by Sally Urwin
‘Come on, leave her to it. She needs peace and quiet for a bit if she’s going to get better,’ he says. He’s right. He grabs my hands and pulls me up from the straw and we walk back to the house together.
Saturday 7th October
I’m spending a lot of time in Button’s pen, trying to get her to eat or drink. She’ll dip her nose into the water, but then turns her head and lies down on the straw. She’s weak and listless and looks like she’s given up.
We ring the vet for advice and try everything – heat lamps, vitamin injections, antibiotics and medicine. Getting the vet to come out to see Button isn’t an option. It’s a hard decision, but this tiny lamb is only worth around £60–£80 full-grown, so asking the vet to visit wipes out any profit at all. Steve has seen cases like this before. If the animal has some type of internal deformity or weakness, they’re just not going to survive.
Sunday 8th October
Button is still very poorly. Her eyes have sunk, and you can see her sides labouring as she’s trying to breathe. Steve tells me we can’t let her go on as she is, and that she needs to be put down to stop her suffering.
I beg him for one more day, and spend hours propping her up, holding the bucket to her nose, trying to get her to drink. She is just not interested but lies quietly in the straw. I leave her in the afternoon to make tea for the kids.
Later that night, after the children have been put to bed, Button dies. We find her little body stretched out in the straw. When I spot her, Steve takes me straight back to the house, tears pouring down my face. It’s just one lamb, and I know I’m ‘too soft’, but I’ve become completely attached to the tiny animal. He goes back later to bag up her body and put it in a corner of the farm to wait for the knacker man. The kids are upset, but not as bad as I thought they would be. Maybe they’ve been inured to this – the sudden deaths and disappointments on a normal farm.
Monday 9th October
I wake up with swollen eyes and a blotchy face. It’s a gorgeous morning though – fresh and bright with a frost lying in the furrows of the front field. The ewes are cheering me up as well. They look fabulous at this time of year, with clean white fleeces and well-padded, chunky bodies.
Mabel is one of my favourite ewes. She’s a sort of milky tea colour, with a tan fleece and a very handsome russet face. When she spots me leaning over her fence she huffs across the grass, her belly swinging from side to side, to demand a handful of sheep nuts. I keep a secret supply of them in my pocket, and distribute them indiscriminately to ewes, chickens, tups, lambs and the pony. It drives Steve mad.
‘This is not a bloody petting zoo!’ he shouts when he sees me surrounded by a selection of farm animals, like a cut-price fairy-tale princess.
Mabel snuffles in my pockets for a few more nuts then, realising I haven’t got any more, she submits to a neck scratch. I’ve realised that sheep aren’t that fond of people patting their heads. I used to try and scratch our sheep between their ears, but they seem to prefer being scratched under their neck. Mabel eventually starts back across the field to the rest of the flock, nibbling here and there at a tasty blade of grass. Picking my way back across the garden, I go in to start making breakfast for the kids. I’m still upset about Button, but the day-to-day work on the farm distracts me from dismal thoughts, and all the other animals still need care and attention.
Thursday 12th October
Tilly the one-eared ewe is looking a lot better. The antibiotics have kicked in, and she’s bobbling around the shed with a couple of lamb friends, busily scrounging for overlooked sheep nuts in the straw.
We’ve eventually decided to put both tags through one ear, so now Tilly is sporting two dangly plastic earrings. We’ll wait until her wound is fully healed and then she needs to go back out with the rest of the flock. She’s very tame, and chases us around the sheep pens asking for food.
Instead of a normal ‘bahhh’ noise she makes a high-pitched ‘creeeeeaaaak’ noise. It sounds as if her vocal chords have been paralysed in some way, or she’s suffering from a sore throat. Maybe the trauma of being stuck on her back has affected her voice.
Whatever’s happened, it makes it very unnerving to go and check on her late at night. She likes to stand on her own at the back of the shed in the pitch dark and ‘creaaakkkk’ softly at me from out of the shadows. I’m hoping her proper voice might come back after she’s had a bit more time in the warmth.
