And Did Those Feet ... (6 page)

After that we drove slowly back to the house. Uncle Frank told me all about the mysterious qualities of the hexagon. The bad things about the square world that everyone else lived in. About harmony and discord, and how bees talked through a bee dance.

Once you got him going there was no stopping him.
Uncle
Frank was one of those guys who was interested in
everything
. All the weird stuff you can point a stick at, but I didn’t mind. As Julius said to Cleopatra, “When in Rome, Cleo, do as the Romans do”. That’s what Dad used to say anyway.

ONE of my regular chores was that I got to feed this cute little black pig called Pimpernel. Uncle Frank made it clear that he was my responsibility and if I didn’t look after him, he would starve. I’d never had a pet before so I didn’t know what to do here either. It’s like I was dumb: everyone else seemed to know everything. Sounds silly now but it still drove me a bit crazy sometimes.

Pimpernel wandered around in the small paddock next to the house. It was all his except for the bits given over to the goat, and the tractor shed. There was plenty of grass but it soon became clear that grass is not enough for a growing pig. What he really wanted was an exciting menu with a variety of items to tempt his taste buds. For a pig, an exciting menu means kitchen scraps.

Pimpernel was a smart little fulla and he and I found an easy understanding. As soon as I closed the back door of the house with the scrap bucket in my hand he spotted me and came running over making soft grunting noises. It was nice this, made me feel wanted. It may have just been the
food but it seemed like more.

Pimpernel wasn’t just a pretty face though, he did other things, which maybe indicated high intelligence. He used to follow me round. Whenever I was climbing on the tractor, or maybe fiddling with the tools in the shed, there he was, watching my every move. He had this special look on his face like he wanted to tell me something, but he couldn’t because he was locked into a pig’s body. It reminded me of those stories I had read when I was really little about people being turned into animals by witches. What a nightmare it must have been, having to watch life go by while you were stuck in the body of some dumb animal. Perhaps that was why I got into the habit of talking to him. Ordinary stuff, things that had gone down, problems that were bugging me, all sorts really. Sounds a bit weird I know but there was something about this pig that said “I understand”. And
because
he was a pig he was unable to tell anyone else what I had said.

I told Pimpernel about all the things I couldn’t tell
anyone
. About Mum. About certain bits of Dad’s behaviour, and how I felt about them. About living with these people. I know they were my relatives and that they were really nice but they were also strange. How they were a family, but they weren’t my family. I had so much stuff going round and round inside my head. It was a pile that seemed to do
nothing
but grow and it got in the way of my thinking. Stopped me from being my normal self. So in some ways it was like I had this spell placed on me too. I stared out of the body of this normal looking boy but I was hopelessly trapped and
no one could do a thing. I guess this might sound a bit
farfetched
to you but that is the only way I can really describe it.

Anyway Pimpernel was like my shrink. My psychiatrist. He would stop eating and listen, making these little grunts after each thing I said. Like “aha” and “huh?” and sometimes a long “nnnnngh”, which is like “far out” in pig language. Of course I never did this when any of the other boys were nearby, I didn’t want them thinking I had gone completely round the twist. They probably thought I was weird enough anyway.

There were other dealings with the animal kingdom that weren’t quite as much fun. One of these was moving the goat. Now you might think that this was an easy task but I tell you it wasn’t. The goat – Uncle Frank called him Satan – was chained to a little goat house mounted on sleds. You had to drag the whole thing along the grass. Satan was a tall billy-goat with big horns, long black hair and an
impressive
beard. Not the sort of beast to mess with. He had these golden eyes that really gave me the heebie jeebies. They were evil. Cold, unblinking, they seemed to bore right into you.

Iain and Jamie claimed he was a good sort, fed him
handfuls
of grass. I was told that Ewan would even jump on his back. I would believe that when I saw it: none of this cut much ice with me. Just like with me and Pimpernel, me and the goat had an understanding too. And it was that was he was the boss, and that I better watch myself.

