“Too good to miss,” he said afterwards, and he was right. Twenty years old it may have been, but it served me well for three more until I sold it, for thirty-six pounds.
Driving it was, I imagine, like driving a bus, sitting high above the passing cars and double-declutching my way through the heavy gate gears. Rachel's first trip in the baker's van was memorable, since she immediately jumped out of the back and sat composedly by me on the front seat, looking down her patrician nose at the foolish humans who laughed and pointed as we went on our stately way to the home of the billy goat. Suddenly I saw in the distance two elderly acquaintances walking towards us. I whipped off my hat and placed it on Rachel's bony dome. I retain the picture of their startled faces as we swept solemnly past.
We had friends who kept Anglo-Nubians, and passing the bedroom window of their bungalow one day, I noticed with a little surprise that on their double bed there lay side by side three large nannies, sensuous, relaxed, and enigmatic, like Goya's Naked Maja in triplicate with a bit of help from Salvador Dali. I knocked on the front door.
“John, do you know there are three goats on your bed?”
“Bloody hell,” he said resignedly, “not again. Goat pellets are so much worse than biscuit crumbs.”
After Giles was born, Myrle stopped showing the dachshunds, and we gave up goat keeping. But earlier, when regular litters of puppies made the chore of milking goats worthwhile, I was scanning the livestock section of Exchange & Mart, looking as ever for a bargain, and saw what seemed a cracker:
“Eight young female goats. £4 the lot.”
Hastily I sent off a check to an address in Staffordshire. A couple of weeks later, I had heard nothing and the money looked to have been wasted. Then the phone rang.
“Mr. King-Smithth?”
“Yes.”
“Williams here, stationmaster.”
“Oh yes, Mr. Williams?”
“Were you expecting some goats?”
“Oh. Yes, I was.”
“Perhaps you'd come up to the station right away.
They're all over the line, and the down express is due through in ten minutes.”
When Gladwyn and I arrived in the baker's van, there were seven gaunt goats of unknown ancestry and a variety of colors wandering dispiritedly on the tracks. The eighth the stationmaster held. All were thin as rakes, their ribs like toast racks, their bleats of protest feeble.
We rounded them up, quite easily, for they had no strength to resist, and shoved them into the van as the express came rushing through.
“When we opened the door of the wagon, they came tumbling out,” said Mr. Williams. “The poor sods are starving, they've eaten the string they were tied up with, and even the labels off each other's necks, bar this one.” And he showed me a scrap of cardboard.
“… Smith” it said, and below that “… Farm,” and at the bottom the last few letters of the name of the village.
“That's how I knew they were yours.”
They weren't mine for very long, for though I worked hard to rekindle their interest in life, they could not respond. Riddled with worms, they could get no good of the food of which they had been starved, and all died, of their own accord or mine. You gets what you pays for.
For Myrle and me, life at Woodlands Farm was really an extension of our childhood pet keeping. Breeding animals was the thing we liked doing, and in an ideal world we probably wouldn't have sent the calves to market or the piglets to the dealer or the chickens and ducks and rabbits to the deep freeze but instead kept the lot, reveling in the increase in our flocks and herds. But of course during the fourteen years we were there, the most important increases were to our own family. We'd arrived with Juliet, aged two. Almost immediately, Betsy had been born. Then, five years later, Giles appeared.
Though he has managed to retain his given name in later life, nicknames are two a penny in my family, and as “Gordon” became Dick, so Juliet is usually known as “Buddy,” and Betsy always as “Liz.”
All three inherited from us the notion that farm animals were all just pets — they treated Monty, for example, as a large sort of dog — and one of their favorites was Snowballs. Snowballs was a duck or, to be more precise, a Muscovy drake.
We kept a lot of Muscovies (good eating: the ducks Aylesbury-sized, the drakes much larger, dressing out at seven or eight pounds, the flesh dark and gooselike). Snowballs, pure white, was the grand seigneur of a large harem of females, black and white or blue and white, and his mission in life was a simple one, namely to pass on his genes.