Saturday 14th October
It’s a cold autumn day with a smattering of frost on the rigg tops4 in the back field. Mavis and I gather up the sheep for the morning check, our breath steaming out into the frigid air. I tell Mavis to lie down, and she obediently flops onto the grass, her long pink tongue lolling.
Checking over the sheep, I see some dark patches on their wool. While I watch I notice some of the lambs are scratching themselves against each other and the fence rails. Catching one with my shepherd’s crook, I look through the wool, trying to find out what’s making them all scratch. It can’t be flies. It’s almost winter, and far too cold for maggots.
The sheep’s skin looks pink and raw, and wool has been rubbed away, leaving cracked, sticky skin. It’s scab. This is a disaster. Scab is caused by tiny mites that burrow into an animal’s skin and eventually causes sheep to stop eating, become poorly and lose most of their condition. Treating scab involves injecting each sheep with a remedy called Dectomax. It’s easy to clear up, and the sheep will recover, but the withdrawal for Dectomax treatment is 100 days, which means we won’t be able to take any lamb or sheep to the Mart until the 100 days is over, and that will be after Christmas.
Steve and I were relying on selling our lambs for meat and using the income to prop up our bank account. Now we can’t.
I chew on my lip, deciding the best way to tell him. He won’t be happy.
‘What are we going to do? I’ve got bills coming out of my ears! I need that lamb money to pay for the last month!’ he shouts when I tell him.
We make a cup of tea, and ring David the vet. He comes out straight away and inspects the sheep.
‘I’m sorry. It is scab.’ David knows very well how this diagnosis will affect our bank account. He promises to leave out the medicine for us to pick up from the practice in Hexham.
With heavy hearts we start gathering in the sheep. They all need to be injected: tups, ewes, breeding lambs and fat lambs. They’ll get better soon enough, and the scab will go, but we’re devastated at losing the income at one of the most expensive times of year.
After discussing it, we decide to take all the lambs into the shed to keep them inside over the winter. It’ll be more expensive, but at least we can keep an eye on them, fatten them as much as possible, and then sell as store sheep in the January sales.
Christmas is becoming a worry: how to buy presents, pay outstanding bills, buy gifts for the family and pay for heating oil. I take on more freelance marketing work – anything to get in a bit of money to pay off debts and keep our heads afloat.
Monday 16th October
I’m mucking out the pony’s stable of a week’s worth of straw and dung. Candy stands in the corner of the barn munching on a hay net, watching me out of the corner of one eye.
Wherever you stand she always makes sure she can see you. She’s a very cautious pony.
She spent a lot of her life in a busy riding school, teaching hundreds of small children how to ride. She hates anyone fussing around her head and ears, and I wonder how often she had children jabbing their fingers into her eyes or pulling on her mouth and ears. Because she’s only small she has been ridden mostly by tiny beginners, with flapping legs and harsh hands.
Her passport says she’s 18 years old, but the vet reckons she’s nearer 26. Small ponies often live past 30, but Candy has arthritis, Cushing’s disease and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. This causes sore joints, excessively hairy coats and shortness of breath.
The vet reckons she’s had a few foals, as her belly has sort of … slippe
d, and she’s distinctly baggy around her bottom.
She’s very, very clever. On a lead rein she’s a saint. In a riding school she will walk and trot like an angel, and even (very creakily) go over a small jump. In a field, with no one leading her, she’s a holy terror. Lucy often rides her without a lead rein, and after about ten minutes Candy decides that everyone has had enough, and will grip the bit between her teeth, canter to the gate and give a good shake so that Lucy falls off.
Wednesday 18th October
It’s been raining now every day for a good fortnight, and the land is soaked. Eventually the rain clears, and the forecast shows three dry days in a row.
Steve races out to sow the field next door to the house with spring barley. With the tractor and a combination drill (which combines the ploughing and the sowing mechanism) he sows seeds into the soil and then flattens the field with the two-ton roller to squish in the stones and maintain the moisture in the soil.
