by Sally Urwin
The Crate Ewe has really taken to Ratty and his brother. They’re the cleanest babies in the shed, and she follows them around devotedly. If another ewe wanders over for a sniff, they get immediately butted out of the way. She stamps her front feet ferociously at Sumo the farm cat while lowering her head as a warning. When the little family lies down she positions herself tight up against them and always has one eye open in case of danger.
One little hogg has just squeezed out the smallest lamb I’ve ever seen. The kids christen him Titchy, and as well as being a bit undersized, he has bandy legs and an undershot chin. His mother thinks he’s wonderful and licks him from nose to tail. Titchy is so small that he trips over in the straw, and I keep having to fish him out of the hay rack, as he’s too tiny to climb out.
Thursday 3rd May
Titchy is staying in the pen with his mum a little bit longer than normal. I’m worried that if I turn him out into the nursery paddock I won’t be able to see him over the top of the grass.
He’s a little fighter though, sucking well from his mum and seeming to grow every day. He gets lots of ‘awwwws’ from brewery visitors who pop in to see the lambing shed.
Friday 4th May
Steve’s back has ‘gone’. At the worst possible time. I find him curled up on the lounge carpet like a prawn.
‘I’ll be fine! Don’t ring the doctor. I haven’t got time to go. Just give us a hand up.’
I pull him up and he staggers over to the sofa like a geriatric. Steve won’t normally take tablets, but I make him swallow two ibuprofen, two paracetamol and two dusty old codeine tablets I find at the back of the medicine cupboard.
Half an hour later he is extremely cheerful, and hobbles off to check the sheep, singing a song under his breath.
The tablets do the trick for about an hour. In that sixty minutes, a medley of Iron Maiden’s best hits is belted out of the sheep shed as he waltzes around cleaning pens. Ben and Lucy think that Daddy is very funny, but it’s back to grumpy old bugger when the tablets wear off.
He won’t go to the doctor, but I might be able to persuade him to see the guy who looks after horses’ backs who comes recommended by a few local farmers.
Saturday 5th May
Now that the mad rush is over, I invite a few friends to come down and see the lambing, and at one point, have about eight or nine of Ben and Lucy’s friends peering at me over the shed fence.
Of course it’s Sod’s Law that when you have onlookers something unfortunate happens.
I spot a ewe ‘hanging’ a lamb. She’s managed to push out the head, but the baby is caught at the shoulders.
I try to pretend everything is normal, while the labouring ewe careers around the shed, avoiding every attempt to catch her. It looks appalling, as the half-born lamb hangs down half in and half out of the ewe, and the baby becomes more and more purple and swollen the longer it’s stuck.
I’m red and sweaty and trying to pretend that chasing a ewe round the shed with a lamb hanging out of her bottom is a normal thing to do.
At ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ from the audience I manage to corner the ewe and fling myself at it to bring it down. It’s pretty simple just to ease the lamb’s head and shoulders out, and in a few moments it’s shaking its head and being mothered and cleaned up by the sheep. The swelling and odd colour will wear off over the next few hours.
All this to a running commentary from the watching kids.
‘Eurgh that’s disgusting! Look at all the blood! And it’s doing a poo. Out of its bum. Muuuuuum, it’s doing a poo just on the floor!’
‘Why have they all got lambs in their tummies? Will they all come out at once?’
‘Why is that lamb not coming out? How did it get in there?’
Afterwards I’m washing my hands and one tiny child sidles up to me and mutters, ‘Why don’t you just hit them with a stick until the babies come out?’
I’m speechless. I stutter a reply about how we ‘never hit our animals, especially when they’re having babies’. The little boy shrugs his shoulders and shuffles off. I’m going to have to watch that one …
Sunday 6th May
Today I’m wearing my Appalling Lambing Outfit No. 3. It’s a huge luminous jacket with a hood that has a sharp point like a triangle. It was left behind by a friend, so I snaffled it. It’s for a very tall, very wide person. Which is a bonus as I can wear three coats underneath to keep myself toasty.
