by Sally Urwin
‘Can she go fast?’ asked Uncle Kev.
Candy lifted her head and gave him a long, level look.
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Unless it’s windy and I’ve got sheep nuts. You can get her to trot if you pull her along and someone waves a Tesco bag behind her.’
‘Let’s try!’ said Kieran.
‘Maybe not today,’ I said. ‘You’ll need a proper hat and Uncle Kev would have to run along to hold you on.’
Even after I’d lifted Kieran down he followed me around asking questions and visiting the sheep and the chickens. He kept asking if he could come and work on the farm. ‘I’d live in the brewery, and me mam and dad could just bring me dinners.’
I wanted to take him on there and then and give him his own overalls and welly boots. He was driven away by his parents and we saw him grinning and waving in the back of the car all the way down the drive.
I hope he comes back again. I’d even wave a Tesco bag behind Candy for a bit of extra excitement.
Tuesday 13th February
Today we went to the Mart, to sell the very last few of our prime stock lambs. They made a whopping £99 each.
Flushed with success we pop by Hubbucks agricultural store and I spot a ‘KiwiCrook’. These are a new type of stick with a normal semicircular hook on one end and a foot crook and latch on the other end. It’s very clever. It makes it possible to catch a sheep’s foot while the latch keeps it secure so that the hoof can’t slip out.
Steve decides to buy me one for Valentine’s Day tomorrow. He presents it to me outside the shop and tells me happily that he’s also managed to claim the VAT back on the farm account.
What an old romantic.
Thursday 15th February
My friend Debbie is going on holiday with her husband James and her kids. I’ve volunteered to look after their dog, a little fluffy ginger Pomeranian called Teddy Pom-Pom.
Pom-Pom is completely unpractical on the farm as he’s like a small fluff ball, and his legs are very short. This lack of leg and general fluffiness means that he comes back from walks absolutely plastered in mud.
We’ve all got a soft spot for Pom-Pom, even though I’ve seen Steve nudge him into the ditch when he spots another farmer.
Today Pom-Pom is helping us foot-bathe the sheep. By helping I mean that we’ve tied his long lead to the end of the sheep race. When the sheep go past him he yaps courageously at them, which encourages them along into the pens.
We shout the occasional ‘Good boy!’, which seems to keep him going. He sits bravely at the end of the race, eyeing up the huge ewes and running up and down at the end of his piece of string while eating the occasional bit of sheep poo. The whole shed is ankle-deep in festering mud, so by the end of the afternoon Pom-Pom is wearing a thick duvet of green muck.
He’s had such a good time. I reckon he enjoys being on the farm. We towel him off and put him in the kitchen to dry. Later on I find him upside down in front of the lounge fire, fast asleep with his paws in the air.
Friday 16th February
It’s a good bonfire day, cold and dry with a good breeze. All winter we’ve been collecting stuff we need to burn. We’re not allowed to burn plastic, sheep feed bags, dead animals (or people), silage wrap or bale nets. Everything else is fair game, if you have an exemption from the Environment Agency. Which we do.
We make a big pyre and I spend the afternoon trotting up and down, chucking on all the cardboard boxes and wrapping paper from Christmas plus all the endless bags of rubbish that seem to collect in the corners of our hemmels and barns.
I smell of smoke, but I come in happy and exhausted. If my number one favourite farm job is clearing out streams, burning stuff is my second favourite. It feels wonderful to be finally rid of all the rubbish that has silted up in the corners of the barns and sheds over the last few months.
Saturday 17th February
Our neighbours have been inspired by yesterday’s bonfire, as they’ve built their own on their tennis court. It’s a massive pile, and their gardener has been hard at work, trekking backwards and forwards to their stables and garage, and chucking on all sorts of junk.
My dad has turned up with some spring bulbs and is pottering around my back garden, pointing out weeds and happily grubbing around in the flower borders.
Steve and I start on the morning sheep check. On our way round the front field we hear a massive bang. It sounds just like a cannon.
