Chewing the Cud (17 page)

She was an Anglo-Nubian, a breed with large pendulous ears and a profile of Roman nobility. I couldn't find a billy of her own sort within range, but the gentlemanly Saanen was good enough, the object of our goat keeping being simply to produce milk to feed to dachshund puppies. It didn't matter how the kids turned out. Whatever they looked like, they were a delight to watch as they skipped about the orchard; and when they were old enough, we would sell the females and eat the males, another delight, like spring lamb with a hint of venison.

Transport for animals at that time was a large custard-colored Austin van, once the property of a baker, which I had bought by mistake at a farm sale. Watching disinterestedly as the bidding reached thirty-six pounds, I had chanced to look towards the auctioneer, a friend, who nodded his head at me, so I nodded back, and he knocked it down to me.

“Too good to miss,” he said afterwards, and he was right. Twenty years old it may have been, but it served
me well for three more until I sold it, for thirty-six pounds.

Driving it was, I imagine, like driving a bus, sitting high above the passing cars and double-declutching my way through the heavy gate gears. Rachel's first trip in the baker's van was memorable, since she immediately jumped out of the back and sat composedly by me on the front seat, looking down her patrician nose at the foolish humans who laughed and pointed as we went on our stately way to the home of the billy goat. Suddenly I saw in the distance two elderly acquaintances walking towards us. I whipped off my hat and placed it on Rachel's bony dome. I retain the picture of their startled faces as we swept solemnly past.

We had friends who kept Anglo-Nubians, and passing the bedroom window of their bungalow one day, I noticed with a little surprise that on their double bed there lay side by side three large nannies, sensuous, relaxed, and enigmatic, like Goya's
Naked Maja
in triplicate with a bit of help from Salvador Dali. I knocked on the front door.

“John, do you know there are three goats on your bed?”

“Bloody hell,” he said resignedly, “not again. Goat pellets are so much worse than biscuit crumbs.”

After Giles was born, Myrle stopped showing the dachshunds, and we gave up goat keeping. But earlier, when regular litters of puppies made the chore of milking goats worthwhile, I was scanning the livestock section of
Exchange & Mart
, looking as ever for a bargain, and saw what seemed a cracker:

“Eight young female goats. £4 the lot.”

Hastily I sent off a check to an address in Staffordshire. A couple of weeks later, I had heard nothing and the money looked to have been wasted. Then the phone rang.

“Mr. King-Smithth?”

“Yes.”

“Williams here, stationmaster.”

“Oh yes, Mr. Williams?”

“Were you expecting some goats?”

“Oh. Yes, I was.”

“Perhaps you'd come up to the station right away.

They're all over the line, and the down express is due through in ten minutes.”

When Gladwyn and I arrived in the baker's van, there were seven gaunt goats of unknown ancestry and a variety of colors wandering dispiritedly on the tracks. The eighth the stationmaster held. All were thin as rakes, their ribs like toast racks, their bleats of protest feeble.

We rounded them up, quite easily, for they had no strength to resist, and shoved them into the van as the express came rushing through.

“When we opened the door of the wagon, they came tumbling out,” said Mr. Williams. “The poor sods are starving, they've eaten the string they were tied up with, and even the labels off each other's necks, bar this one.” And he showed me a scrap of cardboard.

“… Smith” it said, and below that “… Farm,” and at the bottom the last few letters of the name of the village.

“That's how I knew they were yours.”

They weren't mine for very long, for though I worked hard to rekindle their interest in life, they could not respond. Riddled with worms, they could get no good of the food of which they had been starved, and all died, of their own accord or mine. You gets what you pays for.

For Myrle and me, life at Woodlands Farm was really an extension of our childhood pet keeping. Breeding animals
was the thing we liked doing, and in an ideal world we probably wouldn't have sent the calves to market or the piglets to the dealer or the chickens and ducks and rabbits to the deep freeze but instead kept the lot, reveling in the increase in our flocks and herds. But of course during the fourteen years we were there, the most important increases were to our own family. We'd arrived with Juliet, aged two. Almost immediately, Betsy had been born. Then, five years later, Giles appeared.

Though he has managed to retain his given name in later life, nicknames are two a penny in my family, and as “Gordon” became Dick, so Juliet is usually known as “Buddy,” and Betsy always as “Liz.”

All three inherited from us the notion that farm animals were all just pets — they treated Monty, for example, as a large sort of dog — and one of their favorites was Snowballs. Snowballs was a duck or, to be more precise, a Muscovy drake.

We kept a lot of Muscovies (good eating: the ducks Aylesbury-sized, the drakes much larger, dressing out at seven or eight pounds, the flesh dark and gooselike). Snowballs, pure white, was the grand seigneur of a large harem of females, black and white or blue and white, and his mission in life was a simple one, namely to pass on his genes.

