling at us with wide-open mouth, not in pain or fear but in red-hot anger. Her fierce eyes blazed, and only the neck chain restrained her from her obvious wish to disembowel the pair of us with those twin daggers.
So it was at every milking. Even with her hind legs tied and a vicelike instrument called “the bulldogs” in her nostrils, she still could contrive enough galvanic heaves to shake off the units, still bellow her hatred and fury.
Any theory I might have had that Midnight's black satanic anger was directed solely against the milking machine was dispelled a week later. It was Gladwyn's day off, and Myrle had walked out with me when I went to fetch the cows in. She stopped to pick some wildflowers from a bank, and I went over the hill.
When next I saw Myrle, she was on the other side of a fence, rather white about the face and very angry.
“That bloody Midnight!”
“Why, what happened?”
“The moment she saw me, she put her head down and started to paw up the ground, and then she gave a horrible kind of roar and came straight for me.”
“Good God, what did you do?”
“What d'you think? Got through this fence, of course. She's mad.”
“Gladwyn did say she had a funny look in her eye.”
“You should listen to what Gladwyn says in future.”
“Yes. She'll have to go.”
They all did, in the end of course, one way or another, Midnight and Polly and Thompson and Kicker and Cissie and Buttercup the boss and all the rest of them. A dairy cow's life is not often as long as it might be. The vet, the butcher, the slaughterman, they're all waiting, and seldom does anyone die in her bed. But the look of each and every one of them is clear in my mind.
One other bovine character who stands out in memories of Woodlands Farm was Ben-the-bull, so called to distinguish him from a friend called Ben. Ben-the-bull was an Aberdeen Angus just like those black beauties that had roamed the downs at Tytherington. Though you should never trust a bull, he was in fact very quiet and biddable. However, one never-to-be-forgotten day, Ben-the-bull escaped.
I had never been able to bring myself to run Ben out with the cows. Woodlands Farm was a very different matter from Tytherington, and it had a public footpath going right across it. Moreover, however quiet he seemed, bulls will be bulls, and I worried on the children's behalf.
So customarily he lived quite happily out in the orchard on a length of running chain and was brought into the yard for service (though we didn't pull any curtains).
On this occasion he had been for some reason tied up in the cowshed, with that same heavy metal that had once held Mobbs's bull. But, unlike Mobbs's bull, Ben had no horns, and when the cows had been milked and turned out, he had decided to go walkabout. He had slipped his thick neck out and, though all the doors of the cowshed had been left wide open, had decided for some good reason of his own upon a different means of exit. He set his brow against the wooden wall and pushed.
I know that this is what happened because at that precise moment I chanced to come out into the yard to see his head emerging through the cowshed wall, just as a circus dog jumps through a paper hoop. With a splintering crash his body followed while pieces of stout timber and planking flew in al
l directions. He lumbered off into the nearest field, called the Railway Ground, which had a heavy green-fodder crop of oats and vetches, and stood there belly-deep in the stuff, a few yards inside the gate.
Before I could move, Gladwyn arrived back from his breakfast, cycling into the yard. Catching sight of Ben staring owlishly at him, he did not dismount but with wild cries of Welsh anger rode straight into the field as if to ram the great black barrel of a bull and fell off.
Alarmed by the sudden and noisy appearance of this human torpedo, Ben started off up the hill at a ponderous gallop, smashing his way through the tangle of oats and vetches, while Gladwyn, cursing horribly, struggled through them in a vain attempt to cut him off.
I was laughing so much that I couldn't do anything but managed to dash the tears from my eyes in time to witness a wonderful scene. I have only to shut them to summon it up now.
Ben had reached the public footpath, and he turned to gallop along it, directly across my field of vision. And because the path ran along the crown of the farm, making a near horizon, the picture was in stark silhouette against the morning sky.
Fit and furious and free now of the entangling crop, Gladwyn closed rapidly on the fat and flagging Ben. Halfway across he was near enough to grasp the tail of the bull and throw his weight against it, like the anchorman in a tug-of-war team. And by the time that a hedge cut them off from my sight, Ben was down to a trot.
Pulling myself together, I found the bull pole and began to run across the paddock to find them, only to see, now walking towards me, the heaving, blowing figure of a breathless Ben meekly following a panting Gladwyn.
“D'you want me to put him on the pole?”
“Darw, boyo, the silly old bugger don't need no pole, see. He's run out of puff, silly old sod. Look here.” And I could see that Gladwyn had just one finger, the little one, hooked through Ben's nose ring.
Ben's story has a happy ending. When I decided to dispense with him, I felt strongly that I would like him to go to a really good home. And suddenly I thought, Of course! Tytherington! That'd be the life for him.
Chewing the Cud Page 5