Chewing the Cud (2 page)

It's always nice for me to think that, in a funny way,
Babe
was born here, in the little village where we live. I mean that he was born in my head, in my imagination, thanks to our annual village summer fête.

One particular year I was in charge of the Guess-the-Weight-of-the-Pig stall, and I must, I suppose, have thought as I stood upon the village green, recording people's guesses and taking their money, that it was a shame that such a lovely little pink pig should end up, once he was big enough, in the deep freeze.

Suppose fate had something quite different in store for him? Suppose he should go and live on a farm, with a sheep-dog as his foster mother? Suppose he should want to do what she did?

He couldn't be a sheep-dog.

But he could be a sheep-pig.

For twenty years and more I have come to think of myself as a writer. But for all the early part of my life I thought of myself as a farmer, and indeed, between 1947 and 1967, I was one.

Often, in my dreams, we are still at our first farm, Woodlands Farm. The children are still small (though in fact one of them now has a grandchild about the same age).

Occasionally in these dreams, I drive a tractor or work in a remembered field, but I am more likely to be in the farm buildings, preparing food in the old disused pigsty, feeding the pigs in the barn or the calves in the stables or the hens in the loft or the rabbits in a loose box.

Woodlands Farm was like that — everything lived in an unexpected place. Mostly, of course, I'm in the cowshed, doing the milking, always somehow seeming to be behindhand, I'm late, I'll never be finished in time for the milk lorry, get a move on, do.

For Myrle and me, that first farm was a bit like the toy farms that each of us had played with as small children. It was stocked with practically every sort of animal you could think of. It was a bit of a muddle, but a cozy muddle. It was full of interest — then in reality, now in dreams.

I
think I always wanted to farm. I would have had an idealized picture of the life, I suppose, but the wish had two strong roots: to continue to live in the country and to work with animals. It was all going to be so simple. The pets that I had always kept — the rabbits, the guinea pigs, the fancy mice and rats, the ornamental pheasants, the budgerigars — would translate into cattle and pigs and poultry.

When I was eighteen, I determined to make a start,
unconcerned that I was by nature unbusinesslike, that anything mechanical baffled me, and that my educational qualifications for the job were ten years of studying the classics. “How blest beyond all blessings are farmers,” Virgil had said, “…far from the clash of arms.”

In Europe the clash had begun. In Wiltshire, I took my first steps on the road that was to lead, seven years later, to Woodlands Farm. “They won't call you up for a year or so,” my father said, “so you can either go up to Cambridge in that time, or you can go and do some practical work on a farm.” I jumped at that. I certainly didn't want to join the army till I had to, nor, newly released from schooling, did I want to go to university. But farming — now, that's what I'd long wanted to do. Father would find a farmer who was willing to take me as a pupil and would pay him the necessary premium. He found one in the Wylye Valley in Wiltshire, and there I went in the early summer of 1940. Mother sent me tin boxes of 100 Players Medium cigarettes. My employer gave me a pound a week. And I worked hard.

I spent the first four backbreaking blistering weeks at Tytherington Farm hand-hoeing a huge field of sugar beets. The seemingly endless rows of young plants had to be cleared and singled. The weather was right and every available man was at it. At first I scratched about as
clumsily as a newly hatched chick in a barnyard, but gradually they showed me how to use the hoe, to push with it as well as pull, to tease out and deftly flick aside the competing weeds, to cut and scrape and twist the wrist to take away all the surplus seedlings at one spot, a deft instant selection of the fittest that left only the master plant standing to grow to beet's estate. Each completed row had eventually to be a rigidly dressed, exactly spaced rank of the elite, chosen on merit from that great army of plants.

At the start of each pass across the field, at the headland, we are level — the five farm laborers, the horseman, and me. There are others on the farm, of course. There are the four poultrymen, already gone up to the downs to tend many thousands of birds in fold units; they stand like charioteers in their little rubber-tired tumbrels pulled by an assortment of strange ponies and broken-winded hunters. And the foreman, a dour Yorkshireman called Howard, is up there too with his hairy dog, Bran, to tend the sheep and the big mobs of Irish-bred stirk heifers running with their bulls. And there are tractor drivers at work somewhere, far out of earshot. But the hoeing gang is the usual one of Albie Ball and Billy Ball and Tom Smith and Fred Smith, called Henry to distinguish him from the fifth, Fred Prince. And Jack Stannard the horseman, roped in to help and grumbling at it. And me.