I don’t usually care what I look like during lambing, but a very nice friend comes to visit and takes some photos of her children on the farm that then appear on Facebook.
In one picture she’s taken all you can see is the left side of my face – so one bloodshot eye, a huge jowly chin and my pointy hat. I look like an ancient, demented farmhand.
Monday 7th May (May Day)
I always feel I’m letting the side down if I don’t join in some ancient rural May Day ritual. Are we supposed to roll around in the early morning dew, jump over a bonfire or thwack ourselves with a bunch of daffodils? Will this ensure that our harvest doesn’t fail? You never know with archaic rural superstitions.
Instead I crank up our ancient petrol lawnmower and sweat buckets as I drag it around our patch of overgrown back lawn, ignoring Scabby the sheep, who is trying to squeeze her big woolly body through the gaps in the fence to get at the lawn cuttings.
Tuesday 8th May
This afternoon I’m knackered, and not much is happening, so I find an old picnic blanket under some sacks, wrap myself up in it, and lie down for a snooze on the cleanish straw at the back of the lambing shed. I also discover a stash of Jammie Dodger biscuits hidden under a bucket and have a peaceful time scoffing them before falling asleep.
Wednesday 9th May
Lambing has slowed down, which is a bit suspicious as there’s still quite a few to go, so maybe there will be a huge explosion of lambs in the next few days. Steve’s back seems to have recovered, and he’s now able to lift the big bags of sheep feed. I let him get on with it and go and sit in the lambing shed.
The latest lamb has something the matter with his front legs. Some of them are born with contracted tendons in their limbs, due to them having been tucked up inside their mothers for so long.
The lamb’s lower leg is bent, so he walks on his tiptoes instead. It should sort itself out as he gets stronger and his tendons stretch and lengthen. I’ve seen some farmers carefully fit wooden sticks as splints. One farmer we know uses wooden spoons strapped to the bent legs with brightly coloured bandages. Each time she goes into their pens all these tiny lambs clatter over with spoon bowls waving above their backs.
Thursday 10th May
Another busy day of lambing. Tired, fed up and filthy. All pens are full, and as soon as we turf one mother and lamb out into the nursery pen, I have to muck out the dirty straw onto the huge heap outside, and then bed it up again straight away.
It’s turned cold yet again, and the bad weather means we can’t turn out mothers and lambs, so they’re stuffed into every barn or shed corner we can find. Candy the pony has been turfed out of her stable for the benefit of some ewes and lambs, and is shivering at the bottom of her field. I was seriously considering cleaning out the allotment polytunnel, as I reckon I could fit three ewes and their offspring inside.
The cold weather also means that the grass is slow to grow, so we’re having to feed the sheep that are outside additional sheep nuts. And that costs more money. This is proving to be a very expensive lambing year, especially as Steve is still out of work. It’s all so stressful and I’m tempted to sit in the nearest pen, push the lambs away from the heat lamp and go to sleep in the warmth.
Friday 11th May
It’s cold but dry today which means that Steve has been on his tractor since 6 a.m., trying to catch up with land work. He’s ploughing and drilling the next crop of spring barley. He needs to get it into the ground before the rain hits us in the middle of next week.
We’re both running on depleted rese
rves and I’m bloody sick of it. The kids are keeping me going, and my nephew has come up to help. Alex is 15, and a big, strong lad, so he’s immediately deputised into mucking out pens. It’s so great to have another pair of hands.
Saturday 12th May
Alex has gone home. We tried to bribe him to stay longer with promises of chocolate cake and bacon sandwiches, but he has to go home to do his GCSE mocks. I tell him that if he gets more experience lambing, he’ll be set up for holiday work for life, as farmers are desperate for experienced, sensible night lambers. I think he wants to be an aeronautics engineer instead. Damn.