The mating of Muscovy ducks is a kind of ballet, not only of movement but of noise, not of quacking as with common or garden ducks but a sound of hissing. The neat female gives quick little gasps as of ecstasy already enjoyed rather than yet to come while the great drake lets off steam with the regular rasp of a steam locomotive pulling away from the platform. Grotesque he is, this lumbering premier danseur, short-legged yet long-bodied, somehow seeming as much goose as duck: adorning his face are bold patches of naked red skin that flame with passion as he treads his measure. Round and round each other they move, heads jerking back and forth like pistons in a stately, sibilant pas de deux. More often than not, the stage is filled, the entire corps de ballet hissing and twitching around the principals as the dance moves to its climax.
There must have been something in the pomp and circumstance of Snowballs's unending attention to duty that fascinated our children. There was nothing of prurience in this. For if you grow up on a farm, you look upon conception, birth, and indeed death with an experienced and level eye. So, often the two girls and Giles would solemnly dance around the courting couple, intoning as they did so some primitive chant of cadenced jingle that blended with the gobbling gasps of the lovers. Beyond the three children, kept at another remove from center stage, the corps de ballet dutifully bowed and bobbed.
But there was at last a morning when the children came rushing to find me. They had been dancing the ritual dance, but this time the ending was different. They led me to that day's stage, a little side lawn under a false cherry tree, and there he lay, the prince, flat on his back, his cheek patches and wattles engorged with purpling blood. His flashing eyes were closed at last, that rasping hiss was silenced, and the mighty emblem of his drakehood lay flaccid and still forever upon the dirty feathers of his stomach.
“Go, bid the soldiers shoot!”
Chapter 13
A FARMER NO MORE
Wednesday 1 November
All Saints' Day. New moon.
The end of the road. Dispersal sale.
Big attendance. Lots of bargains.
Though I rate myself as having been a reasonably good stockman, caring properly for my animals, I was (and still am) a hopeless businessman. Worse, there was no pressure on me to do better at this so important part of farming, for the Golden Valley Paper Mills didn't much mind if the farm made a loss. They simply set it off against tax. So for fourteen years I failed to record even the most modest profit. Had Myrle looked after the farm accounts then, and later when we moved to a much bigger farm, things might have been different. She couldn't have been worse than me. But she had the cooking and the housework and all the gardening and the children to look after, and all her breeding and showing of dachshunds.
At last in 1961, the paper mills ceased trading after fifty-three years under first Grampy K-S and then Father. It was one of the very few remaining small family mills making high-quality paper, and with its outdated machinery, no longer in a position to compete with the big boys in paper-making. So it folded, and then of course Woodlands Farm was put on the market.
What was to become of us? By chance, an old friend of Father's owned a farm a handful of miles away whose tenant was about to retire, and so I was offered the tenancy of Overscourt Farm, at 200 acres four times the size of Woodlands Farm.
I would love (how I would love) to be able to tell you that the six years that I spent as the tenant of Overscourt Farm were, f
inancially, successful. But alas, one thing didn't change, namely my lack of business sense. Gone were the pigs and the goats, three times as large as the dairy herd that Gladwyn and I had to milk; I grew a large acreage of corn, and we started out with high hopes. Yet six short years later, I was done for, six years in which Myrle had worked so hard to make the old Elizabethan farmhouse (which needed a lot of money spent on it) into a comfortable home.
There were excuses for me, I suppose. It was, by general agreement, a difficult farm to work, some of it heavy clay, some useless woodland, some thin old pasture. The rent was high, and the man who eventually succeeded me as tenant couldn't make a go of it either. But still it hurt, to have wanted to farm, to have been a farmer for twenty years, and to finish up a failed farmer. The day of the dispersal sale in 1967 was hard to bear, having to watch the stock sold, the cows, the few chickens, the many ducks — all, by selection, pure white now in memory of their great ancestor Snowballs — the machinery, the implements, all passing into the hands of strangers.