He works until after midnight, but it means that our spring barley is finally planted and will be ready for harvest around next September. Eventually the barley crop will be sold to a grain buyer and be sent away to be malted and made into beer.
Friday 20th October
I’ve not had a good day so far, so I’m sitting in the warm, wrapped in a blanket with the cat on my knee, avoiding everyone.
It started this morning.
My very posh neighbour, Sybil, rode past me on her hunter. I was trying very hard to get some lambs through the gate into the yard. She bellowed something like, ‘I say, jolly good, get the bally things what jolly good what!’ at me. Sybil has such a cut-glass accent that it’s difficult to understand her. She’s as posh as the Queen. She’s probably related to the Queen. I just smiled and waved weakly, and then tripped over the dog.
Then when I walked past High House Farm Brewery, David, the brewery assistant, shouted over to me, ‘Oi, Sal! Next time you’re getting dressed in the morning, close your curtains, will you?’ The horrors. He must have seen me in all my glory, boobs swinging and scratching my arse, while silhouetted against the morning sky. And the poor lad must only be in his mid-20s. I’ve probably scarred him for life. I’m never going to open the curtains again and have decided to spend my life swathed in a full-length floral housecoat.
And after last night’s late check, I must have forgotten to lock the fat pony into her stable. I found her early this morning, down the road, in a neighbour’s ornamental shrubbery, thoughtfully munching on their pampas grass. She’d spent a happy evening investigating all the old sheep feed bags in the shed, rubbing her arse on Steve’s quad bike and decimating a nearby garden. Fortunately, nobody seemed to have noticed, so I hauled her back into her field and tried to ignore all the pony hoofprints across their immaculate lawn.
Saturday 21st October
We have a sheep called Scabby Ewe.
She has an undershot jaw (called a ‘shuttlegob’ in the local dialect), meaning her bottom teeth don’t properly meet her upper palate, so she finds it very difficult to chew hay or grass. She and her flock have been out in the field the whole summer, but Scabby can’t chew the pasture well enough, so she’s very, very skinny.
Inevitably, Ben has adopted her as ‘his most favourite pet ever in the whole world’. When we tried to persuade him that one of the healthier, cuter sheep would make a much nicer pet, he was adamant that Scabby was his favourite ewe, even though she looks like a toast rack on legs.
Due to her jaw deformity, she’s never going to be able to keep on enough weight like the other sheep. Some farmers would have her put down. But the kids have a minor meltdown when this is mentioned.
She did manage to raise one lamb this year. Just. It was a bit touch and go, but we carefully siphoned in lots of extra sheep nuts so that she was able to make enough milk for her single baby.
All farmers have the odd mangy sheep, and they normally put them in the back fields, well away from the road, so that no one can spot them and judge their stock-keeping. Poke around any farm and you’ll eventually come across some cheerful, threadbare animal living the life of Riley in a tucked-away stable.
Because we’re not heartless and miserable, we don’t begrudge Scabby this extra feed. But we’re going to have to make the decision what to do with her. We can’t put her into lamb again, as she (and the lamb) may not survive.
Scabby’s future lies in the balance. We can’t even sell her ‘fat’ (for meat) as she isn’t anything near the weight she should be, and would probably fetch around 20 pence, before everyone laughed us out of the Mart.
She’s ridiculously tame and will happily follow you around the farmyard. Whatever I’m doing on the farm, Scabby is beside me, usually with her nose in my overall pocket, on the scrounge for extra food. She also has a rather nice fluffy bit between her ears where she enjoys a good head scratch.
So, I think she’s destined to become a field ornament, just like Button the undersized lamb (R.I.P.) and last year’s Blind Sheep,5 which had some kind of brain problem and couldn’t see anything. Eventually these elderly pets die of old age, and Steve breathes a sigh of relief, until the next lambing season brings along another few decrepit characters.
