Today's Reading
I was born in June 1953 in the cottage on my grandfather's farm in the village of Condicote, but we moved when I was less than two weeks old to a remote smallholding in Clapton-on-the-Hill, rented from Gloucestershire County Council. It was truly off the beaten track but in the early evening of the first day, thirteen cats appeared on the doorstep asking to be fed! The fields were steep and the soil was heavy and waterlogged. It had been occupied since 1919 by an invalided First World War veteran. My father set about draining the wettest fields, digging almost a mile of trenches by hand with a ditching spade, laying red clay pipes in the bottom of the trenches and then back-filling with soil. We lived in a bungalow in the middle of nowhere, several hundred yards from the farm buildings, with magnificent views but no telephone, electricity, or easily accessible water supply, just a temperamental pump in the back kitchen. Within a few months, though, a telephone line and mains water were connected. Electricity was laid on too but the council wouldn't pay to wire the bungalow, so my father did it himself.
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There is a grainy photograph of me aged around two years, bottle-feeding a lamb in my grandmother's orchard. It would be more than half a century before I was able to decide to keep sheep myself. The intervening years were spent with cows and pigs and hens. 'Other people' kept sheep and the only ones I ever saw were in huge flocks. I'm ashamed to say that I believed what I was so often told, that they didn't have individual personalities.
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Cows were not just part of our life but the very core of it. I helped to move the electric fence most days when I was not at school and tested its strength by holding a blade of grass to the wire, which gave me a small shock rather than the powerful one I occasionally got by accidentally touching the wire itself. I roamed freely among the cows from the time I could walk. Only Susan was a bit inclined to toss her head, so we always walked behind rather than in front of her. I frequently picnicked in fields of cows, or sunbathed, eyes closed, without the tiniest worry that they would harm me. They often surrounded me, snuffling at me with grassy breath and licking my wellington boots.
My days were filled with the routine of school, before the excited rush home to be on the farm. One of my jobs was bucket-rearing calves. We milked a herd of pedigree Ayrshires. The calves were kept separately and fed whole milk twice a day. I would carry four small plastic buckets each containing four pints of precisely warmed milk, two on each arm to leave my hands free for opening latches. The trick was to time my entry to the calves' home and swiftly position the buckets under each nose without any being spilled. I had of course watched this being done countless times before attempting it myself, and I knew that to spill any would not merely be expensive but would cause havoc. Four calves each receiving their allocation simultaneously spelled success and contentment. If one bucket or part thereof was spilled, the deprived calf would try to steal from one of the others, resulting in much if not all the milk being lost, and the whole procedure having to be repeated.
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Our Scottish Border Collie, Roy, was exactly the same age as me. He was bought by my father, by telephone, from a breeder he knew. At the age of six months Roy travelled unaccompanied in the guard's van, all the way from Scotland to the old railway station in Bourton-on-the-Water, on the long-gone branch line from Kingham to Cheltenham. This journey involved many changes of train, and we were all waiting anxiously on the platform. As soon as Roy alighted, my father called him by name and the dog ran straight to him. Evidently the various guards had all made a fuss of him because he seemed extremely happy.
Roy was fully trained—he responded to Scottish commands—and happily worked with any of us. He could distinguish between calves and cows in adjacent fields if we said the words clearly. He had a sweet temperament and we all loved him. But he was used only twice a day to bring the cows in for milking, up very steep fields on our first, forty-seven-acre smallholding. The rest of the day was his own. He enjoyed our company and could always be seen in family photographs, even when we had no knowledge he was there until the picture was developed. Every time he was given a bone he would immediately hurry away and bury it, but he could never remember where he put it. We had to get into the habit of secretly following him so that when he started looking for it we could tactfully show him where to dig.
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