We'd had good times at Overscourt Farm as a family, of course we had, and as a family we were happy. But my most abiding memories are of two accidents that happened to me there.
I was always having accidents. Curious that they always seemed to be my fault.
For example, there was an old cart shed, the roof of which was failing to such an extent that I became afraid it might actually fall on someone, the children perhaps. I determined to engineer its collapse. I tied a rope to a large central A-frame, which I (rightly) considered the keystone to the whole business, prior to going safely outside and pulling. Unfortunately I did just give one sharp tug while still inside — just to make sure the knot was properly tied — and the A-frame promptly fell on my head.
I visited the same hospital not many months later for a different reason. We had a new contrivance for the front-loader of the tractor: a heavy metal scoop, held in place by two steel bolts each the size of a large cigar. We had been shifting some very wet dung, slurry in fact, and when the job was finished, I set about disconnecting the scoop. Obviously these bolts had to come out, so I pushed one of them through with my forefinger and the whole weight of the five-hundredweight bucket fell on it.
Doubtless there are even less pleasant situations than to squirm on your belly in liquid manure with your finger trapped in a frontloader scoop, but my agony would have been even longer had it not been for Tom's presence of mind. Tom had replaced Gladwyn as my cowman, though in fact I did most of the milking to leave him free to do those mechanical jobs at which, not understanding machinery, I wasn't much good. Finding that his efforts to lift off the weight were unavailing and merely incited me to louder shouts of pain, he leaped into the driver's seat of the tractor, started the engine, engaged the hydraulic lift, and very gently, very slowly (for too rapid a rise would simply have chopped my finger off) eased up the scoop till I could pull free.
Myrle drove me straight in to casualty, filthy and stinking as I was. Damage to one's extremities is especially painful, but through my anguish I still noticed that everyone stood up and moved away, leaving me sitting all by myself. After a while the sister came in with a large aerosol. Ah, painkiller, I thought. As she sprayed it liberally on and about me, I saw the label on the can. It said “Spring Violets.”
What a strange awakening there was for me on that first morning after the dispersal sale. No cows to milk. After twenty years, no need to get up at the crack of dawn. But what were we to do? Where were we to go? The first stroke of luck was that a friend called Anne had moved out of her cottage, intending to sell it, but seeing our plight offered it to us to live in for the time being, rent free. We had somewhere to go. Then came the next stroke of luck when along came another friend, Pat. He offered me a job, a temporary job, for six months only, but it meant that I had something to do and it got me off the dole. Pat manufactured, among other sorts of clothing, special fire-fighting suits made from aluminized asbestos and guaranteed to withstand very high temperatures. So now I became a rep, a traveling salesman driving all about England, to airfields, to motor-racing tracks, to petrochemical works, trying to sell aluminized asbestos fire-fighting suits, boots, and helmets.
I had to use my own car (and the mileage I covered pretty well wore it out), but Pat paid for the petrol and I stayed in a good many rather nice hotels at his expense. I quite enjoyed myself, seeing bits of England I'd never seen before, but it was no fun at all for Myrle, stuck on her own in the borrowed cottage all week.
The one thing that I was terrified of was that on one of my visits, someone would say to me, “So this suit will protect the wearer in a really hot fire, will it?”
“Oh yes! Up to one thousand degrees centigrade.”
“Good, because we've built a nice big bonfire all ready for you. We'll light it now, and when you're all dressed up, you can walk into it.”
Mercifully, no one ever did this. At the end of my six months as a rep (I did sell a few of the fire-fighting suits but nothing like as many as a professional salesman would have done), there I was, back on the dole again.
For the next three and a bit years I worked in a shoe factory, a job that I landed through the kindness of another friend, David. I was a work-study engineer, but having to drive into Bristol each day and walk about the factory floor dressed in a white coat and carrying stopwatch and clipboard was something, I found, that I could take only for so long. I resigned, just in time — I'm sure they were about to sack me.