Sunday 13th May
Today Steve is ploughing the ‘buffer strips’ on the farm. At High House these strips are in the eight-acre and fourteen-acre fields, in the wet spots right next to the two streams that run at the bottom. The strips are sown with a special ‘pollinator’ mix: a blend of colourful wild flowers that will encourage bumblebees and butterflies and stop any of our pesticides or fertilisers leaching into the water. I pinch a handful of the seed and fling it around my garden to try and perk up the flower beds. Only a small wooden fence separates my garden from the crop fields, and I’m used to having the odd patch of wheat appearing among my geraniums.
Monday 14th May
A ewe is marked as having twins, and she is starting to push, but there is no birth sac or fluid hanging down behind her. Her cervix is open, but instead of a bag of amniotic fluid, all I can feel is a strange dry mass. I start to pull on a front leg and almost pass out in horror when it comes off in my hand.
The smell is appalling. A mix of rotting flesh and decaying blood. I make an inarticulate sound and turn to retch into the straw.
Disgusting. Poor ewe. The lamb must have died inside her and I’d inadvertently pulled some of the carcass out. Steve takes over and pulls out (in bits) a mummified lamb.
The smell is everywhere, and I wrap the corpse and put it out for the knacker man. Incredibly, Steve can feel a healthy, if small, single behind the dead lamb, so he successfully reaches in and pulls it out and puts mother and baby into a clean pen.
We’ve given her a massive dose of antibiotics, painkillers and anti-inflammatories. I’ve washed myself twice in the shower and I still can’t get rid of the smell.
Tuesday 15th May
I still smell revolting. Nothing is shifting it. It’s a mix of dead lamb, spoilt silage and amniotic fluid. Mum offers me a lamb hotpot for tea, and I can’t face it, as it smells the same as inside the lambing shed. I eat cheese on toast instead.
Wednesday 16th May
Around lunchtime a pair of lambs are born, but because I didn’t get to them fast enough, one of our Suffolk ewes has ‘pinched’ one of the newborns.
The Suffolk is pregnant herself, but is so crazed on pre-birth hormones that if she sees a lamb born she’ll take it off the real mother and convince herself she’s given birth. Except she’s still full of her own unborn babies and hasn’t got any milk.
By the time I get to the shed after lunch, one lamb is being suckled by the proper mother, and the other lamb is standing under the very smug Suffolk ‘pincher’ ewe, headbutting her udder and blaring for milk.
Of course, the real mother refuses to accept back her second lamb now that someone else has licked it.
I stuff the real mother in the adopter crate and manage to eventually drag the pincher ewe away from both lambs. Then I run to pick up the lambs and plonk them back in with their real mother in the pen.
A day or two in the crate will hopefully let the real mother re-bond with her babies.
Pincher ewe is now trying to squeeze her entire fat body through the gaps in the pen gate, bleating in desperation to reach what she thinks is her lamb.
Everyone is confused, fed up and bored with the pincher ewe’s dramatics.
Eventually I get so annoyed at the noise that Steve helps me move the real family into another shed, and eventually the pincher ewe settles down for her tea.
Hopefully she’ll lamb herself in the next few days, and the problem will disappear.
Thursday 17th May
I’m tired today. I’d forgotten to take my watch off before my shift in the lambing shed last night. It disappeared halfway through a lambing, and for a moment I thought I’d actually lost it inside a ewe. Fortunately I found it this morning when I was mucking out a pen.
Saturday 19th May
Titchy, who is our most miniature lamb so far, is managing very well. He stands on tiptoes to reach his mother’s milk, but he’s drinking lots and spending much of his time lying on his mother’s back. It must be the softest and warmest place in the whole pen.
I’ve spent the afternoon trying to stop the Suffolk pincher ewe from nicking everyone else’s babies. I think she’s gone completely mental. She’s started licking lambs as soon as they emerge from another ewe’s bottom, which really pisses everyone off.
After wrestling her to the ground a few times I give up and shut her in her own pen. She’s now yelling over the side and scuffling in the straw trying to find what I can only imagine is her own imaginary lamb. Completely barmy.
