Over the Farmer's Gate (28 page)

If there was a horse to be shod, equipment had to be fixed outside, even if it was pouring with rain. All that wet and all that electricity made me twitchy, but it wasn’t that much safer inside in the dry, with the old man fixing a shoe front end of a horse and all those sparks flying about at its back end.

The father (sounds better than old man) was a great prankster and would love to tease serious horse owners, especially if they were a bit on the novice side.

One day he had me holding a horse’s head while he trimmed its feet prior to shoeing. It was a young lady’s first horse and the first time she had had it shod. She watched what went on,
wide-eyed
and fascinated. He did all four feet and then stepped back to have a look.

‘Do you think the horse is level now, Roger?’

I gave the halter to the owner and joined him to eye the horse up.

‘I think it’s a bit high on that one corner.’

So he lifted the one hoof up and took just a token sliver of hoof off. We stepped back and had another look.

Just to be sure I fetched the spirit level and we did several checks with it on the animal’s back before we were satisfied. By now the owner’s jaw was well dropped, but she never said a word.

The new shoes were duly fixed but there was more to come. The owner had ridden the horse to the blacksmith’s and the saddle had been removed for shoeing.

So Father Blacksmith enquired of the owner which way she intended to ride home. He went to great lengths to determine that she was going to return the way she came and not take a ride around the village first.

Having determined that she was going back the way she came he picked up the saddle and put it back on the horse, facing the wrong way round. He explained that this would save her turning the horse around.

His parting shot was to enquire, indicating his son welding outside, if she wanted to buy some sparks to make her own Christmas decorations. An old blacksmith’s joke, but always amusing the first time you hear it.

THERE was a time when I was given to drinking on licensed premises on Saturday nights. There was a group of us who would congregate in the same pub, in a particular area of that pub, where we were all sitting in close accord on three sides of a small bar.

It used to be quite a competitive issue, laying claim to this bar area, because there was another group that used to seek it out as well.

They used to irritate us because they used to smoke what we called ‘funny fags’ and would take up valuable, and coveted, bar space for the whole evening while only drinking a couple of halves of mild, their relaxation coming from whatever they were inserting into their rolling fags.

Ours was a good crowd of real country people, farmers, farm workers, and some who didn’t work on the land, but came from a rural background; for example, lorry drivers who would help you shear or cart bales at weekends. The landlord would sometimes put a 78 wind-up gramophone on the bar and we would end up with a singsong.

It all disappeared when the pub closed for a couple of years and we all went in different directions on Saturday nights.

What I took for granted at the time and which also disappeared was a lift home. For years I would pick up a neighbour and drive him in the four miles to our local town and at 11 o’clock, as good as gold, his wife would take us home.

Drinking and driving was strictly a no-go area around here at the time. We were possessed of a very driven local policeman who had a mission in life to clear the roads of cars. He would lurk about on the outskirts of the town while the two local ‘specials’ would watch pub car parks and radio him when a prospect left to go home.

Not for a minute am I condoning drinking and driving, but he would breathalyse people sleeping in cars. He got my son while he was relieving himself against a barn wall as he set off to walk home one night, just because he had his keys in his pocket.

He would breathalyse farmers in the early hours as they drove in Land Rovers to go around their sheep at lambing time.

A lift home was very precious and still is.

Times change and we all move on, but sometimes I do fancy a visit to the pub on Saturday night. If I’ve been away a lot during
the week I’m not bothered, but now I occasionally go to the pub in the village.

It’s only a mile-and-a-half away and, in theory, I reckon I’m safe to drink four halves, but I’ve usually drunk them by nine o’clock. It’s not far and the roads around here are very quiet and the incentives to have ‘just one more’ are very tempting.

I don’t think I’m much of a danger on a road where I am unlikely to meet more than one car; it just needs a bit of common sense, because the same rules apply to me as those to someone driving at 70mph down a motorway.

Going back to the times when we had that good crowd together, central to our fun was a great character, now sadly departed, who farmed in the hills outside town. He would be in the pub by seven o’clock every night of the week and taken there by his wife who would fetch him home at 11pm.

His vulnerable time was lunchtime at weekends when he would drive in for a few pints on his own. The vigilant policeman referred to earlier, started to take interest and actually chased him home a couple of times, but didn’t quite catch him.

My friend, a resourceful man, made a plan. For most of us the plan would have involved staying at home at lunchtime, but he had other ideas. Halfway home for him, down these narrow lanes, was a sharp 90-degree bend. There was a gateway on the angle of the bend and inside the gateway, but also at an angle, was a large barn.

