Chewing the Cud Page 4

  By chance, I was standing at a point nearest to the open orchard gateway. Out in the orchard the sold cows grazed happily, only the red-numbered labels glued on each between pinbone and hook bone showing this to be an unusual day. When, after several more circuits, the bull stopped and focused upon them, only I, frozen now into the inertia of nightmare, stood between. He put his head down.

  Man can fly. I did. As the wire burst and the posts cracked and the straw bales exploded like so much Weetabix, I flew, overcoat, boots, and all, striking with my shoulder the closing post of the orchard gate and snapping it off like a carrot. Inches behind came the thunder and wind of the bull's passing, and then he was gone, out into the herd, and away they all went in a mad gallop among the apple trees. I picked myself up, and then I heard my father's voice as he emerged from the nearby loose box.

  “Damn brave of the boy, Fred,” he said to a farmer of long acquaintance. “He tried to stop him.”

  “Stop un?” said Fred. “He never. He were trying to bloody miss un.”

  The “boy” at that time was twenty-five. It was now three years since that hand grenade had blown me sky-high in that dark Apennine wood. At last I was fit again, fit to fly for my life. We looked about for the bovine bomb that had just gone off and saw him being shepherded back into the cowshed, safely hedged about with puffing, blowing cows. Nobody, it seemed, was keen to buy him, and when I went to see him later, they had made a belt-and-braces job of his security. Round his thick neck was a heavy plaited chain, and a short rope led from his ring to a stanchion at the back of the standing. As bulls do, he screwed his head round slowly and rolled one eye at me. I'll be happier when you're gone, you rascal you, I thought.

  A week later, the lorry came to take him to the slaughterhouse. We tied a length of rope through his ring and led it right up the shed and through a pulley at the far end of the lorry bed. Helpers unchained him, and carefully I took the strain and winched him up. He went in like a lamb.

  “Fuss about nothing,” said the lorry driver as we locked up the tailgate. “Wouldn't hurt a fly. I knows a bad bull when I sees one. Thissun won't give no trouble.”

  Later the news filtered back. The smells, the sights, and the sounds of the slaughterhouse were by no means to the liking of Old Mobbs's bull, and he had come out of the lorry like a tornado. Around the slaughterhouse he went, smashing anything in his path and refusing all attempts to pen him. I don't know what the proprietors of china shops do, but these slaughtermen kept a high-powered rifle for such a contingency as this, and they called up their marksman. So the Shorthorn bull perished, but not at the first shot. In the general confusion the rifleman must have loosed off a little carelessly. The bull kept galloping, but above the rumble of his hooves was heard a cry of pain as an onlooker fell with a bullet in his shoulder.

  It was Gladwyn who told me the final twist in the tale of Old Mobbs's bull. Gladwyn was a Welshman from the Valleys, a year or so younger than me, who had worked for the Mobbs family and stayed on to work for us, for fifteen years as it turned out. We were mucking out the pen where the late beast had lived in semidarkness. It was in a section — two stalls' worth — of the old stables, lit by a small window only. No ray of sunlight had ever entered. In the gloom at the far end, another of my purchases, Bob the one-eyed carthorse, stamped and ground his teeth.

  I said, “You can't wonder that that poor devil went wild on getting out of this dim poky hole. Did he ever see the light of day?”

  “Oh, we used to take him outside for service,” said Gladwyn. “Mind you,” he said, “it would have been awkward with the roof being a bit low, but they'd sooner have brought the cow in here.”

  “Why?”

  “More discreet, see.”

  “Discreet?”

  Gladwyn had a sudden high, shrieking laugh, often ending in copious weeping if the joke was funny enough. He whinnied loudly now, and Bob started against his head rope.

  “Mr. Mobbs thought it was rude,” said Gladwyn, and he began to cry. When at last I got the facts from him, between snorts and snuffles and much mopping of the eyes, they were these.