By the time we've been going for a bit, things look rather different. Albie, in keeping with his undefined but acknowledged position of leadership among the men, is clearly the best man in the field. Tall body bent, blue eyes sharp in a very red face, the hoe flicking in his hands like a striking snake, he is some yards ahead of Tom, Henry, and Fred. Of these three, Tom has the edge in speed but deliberately handicaps himself, slowing his work by much chat and laughter. Then comes Albie's uncle, Billy, a very small man with a drooping mustache and a high voice, broader than any in his speech. He seems to me to be extremely old (he might have been in his fifties) and shouts ahead to keep in with the conversation. Behind him comes Jack with his limp — some mettlesome horse had once smashed him against a wall — and a look of distaste at unaccustomed field work. And last, of course, is the beginner.

But Albie, as soon as he reaches the far headland, turns and comes back up one or another's unfinished row, and so do the others in their turn, so that we all start again together, seven rows of sugar beets nearer to the other, far-distant side of the field.

They were very good to me, those farm men. They showed a lot of patience when I made a mess of a job, and they were always willing to teach me how to do a thing right. These days machinery reigns and there is almost
always a tractor with something on its front or back end to do the donkeywork. But then we were usually on our flat feet, holding a hoe or a fork or a rake, spade, pickax, crowbar, sledgehammer, beetle, billhook, reaphook, slasher — the list is endless, and there's a right and a wrong way to handle each.

For hay or straw you must master the pitchfork, the “two-grain prong” they call it in Wiltshire. There are parallels with the game of golf, where the same club in different hands may send the ball flying long and true or scuttling feebly to hide itself in the rough for shame. Success lies in the timing, the grip, the stance, the swing, the unhurried rhythm. So it is in the hayfield.

“Yur, look at old Dick. Wass doing then, stabbing Germans?”

“Thee'll 'ave it droo thy vut if thee dussn't watch out.”

“Thee 'on't pick up no more nor a bird's nest like that.”

“Give us thic prong, Dick. Now lookzee…” And Albie or Tom or Henry would tease and twirl and cajole a great mass of hay into place and then, leaning over the top of it, lance the two slim forward-facing tines into the exact magical kernel of the heap. A shift of the grip, a downward press with the right hand at the very end of the long shaft, a lift with the low-gripping left hand, an easy twist and heave, and a dip of the shoulders to bring the prong
upright, and there's a miniature haystack walking away towards the wagon. It's not as easy as it looks.

In the nature of things, I improved. And in the course of time I began to learn how to do a whole host of things I'd never done before. How to stook corn and how to pitch sheaves up onto a wagon and thence to the rick maker high on the rick or mow. How to lift and carry sacks of wheat as heavy as myself. How to harness and drive a horse in shafts. How to dig a posthole and hang a gate and strain a four-strand wire fence, and throw a ewe on her back for the shearers, and fling dung, and drive cattle, and cut a block of hay from the mow with a hay knife.

I began to make myself useful, to stockman or shepherd, to carter or thatcher, in the hayfield, at harvest, or by the threshing machine. Here I was usually condemned to be “on the dust”' responsible for raking away and heaping aside the dirty, powdery, choking river of chaff and bristly awns and weed seeds and general rubbish that the roaring, heaving monster voided from its bowels, filling eyes, ears, mouth, and nostrils, penetrating up sleeves and trouser legs and down collars, ferreting in through the very lace holes of my boots.

It was Billy Ball who was run away with one day in harvesttime, and thinking about that reminds me how big
a part the horse still played, sixty years ago. There were tractors of course: an early Fordson, a Case, an International, a green John Deere, and an orange Allis Chalmers. It was a big farm, and already the downs as well as the lower lands were being plowed and cultivated and sown to grow food for a nation at war. But the bulk of the wagons and carts still had shafts to them, not drawbars, and there was work for horses in a dozen other ways — harrowing, horse-hoeing, hay raking, for example.

Indeed in the hayfield, where the pick-up baler was only just beginning to show its face, we used a monstrous horse-operated Canadian machine to lift the loose hay up onto the mow. First the hay was pushed up together, not by tractors, but by a couple of ancient and aristocratic motorcars fitted with wooden sweeps, a Lea-Francis and a Lagonda. Then, once a sufficient mountain of hay had been collected, Jack would whip up the horses — four there were abreast — and somehow (the mechanics of the thing are quite beyond me) this great contraption, a cross
between a giant's toast rack and a Roman ballista, would creak and crack and groan and throw half a wagonload up onto the top of the mow in one convulsive heave.