Whenever I was around, especially by myself, this Satan had
one thing in his head: mounting me. I don’t know whether it was personal or whether the same would have gone for
anyone
else but every time I tried to move the shed this thing happened. Maybe it was a territory thing, he thought I was trying to mess with his patch, who knows, but every time I moved the goat house it went like this.

I was straining at the back of the hut trying to push the thing a few metres forward and the next thing you know the bloody goat thought this was an open invitation to climb onto my back. I tried everything I could think of to break the pattern. I would throw a handful of hay, to keep him busy and then hit the back of the hut at speed hoping to get it over and done with before the goat noticed, but he did notice. He would be around after me, hay still hanging out of his mouth, rearing up all ready for some goat action. I guess you get used to this sort of thing in the country but I was a city boy, and I believe that each species should stick to its own kind. I would stand up and push him away. He would stand off to the side as if he had lost interest but the moment I bent down to drag the sled he was on me again.

In the end I had to invent a non-bending over technique in order to complete the task safely. I would take a fence batten with me and lever the whole caboodle forward a few inches at a time. The goat would stand off to one side
watching
carefully as if to say “one false move and you’re mine!”

Satan totally dominated me.

When it first happened I mentioned it to Uncle Frank and Aunty Lorna as they were about to go out somewhere in the Landrover. Aunty Lorna did this sort of smile and
looked away. I could see her shoulders moving and thought she might have actually been laughing about what I
described.
That wasn’t good.

Uncle Frank was more open. He just laughed, and said, “The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.” It was evidently a bit of wisdom from William B., who seemed to have
something
to say about most things.

“Thanks Uncle, like that’s a big help.”

I could feel my face going red and Aunty Lorna came around the Landrover to try to suck up, I could tell. “Would you like the twins to help you with it?” Which is another way of saying, “Is this job too tough for you, city boy? I’ll get a couple of seven-year-olds to give you a hand.”

I took a step back to keep her out of range. “No. It’s fine. I can do it. I just thought … oh it doesn’t matter,” and I stormed off.

You know what it’s like when everyone gets right up your nose?

SOON after this I was presented with a pair of shiny new gumboots. My size. I could stop wearing Aunty Lorna’s everywhere. It was like I had become part of the family. The gumboot family. It’s soggy everywhere on a farm, and
without
gumboots you can’t go anywhere. Your bare feet sink deep into the brown stuff and the earth sucks hard. (But at least Uncle Frank had pulled a bed out of Mackthuselah so the three of us got a decent night’s sleep.)

These gumboots had a bit of a down side too – I should have known. The following morning I was wrenched awake, along with Iain and Jamie, to help with the milking. I have never been up so early in my life. It wasn’t like early
morning
, it was more like late at night. The other two were used to it, I guess, but I found it really tough.

“Iain, tell your dad that I am not a morning person.”

He just laughed and said, “Everyone is a morning person in this house.”

That seemed to be the end of the matter.

You probably don’t know, in fact you will probably never
know, what it’s like to get up at that time in the morning. It’s really dark and wet. After we left the house the only light was from the cowshed. We all stumbled towards it half asleep: only parts of your brain work at that time of the day. Our job was to bring the cows in, which meant walking to the back of the farm and undoing all the gates. The wolves went with us, like enforcers, but the cows didn’t need them. They knew what to do, in fact, I suspect they were looking forward to it. They led the way, we followed, making sure the stragglers didn’t hold anything up. Iain had a sort of businesslike
attitude
to all this. He was a real farm boy in that way. I could just see him taking over the place when he got older. Jamie was dreamier, a bit like me. He sang all the time, softly and to himself. I thought that this was a bit weird when I first came, but after a few days I hardly even heard it any more. It had its uses too. It made him easier to track down, which is handy when you are living in a big place.

When we got back, the island of light had become a
sucking
, clattering, rural party complete with Beethoven belting out of a little ghetto blaster Uncle Frank had tied to a wall. There were only a few jobs, and they were simple, it seemed to me. Changing the cups: this was the most skilled, along with getting the cows into the bale. Uncle Frank made a big point of pulling a cup off and squirting me with milk straight from the teat whenever I was standing around watching. The other two thought this was real funny. Ho, ho, ho. Country humour, eh? You have to laugh.