  Whenever a cow or heifer in the Mobbs herd had come on bulling, an unvarying routine took place at Woodlands Farm. First Old Mobbs would order Young Mobbs, then rising eighteen, into the house and would ensure that Mrs. Mobbs and Miss Mobbs were also within. All the curtains would be drawn. Only then would Old Mobbs bring the cow down from the cowshed on a halter while with the bull pole Gladwyn fetched out the bull from the stables and stood by during the short ceremony.

  Old Mobbs's eyes, Gladwyn assured me tearfully, flicked anxiously from window to window the while. Then the two beasts would be put away, Old Mobbs would go to the back door and order the curtains to be opened, and the family would continue their polite way of life, unsullied by the facts of it. When they left Woodlands Farm, the Mobbses went market gardening. Vegetables, after all, are so much more circumspect.

  Chapter 5

  WOODLANDS FARM

  Sunday 29 February

  3rd in Lent.

  Buttercup calved, bull calf. Myrle had baby girl 10:50 A.M. (7 lbs.). Both well.

  In fact, we did not move into the farmhouse until early in 1948, Myrle and I and the baby Juliet and our three dogs, Anna the dachshund, her son Jonah (he was to become a champion), and my terrier, Susie, whom I had bought as a puppy from Jack the horseman at Tytherington Farm (the price was two packets of Woodbines). Our move was only just in time, for Myrle was heavily pregnant, and the first of my thick stack of farm diaries carried the above announcement for Leap Year's Day in 1948.

  The previous afternoon we had been to the cinema in Bristol. The fact that Myrle was thirty-nine weeks pregnant was not going to interfere with one of our routine pleasures. Mine Own Executioner, the film was called, and about halfway through the pains began.

  “What d'you think happened just now?” Myrle said after we had fought our apologetic way along the row to the gangway.

  “What?”

  “A man pinched my bottom.”

  “It's very dark in here.”

  By chance we had left the car in what looked like a public car park but must, in fact, have belonged to some firm or business premises. As I approached it, supporting the mother-to-be, I could see that its tall iron spear-pointed gates were shut. There was a latch, but it was on the inside and I couldn't reach it through the bars. The high stone walls on either side were topped with bits of broken bottles. Inside, passport to home and warmth and safety and doctors and midwives, stood the car. I began to climb the gates. By the time we reached Woodlands Farm, the pains had stopped.

  By five o'clock on Sunday morning, it was plain that this baby was in no mood to wait for March the first, when the monthly nurse was booked to arrive, and so I was on my way to fetch the local midwife. On arrival she was greeted by the three dogs, Anna, Jonah, and Susie. She drew up her skirts in distaste. “We shall want them shut away,” said the midwife, and on entering the bedroom, “We shall need newspapers, plenty of newspapers. And boiling water.”

  Then, as I still don't, I never saw any use for the boiling water, but the armfuls of newspapers that I carried upstairs were laid everywhere — on the bed, under the bed, all over the floor, even upon chairs and tables. By the time the doctor arrived, the place was a sea of newsprint. Myrle was being extremely stoical, only seeming every now and then to give voice to a curious whining sound. Ventriloquially, it came not from the bed but from beneath it.

  Suddenly the midwife dropped heavily to her knees and, splaying herself out like a giraffe at a water hole (for the bed was very low), peered beneath it.

  “There's a dog here!” she cried.

  All dachshunds are stubborn and Anna was especially so. Our bed — we still sleep in it — is a large one. The baby that was about to arrive would be of the third generation, following myself and my mother, to have been both conceived and born upon it. The space beneath it was too cramped for anyone to get hold of Anna, an
d she was deaf to threats or blandishments. So she was present at the birth.

  Later in the day, Father arrived to view the new (red-haired) baby girl. Never the most tactful of men, he excelled himself on this occasion. “Wrong sex again, eh, Myrle?” he said, and earned himself an earful from his furious daughter-in-law.

  The next morning, Sister Cartwright duly arrived, a round, comfortable, smiling person. Everything looked good at Woodlands Farm. Mother and child had had a restful night. Gladwyn and I had milked the cows. (I'd bought about ten by then. Fancy! Nowadays one man milks a hundred or more.) The horse, Bob, and Molly, first of the pigs, had been fed. The dogs lay happily about in a bedroom free of newspapers, and the kettle was being used for the understandable purpose of making tea. What was there for a newly arrived highly qualified monthly nurse to do? Hardly had she taken off her sensible belted gray tweed overcoat than Gladwyn's head came round the kitchen door.

