Over the Farmer's Gate (21 page)

Hay racks full of sweet-smelling hay, I have discovered, are ideal places for a cat to stretch out in comfort while it idles the day away until it’s time for the calves to have some more milk. A nice little hay rack will hold three adult cats or about 10 little kittens.

Calves, I have also discovered, are less likely to eat hay if it’s stinking of cats. Sometimes, on dark, wet days, my mind drifts towards the word ‘cull’.

I know I could catch them and have them neutered but the last time I took about 20 of them to the vets, they got out of their boxes and nearly wrecked his surgery.

When he finally rounded them up, he pointed his finger at me and said: ‘Don’t you ever do that again.’

But I don’t have only dark days, I sometimes have bright ones, and as I go towards the calf pens, buckets of milk in each hand, I have to smile at these semi-wild kittens that run to meet me, torn between their desire to be fed and their desire to remind me that they are indeed wild; backs arched, tails erect, spitting sparks, ready to fight me.

The dog keeps well away during these encounters. The dog, for his part, has developed a particular excitement on Friday mornings when I take the wheelie bin down to the bottom of the road. I suppose I have to pull it a couple of hundred yards and he becomes so animated about the process he has bitten me twice now. Only playful nips, but the nips are getting less playful as week by week the excitement mounts.

But I’ll never swap him for anything. He thinks the world of me. He knows I’m in the house while I’m writing this and he
keeps creeping further and further through the kitchen door.

I can hear the corgi, whose kitchen it is, growling at him. Now they are fighting and Mert is getting the blame and a bollocking to go with it. I’ll take him for a ride in the Discovery in a minute; just the two of us together is the best company either of us ever gets.

I’VE GOT a friend who used to be a builder but did a bit of farming on the side. He took on some extra land one year and bought a lot more sheep. If you’ve got a lot of sheep, it stands to reason you need a good sheepdog. So off he went to buy one.

He went to one of those top trialists, who can make a dog do just about anything, and paid him £500 – which was a lot of money for a dog 10 years ago; it’s a lot of money now.

We advised him, we in the pub, not to let the dog loose for a few days until it got used to him. He didn’t listen and the next morning he went out into the field where the sheep were, made the dog sit down by his side, and then with all the panache of a contestant on
One Man and his Dog
, told the dog to ‘Get by’. And the dog did get by, he ran around the flock of sheep in a perfect line beside the hedge, through the fence at the end and around the next field and the next and to cut a long story short, they never saw him again.

As far as I know, he could still be running – or then again, one of my friend’s canny Welsh neighbours might have got himself a top-class dog, very cheap.

I HAD my day’s shooting this week. Shooting is like a lot of outdoor activities: you have to have the right kit. By the time I started to get ready, time was already running out.

First off, the gun. I knew where the gun was – in the gun
cabinet, which is located well out of sight in an old attic.

The trouble with old attics is that there are lots of nooks and crannies in which to hide the key. As I hadn’t used the gun for 12 months I couldn’t remember which particular cranny held the key to the gun cabinet. It took me about 10 minutes with the torch to find the key. One of the few things that wind me up is being late so, as you can imagine, I was getting wound up by now.

The rest of the kit was no trouble; all I needed now were some sandwiches and a drink. Some sets have quite expensive bits and pieces to go with them, like stainless steel thermos flasks – one for soup, one for coffee – and nice little containers for food, with little compartments in them for whatever items happen to be on the menu.

My choice was between an empty ice-cream container and a plastic bag. I chose the latter. By the time I had emptied my wife’s saucepan cupboard on to the floor looking for the flask, she was getting annoyed as well. ‘You’ve left it outside somewhere,’ she said. And I had, in a tractor cab. As I walked back to the house I gave it a bit of a shake to see if it was empty. The tinkling noise that came from inside told me that it chiefly contained broken glass.

The flask went into the black bin and I set off to shoot. My little plastic bag held one of those little drinks cartons with a straw fixed to the side that my wife buys for our grandchildren.

The first drive of the day reminded me that practice makes perfect and I needed lots of practice, because I didn’t shoot a thing. After that my competitive streak kicked in, and I tried to work out what was going wrong and correct it. After three drives it was lunchtime, and I reckon I’d shot only four. But I didn’t tell that to anyone.

Lunch took place around a table in a garage. My little plastic bag didn’t look much in that company. All the others looked as
if they had called into Harrods on the way, not only for the food they had with them, but for the containers they put it in, too.

Last to sit down is a farmer from Herefordshire. He farms in a very big way: there is a new four-wheel drive Mercedes outside. He had his lunch in a little plastic bag as well. I saw him looking at mine and our eyes met, and there’s a flash of empathy and understanding there.

We had two drives after lunch, and on the first I was on the end and didn’t get a shot.