So, I was on the dole for the third time. First, as failed farmer. Next, as time-expired salesman of aluminized asbestos fire-fighting suits, boots, and helmets. Now, as ex-work-study engineer.
So — what to do? I was only forty-nine. I had no private means. I needed an income. Someone suggested teaching. But I'd need qualifications. My only academic achievements were credits in the school certificate, thirty-three years ago.
Along comes another piece of good fortune. An old friend, Charles, was in turn a friend of someone who was a tutor at a teacher-training establishment, the College of St Matthias in Bristol. Charles brought the man to see me and I was given an interview and, in the nick of time, got a place on the impending three-year course and a grant. The grant was not generous, but Father topped it up a little, and so now I found myself, at the ripe old age of forty-nine, being taught to be a teacher.
Best of all, at last we had a real home of our own. We found a very old, very small cottage in a little village (no more than three miles as the crow flies from the house in which I'd been born) and were lucky enough to buy it at auction. Early in the summer of 1968 we moved in. And, as she had done at Overscourt Farm, Myrle set about putting the inside of the cottage to rights, painting and decorating and — hardest of all — painstakingly removing from the good old oak beams the layers of paint that had been slapped on them.
It was all fun, those three years as an elderly student, so much so that I determined, with Myrle's approval, to stay on for a fourth year, in order to gain a degree in education from Bristol University. Which I duly did. So there I was (it's 1975 now), a qualified teacher with no one to teach. By now I knew the sort of job I wanted. One, it had to be near home — I didn't want to have to drive miles to work for years and years. Two, it must be in a country school. Three, it must be in the primary sector — I didn't want to have to deal with people over the age of puberty.
Once again, fortune smiled. I had an interview — just one — at a village primary school five miles from my door,and as I drove back down the lane to our cottage, there was Myrle, in the garden, eyebrows raised high in hopeful query. Happily, I stuck my thumb up.
I taught at Farmborough Primary School for seven years, that is to say from age fifty-three to age sixty. Part of the school was very old, built in 1857. Part was brand-spanking-new. For four years I taught eight-year-olds in one of the new classrooms. For the final three years I taught six-year-olds in one of the old classrooms, its walls crying out for a lick of paint, its roof so lea
ky that in a real downpour, bowls were needed on the floor at strategic points to catch the drips. But actually I preferred the old classroom because I was happier in it, and thereby hangs a tale.
My headmistress, a woman about the age of my elder daughter, became, understandably, worried at the end of my first four years. Not because I was the only male teacher, but because my problems with understanding mathematics were not helping my pupils.
She decided to move me from the juniors to the infants, presumably on the basis that though I couldn't understand long division, I could just about add two to three to make five. So then I had three good years with those young ones and very rewarding I found them. Many years later I wrote a book (The Schoolmouse) set in that very classroom.
Being the only man in the school, I was also in charge of football, as coach (not a very good one) and, at school matches, as referee (weak on the offside law).
But all this time I had been not only teaching, but also writing. In the summer holidays of 1976 — when I should have spent my time preparing next year's classroom work — I wrote my very first attempt at a children's book.
I'd had the ideas for it twenty years earlier in the middle of the farming era, when that passing fox had murdered a whole lot of my chickens. One day, I said to myself, I'll have a go at writing a story where the weak are victorious over the strong, where the chickens vanquish the foxes.
So long had the notion been in my mind that I actually wrote the first draft of The Fox Busters in three weeks. The first two publishers to whom I sent the manuscript rejected it, though with polite notes (both houses published me later, I'm glad to say), but the third, Victor Gollancz, actually expressed a deal of interest in the story, thanks to a wonderful editor, name of Jo. She pushed me and pulled me and bullied me and encouraged me until at last I knocked the story into publishable shape. I owe Jo a great deal.
Chewing the Cud Page 11