Over the Farmer's Gate (8 page)

I can’t remember being asked to try some, which is a stigma that still hurts today. There would be a pig unit there, a dairy unit and, if I remember correctly, a poultry unit, too. One by one these units, like the attendees, have drifted away.

Our milk co-operative used to have a stand there and I would be on duty for four days but it’s an expensive business and every year we would see fewer and fewer members.

The last time we were there was particularly hot and there was a nice lot of skin to be seen.

As times in general have become tougher, people in agriculture have tended to identify with the major shows in their locality, like the Bath and West and Cornwall, and that great success story, the Royal Welsh.

The Royal at Stoneleigh was ‘everyone’s’ show, but not sadly, anymore. At this year’s I received a fellowship of the Royal Agriculture Society of England, which was a proud day for me.

I’ve been an associate for a few years now so I’ve moved from a sort of lance corporal up to sergeant.

Honours don’t fall on dairy farmers very often. What usually falls on dairy farmers comes from under a cow’s tail.

A COUPLE of years ago we were given a barn owl nesting box. It’s never been out in place, just moved around as we have gone through tidying up processes.

It has been a doll’s house, a garage, a kitten’s cottage, but an
owl it has never seen. We have given it some thought – we’ve tried to identify where it would most likely be used.

There’s things like height and safety to consider and we’re not big on height here.

But there is a barn owl regularly working one of our bottom fields and there is a big old oak tree in the middle of the field, so it seems obvious, at last, where to put it.

Barn owls are just about as beautiful as creatures get. They are probably benefitting from the 6m margins around fields and the extra hunting areas that this provides. Good luck to them.

WE WENT out with friends for a meal on Saturday evening to the pub in a village not far from here. It’s quite an unusual pub because like a lot of pubs in small villages, it has struggled from time to time, so it was bought by the community some years ago and, despite one or two ups and downs, it is flourishing at the moment.

Later in the evening while sitting by the window in my observation mode, I saw an old Discovery come down the road and turn into the car park.

Some time ago I watched a TV programme where they showed how to fly a Jumbo jet from New York to Heathrow entirely by computer. So accurate was this that when the plane landed at Heathrow it straddled exactly the white line down the runway. The Discovery came down the road like the plane, straddling the white line.

The driver came in after a while. He used to be a local agricultural contractor; someone in our group said he’s 90 next month.

Two years ago I saw him at a ploughing match doing a fair job with his vintage tractor and two-furrow plough. Everyone knows
him; he’s lived in the village all his life.

He got himself a pint and retired to a quiet corner, obviously contented and at ease. He got out the paraphernalia that he needed to roll himself a cigarette and did it quickly and expertly. Then, sadly for me, he had to go outside to smoke it.

He’s probably been drinking in the pub since he was 10, and when he first drove down the main road there probably weren’t any white lines on it.

I’ve never smoked and I think pubs are the better for the ban but I somehow feel he’s earned the right, at his age, to smoke his roll-up where he likes.

When we left he’d just finished it and we had a five-minute chat. It was a beautiful warm evening and he seemed unconcerned about having to move with the times, something he’s obviously always taken in his stride.

WE’VE got a really good lad who works here part-time. He comes three days a week in the winter and when he can in the summer.

Summer is his busy time because he’s bought his own tractor and goes off doing contract work – all very enterprising in a lad who is only just 17. I wouldn’t want him to know I think he’s a good lad because it’s also important to keep him on his toes as he spends a lot of time trying to keep me on mine.

His social life is of interest to me and I’m always surprised by how many fights there are at the dances he attends. I see it as my role to teach him a bit of homespun philosophy and to avoid these fights and to concentrate on the girls instead.

‘This,’ I told him, pointing to my head, ‘is for thinking, and these,’ pointing to my feet, ‘are for dancing and running away.’

He’s not been here for some weeks now – last time he was here he was carting muck on to our maize ground. There was a
huge heap outside a shed that we clean out every month during the winter. He wanted a couple of hours off at noon to go for a driving lesson so I said I’d clear out the remaining muck in the shed while he was away.

‘Take you a lot longer than two hours to do that,’ he said. ‘It’s all very well you young boys ripping and tearing about on these machines and making a lot of noise,’ I told him, ‘but now and again someone like me has to take a hand. My superior tractor driving skills, knowledge and expertise are needed to keep work up to schedule and, if you are bright enough, it gives you a chance to learn from the high standards I set.’