Inevitably, my mind started to wander and reminisce about shooting, in particular the times when I used to do a lot more.

There was a gang of us in those days, who had played rugby together for years and we had taken on a fairly modest shoot. Boy, did we have some fun.

An important part of the fun was a spaniel I had that I had bought for £60, second-hand from a gamekeeper.

The dog’s name was Bullet. We used to have an end-of-season shoot dinner, with awards in categories such as shot of the year, miss of the year and so on, traditionally presented in golden envelopes.

Bullet was always dog of the year but they wouldn’t let him go to the dinner – I had to receive his prize on his behalf.

Lunchtime always made me think of Bullet, because we always used to stop for sandwiches in a tin shed in the middle of the shoot. One of my friends used to bring business clients to shoot, who we weren’t allowed to make fun of. This was a bit of a struggle, but we didn’t mind, because if he had clients with him, he would always pick up the tab for the bar meal we would have at the end of the day.

Anyway, during each shoot, we would sit down in this tin shed for our lunch. There would be various spaniels, Labradors and the odd sheepdog scattered about the floor, all of them except Bullet
busy grooming themselves after their morning’s exertions.

Bullet would sit centre-stage on full alert, apparently listening to our conversation. There would always be one guest who was there for the first time. These guests, given the types of people they were, would probably categorise themselves very highly, and would take it upon themselves to lead the conversation, mixing, as they were, with a group of ‘simple farmers’.

Sometimes, eloquence in conversation is enhanced by the expansive gesture, the telling wave of the hand, and sometimes that hand might contain a sandwich or a piece of pork pie, or indeed, on the very first occasion this happened, a generous slice of camembert.

Bullet was, by now, facing the speaker. You wouldn’t have seen him move; he must have just shuffled gradually until he’d turned around fully, without any of us noticing. Eventually, the piece of Camembert went just an inch too far. There was a blur of Bullet’s head and we heard the click of his teeth.

‘Your dog’s taken my cheese!’ the speaker shouted in surprise.

Everyone else was in stitches, and then the former owner of the cheese forgot what he was eating, and checked to see if his hand was still attached. Despite everything, he was fine. Bullet was not a dog to waste anything. I miss that dog still.

One day I received a phone call from a neighbour about a cow flat out with milk fever and, without thought, I jumped in the car and set off to attend her, forgetting that Bullet was loose in the yard. I didn’t see him follow me to the end of the lane and under a lorry.

After this week’s shoot we went to one of our local pubs for something to eat. I sometimes wonder if people think me aloof and unapproachable, because I often find myself on my own in company, just ‘people-watching’.

That afternoon, there was a young lad doing the cooking. I
think he’s between 16 and 18 years old, and he had a chef’s outfit on. When he thought no one was watching, he fetched a half-pint glass, half filled it with one of those Irish cream liqueurs, and further fortified it with two shots of whisky.

This went down in two gulps and then he disappeared back to work. Fascinating.

I’M OFF to do one of my favourite jobs. I go on my own to do it, which is, in itself, a cause for some reflection – have I started to prefer my own company?

Most of the land I rent has, around it, what we call a
six-metre
margin. This margin is left to its own devices; it is left unfertilised, unsprayed and ungrazed. It forms what the ‘experts’ call a wildlife corridor.

Where we have, as we do in lots of cases, a six-metre margin in this field, a hedgerow, and then a six-metre margin in the adjoining field, it forms quite a considerable area of wildlife haven.

Add to this the several areas of cover that we grow, and it is no wonder that I can see a steady increase in wildlife. These areas are all receiving a payment which goes, in my case, to the landlord. I rent what’s left in the middle of the field. The money comes from the funds that used to be focused on supporting the production of food and is now targeted at improving the environment which, politically, is more acceptable. Many people raise their eyebrows at the phenomenon, under a Labour Government, that sees huge quantities of money moved gradually away from the farmer to the landowner.

By midsummer, these margins are rough, overgrown areas. Now in their fourth year, weeds are starting to proliferate, and I see a problem here in the long term.

At the moment, thistles, docks and nettles predominate, but
there’s a lot of ragwort appearing this year. My job today is to take tractor and trimmer and cut a strip around every margin. The strip is to be cut on the side nearest the field centre, and I think it’s supposed to be an area where wildlife can dry out after a downpour. I’m supposed to cut it in July/August but I’m a bit late this year, but there’s only you and I who know that.

I suppose what I like about it is the fact that it takes me slowly around the outside of every field and gives me a chance to take in every detail of crops, fences and wildlife.

The six-metre concept is probably the best value for money that anyone ever had. Farms and farmers are subject to random audits by Defra. These audits are at very short notice, I think 48 hours, and there is absolutely no chance of a postponement.