Peaks and Troughs

by Nick Perry

  In the morning Ros slept in. It was a Saturday, and Sam and Lysta were excused the chore of laying the breakfast table so that they could watch Tiswas, their favourite television programme. It was Spit the dog who amused them, me too if I was around. I left the house, hearing them laughing, to join Harry, his head full of a summer cold, dragging the carcass of a gilt from its pen to be put with the others that had succumbed; a pile of death to be taken away in the lorry that Cluttons sent out every day. They had to be winched on board, a steel cable attached to a trotter. We watched them hauled up the ramp inch by inch, listening to the dull clunk of the cogs as the driver turned the handle.

  So it went on for the next two months, decimating the pig herd at Dyffryn. Sometimes we lived in hope, that after three or four days without a death it was behind us. But back it would come; there was no pattern to it. Eventually we had only the odd isolated case. Until on 14 July Barry Evans declared us free of Chicago Vomiting and Wasting Disease. We had lost over thirty sows, fifty-five porkers and I don’t know how many piglets. We would receive not a penny in compensation, and although the FUW gave us tremendous support there was nothing they could do to help us financially. The Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food were sympathetic, but as it was not a notifiable disease nothing was forthcoming from them.

  And then, when you have reached that lowest point, your luck changes, just as you were about to give in.

  Ivan Treadgold rang to say there was a Dutch sculptor in his office looking to buy a hill farm.

  ‘He’s in the area for a couple of days. Do you want to meet him?’

  ‘Why not?’ I replied. ‘He sounds like an interesting guy.’

  He and his girlfriend came by taxi all the way from Caernarfon. That must have been expensive. I wondered why Ivan had not driven them; surely not because of the damage done to his exhaust. He had shoulder-length hair and was wearing a collarless shirt with a pinstriped waistcoat and faded jeans. She had rings on her fingers, dark leather trousers, a loose flowery blouse. My first impression was of a glamorous hippy. As she shook my hand she smiled, showing perfect white teeth. He looked as if he’d had a heavy night. What is it attractive women find in roughened men with that unkempt look? Maybe I should ask Ros. Like all the Dutch, they spoke good English.

  ‘Hi. I’m Ocker, and this is Yvonne.’

  Before we walked to the lower fields I lent them each a pair of wellingtons. We had various sizes left by visitors through the years. Down the track under the larch trees I chased away the geese who were flapping their wings and coming towards us aggressively. I threw a handful of mud at them.

  ‘Sorry. They see everyone as an intruder. I’ve been meaning to get them into the oven for ages.’

  I opened the gate. Ahead of us I could see Dave lying in a bog. The poor boy was having great difficulty getting up when he heard us coming.

  ‘That’s his health spa,’ I said. ‘He’s our old boar, living out his retirement.’

  We walked the boundary wall, which met a ring of mountain ash curving the length of Dyffryn’s border.

  ‘There’s not much grass down here, only what you see running through the middle, where you can graze a few cattle.’

  In the hazy July evening they told me of their lives in Amsterdam. As we walked she touched him a lot, slipping her hand in his, putting her arm round his waist, loving where she was, taking in the view.

  ‘I manage to make a living from my art, selling most of it in one exhibition a year,’ Ocker told me. Yvonne was a painter, and they both wanted to ‘hang out’ in a remote part of the world. He was interested in how we lived, growing as much as we could on the farm. I told him I preferred to barter whenever possible.

  ‘Hey, man, that’s so cool.’

  ‘We’re not a bunch of hippies. We have to work hard.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I understand.’ But they weren’t interested in buying Dyffryn for agricultural purposes. As we talked, I gathered they wanted to create a sculpture park, to exhibit their art in a natural landscape, letting the weather give it the patina that can only come from being exposed to the elements.

  While Ocker and I waited outside, Yvonne walked round the house. ‘Do you mind if I have a joint?’ he asked, taking one ready rolled from a cigarette case.

