Over the Farmer's Gate (19 page)

Just as they started to lay, one went missing. The family searched everywhere, to no avail. There was no sign of her, no feathers anywhere either as evidence of a visit from Mr Fox.

She phoned me up and said: ‘If I lose any more of my chickens, my business will be in ruins.’ This from a seven-year-old.

Then, lo and behold, as they say, or just like that, as Tommy Cooper used to say, the errant pullet returned, with no explanation, as though nothing had happened, and went on laying an egg a day.

Katie was at our kitchen table one day, telling the story to a friend of ours. ‘Where do you think she went, Katie?’ ‘I just think she wanted to sample life on the wild side.’ Walkabout, the Aborigines call it.

DRIVING ABOUT, on tractor or in Land Rover, the sudden movement of pheasants in fences and hedges is recorded in your mind subconsciously. Yesterday, something brown scuttling about in a fence caught my eye because its movement was different. It was a fox caught unawares by the approaching tractor. It’s harvest time for foxes. Shoots go to great lengths to collect any birds that have been wounded. It’s a part of shooting that is scrupulously observed but, inevitably, the odd bird is missed. Enter your fox to clear up.

I reported the sighting to the keeper who asked me the time of day I’d seen the fox and he was able to tell me, within about 30 yards, where I’d seen it. His knowledge of wildlife and its habits never ceases to amaze me. (Foxes, for reasons I don’t understand, are called Charlies in this area. Hares are known as Sarahs.)

The keeper tells me that there are lots of ‘new’ foxes about. A keeper on a neighbouring shoot has shot 10 in the last week, all within half a mile of his house. Where they all come from bewilders me. When my children were young, my favourite TV programme
Bagpuss
sometimes used to show a chocolate biscuit factory that continually turned out biscuits but there was, in fact, only the one biscuit which a little rascal called Charlie mouse carried around the back of the factory in order that it could reappear in due course at the front. Foxes are a bit like those chocolate biscuits – they keep on appearing, endlessly. Where do they all come from?

THE WET and windy weather has seen the majority of our cattle into their winter quarters and the weekend work routine has become a full and demanding one. My son still plays rugby every week at a reasonably high local level. My wife reckons he’s too old to be playing first team rugby, but when he started playing she reckoned
he was too young so you can’t win, as most men have discovered. Every Sunday morning she asks if he is all right from the previous day’s game. Mostly he is, apart from a bruised this or that or a cut or a black eye. Last Sunday, he was completely unscathed.

On Sunday afternoon, he took his two boys ice-skating – a birthday treat – and broke his ankle badly. He must have been doing one of those triple whatsits but he hasn’t told me how he did it yet. The boys will, when I see them.

What it does do is put a lot of extra work on the rest of us just when the routine workload reaches its highest. We’re fairly pragmatic about injuries here and take them in our stride (is that a sort of pun?) For many years we were both playing rugby, and at one time I had a broken ankle and he had a broken arm. It worked out quite well in the end because I could do what he couldn’t do and he could do what I couldn’t do and we were both getting paid weekly by our private insurance policies. Come to think of it, that was about the last time we made any money. His mother says he will be off work for three months but I noticed this morning he had two sets of crutches – one for best and one for going around the cows.

NEXT WEEK we have our annual TB test. I’m dreading it. It will be four days’ hard and difficult work at four different locations. In the summer it is a simple matter to move cattle about the fields so that they are handy to where we have our best handling facilities, but now they are all in their winter quarters we will need a bit of ingenuity and planning to achieve a test. Matters are not helped by having our main cattle handler immobilised while his leg is in a plaster cast. He has a particular knack of grabbing the unco-operative animals when they least suspect it and then has the strength to hold them while the vet does the test.

I’m also dreading the test itself. We haven’t had a reactor for 20 or 30 years but bovine TB is rampant in this county. A herd a few miles away had 38 cows taken for slaughter a couple of weeks ago. The animals were on a large estate, not in any proximity to any other cattle, and they haven’t bought stock in for years and years.

