The Yorkshire Shepherdess

by Amanda Owen

  ‘A shepherd spends all his time looking for things that he doesn’t want to find,’ he says.

  We have our own version of a hospital, an ovine hospital, in a small building with a row of a dozen individual pens, a warming box, medicine chest and all the paraphernalia that goes with lambing time. This is where yows and lambs that require more attention are nursed and it’s the hub of the whole operation. It’s in here that decisions are made. We prefer our shearlings, the first-time mothers, to go back to the moor with just one lamb – rearing two lambs is a big ask for a young sheep.

  If an older yow is struggling to feed twins, we may have to take one off her. This is where our pet lambs come from (‘pet’ lambs is what we call the hand-reared ones). People assume that a pet lamb is an orphaned lamb, but in reality it’s more likely that its mother just didn’t have enough milk. This happens more if the weather is bad, as less grass means less milky yows. We hand-rear about forty pet lambs every year, although in 2013, when the weather was so bad, we had seventy. I used to use a device known as a ‘shepherdess’, which is basically a bain-marie. The milk powder is mixed with water and then it sits in a bucket of warm water, kept at blood heat by an electric thermostat. The lambs actually feed themselves from the rubber teats after the first two or three days, so the milk is available to them all the time in the same way that it would be if they were reared by their mothers. But I was flat out trying to keep up with them as they got bigger, and was mixing, filling and scrubbing the feeders several times a day. Then Clive bought me a present, an expensive one at that, a wonderful machine that only has to be filled once a day with the dry milk powder, is plumbed into the water supply and has an automatic cleaning programme. It took us a while to get it calibrated, but it’s a godsend, and proved a good investment.

  Clive will sometimes come roaring up the yard on the bike with a yow in the trailer, sometimes a yow in denial with a lamb she refuses to acknowledge as her own. She needs a few days in a pen to get her head around motherhood. Sometimes he will return with a small woolly corpse. Providing that the dead lamb’s mother has plenty of milk, this is a good opportunity to mother on a pet lamb. The dead lamb is carefully skinned, its jacket fitted onto the pet lamb, and if all goes to plan the yow, after a bit of sniffing, will accept it as her own. We remove the skin after a day, and then the yow with her ‘new’ lamb can return to the flock.

  Occasionally we may need to assist with the birth of a lamb. Sometimes the lamb will not be presented correctly, perhaps in a breech position, or perhaps twins coming together at the same time. You only realize that something is not right when too much time elapses with no result. There is one sure-fire way to find out what’s going on, and that is to put on the shoulder-length orange plastic glove and investigate. In most instances the problem is easily solved, perhaps by the straightening of a leg or a gentle pull, but in very difficult cases where the lambs are tangled together a great deal of patience and dexterity are needed to get them into a position in which the yow can lamb them.

  On one occasion during lambing time we had some overseas visitors who were doing the Herriot tour, a Japanese couple who were intent on seeing a yow giving birth.

  ‘Not a problem,’ I said. ‘Follow me an’ we’ll go an’ ’ave a look at what’s going on in t’barn.’

  We stood quietly in the middle feed passage. It was a scene of contentment, the yows all quietly eating their hay. I explained that we needed patience, so we sat down on a bale of straw and watched intently. It wasn’t too long before an old grey yow started to show all the signs that a lamb was imminent. She headed off to a corner and began pawing at the straw with her front foot. She sat, then stood, then lay down. It was looking promising, and I explained to our visitors that it wouldn’t be long. The video cameras came out, focusing on the yow. Then the noises started, terrible, agonizing groans coupled with an eye-popping strained expression. I was beginning to feel a bit uncomfortable – though perhaps not as much as the yow. My visitors thought this was entirely normal and the cameras kept rolling. I reassured them that there was nothing to worry about, trying to keep up the pretence of normality, while hoping that Clive would put in an appearance. Lo and behold, he did, alerted by the dreadful noises coming from the barn.

  I looked at Clive, he looked at me; the Japanese couple happily chatted to each other. Whatever was said was unintelligible to me but the smiles told me they had no idea things were going a bit wrong. I explained to them that we were going to go to the labouring yow to make sure she was all right, muttering to Clive under my breath, ‘Just keep smilin’. I ’aven’t a clue what the problem is. She’s scanned for two.’

  We knelt down next to the yow, and quickly realized that both lambs were coming at the same time, jammed like a cork in a bottle. Clive whispered, ‘Turn t’owd bugger around, away from t’camera. We’re not guaranteed to ’ave a happy ending here.’

  In a case like this, both lambs need to be pushed back, making for one incredibly unhappy yow. She was already being pretty vocal, and this procedure did nothing to quieten her. Clive lifted the rear end of the yow up into the air and off the ground and I did the shoving, all the time smiling for the camera. Eventually the lambs moved back far enough to be able to be realigned and I was able to grab two front legs, luckily both belonging to the same lamb. In an instant we had a lamb, with a round of applause from our visitors, the second lamb following immediately. Both lambs were none the worse for their ordeal. We left the now-quiet yow happily licking her offspring.

  The Japanese people said it was one of the most amazing things they had ever seen. We thought we were amazingly lucky to have got away with it – it could so easily have ended in disaster.

  We always give an injection of penicillin to yows we have physically helped giving birth, to ward off any infection, and the following day this old girl went out into the fields with her two lambs, all fit and healthy.