The theory was that if he thought the police car was after him, he would drive straight through the gate and take a right-angle turn at speed into the barn and be out of sight, where he thought he would lie low until he decided it safe to go home.

He even practised this manoeuvre a couple of times to perfect it. I came upon him one Saturday evening in the pub in reflective mood. We were on our own and I could sense something had gone
wrong: ‘That Lewis, the policeman, was after me at dinnertime.’ There’s a long pause now while he tends to the need of his pipe. It’s up to me to drive the conversation on.

‘Did he catch you?’

‘No, I’ve been ready for him for some time.’ He gets quite animated now as he tells me the story. ‘You know that sharp corner by Davies’s barn, well I’ve had my eye on that for some time. I went straight through the gateway at about 30mph and whipped round into the barn and out of sight. About a minute later Lewis came roaring up the road, blue lights a-flashing, never saw me. He went back 10 minutes later and I walked home across the fields.’

He puffs on his pipe and takes about half a pint out of his glass.

‘Well that’s all right then,’ I say, ‘you got away with that.’

‘No it’s not, they’d parked a bloody baler just inside the shed and I drove straight into it and wrote my car off.’

His cars were never very valuable; probably third-party, fire and theft, so there would be financial loss to undermine the moral victory. ‘He thinks he’s going to take my licence off me, but he never will.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Never had one.’

MANY YEARS ago, I used to breed Labrador pups. I had one bitch to start with, and over a short time the vets gave me two more that had been left at the surgery to be put down.

We used to get a similar phenomenon to the handbag scenario. This was explained to me by a friend of mine: if a woman gets out of the car with her handbag, she’s come to buy. If she leaves the bag in the car, she’s just making an enquiry.

When I had a litter ready, Mum, Dad and kids would turn up to see the pups. The children would soon be knee-deep in adorable yellow or black Labrador pups. All that was missing to complete
the scene was unravelling toilet rolls. ‘How much did you want for them?’ the woman usually asked. ‘We haven’t decided yet if we’ll have one or not.’

‘I bet you haven’t,’ I’d think. ‘I’d just like to see you go away from here with those children without a puppy.’

The last time I deliberately bred a litter of pups it was out of a most remarkable border collie bitch I had. She was the best working dog I ever had (it’s OK, Mert won’t know I said this, he’s not big on reading and writing) and I thought I would breed a bitch out of her in the hope that mother would teach daughter in her ways of working. So we chose a good working dog and, in due course, a litter of pups turned up. I chose a bitch that I would keep and advertised the rest for sale.

Our local daily paper comes out early afternoon onwards depending on how far you live from the head office. The first purchaser was on the yard at 3.30pm, a very attractive young lady wearing a very smart business suit. She took the jacket off to reveal one of those very pretty white blouses that ladies sometimes wear that is see-through enough for you to see what very pretty lingerie they have underneath. I don’t tell you this to titillate, just to complete the picture.

The pups were in a shed and she asked for them to be let out so she could see them better. Farmyards can get muddy. One after the other, she picked the pups up to hug them to her bosom. Should she have a dog or a bitch? One or two? As she deliberated, others turned up and bought pups, and after two to three hours she had to settle for the only pup left.

You should have seen the state of her.

THERE is a part of my life that finds me speaking after dinners. It’s not something that I ever sought to start with; it’s just something
that sort of crept up on me.

For many years I organised our rugby club dinners, including the speakers. There were countless rugby internationals with just a handful of caps who would want thousands of pounds to come to your dinner. I thought ‘I’ll have some of that’ and for a time, indeed, I did charge a fee.

But the agricultural community has its feet very firmly on the ground and will not pay anything like that amount for a speaker. I would ask for a fee that, per hour away from home, wasn’t much at all, to be met by the response: ‘
How much
?’

You’d be surprised how many people expect you to drive 200 miles for nothing.

Could it be that the dial on the petrol pump goes around so fast these days you can’t see the figures anyway, so they think it’s for nothing.

These days I confine my after-dinner activities to requests from my friends or members of the dairy co-operative I am involved with, so don’t construe what has gone before as some sort of advertisement for more appearances.

What I do now is ask for a donation to the NS PCC, which is a bit close to my heart because I think children are so special and some have no chance at all in life.

I had to speak at a friend’s birthday party last Saturday (and very generous he was, too, to the children) and while I spend some time thinking about what I am going to say, I have a habit of making my notes at the last minute which, if something goes wrong, can make me a bit tetchy, and infuriates my family.

Last Saturday, I chose the hour between the end of milking and time of departure for this very important part of my preparation. I laid out pens, cue cards, started to write and the electric went off. The rest of my preparations were done by candlelight and torchlight.