  “The pullets!” he cried in ringing tones.

  “What? Oh Lor', what with having to fetch Sister and one thing and another, I forgot to feed them.”

  “You needn't bother now, see,” said Gladwyn.

  A couple of weeks before, I had bought a dozen fine Light Sussex pullets on the point of lay. They were housed, out in the orchard, in a homemade ex—Mobbs run that could be moved about over the grass. It was quite a stout contraption with a roof over it, and because it had a floor of chicken wire, I had no fears for the safety of the birds.

  What I had not bargained for was that the five-centimeter mesh of the floor netting would admit part of a long nose. A fox had scratched and scrabbled away to make a tunnel under the run and had worked his way beneath the birds. Carry them away he could not, but he had forced his muzzle through the wire time and time again and pulled and bitten at anything that came within his reach, a wing tip, a leg, a throat, as the wretches blundered about in the moonlight. Nine of the twelve lay sprawled and dead, of loss of blood or limb or of shock.

  “Look at these three, boyo,” said Gladwyn softly. “Poor buggers.” The unhappy survivors squatted with outstretched wings, their beaks wide, the nictitating membranes agitating over their reproachful eyes. In their breasts, part plucked by the urgent fox, there were gaping holes.

  “I'll hit 'em out, shall I?” said Gladwyn.

  “Yes. No, wait a minute.”

  We carried them to the kitchen, for the inspection of professional eyes.

  “What d'you think, Carty? Any chance of saving them?”

  “Easy as wink, dear. Get some newspaper on the table here. And put the kettle on.”

  And out of her little black bag came needle and surgical thread and dressings and antiseptic.

  Monday 1 March.

  St. David

  Carty arrived, sewed up three pullets.

  Fox had the other nine. To Chipping Sodbury to register Betsy's birth.

  If the Mad Hatter and the March Hare had put their heads together and planned the stocking of Woodlands Farm, the results could hardly have been more higgledypiggledy than those that I achieved all by myself. It was so when we were children, and we had graduated from bur collections of toy farm animals to actual livestock, in fact to breeding budgerigars.

  Myrle had practiced color breeding, green or cobalt or sky-blue birds confined to their separate compartments, or flights, each pair creating budgies in their own image. Male and female created they them, and all was order and neatness, Virgo-style. But in Aries' aviary, I mated everybody happily to everybody else to produce offspring of unconventional shades, rather as a child indiscriminately mixes various-colored sticks of Play-Doh and ends up with a muddy mess. Green being dominant, my flock became a collection of greenish birds with bits of blue about them, not to be compared with those Virgoan budgies. Unable to match the competition, I went in for foreign finches.

  But at Woodlands Farm I had the field, or rather the cowshed, to myself. I began to acquire a body of cattle of all shapes and colors. Anyone with any sense would have decided upon a breed and laid out every penny to fill the twenty-four standings with down-calving or freshly calved heifers, or at the oldest, second calvers; would have bought good-quality commercial beasts from carefully selected dispersal sales or through a reputable dealer; would have concentrated every effort and all available money towards getting back a decent monthly milk check just as soon as possible. Not me.

  You must believe (I must believe, my diary tells me) that by 10 March 1948, having had possession for four months, I had the apt number of thirteen cows in milk. They were of all ages and sizes and bore as little resemblance to each other as was bovinely possible.

  True, a number of them were Shorthorns of one type or another (pretty colors, you see, all different, not like boring old Friesians), some being first calvers bought from Tytherington for old times' sake. But in addition there were a couple of Ayrshires with horns like hat racks, a blue-gray beast, the second cousin of a Jersey, and a very small short-legged animal of unknown origin that had been someone's house cow, kept in his garage. I fell for her because of her cute size and pretty mottled markings; she gave as much milk as a goat.