The mating of Muscovy ducks is a kind of ballet, not only of movement but of noise, not of quacking as with common or garden ducks but a sound of hissing. The neat female gives quick little gasps as of ecstasy already enjoyed rather than yet to come while the great drake lets off steam with the regular rasp of a steam locomotive pulling away from the platform. Grotesque he is, this lumbering premier danseur, short-legged yet long-bodied, somehow seeming as much goose as duck: adorning his face are bold patches of naked red skin that flame with passion as he treads his measure. Round and round each other they move, heads jerking back and forth like pistons in a stately, sibilant pas de deux. More often than not, the stage is filled, the entire corps de ballet hissing and twitching around the principals as the dance moves to its climax.

There must have been something in the pomp and circumstance of Snowballs's unending attention to duty that fascinated our children. There was nothing of prurience
in this. For if you grow up on a farm, you look upon conception, birth, and indeed death with an experienced and level eye. So, often the two girls and Giles would solemnly dance around the courting couple, intoning as they did so some primitive chant of cadenced jingle that blended with the gobbling gasps of the lovers. Beyond the three children, kept at another remove from center stage, the corps de ballet dutifully bowed and bobbed.

But there was at last a morning when the children came rushing to find me. They had been dancing the ritual dance, but this time the ending was different. They led me to that day's stage, a little side lawn under a false cherry tree, and there he lay, the prince, flat on his back, his cheek patches and wattles engorged with purpling blood. His flashing eyes were closed at last, that rasping hiss was silenced, and the mighty emblem of his drakehood lay flaccid and still forever upon the dirty feathers of his stomach.

“Go, bid the soldiers shoot!”

T
hough I rate myself as having been a reasonably good stockman, caring properly for my animals, I was (and still am) a hopeless businessman. Worse, there was no pressure on me to do better at this so important part of farming, for the Golden Valley Paper Mills didn't much mind if the farm made a loss. They simply set it off against tax. So for fourteen years I failed to record even the most modest profit. Had Myrle looked after the farm
accounts then, and later when we moved to a much bigger farm, things might have been different. She couldn't have been worse than me. But she had the cooking and the housework and all the gardening and the children to look after, and all her breeding and showing of dachshunds.

At last in 1961, the paper mills ceased trading after fifty-three years under first Grampy K-S and then Father. It was one of the very few remaining small family mills making high-quality paper, and with its outdated machinery, no longer in a position to compete with the big boys in paper-making. So it folded, and then of course Woodlands Farm was put on the market.

What was to become of us? By chance, an old friend of Father's owned a farm a handful of miles away whose tenant was about to retire, and so I was offered the tenancy of Overscourt Farm, at 200 acres four times the size of Woodlands Farm.

I would love (how I would love) to be able to tell you that the six years that I spent as the tenant of Overscourt Farm were, financially, successful. But alas, one thing didn't change, namely my lack of business sense. Gone were the pigs and the goats, three times as large as the dairy herd that Gladwyn and I had to milk; I grew a large acreage of corn, and we started out with high hopes. Yet six short years later, I was done for, six years in which Myrle had worked so
hard to make the old Elizabethan farmhouse (which needed a lot of money spent on it) into a comfortable home.

There were excuses for me, I suppose. It was, by general agreement, a difficult farm to work, some of it heavy clay, some useless woodland, some thin old pasture. The rent was high, and the man who eventually succeeded me as tenant couldn't make a go of it either. But still it hurt, to have wanted to farm, to have been a farmer for twenty years, and to finish up a failed farmer. The day of the dispersal sale in 1967 was hard to bear, having to watch the stock sold, the cows, the few chickens, the many ducks — all, by selection, pure white now in memory of their great ancestor Snowballs — the machinery, the implements, all passing into the hands of strangers.

We'd had good times at Overscourt Farm as a family, of course we had, and as a family we were happy. But my most abiding memories are of two accidents that happened to me there.

I was always having accidents. Curious that they always seemed to be my fault.

For example, there was an old cart shed, the roof of which was failing to such an extent that I became afraid it might actually fall on someone, the children perhaps. I determined to engineer its collapse. I tied a rope to a large central A-frame, which I (rightly) considered the keystone
to the whole business, prior to going safely outside and pulling. Unfortunately I did just give one sharp tug while still inside — just to make sure the knot was properly tied — and the A-frame promptly fell on my head.

I visited the same hospital not many months later for a different reason. We had a new contrivance for the front-loader of the tractor: a heavy metal scoop, held in place by two steel bolts each the size of a large cigar. We had been shifting some very wet dung, slurry in fact, and when the job was finished, I set about disconnecting the scoop. Obviously these bolts had to come out, so I pushed one of them through with my forefinger and the whole weight of the five-hundredweight bucket fell on it.