Sunday 22nd October
Living on a farm isn’t the solitary, hermit-like existence you might expect. It’s not exactly Piccadilly Circus, but we do meet a fair few different people, mainly a result of the farm being a wedding venue, but also due to walkers, cyclists and riders wandering past our house.
I had a great chat with a man on a horse today. I saw him on a bay mare, leading a short, fat bay cob down our road. Being completely shame free, I stood on our garden gate and loomed at him over the top to ask where he was going, what he was doing, what his horses were called and where he lived.
When he got a word in edgeways he explained that he lived in Great Whittingham, was an engineer and liked to go on long hacks when he could, and that his ponies were called Lyn and Betsy. Then he added, apropos of absolutely nothing, ‘Sometimes in the evening I like to cook naked in my back garden.’
‘Gosh,’ I said enthusiastically, ‘that must be … chilly. What happens if the neighbours catch sight of you?’
‘Oh, I’m known for it,’ he replied airily. ‘I think they expect to see me out there, so they all look the other way.’
I wouldn’t. If I lived next to him I’d be riveted. Not in a peeping Tom type way, but I’d want to know what he was cooking on his barbecue, and whether he wore an apron to protect his tender places from sparks, and whether he sat on the grass or ate his steaks standing up in a ‘wild, hunting man’ stance.
I invited him into the garden for a cup of tea, so he tied his horses up to the gate. Betsy did a wee on the drive, and I fed the man cake and asked him questions about his ponies and his hacking and living in the village. He said he’d knock on my door next time he came past. It’s nice to make a new friend. Even one who is occasionally naked.
Monday 23rd October
I’m furious today, as three of our five chickens have been snatched by a fox. They were stolen during the day, and after calling them for ages I found the inside of the chicken house was absolutely plastered in feathers and blood. Only foxes would take all three chickens in one go.
Steve was really upset – we’d raised Doris, Tabitha and Elsie from chicks, and they used to feed from our hands and sit on the tractor and join in people’s weddings, even when they weren’t invited. I’d spent many a happy hour avoiding the kids by sitting in the veg patch digging up worms for a grateful Tabitha.
I tried to be matter-of-fact with Ben and Lucy, but faced with a couple of wobbling lower lips had to have a rethink.
‘Maybe … maybe a mummy fox was so hungry and couldn’t feed her three fox cubs, and had to take our chickens so that they wouldn’t starve and they really didn’t mind, as they were sort of pleased to give the hungry babies a good meal.’
It seemed to work. ‘It’s a farm,’ said Lucy in an off-hand way, ‘and t
hings eat other things.’
Exactly.
I do feel sympathy for foxes, and I’m actually glad of the ‘hunting with dogs’ ban, especially since it seems to have attracted more people to the hunt than ever before, which can only be a good thing for employment in the countryside. But it’s hard when you’re faced with a sudden chicken massacre.
We’ve never had much luck with the chickens. Maud died by being suffocated one cold night when all the other chickens sat on her head. I don’t understand this. If someone stepped on my head when I was asleep I’d be extremely bitey. Perhaps they all sat on her at once, and she was taken by surprise? Sounds rather premeditated. …
We put Maud’s body in the bin, which fascinated Ben, who then told the health visitor that ‘Daddy put Maud in the rubbish’, making it sound like we’d disposed of an elderly relative.
I clean out the chicken shed and give a pep talk to our remaining two chickens (Marjorie the Fourth and Ethel) about personal safety and self-defence. I’ve also put up more chicken wire around the perimeter of the shed, although it’s beginning to look a bit like the film set of Escape from Colditz. The kids and I are keeping everything crossed that the fox (or her hypothetical cubs) doesn’t come back.
Tuesday 24th October
One of my most frustrating conversations happened last week, when I was bedding up pet lambs in the top shed. A winter wedding was in progress, and a wedding guest was floating around, watching me wrestle with the straw bale. When I wandered back out with the wheelbarrow he came up and said, ‘Hi, I’m Martin and I’m a militant vegan.’