Racing back, we find Dad wandering round in small circles making ‘oof, oof’ noises. When he bent down to plant a daffodil bulb, a piece of metal shot past him at head height and embedded itself in our garden fence.
‘I’ve been bloody shot at! There was a hell of a bang!’ he says when he sees us.
We look at the bit of metal which seems to have come from an old tin.
We realise that our neighbours must have been throwing old cans on their bonfire, and the heat made one of them explode.
‘It’s like the Somme up here!’ says Dad, understandably distressed that he could have been decapitated by an old Dulux paint tin.
We sit him down and give him a cup of tea and a pork pie.
Steve goes and has a quiet chat with our neighbour’s gardener and asks him to check through the piles of rubbish before they’re burnt.
Last year, we accidentally threw an aerosol of sheep marker on our bonfire and it went off like a bullet, shooting out horizontally and nearly taking out one of our chickens.
Sunday 18th February
I’m digging over our allotment. We have a small vegetable patch near the sheep sheds, with a patched-up polytunnel, home-made garden shed and four vegetable beds. This year I’ve decided to grow leeks, potatoes and strawberries. I fork in barrowfuls of manure from Candy’s stable and the occasional bag of old hops from the brewery to improve the heavy clay soil. It’s a long and arduous job, and the kids jump over the fence, collecting the worms to feed to the chickens that are pecking about in the farmyard. Eventually Marjorie and Ethel join me in the allotment and watch me digging through the soil, waiting patiently as I fork over the thick clumps of weedy soil so that they can run in to snatch wriggling worms and beetles.
Monday 19th February
It’s time to hand back Pom-Pom the dog.
He gets car sick, so Debbie has rung me from the airport to tell me how to get him home without him throwing up all over my vehicle.
‘Put him on your knee and open the window right down. Then, push his nose out when you go around the corners,’ she says.
Suitably instructed, I get in the car, put Pom-Pom on my knee and make sure the window is wide open. It’s absolutely freezing, and windy too. We set off down the road. Because my legs are so short, my seat is right up to the steering wheel, and Pom-Pom is jammed in the gap with his feet against my chest. As we go around the corner, he slides across my face and I end up wearing him as a hat.
This isn’t going to work. It’s probably illegal. I stop the car and readjust us both. I work out that if I stick Pom-Pom half out of the window, there’s just enough room for me to turn the wheel and move the gearstick.
By the time we get to Debbie’s house, Pom-Pom and I are both frozen, and wrapped in an inextricable knot with the seat belt.
Tuesday 20th February
Dad and I have signed up to go on an ‘Introduction to Lambing’ course run by our local vets, in the town of Rothbury, about an hour’s drive away.
I want to fill in the gaps in my lambing skills, and Dad just enjoys a day out and the chance to ask questions at people.
It takes us an hour to get there. The course is held in the town hall and hosted by a vet called Samantha. There’s around ten of us there: a mix of farmers, students, smallholders and Dad.
The morning session goes through the basics of the care of the pregnant ewe, how a normal labour progresses, how to look after both newborn and the mother and, depressingly, all the different diseases she and her lamb could catch.
Then Samantha starts
discussing ringwomb. Ringwomb is a terrifying condition where the cervix doesn’t properly open in labour. It’s a shepherd’s nightmare. I ask Samantha what she recommends.
‘Good question. It’s a tricky one. If you catch it in time, the best thing to do is to gently push your fingers into the ewe’s cervix and try and massage it, so it opens up a bit. At least enough so that you can help out the lamb.’
A few years ago, we had a ewe with ringwomb. She started the usual signs of labour: pawing at the straw, stargazing, licking her lips and pushing, but she didn’t seem to progress. When we checked her, her cervix was completely closed. Normally you can fit your hand through and feel the lamb’s front feet, but I couldn’t even fit a fingertip through the entrance. Eventually, through patience and sheer strength, we managed to help her enough so that the lambs could be born. They were both dead. It had just been too long between the onset of labour and getting them out of the ewe. Devastating.
Everyone else chips in with their stories of difficult lambings.