As well as these jobs there was the full time one of hosing away cow shit. They make a lot of it, cows, more than you
would think. So it’s a busy scene; there’s milk being sucked out into a vat, there’s cow shit flowing down a drain into a sort of swamp, there’s cows coming in and cows going out. I guess it’s sort of organised. The smell’s a bit weird but I stopped noticing it after a while. No one talked much
because
of the noise. So we all just kept our heads down and got on with it.

Those noises! There was the clang of gates slamming, the stamp of hooves on concrete, and the Beethoven filling in the gaps. (Good milk music, Uncle Frank says.) Jamie
particularly
enjoyed singing along to the Beethoven so he sure added his four pence worth. And that was just background music.

On top of this racket there was also another rural number that went like this.

Suck, suck … moo, moo … suck, suck … splat, splat … suck, suck … “Hold still Molly!” … suck, suck … “Iain get that hose!” … suck, suck … “whoa, whoa” … “Open the gate Jamie!”… suck, suck … “Watch out Sandy!” … squirt, squirt … “Yaaaargh!”

That last one was me being squirted with warm cow’s milk, which is Uncle Frank’s way of saying, “Come back to planet Earth, you space cadet.”

This chorus goes for the full eighty minutes. And the weird thing is no one else seems to hear it, just me.

When I got back to the house, boy was I hanging out for that porridge. After cleaning up, I get on with the cream, milk, golden syrup routine and I’m into it. Halfway through I notice that I am going hard in the eating department too,
slurping away with the best of them. I guess I’m getting
ruralised
, real fast. I remember thinking, “Hmmm. Could be a good thing, could be a bad thing, it’s too early to say.”

ALTHOUGH it sure seemed like it sometimes, life on the farm wasn’t only chores. There was down time and we
always
seemed to have plenty to do. I guess with no TV, radio, or even a newspaper we weren’t too concerned about what was going on in the outside world. Looking back now I see how this had a positive side. We were more creative about how we had fun. We had to be. There was nothing to spend money on, and nowhere to spend it.

One of our favourite places was the barn. This was a huge tin shed with hay bales stacked at one end and machinery and work bench at the other. It was the oldest building I had ever been in, filled with strange objects that had been hung on a rafter forty years ago and were still waiting to come in handy. In the country there could be a saying (although I have never heard it said): “Can’t think of what to do with ten metres of barbed wire/set of antlers/length of chain/old tractor seat/tin of grease/pair of fishing waders? Hang it on the rafters, so it’s right there, when my grandson needs it, in fifty years’ time.”

Iain had this talent though; he could make things out of that kind of old stuff. Just the junk he found lying around. They were really good things too. Give that boy a bit of
copper
pipe, half a metre of hose and a detergent bottle and he would come back with a lethal weapon. It’s true. He made guns that fired wattle seeds. The barrel was a piece of
copper
pipe from an old milk cooler: this was attached to a pistol grip he had cut out of the end of a wooden box with a coping saw. This looked a bit like a gun, but when he added the hose and plastic bottle and dropped a wattle seed down the spout, you really had something that could do damage. It might not seem like much but that very afternoon we were able to
murder
a rat that was feeding on Pimpernel’s food scraps.

Yeah I know, slaughtering a harmless rat going about its ratty business might seem a bit psycho but you have to
understand
that things are different in the country. They don’t see animals the same way we do. Every beast is a food unit, a servant or a thief. They don’t do pets like city folk do. I was brought up to speed with this a few nights after I
arrived
. We were all sitting around the big table eating dinner when I heard this sort of scraping noise on the roof. Next thing Uncle Frank springs to his feet with a hunk of cabbage hanging out of his mouth and lurches off into the bedroom. When he reappears he is holding a huge shot gun and a bunch of red ammo. As he is breaking the thing to load it up, the boys all pour outside, leaving Aunty Lorna at the table trying to restrain Wee Jock from joining them.