  Yvonne leaned out of a bedroom window shouting ‘I want it, I want it!’ And when she joined us she snuggled up to Ocker, saying, ‘So what’s the next step?’

  ‘I take it you want to buy the place.’

  ‘We do, we do!’ she said, speaking for them both.

  ‘When do you want to complete by?’ I asked.

  ‘Now,’ she said.

  Then, having already made up his mind, Ocker said, ‘I’ll give you your asking price, thirty thousand pounds.’ He handed me a business card, showing a huge statue in a fountain of entwined birds.

  I said, ‘Is that your name?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s me, Ocker B. van Tits.’

  ‘Wow, what an unusual name,’ was all I could say.

  They were keen to pin me down, wanted to move into Dyffryn in September, only a little more than a month away. They would have handed over a deposit there and then, but I said I had to talk to Ros. They were here for another three days; we would have an answer for them before they left. They gave me the telephone number of the guesthouse where they were staying in Bontnewydd, and I rang for a taxi to pick them up.

  That evening after supper, when we finally got the children to bed, I told Ros.

  ‘Thirty thousand pounds.’ I said.

  She said nothing, reaching for a bottle of Blue Nun.

  ‘In a month, Ros. They want to complete in a month.’

  These were tense moments. She could easily pull back and drop the idea, not ready for all the effort of a new beginning. Eventually, after keeping me guessing with a long pensive stare, she leant forward to fill her glass and lifted her head, our eyes meeting.

  ‘Let’s do it. Accept their offer,’ she said.

  In that very moment life suddenly flowed forward again. The psychological dam broke and energy found its right course; we were on the move.

  There was only one thing left to do now. I picked up the phone and made the call to Ocker.

  Since we were leaving anyway I did not replace any of the stock. Harry knew it was only going to take one pair of hands to run the place. The whole atmosphere of the farm had changed. It had lost its purpose, and in early August I went on my final meat round. It was a day of long goodbyes, telling them one by one that this would be the last Friday I would be calling on them. Some were closer than others, but all of them meant something to me. I had no idea it was going to be so emotionally draining. I kept telling myself they were just customers buying joints of meat, they didn’t own my heart. But after so many hugs and kisses and watching them wave to me as I drove out of Talysarn for the last time, I was overcome with sadness. It was true; I had been the housewives’ farmer.

  With us now restored, plans continued to be made. Ros booked the coach tickets, sorted out things with the school, arranged the children’s work for the next year. All her doubts, and the sense of guilt she felt about Tom and Agnetta, soon melted away. We had an evening with them when Ros bared her soul. She sought forgiveness for letting them down, while they blamed themselves for being blind to her grief over Gwyn’s death. It was what you could call a cathartic clearing of the air. It was the final lifting of an emotional weight for Ros; you could see it in her face. That smile returned.

  Ocker had paid his deposit, and the sale proceeded in solicitors’ offices.

  In mid-August I drove to Porthmadog to put Winford Hook in the picture. It was bound to be a messy affair, all those loose ends to be tied up neatly for the taxman. I walked past the Cob record shop into his office, up those creaking stairs, and knocked on the door, waiting for the sylph-like figure of Mrs Hook to turn the handle and let me in. My first surprise was how much weight she had put on; my second, how much Winford had lost. They had a
lways intrigued me as a married couple. Everything gives way to its opposite is a definite law of the universe. Winford, who couldn’t have been short of a penny or two, obviously did not care much about his appearance. He had shrunk inside his clothes, which were the same ones he was wearing when he was three stone heavier.

  ‘Sit yourself down, Perry.’

  I did, noticing the cat in the fireplace; where else would it be? Winford, with a poetic perception of my state of being, said, ‘It looks as if the tides of life have left their mark on you.’

  ‘Do you mean seaweed?’

  ‘Boy, you have changed; you’re losing your youth.’

  ‘Well, you’re no Lionel Blair yourself.’