Sunday 20th May
The Suffolk pincher ewe has finally lambed, and therefore stopped trying to kidnap everyone else’s babies. She has twins that match her exactly, with black heads, huge satellite ears and splotchy black-and-white legs. She’s a brilliant mother, as she should be with so much bloody practice.
Monday 21st May
We have finished lambing!
Everyone (including the twelve hoggs) have finally given birth. Spotty Nose was the last ewe to go into labour, giving birth a full three days after everyone else. She’d been marked as expecting twins, but instead managed to cough out one skinny single lamb. Mother and baby are both sitting under the heat lamp, tucked up together in the straw.
Spotty Nose is our oldest sheep in the flock at six years old. She’s not the most attractive lady, and has a misshapen nose and lots of black freckles and spots. She must have been mated by the tup on the third cycle, rather than the first or second cycles like the rest of the flock, hence being the last to lamb. Steve reckons that the tup went around everyone else first, and then got to Spotty …
Tuesday 22nd May
Now lambing has finished we have a tally of:
Twelve pet lambs. Most of these are now great hulking animals, and are eating lamb feed and don’t need any milk. The slightly smaller or dimmer lambs are still on the Titty Machine. These include Fred, Fuzzy and two tiny spotty brothers whose mother didn’t have enough milk to feed her pair of lambs. The Spotty Brothers are covered in a pretty pattern of black and brown splotches. Fortunately, they get the hang of the Titty Machine without too much coaching, and spend their time curled up together with two fat, full tummies.
Around 290 bouncing healthy lambs, although I haven’t counted them yet. These include Titchy – the minuscule lamb that was born to our smallest hogg. They’re currently outside with their proud mothers, and don’t seem to be taller than a blade of grass.
Everyone lets out a huge sigh of relief, and I lie on the carpet with a cup of tea for a while, mentally congratulating myself for getting through the biggest lambing I’ve ever done without a) divorcing Steve b) accidentally killing any human or animal and c) going mad through sleep deprivation.
Thursday 24th May
There’s still plenty of work to be doing, even though lambing has finished.
The Titty Machine needs cleaning every day, which is a job I absolutely hate, and I’m still checking ewes and lambs outside and inside, castrating lambs and feeding everything twice a day.
But at least I don’t need to muck out lambing pens any more.
I think I’ve lost about half a stone, and my hands are red and cracked, no matter how much E45 I slather over them.
Steve’s back is still sore, and we haven’t sat down for a proper dinner in about six weeks.
Steve is now in a race to get all the spring barley into the ground while the we
ather is dry. He loves sitting on his tractor, and if everything is going well, he falls into a zen-like state. I find trundling up and down a field for hour after hour deeply tedious, so I leave him to it.
Friday 25th May
Our oilseed rape is in full flower. The buds are a bright acid yellow, which isn’t to everyone’s taste, as it’s such a contrast to the pale green of the grass fields, but I rather like the shimmering splashes of colour. We have a rape field right next to the house and the honey fragrance has started drifting through our open windows. I go for a walk around the field edge to look at the crop. Close up, the rape loses the intense sweet scent, and instead has a heavier, astringent smell. The field is abuzz with activity, honeybees hovering in among the flower heads and small cabbage white butterflies fluttering from plant to plant.
The ground around the edge of the field is tricky to walk on, but I stumble over the plough marks and see many tiny vole and mice holes in the cracked soil. No wonder the buzzards like to nest in the corner of this field. It must be teeming with their favourite sort of food. Sumo the farm cat also likes to hunt in among the crop stalks, and I often see him, intent on some unseen prey, black-and-white tail swishing from side to side.
When I walk back to the house my trouser legs and wellies are covered in yellow pollen. The entire family (apart from me) suffers badly from hay fever, so I do the kind thing and wash off my boots at the outside tap before I go inside. I can’t even have flowers in the house, as it sets everyone off sneezing and complaining.