Over the Farmer's Gate (3 page)

Having persuaded the cows out of the shed, you have to persuade the calves to stay there. But usually this can be done because it’s a natural instinct for a calf to go and lie on its own while its mother isn’t about. This can be a real problem when calves are born outside in the summer, as they will secrete themselves away in clumps of nettles and the like and you can spend ages looking for them.

Anyway, with luck the calves in the shed will go and lie by the walls until mother returns from the milking parlour, which will be only 15 minutes or so. If they go and lie quietly, you can file the mothers back there uninterrupted after being milked. But it doesn’t always work like that. Sometimes, at a signal I cannot detect, four or five calves will kick their heels up, frolic around the shed a couple of times and then it’s off down the yard at a hundred miles an hour causing chaos everywhere they go. It’s then that they get taken from mother.

We had a good calf that would go and lie down at milking time, its mother would leave it for the short time without any fuss, and so it stayed there for about a week and grew and thrived. One day I went to get the group of cows to milk them and there was no sign of the calf. The mother was lying there chewing her cud, completely content. I walked around the shed again – there are 40 cows in this group, so I could have missed it. But experience told me where it was. I got the cow up and there was the calf, cosy and warm, flat and dead. Mother had been sitting on top of it like a broody hen trying to hatch some eggs. Sometimes animals will contrive to die despite your best efforts.

We had a cow once that lay on three calves in succession; she’d killed them as soon as they were born and before we ever saw them alive.

WHEN WE came to live here, in 1964, there was a man living in one of the cottages who had worked on the farm for 47 years.

He used to tell me that his first job here, with others, was to construct a grass tennis court by the farmhouse. They had to excavate by hand into the sloping garden and then work a fine tilth on a nearby field and cart the top two or three inches of fine soil back with horse and cart to create the seedbed they needed.

If ever you read that fine book
Farmer’s Glory
by A G Street, you will find that the playing of tennis was an important part of the life of a yeoman farmer, whose lifestyle brought them close to the leisured classes.

This was quite readily achieved if you had lots of staff and paid them just enough, but only just. We’ve never used this part of our lawn as a tennis court but it has seen lots of use as a football pitch and I have constructed goalposts at one end so that my grandsons can practise their goal-kicks for rugby, as well.

This year, large parts of the lawn resemble a war zone, as the lawn has been taken over by moles. The trouble is, I’ve never been any good at catching them. Until this week, the only mole I have ‘caught’ for years was when I spent the whole of a sunny evening sitting in the garden reading the Sunday papers with a shotgun in my lap.

I’ve tried all sorts of traps, smoke bombs, pills, windmills in bottles, the lot. Expert mole-catchers use traps but they never worked for me.

My heifers are away on another farm and the manager there is always catching moles successfully. Eventually, the lure of a can of cider and £5-a-mole brought him to our garden.

He surveyed the scene of destruction quite nonchalantly and then found a run along the wall at one side and another along the fence and he put two traps down.

I couldn’t see how he detected these runs but it was done in
no time at all. Next morning there was a mole in each trap so I re-laid them and the next day there were two more.

I’ve not caught one for several days now but there are still new molehills every morning, albeit at a reduced level of activity.

I had a man working here many years ago who was good at catching moles. He claimed to know something of a mole’s psyche. He had a theory that it was impossible to catch a mole in the normal course of events; they were too clever and could easily detect a trap. You could catch them only when they were running away and a mole will run away only from mating and fighting. He didn’t use the word mating; he used another word, a word that connected with fighting as an example of alliteration. He didn’t know that alliteration existed but it had a certain eloquence to it. How he knew all that, goodness only knows. We can see what the birds of the air and the beasts of the field get up to, but what goes on underground is more of a mystery.

It wasn’t for me to tell him he’d made it all up – the way he told it, it was a good story and anyway, he could catch moles.

I had a good look at the first one I caught. They are quite remarkable little creatures, their little ‘hands’ able to dig away all that soil. I bear them no ill will; it’s just that I don’t need them on my lawn.

Truth be told, we don’t need them in fields, either. Too many molehills in a field and your silage can be contaminated with soil and the cattle can die of listeria. Not a lot going for it, really, old mole.

THERE ARE only two sounds to be heard at this time of the morning. The most obvious one is the non-stop tinkling of the cow bell attached to my brown Swiss cow.

It’s a constant in our lives now; you can hear it as you go out of
the kitchen door, ringing to the cow’s slightest movement, even, it seems, as she breathes.