Dad is enjoying himself. He’s the oldest in the classroom by about forty years, and is asking many, many questions and regaling people with his adventures in lambing so far.
We all get a sandwich lunch and drive to the afternoon session, which is held in a lambing barn at a windswept farm just outside the town.
Everyone gets changed into their lambing wear, involving complicated layers, waterproof trousers and jackets, hats and gloves.
The lambing barn is huge. It holds 400 pregnant ewes and looks ultra-organised. All the pregnant ewes are corralled into three large pens in the middle of the shed. The individual lamb pens have been built around the edge of the shed, each with hay feeders and water drinkers hanging on the side of every gate. Most of the pens are already filled with ewes and pairs of lambs. This farm lambs earlier than us, and will have tupped their flock around October.
As we’re waiting, two ewes are already in the middle of labour in the big pen, and one has just given birth. We want to help, but daren’t step in, in case we do the wrong thing.
Where’s the shepherd? Eventually we see him roaring down the hill on a quad bike, looking manic and wild-eyed. The bike screeches to a stop in a shower of gravel and he rushes into the shed and begins to pick up lambs, catch ewes and drag them into pens.
The shepherd’s face falls when he spots us all awkwardly standing round the entrance to the shed. A load of clueless students is the last thing he needs in the middle of a very busy day.
The vet clears her throat. ‘This is one of the busiest farms in the area. They have 800 Suffolk ewes, split into two flocks. This is the first batch, and as soon as they’re all lambed, they’ll be moved out, and the next flock will come in.’
The shepherd rolls his eyes. ‘Aye, if the rain stops pissing it down. They’re stacked three deep at the moment.’ He waves a hand at all the pens. ‘And there’s only me, and the ould wife helping today,’ he mutters.
Samantha gives a watery smile. ‘Well, we’ll keep out of your way, I promise.’
She leads us over to a quiet corner of the shed. We’re all ‘oohing’ and ‘ahhing’ at a tiny kitchen set into the wall. There’s even a hot-water boiler, and a roll-out bed! It’s all very posh. This must be where the night lambers hang out.
On a table is a large, rectangular wooden box with a hinged lid and a round hole cut in one side. The vet picks up a sheep feed bag and after rummaging around in the bottom, produces a small, very dead black-and-white lamb. She pushes the dead lamb through the hole into the wooden box.
‘Right,’ says Samantha. ‘Who’s first?’
The box is a pretend ewe’s uterus and we’re all going to practice our lambing skills.
I volunteer. Looking into the hole, I can see a thick plastic bag which is half filled with water. She hands me a bottle of lube, and I squeeze a generous amount all over my right hand and push my hand through the hole. I can just about feel the tip of a cold, wet lamb foot.
‘I’ve put it in a weird position,’ says Samantha, with a smile. ‘See if you can work out how to get it out.’
From the tip of the hoof, I work one hand down the leg and check which way the joint moves, so I can work out if it’s a front or back foot. It’s a back leg. I reach down the body to try and find the other leg and feel a little tail instead. I push my fingers underneath the lamb body and manage to hook a forefinger round the second hoof to attempt to ease it out.
It feels very strange working with a dead lamb, as a ewe feels warm inside and baby lambs are often very wriggly. Finally, after a lot of squeezing and false tries, I manage to catch the second hoof, and I pull out the little cold body.
‘Well done!’ says Samantha. ‘Remember, with a breech or backwards birth, you’re going to have to get the lamb out quick, as otherwise it can drown in amniotic fluid.’
After we’ve all had a go with the birth box, it’s time to learn how to tube-feed a lamb. For the second time, Samantha rummages around in the bottom of the feed bag and pulls out the tiniest dead lamb I’ve ever seen.
‘Premature,’ she says. ‘Let’s see if you can get a tube into its stomach.’
Tubing a lamb is a key skill that all shepherds need to learn. Premature or very small lambs often need a top-up of colostrum5 when they’re first born, so it’s essential to learn how to insert a tube into their stomach so that you can give them a good feed.