I follow my cabbage-munching uncle out onto the frosty lawn to where Iain stands with the others. In his hand is a
powerful spotlight and on the roof is a cute furry creature. Just as I work out what it is there is an almighty boom right next to my ear. The possum disappears over the roofline in a hail of shot. All that remains in the torch beam is a
little
cloud of fluff. By the time we get to the far side of the house the possum, which is missing quite a few of its bits and pieces, drops to the ground in front of us. There is certainly no need for a second shot.

After it was dragged out to the kennels where it was hung up for dog tucker, we all wandered back inside. Everyone else got stuck into their dinners like there had been no more than a commercial break, but I couldn’t. Try as hard as I might, I couldn’t get a single piece of food down. I’d been quite hungry too but I lost my appetite. No one seemed to notice except Aunty Lorna, who came over to me later when we were clearing up and told me to come back just before we went to bed and she would do me some toast. I was pleased she said no more than that. I was struggling to fit in anyway, and then something like that happened. It’s really annoying when your body lets you down like that.

So anyway, during the down time we usually wandered around the farm, looking for things to shoot. I felt good with this pistol strapped to my leg. My blood was up, I was armed and dangerous. The only bad thing was that all the prey seemed to know this and they would keep their heads down. It was really frustrating. When you are not armed they seem to be everywhere, when you are carrying a weapon, the word goes out on the animal telegraph: those annoying little birds that always followed us around the farm, never coming
closer than twenty metres, which was about the limit of our range. We were forced to shoot leaves and fence posts, stuff that didn’t move, or if we were really lucky, a moth that had found itself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Later, when I got really bored, I shot Iain in the bum as he was climbing a fence. It was only a soft one, bit of a joke really. He turned, smiled a really evil smile and shot me in the knee cap. I got this big pink ring with a bruise in the middle. It was the last time I pulled that stunt. Those guys were lethal. Smiling assassins.

But, I should say just so you know it wasn’t all killing in the country, we got to do creative things too. Sometimes especially on wet days, the five of us would go over to make huts in the hay shed. The bales were heavy but two of us could haul them up into place and before long we had built a series of little rooms with connecting passages and
untold
little nooks to hide in. We wriggled through the holes like rats and snuggled down in our musty caves waiting for someone else to find us. It was good down there, a bit sneezy maybe but it seemed there was an endless number of ways we could build so we would be constantly tearing it all down and rebuilding.

Another time we put on a stage show. Iain rigged up this curtain contraption on a wire across the barn with a big green tarpaulin and we all took turns doing acts. Iain and the twins did a series of gymnastic tricks. They were good too, especially Ewan. Handstands, cartwheels, somersaults and lastly a thing called The Tower of Strength. For this Iain had Dougal climb onto his shoulders and then Ewan
climbed up on top of both of them. He was just about to swing off onto a rafter when one of Iain’s legs gave way and they all came down, taking the curtains with them.

I did my usual stand up comic routine, I’ve been doing this for a few years now so I know how to get ’em laughing and keep ’em laughing. It’s called “being on a roll”. Once you get you get them on a roll they will laugh at anything. Even things like this:

“What did the dog say when it sat on the sandpaper?”

Answer: “Rough!”

Jamie surprised me though. I had got used to the fact that he sort of sang continuously, only stopping when he was
really
concentrating or short of breath. On those occasions he would usually whistle. Bloody annoying really, so I didn’t rate him. Anyway he sang a Scottish song called ‘Johnnie Armstrong’. It was a really long song full of weird Scottie words.

It told the story of a man who was a bit like Robin Hood except that he stole from the English and gave to the Scots. The King betrayed him in the end, invited him to dinner and then had him killed. Maybe it was because of the kind of story it was, maybe it was the way that he sang it, but I sort of disappeared into that song and for a while it was like I was wandering around in a world far from our own. It was like being put under a spell. Very hard to explain.