I like to hear it, but my wife thinks it’s cruel. ‘What,’ she says, ‘if the cow doesn’t like a bell ringing around her neck night and day, 24/7?’ She has a point, and I may take it off and put it on another cow to give her a break.

There’s another noise and I like to hear that as well – the sound of barn owls hunting. If you see one close to, even if it is stuffed and in a case, you wonder if you ever saw such beautiful plumage.

Some people around here call owls ‘hullards’. I’ve no idea why – perhaps it’s a sort of dialect name – but it doesn’t stop there. If your name is Howells, and there are a goodly number of Howells about this area, Jimmy Howells, for example, can end up being called Jimmy Hullard!

I used to be in a group of pheasant shooters and one of the members used to bring a guest regularly who was ultra-conscious of a step he mistakenly thought he had taken up the social ladder, and he used to attach an ‘H’ to all sorts of words as he tried to posh himself up.

We would often see owls when we shot away in the woods. The first time he saw one it was a ‘howl’, and that’s what they all became after that.

Just to complete the bird theme, when my brother first started school there were two girls in his class who caught his eye, one called Hazel Pigeon and one called Hazel Dove. He thought they were sisters. But then life has always been a struggle for him.

IT IS OFTEN brought home to me the strange phenomena of people in towns and cities who don’t talk to each other. They may not know them, but surely they see the same people every day on
the same train, so what’s the problem?

Talking to the people I meet daily is an important part of my life and I struggle to imagine a life without it.

But sometimes it can be a bit of a nuisance if you are in a rush. Once, memorably, I was sent into our small local town on Christmas Eve to get some chestnuts. I came back three hours later with one chestnut!

This week I had a similar experience. I’ve been busy with my dairy co-op work lately and although a recent day involved a drive to the top end of Lancashire, there were a couple of jobs of my own I needed to do before I went.

So I set off a couple of hours early and my first stop was the shoe shop. The shop keeper is in his late 60s, owns three or four shops, does a bit of farming, and is a third-generation cobbler and proud of it.

I drew his attention to the black shoes I was wearing with a broken shoelace and a sole showing a bit of a gap from the upper.

We had a bit of banter about the shoes still being under guarantee, but eventually he told me to get them off while he put soles and heels on them.

I pulled up a chair and watched him at his work. It took him about 40 minutes and in this time we had a good chat about farming and shoe-mending.

He told me how he spent most of his National Service mending army boots. He still has examples about his shop of footwear of yesteryear, including those old football boots with leather nail-in studs, and hob-nail boots for a small child, all of which he made himself.

I’m always telling him he should make more of this memorabilia with a small display area within the shop but he doesn’t seem to be motivated to do that.

Throughout his life he envied farmers, thinking they made a
fortune, so he bought two farms. He’s not found it as easy as he thought, but he still thinks he’s missing a trick somewhere.

Job done, I drove a couple of hundred yards up the street to get my new glasses. There was a time when my glasses were quite safe within the breast pocket of my shirt, where they lived with my mobile phone. I seem to have several shirts now without this important accessory and my glasses became seriously damaged in my trouser pocket.

They’ve spent two weeks held together with Sellotape and I’ve had to drive with my head tilted on one side to keep my world level.

My daughter suggested holding them together with Elastoplast, saying: ‘Then you’ll really look like Jack Duckworth.’

My new glasses had arrived and the optometrist and her assistant were all over me as they determined that the new glasses fitted correctly.

I found the close proximity to these two women a bit disconcerting, because when I say close, they really were close. It’s probably because I’d showered and got clean ‘going out’ clothes on, whereas when I came to have my eyes tested I was in my working clothes and rather ‘mucky’.

It is not such an enjoyable experience when they touch me for £260 for the new glasses and the bits they have bought to mend my old glasses, which will now become my working glasses.

As I went out of the shop I tried to evaluate the elements of cost that I had to pay for the traces of perfume that still linger about me, so I decided that the glasses were quite reasonable.

Across the road from the opticians is the florist and the florist, who I know well, is outside the shop talking to another woman, who I also know.

Spotting me washed and tidy they came across and wanted to know where I was off to. I took the opportunity to get the florist
to come and turn the volume up on my new sat-nav. I could do it on the old sat-nav but haven’t worked out how to do it on this.

The florist remarks on the nice female Irish voice I have on it. I told her I chose it because it reminds me of the lady who kept the pub in Ballykissangel – I think I’m falling in love with the lady on the sat-nav.

The florist told me she’d done the flowers for four funerals already this week but my love for the sat-nav lady was about the saddest thing she’d heard. Suitably put down, I finally set off on my journey.