  Take Auntie. She was a good example of my technique. I bought her from Bill Tanner, whom I'd known since I played around his farmyard as a small boy. Thinking about it, Auntie was probably there then, she was so old. A smallish Ayrshire with a kind, sad face and lovely long white eyelashes, her overgrown hooves curled like pairs of Turkish sandals, her back dipped like a fairground gondola, and her drooping hairy bag, its four great teats like bananas, was just what a dairy cow's udder shouldn't be. But she was so gentle and quiet (not having the energy to be otherwise) and so cheap, a real bargain. The bargain of course was Bill's, since I paid him much more than he'd have got from the slaughterhouse. Before the year was out, that's where poor Auntie went, dry, barren, and bony.

  I fancied myself as a good striker of a deal. Buy or sell, I must have been everybody's sucker.

  Look what my thirteen cows were producing.

  Wednesday 10 March

  New moon.

  Sent 30 gallons away.

  Surely I didn't record that out of pride? Probably it was the first time we'd reached such a figure. Of course I never could see, still can't sometimes, that if you want a pair of decent shoes, you have to pay good money for them. I prowled around the local sales and markets till I'd filled the shed with mongrel mediocrities. Not that they seemed so at the time. Each, I thought, was in some way remarkable. They all had carefully chosen names, they were well cared for and generously fed, their mating and their calvings properly conducted, their slightest ailment promptly treated. Sometimes the vet seemed practically to live upon the place, so solicitous was I of the health of my herd. In large measure, they were pets. Too few cows giving too little milk — not the ideal start to dairy farming.

  We compounded this first basic shortcoming because of this pet-loving mentality — the miscellaneous collection of painted lead animals proudly set out upon the nursery floor — and filled every spare space at Woodlands Farm with one or another bird or beast. On farms, we knew, you could keep all kinds of creatures. We kept them.

  Leaving aside the household animals — three dogs soon to be many, two cats soon to be a legion, and counted in with them the rabbits, the guinea pigs, the mice, the budgerigars (all these we still had), the tortoises set to race on the lawn (first to fall in the flower bed wins) — we wanted to and did keep every kind of living thing that took our fancy. They'll earn their keep, we thought, producing eggs or meat or salable young. They mustn't just be passengers.

  We never in fact kept sheep, because a public footpath ran through the middle of the farm and we feared harassment from local dogs, but instead we bought goats and tethered them all over the shop. They were to provide milk for puppy rearing. Though they were as varied in their origins as the cows and, proportionately, as unproductive, there was hardly one that hadn't been an absolute bargain. And there are few sights so attractive as that of
newborn kids skipping around.

  We didn't have horses, if you don't count Bob and we didn't count him for long. As a colt (a very long time ago), he had put one eye out in a thorn hedge, and this affected his idea of a straight line, whereas the Ferguson tractor was young and didn't move diagonally or grind its teeth. Bob was given one last good gallop among the blackberry bushes in the woods and then sent to Doyle the slaughterman, who, to our horror, turned up later that day. He carried two large, still-warm lumps of meat.

  “Oi thought ye moight loike a bit for the dogs.”

  I can't think why we didn't have any donkeys. Delightful creatures, I feel sure we should have made some excuse for keeping them.

  But we kept a great variety of poultry. Chickens — growers, layers, table birds, of a host of different varieties — game birds both full size and bantam: pheasants, guinea fowl, geese, ducks; again, why no turkeys?

  Last of all there were the pigs, supposedly second only to the cows as a commercial enterprise, but for my money — which is what they gobbled up — far superior in native intelligence, good common sense, and beauty of form and feature.

  And all these mooing, grunting, bleating, squawking, quacking things were of surpassing interest to us, characters with names and personalities.

  There was always something fascinating going on. But did they pay their way? I hear you ask. Sorry?

  This motley conglomeration of creatures that you seem to have surrounded yourself with'were they commercially viable?

  Well, we got a lot of fun out of '

  Surely you kept proper accounts?

  Yes, of course. After a fashion.

  Well, did they show a profit?

  Oh dear.

  The play had only just begun, the curtain hardly risen, but, had we known it, the fateful figure of that bank manager already stood in the darkness of the wings, awaiting his entry at the end of the second act.