For farmers, it is quite clear that most of this infection comes from the reservoir of infection that exists in wildlife and in one particular species. It seems totally unfair to me that I have to offer up my stock for annual testing while the source of infection is not addressed. It is a question of balance that completely baffles me. It’s OK for cows to be slaughtered but not the culprit. For farmers, it’s a bit like trying to stop the tide coming in.

If we do fail our test next week, the restrictions that will be imposed on our business will be devastating. We could easily end up slaughtering calves at birth because we wouldn’t be able to sell them at a month old, and we would have neither the room to accommodate them nor the food to feed them.

I HAVE ALWAYS, it seems, woken up at two or three o’clock in the morning. There is a very good reason why I wake up at that time these days, the details of which would be inappropriate to set down here.

Thirty years ago it would have been for a very different reason altogether but the details of that would be even more inappropriate.

This morning I was woken by a throbbing noise. As I lay in a semi-conscious state I, very feebly, tried to identify what it was.

I ran a sort of roll call of my body parts to see if all was well and decided that the only bit that was in any difficulty was my left arm. I was lying on it. The arm felt sort of dead and it was full of pins and needles so I decided that it was empty of blood and the
throbbing noise was in fact the blood trying to get back in.

I turned over on to the other side and went back to sleep, pleased that I had solved the problem without having to wake up properly.

The noise woke me a second time but I drifted off again.

The third time I woke I turned over on to my back and I did another body check. After a few minutes, half awake, half dozing, I decided that the noise wasn’t coming from me. I also decided to try to locate it.

First I checked my mobile phone. I use it as an alarm clock because I hate the noise it makes so it always does a good job of waking me up. I put my hand out in the dark and located the phone – it was fast asleep, just like I should have been.

I sat up in bed and realised the noise was quite clearly coming through the window. And there lay the answer – it was a rave.

They have one on a farm about three miles away several times a year and the drumbeat always wakes me up and invades my subconscious. I always wonder how loud it is if you are actually at the rave if I can hear it such a long way away.

I know the lad whose farm it was on; he’s a grand lad, even if he is a bit unconventional for a farmer. I’ve asked him if I could go to one of his raves and he said I’d be very welcome.

I went back to sleep content and satisfied. For a few minutes there, I’d thought I was having one of my turns.

I’VE ALWAYS considered myself a dog person as opposed to a cat person. There are plenty of cats around our farm but I try to distance myself from them. To achieve this, I have always described them as feral, meaning wild, as in free spirits, free to come and go as they please. This is a particularly important distancing because my farm assurance says I should worm the cats. So, when the
inspector asks me the appropriate question, I take him to a place where I know there are likely to be a dozen or so taking their ease. They bolt quite violently in all directions and I have proven my point.

But I give them milk every day and, for their part, they are expected to catch the solids in their diet. Every spring, they have lots of kittens which they secrete away in bales and the like, so that by the time I see them they are too big and too wild to catch. But there have been two litters born this autumn which is very unusual. Half of them are black, and half a beautiful grey colour. I have a dish hidden away behind some bales that I put nice, warm milk in twice a day, and hidden behind a pallet is a bag of cat food. The food isn’t hidden from the cats but from the humans. The kittens get this food twice a day, as well as the milk, and now some of them will come quite close to me.

Don’t tell anyone. It wouldn’t suit my image, so let’s keep it between ourselves. Men don’t keep cats. They keep dogs, and real men keep working dogs. My dog is called Mert, an abbreviation of Mervyn who gave him to me. When he came here he had a name that was very, very politically incorrect so we quickly changed it to Mert. Mert is a real dog. In fact, he thinks he is a wolf. He probably gets that idea from watching our favourite film
Babe
too many times. Wolves like Mert prey on joggers, ramblers and cyclists. They are all legitimate quarry in his eyes, providing all the growling and aggressive posturing that can be done while he’s in the Land Rover with me.