  Mrs Hook, now heavier in step, made her way towards me, rattling the teacups, clinking the cutlery. I felt a tinge of sadness, knowing I would never sit here again. I emptied the saucer just as I had always done. I was strangely fond of her; she was beyond type. After she had left us, I told Winford my plans. A look of astonishment moved slowly down his face, the fountain pen falling from his hand and rolling across the ledger. He was speechless. Eventually he said, ‘You’re . . . you’re going to survive.’

  ‘Well, I hope so.’

  ‘The hills are not going to claim you.’

  In that last half hour he showed another side of himself. I think he was genuinely pleased that I was escaping from a life that he had seen defeat so many. Now he stood up, and for the first and last time walked round to the front of his desk and shook my hand warmly.

  ‘Send the paperwork in. I’ll square it all up for you.’

  I stopped outside the Cob, but didn’t go in. Instead I looked at the large poster in the window advertising Bob Marley’s Exodus and drove back to Dyffryn.

  Harry was all on edge when we met in the morning. It took us no more than an hour to feed and muck out the pigs. After I’d milked Frieda he came to me, saying, ‘I know it can’t go on much longer.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Me being here like this. I’m fed up with looking for things to do.’

  As we walked down with a bucket of swill to see Dave I fought with myself, trying to find the right way of putting it. There was no point in delaying what had to be said to this man who had shown such loyalty, been working with me for so long. It was as difficult as those painful conversations with Ros. But he forced it from me and I was glad.

  ‘We’re selling up. I have to. There’s no future here.’

  ‘I know that, I’ve known it for some time. So when are you going?’

  ‘In September . . . the fifth to be precise.’

  We walked the next few yards in silence as it gradually sank in.

  ‘I’m going to look after you, Harry.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘With some money. I’m not just going to walk away.’

  ‘To be fair to you, man, I could do with it.’

  ‘I know that. There will be enough to keep you going for a while, until you find something else. You’re a survivor.’

  ‘What will you do? Where will you go?’

  ‘We’re going to live on a Greek island for a year.’

  ‘With the children?’

  ‘Of course with the children!’

  We talked no further of it, for when we saw Dave it was obvious the old boy was in trouble. He struggled to get to his feet as we called him, rattling the bucket. His back legs buckled as he tried to raise himself up. He could only manage a few yards before he went down again. I knew then he was in pain, the time had come. We fed him, holding the bucket in front of him as he sat on his backside. There was nothing wrong with his appetite. As he ate I scratched his ears. He sniffed the bottom of the bucket, throwing his head around, his bright blue eyes still vivid. He looked in good condition, his skin still had a sheen to it, and as he sat there licking his lips you would have thought he was a healthy pig. But his arthritis was now so severe it had reduced him to an invalid. We should not let him lose his dignity as well.

  ‘It breaks my heart to see him like this,’ I said to Harry. ‘We should call out Barry Evans. Let’s take him up and put him in the barn.’

  ‘What, just the two of us?’

  ‘I’ll bring the Land Rover down,’ I said.

  ‘It will take more than you and me to lift him.’

  ‘Jack’s coming later. The three of us can do it then.’

  On that warm summer morning dancing with insects, as the bees fed in the gorse flowers, I asked Harry if he would leave me to sit alone with the old boy who had been so much a part of my life. With Moss flat out in the bracken I hugged him, my arms round his neck, and talked to him as you would to a loved one, remembering the first time he tried to shag, the walks with Sam and Lysta to wait for the school bus. The days when he carried them and then stood at the gate, the children waving, their faces pressed to the bus windows. He was a pig with personality.

  As I walked away, I looked back at him sitting there like a stone statue, solitary, his head tilted skywards into the blue beyond, unmoving, me weeping because I knew his fate. And when Barry Evans came the next day and shot the bolt into his brain I said to Harry, ‘The king is dead, long live the king.’ I didn’t know what to do with myself, such was the sense of loss.

