Over the Farmer's Gate (9 page)

IF EVER you come to our house, and you are very welcome – bed and breakfast, en suite, reasonable rates – you will discover that our back yard slopes down to our house, that there are buildings on two sides of the slope and the house is at the bottom.

If I tidied our kitchen table up and let you in, you would also discover that it is a typically large farmhouse kitchen, and that you need to go down three steps from the kitchen to the rest of the house.

Earlier this week we had the mother and father of all thunderstorms. I was putting a machine on a tractor to go thistle cutting and took shelter in an adjacent building.

It was raining so hard it was quite spectacular but after a quarter of an hour, I decided I would be as well off in the house and do a bit of writing.

I didn’t have a coat with me so the 50-yard dash would have soaked me to the skin but the Discovery was sheltering in the shed with me, so I took that to get to the house.

I’d never seen so much water going down the back yard and you could see that although the drain wasn’t blocked, it just couldn’t cope and the water was rising at the kitchen door.

There was already an inch of water in the kitchen when I opened the door. I’ve always thought of myself as resourceful, so I
went straight to the airing cupboard and got out some blankets.

I put one against the door that leads to our living room, where the water was now starting to accumulate, one at the top of the steps to stop the waterfall that was gathering pace and then tried to brush some water back out of the door.

This was a complete waste of time so I put the third blanket across the bottom of the door and with two feet and the broom head, managed to keep it in place and stood there for half an hour.

I did open the door a fraction to see what was happening but the water was six inches above the doorstep. Eventually the storm abated and I was able to clear what was now three inches of water back out through the door. It took me two hours of sweeping and mopping to restore order.

My wife was out during this drama and when she returned home the kitchen was fairly clean, I had lit the Rayburn to speed up the drying process (always a plus where my wife is concerned). Most important of all, I had stopped the deluge flooding the rest of the house.

A few years ago we had a similar experience but there were no heroes on hand to save the day. Our living/dining room was flooded. We worked hard shampooing the carpet and hired dehumidifiers and thought we’d done a good job but three days later the carpet started to stink.

If ever you see flood victims on television waiting for new carpets and fittings, don’t be tempted to think they are trying it on because the filth and smell left by a flood is appalling.

Personally, my own heroic efforts went largely unheralded and I felt a bit like the little Dutch boy who saved the community by putting his finger in the dyke, but without the recognition.

My next-door neighbour, who knows everything, and certainly more than is good for him, reckons we had an inch and a quarter
of rain in 40 minutes, most of which came down our back yard.

ON A never-to-be-forgotten Sunday a couple of weeks ago I caught two moles, one an hour after I laid the trap. One was still alive; the trap had caught him by his leg. I had some difficulty deciding what to do with him.

You have to have some admiration for these little animals and how they live their lives; I just wish they would do it somewhere else. I don’t mind trapping them and killing them, I just prefer it to be out of sight down the burrow.

I told my daughter I’d put it in a bucket of water. ‘That won’t do, moles are good swimmers,’ she said. Not with a mole trap on their leg, they’re not.

OUTSIDE it’s cold, very wet and very miserable. The livestock are miserable and all the staff are miserable. It wouldn’t be a particularly bad day in the middle of February but we’re at the start of June. It’s a good day to sneak into the house to write but only because the Rayburn is keeping the kitchen cosy.

Earlier today I was reminiscing. I’ve reached the stage of my life when my wife says that I have more to remember than I have to look forward to, but I have one or two things up my sleeve I haven’t told her about yet.

A week ago we went to a promise auction for the village school and that’s what started me off on my reminiscing. I used to be very involved at the school, chair of governors, chair of PTA, unofficial lifeguard at their weekly swimming lessons, but children grow up and your life moves on.

Yet here we were again in the village hall at a social event on a Saturday evening to raise money for the school. Our attendance
was at the request of my daughter whose daughter has just started at the school, the third generation in our family.

It reminded me how much fun you can have with rural fundraising. The first time I raised money in this area was many years ago when I organised a raffle for the rugby club. It was one of those proper Christmas raffles with an official licence and lots of prizes. Getting to the last two prizes, and also getting a little jaded, I found that someone in our local town had won a pair of tights and someone in Blackpool had won a turkey. I’ve always been a practical, commonsense sort of person and it seemed to me eminently sensible to swap the prizes over and send the tights to Blackpool. Someone found out what I’d done and reported me to the authorities and I got into quite serious trouble, and still ended up sending a turkey to Blackpool.

When I was chair of the PTA I used to have an annual battle with the ladies on the committee, they were all ladies on the committee except me. We used to run a dance every year in the village hall. I would insist on a local farmer doing the music. He had no lights, no effects, just a deck and some records but
he only charged £15. That meant we were into profit as soon as the committee had bought tickets. He always used to bring a spot prize with him which would be won by the couple dancing closest to a rusty nail stuck in the ceiling. He always chose the same nail, same spot, so the spot dance always became something of a rugby scrum. The year after I retired the ladies had a live band and lost £150.

A couple of years ago, we had a golf day at the rugby club and the first prize was a pig. Everyone was going ha ha, very funny, but secretly suspecting it was a frozen pig for the deep freeze. Some of them were already smacking their lips in anticipation of the crackling. Actually it wasn’t a frozen pig, it was a fresh one. Very fresh, alive and well and weighing about 200lbs. They let it loose in the clubhouse where it ran amok as it rooted about for food scraps left from the dinner we’d just had. Half the people were on the floor because their chairs had been knocked over and half were on the tables because they were afraid of it.

My favourite fundraising story is of the cheese and wine we held here at the house once for the rugby club. Things got a bit out of hand, as they do, and someone fetched the children’s donkey out of the field and into the house and raised a lot of money giving donkey rides — once around the kitchen and twice around the sitting room for a £1. Women with tight skirts were 50p. The donkey was impeccably behaved from a lavatorial point of view.

Our promise auction for the school was fun. If you were associated with a school in a large town or city you probably wouldn’t get the chance to buy a load of manure, two tractor batteries or some hay. There was a load of logs on offer that made £70. The £70 was bid by the person who had given the logs. I had to ask why he had done it. ‘What time have I got to cut a load of logs?’ came the reply.

I’M OFF to bed, as usual, fairly early – it’s where I do most of my reading. There are three of our bed and breakfast guests in their sitting room, I’ve not yet met them, so I pause to say hello.

They ask me for a corkscrew to open a bottle of wine, which I get, along with three better wine glasses than the ones they are using.

They ask me to join them in a drink, which I decline, but I do sit down for a chat. The conversation drifts towards wildlife. They have been watching our pond and, in particular, the mallard and her young, and a coot and her young. The mallard ducklings are declining in number and I suspect the coots are to blame.

I tell them I’ve been watching
Springwatch
. They tell me they love the programme, but just can’t put up with Bill Oddie, so they don’t watch it any more.

I can sympathise with that, perhaps it’s because dairy farmers are more used to adversity and become more pragmatic, but I tolerate Bill Oddie because I enjoy seeing the wildlife.

It’s a classic case of a ‘celebrity’ who thinks his ego is more important than the programme. On one show he talked about a species of bird being reintroduced to the UK. The reintroduction was set back a year when the birds strayed off their sanctuary on to a farm where they were ‘inevitably’ poisoned. He was saying quite clearly that farms are synonymous with a poisoned environment. How disgraceful is that?

He wants squeezing into a wetsuit and dropping in a cold loch, where, with a bit of luck, he might be picked up by an osprey and fed to its young – all shown on camera, of course.