I open the weeny lamb mouth and carefully push in a tube, trying to work out whether it’s going into the lungs or the stomach. A tube positioned correctly will smoothly press down past the gullet and into the stomach.
‘Always measure your tube against your lamb before you try and push it in, so you know exactly how far it should go,’ says Samantha.
The lamb is so tiny that it takes me a few goes to get the tube past the oesophagus into the correct position.
‘Great job,’ says Samantha enthusiastically, as she gathers our dead lambs and drops them back into the feed bags. We all take a break and swap stories of past lambings and our farm set-ups. This is fun. I never get to work with other people, and hearing about their backgrounds and challenges is fascinating.
After a full afternoon of pretend birthing and tubing we go back into the thick of the lambing shed. It’s bedlam. There’s lambs dropping everywhere. The shepherd is at full tilt, rushing from ewe to ewe, picking up the newborns and coaxing sheep into individual pens. The ‘ould wife’ turns out to be the owner of the farm, and she’s moving like a blur, injecting ewes, tubing lambs and mucking out pens.
‘Here. Take this,’ she says, thrusting a wriggling newborn lamb into my arms. ‘Drop him in a clean pen over there, while I try and get his mother in.’
The lamb is heavy and wet with big black ears that stick out at ninety degrees from the side of his head. When I cradle him in my arms he turns his head to stare at me. I sniff the top of his forehead and inhale his baby sheepy smell. Wonderful. He goes into a clean pen lined with thick straw and starts blarting for his mother.
‘They’ve got another three weeks of this left,’ says Samantha.
The shepherd rolls his eyes at us and smiles suddenly. ‘It’ll be over soon,’ he says. ‘We’re all knackered, but it’ll all be over soon.’
It’s been an excellent day, and when I get home I regale Steve about all the new ideas I have and how we should start organising our pens in the same style as the shed I’d seen today.
Steve humours me as I chatter on. ‘We could hang up the water buckets from the side of the pen, see? Drill two holes in the side and fill them with water and then we wouldn’t have to keep watering the sheep and it’d save time!’
‘Let’s just see how we get on,’ says Steve gently. ‘We’ve got about a third of the sheep that they had. Let’s just see how it all goes.’
I go to bed, my head filled with lambing scenarios, and dream of breech births and tubing lambs most of the night.
Friday 23rd February
When the local paper come
s out on Friday I rush to find our piece on the sheep thefts. They’ve written a great article on how we’re going to use TecTracer microdot paint and everything. But the photographs …
I look enormous. Like a tweedy barrel. And even worse, my nose is bright red.
‘Oh god,’ says Steve when he sees the picture, ‘we both look like a pair of grumpy fat knackers.’
‘Why are my nostrils so big?’ I ask him worriedly. ‘Do they normally look like that?’
‘I think she was taking the photograph from below,’ says Steve, ‘so maybe she was looking right up your hooter.’
Oh Lord. And of course, round here everyone reads the paper. No one is going to miss it.
‘Eeee Sal, I saw you in the Courant! You looked right bloody grumpy!’ shouts a passerby happily at me from across the road.
Bloody hell.
‘At least it wasn’t a report on you being drunk and disorderly,’ says Dad comfortingly. ‘Or … being arrested for crashing your car, or being under the influence or something,’ he adds. ‘It could be worse.’
I suppose. And vanity aside, it is a good piece, and hopefully gets the message across to other farmers that there might be sheep thieves in the area.
Monday 26th February
Today, Steve is giving me a lesson on driving the loader, so I can help more on the farm when and if he finds another job. It’s not a difficult machine to operate, and I learn how to tip the forks forwards and backwards (crowding and tipping). I practise spearing a bale of hay and putting it in the sheep shed.
‘Watch the roof!’ shouts Steve. ‘Watch it when you go backwards!’
‘Watch the sheep!’
‘Watch the dog!’
My spatial awareness skills aren’t very well developed, and I struggle to estimate the width of the loader when driving through a narrow shed door. But there’re no accidents, and I manage not to run over the kids.