  After Gitto had taken the last of the sows to Bryncir market, only Frieda remained. The porkers were sold to FMC as part of our contract. Sows with litters went to various local smallholders who fattened pigs on kitchen swill, not interested in producing a lean animal, having them killed by local butchers. When I gave Tom the bees, he told me, ‘You know you can come and join us at any time.’

  Ivan Treadgold organised the farm auction, all the equipment laid out in the top field. The Massey Ferguson, the Land Rover, the plough and harrow, everything we owned was there. Fencing posts, barbed wire, troughs, shovels, the wheelbarrow. And now it was my turn to feel like those before me as the buyers came and picked over every implement. As each lot was sold a memory sprang up, the days working with it in the fields, even how the weather was, who had been with me. For Harry it was too much. I saw him walk away with Ros down to the house. Jack hung around, jotting down the prices in a notebook. We knew some of the buyers, but it was significant that Gethin Hughes was not amongst them, nor Hughie. Dewi bought the wheelbarrow, for sentimental reasons, he told me. ‘That’s how I’ll always remember you, pushing that thing around.’

  Jack and Corinna bedded down in Rob’s old caravan for our last week at Dyffryn, the beginning of the long goodbye. Hendy was still on the market, despite my mother’s dropping the price by £2,000. Whatever Jack didn’t want was being sold to a house-clearance chap in Caernarfon, apart from Gwyn’s books, which were crated up and being held in storage. After banking not far short of £3,000 from the farm sale, I wrote a cheque to Harry for a thousand pounds. I put it in an envelope, saying he wasn’t to open it until we’d gone. He knew it was a cheque. ‘It will see you all right for a while.’

  ‘To be fair to you, man, you’re a good ’un.’

  All the sheep up at Caesarea were to be sold in two weeks at Bryncir; the farm was now deserted. Frieda had the place to herself, and being literally an old cow and beyond having another calf she was without value to anyone. I bribed Dewi into taking her, giving him fifty quid, and the twelve bales of hay that remained in the barn. It was on the understanding that he would not have her slaughtered, that she would see out her last days with him. I trusted him; what else could I do?

  That last week at Dyffryn we got to know Corinna, a girl like ourselves, close to the soil. She was ambitious, had plans for Jack and herself that I knew would take my brother away from shepherding. Unlike Jack, she was sociable, loved the company of others. She expressed her point of view, quite unlike Jack, who preferred to show indifference to the world. What a relief that they would take Moss; she wouldn’t have been happy with anyone else.

  It was one thirty in the morning when I staggered downstairs to answer the phone. It was Rose Tobias rin
ging from California, telling me she had just opened Jack’s letter. She hadn’t come over this year, staying in America to look after her elderly mother.

  ‘Gee, I’m going to miss you guys. And as for that brother of yours, not waiting for me, taking another woman!’ She was joking, I’m sure. ‘And who’s going to look after the place for me?’

  I said I’d talk to Harry about that, and added that we were only going for a year; it was more than likely we’d return.

  Then the phone went dead. I waited ten minutes but she didn’t ring back. I remembered her out in her garden, painting, shouting to us whenever we passed, ‘Come on, guys, come on in for a beer.’

  Ros had mentioned nothing to Eryl, only telling her mother our plans three days before we left. It was a good idea. We couldn’t have lived with the fallout for any longer. Her comment, Ros told me: ‘The act of a man who has no direction in his life.’

  When my mother heard what we were up to she spoke from her own personal experience, concerned about practical matters.

  ‘I hope you’ve got proper medical insurance. You know they will not have a hospital on a remote island. If anything horrible happens, they will have to get a helicopter and fly you to Athens. They only have the odd bandage and a bit of sticking plaster, believe me. Take plenty of aspirin with you . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mother. Ros has already packed a medicine chest.’

  ‘And as for dentists . . . well, I could tell you a story or two.’

  ‘I’ll write as soon as we’re settled.’

  ‘And watch out who you work for. Each island has its own mafia.’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  ‘And remember to beware of Greeks bearing gifts.’