He thought this was all very funny and went off to his lesson saying: ‘You won’t clear that shed out before I get back!’

I leant nonchalantly on a gate until he was out of sight but then I leapt into action. It’s the best shed we have for cleaning out – in a previous life it was a large grain store, so it’s got nice concrete walls and floors.

A lot of our sheds are not concreted right through because the cost of concrete in recent years has been prohibitive. In fact, it would probably be cheaper to cover the floors with the finest Indian carpets.

The previous tenant to me, who used the shed as a grain store, had lined the roof with plastic fertiliser bags. I don’t know why, perhaps it was to stop condensation, but I’ve noticed that lots of pigeons live in the space between the bags and the roof.

The roar from the machine disturbed them and I’d got my fifth bucket full when two very young pigeons came fluttering out from their sanctuary and landed on my bucket.

I had two choices: carry on regardless and tip muck and pigeons on the heap outside; or get off, catch them and put them somewhere safe.

I chose the latter, of course, but my mind was on my young
helper – I didn’t need this delay. I pressed on with my work and had to stop three or four times more to remove pigeons from the bucket, including the pigeons I’d removed to safety but which had fluttered back on to the bucket.

The shed was clear, the loader parked up and I was back leaning on the gate before the world’s best tractor driver got back. He popped his head inside the shed door and, to be fair, gave me a congratulatory nod. Now here’s a strange thing. As I got off the loader while dealing with the pigeons I muttered ‘bloody quist’ to myself.

I don’t know how you spell it but you pronounce it
kwist
. It’s a word I’d not used for years and years but have used before to describe a pigeon.

I left the lad to his work and went off thinking about my automatic use of the word ‘quist’. I lived the first 20 years of my life in Monmouthshire and wondered if it was a word that came from the Welsh.

I phoned a Welsh-speaking friend that night but he’d never heard it. A friend in Monmouthshire hadn’t either.

I told him another word I used to use was pronounced ‘een’, which described a ewe in the act of lambing. He’d heard that, saying: ‘An old boy who used to work here at one time always used to say een.’

Thank you very much.

I used to employ a real star of a man, who’d be well into his 80s now. He’d been dragged off the farm where the shed and pigeons are during the war, because he was the only single employee there to join the army.

He hated his induction training so much that he volunteered for a role, not specifically described, that would earn him an extra two and sixpence a week. A couple of months later he found himself jumping out of a plane over Arnhem.

Jack always used to bring two thermos flasks to work. One contained ordinary tea and one contained tea and whisky.

At the time, I had a business that used to export game products to France and Jack and I used to drive hundreds of miles together. If ever I was to lose my licence for drinking and driving it would have been because of what was in his number two flask. But he didn’t call them flasks, he called them costrils.

‘Bit cold this morning,’ he’d say. ‘Had to give number two costril a bit extra.’

‘Why do you call them costrils, Jack?’

‘No idea,’ he’d say, ‘always called them costrils.’

Then, one day, I visited the Welsh Folk museum at St Fagan’s on the west of Cardiff – very well worth a visit.

There, hanging on chains under a hay wagon, was a tiny barrel that would have been used to take cider to the hay field. It’s name? A costril.

OVER the last few months, new signs have been appearing in the area denoting a national cycle path.

The chap who works for us cycles half a mile to and from work and I thought at first it was to show him how to get to his house, but it’s obviously a lot more than that.

By strange coincidence, the signs follow exactly the route that was historically taken from London to Aberystwyth. This was a very direct route taking straight lines across country whenever possible. I always thought it was originally planned on a map that didn’t possess contour lines, because it is up and down some very hard pulls.

I used to think: poor bloody horses. I don’t extend that concern to the cyclists because they have more choice than the horses ever had.

There was time when I did a lot of cycling to keep fit and sometimes I am minded to take it up again, as a recreation. A friend once told me that a lot of disused railway lines are now cycle paths and railway lines rarely go up steep hills – that seems an eminently more sensible option.

He once told me he had cycled from Merthyr to the centre of Cardiff and went home on the train – a ride almost entirely downhill. Excellent.