  For a whole month we lamb day and night. We take turns sleeping, one of us working late into the night, the other starting very early. It is exceptionally tiring, but it was even more so for me in 2006, when I was heavily pregnant for the third time, with Raven just started at school and Reuben a very active two-and-a-half-year-old. The government advice is that pregnant women should avoid all contact with sheep, especially at lambing time, because there is a risk of picking up infections that can occur in sheep. I was faced with a real dilemma: no one wants to be accused of being selfish or reckless with the life of a baby, but there was a job to do. Whether I was out in the lambing shed or inside the farmhouse, I was always going to be in contact with sheep, directly or indirectly from dirty wellies and clothes. The only way to avoid contact would be to leave Ravenseat for the duration of lambing, and I wasn’t going to do that. I was careful: I took extra precautions, scrubbed up, wore surgical gloves and slathered disinfectant everywhere. I avoided physically lambing any yows unless it was necessary, but sometimes a yow in difficulties just needs a smaller hand.

  By this time I knew I didn’t go into labour the normal way, with contractions and waters breaking, the textbook signs. I knew that when I started feeling just a bit out of sorts then I ought to set off to the hospital. There was no way the medical profession would let me have a home birth after my two previous experiences. And I was very organized this time: I even laid out the clothes for the other two children, so they would look splendid when they came with us to the hospital.

  It started at 5 a.m., just a couple of weeks before my due date, when I began to feel sickly. There was no pain, but I recognized the feeling and woke Clive.

  ‘Come on, it’s time we were going.’

  It was a beautiful May morning, clear and bright, with a hazy mist just lifting over the moor. Clive nipped out into the yard to do a few jobs, and I got Raven and Reuben dressed in their best clothes and put them into the back of the Land Rover, and off we set. Clive was driving sedately down Swaledale towards Richmond, a lovely route that winds its way through Muker and all
the other pretty villages down the dale. Even when you know this area like the back of your hand, you can still marvel at how beautiful it is, and Clive loves to drive slowly, doing his ‘visual farming’, keeping up a running commentary about so-and-so having his cows out, should ours be out, who’s feeding their tup hoggs and so on. There was no sense of urgency.

  I was feeling a bit uneasy, shuffling around in my seat, but I suffered in silence.

  ‘Get a move on, will ta?’ I said to Clive eventually. I really didn’t want to stress either him or the children.

  He looked slightly concerned and went a bit faster, but there’s a limit in a Land Rover.

  ‘Do you want me to stop and get a feed bag for you to sit on?’ he said.

  ‘No, I don’t want a bloody feed bag!’

  Was he worried I’d mess up the Land Rover? It wasn’t exactly pristine.

  ‘Just drive a bit faster, yer dozy bugger, ne’er mind who’s cleared ’is meadows,’ I yelled at him.

  He put his foot down, but I realized it was getting urgent.

  ‘Clive, we ’ave to stop.’

  I knew there was a military hospital at Catterick Garrison, the army’s infantry training camp, but also that the out-of-hours GP service was run from there, so there had to be a doctor and some help at hand. We were only halfway to the Friarage Hospital, and there was no way I was going to make it through another hour of driving. This baby was imminent.

  Clive pulled up to the sentry box at the gate and got out. Two soldiers emerged, carrying rifles.

  ‘I need to see t’doctor, wife’s ’avin’ a baby right now,’ Clive said, hopping from leg to leg. He was getting seriously twitchy now.

  We didn’t, of course, have the right slip of paper for admission to the military hospital: they send you one if you go there for a routine appointment. But this was not routine. The two young soldiers didn’t know what to do. Maybe they thought we were terrorists, in a battered old Land Rover, with two little kids and a heavily pregnant woman . . . But they had a job to do, and they were doing it.

  ‘Sorry, we can’t let you in without a pass,’ one of them said.

  Clive said, ‘Come on, lads, this’s a proper emergency. She’ll ’ave t’baby in yer sentry box if yer don’t ler us in.’

  They kept looking at me, and I suppose, like everyone else, they expected me to be writhing with labour pains, which I wasn’t. Eventually they capitulated and waved us through.

  We screeched to a halt outside the doors of the hospital. Clive rushed in and appeared moments later with a doctor who said that an ambulance was on its way, and that she would give me a quick examination. Clive began to unload the children from the back of the Land Rover but the doctor said, ‘There’s no need to get the children out of the car, you’ll not be stopping.’

  I followed the doctor into a treatment room, while Clive played his deaf card and manhandled the children into the waiting room. The doctor was probably praying for the ambulance to arrive, and it did, very promptly. But as soon as the ambulance men took one look at me they said, ‘We can’t move her. She’s too near.’

  So then there was no choice. I had the baby there, on that narrow examination bed, with my foot resting on a wall socket. The look of relief at the safe delivery on the doctor’s face was a picture: it had certainly livened up her night shift. I had a healthy seven-pound baby boy who cried immediately.

  Outside Raven said, ‘Babby’s ’ere, I can ’ear it crying.’

  They popped their heads round the door to have a quick look at the new arrival, and then Clive took them off to the garrison McDonald’s for a celebratory breakfast while I was loaded into the ambulance with the baby and taken to the Friarage. It was good that this birth had been witnessed by a doctor as she told me that he was born in the occiput posterior position, the same way that Raven had presented, but, thankfully, as the baby weighed less than she did, I had been able to deliver him.

  Clive and I had both decided that he would be called Miles. We have a field called Miles’s field complete with a barn called Miles’s cow’as (cow house) so it figures that there had been a Miles at Ravenseat long ago. We also like names that are short or can be shortened, so they can be easily yelled at high volume from the farmhouse door when the children are just specks in the distance.

  Miles was a very sleepy, contented baby and fitted in well to life at Ravenseat. I carried him with me everywhere as I went about my work on the farm. My babies have always been good at sleeping through the night from very early on. I always think it must be because they are in the fresh air all day long.

  I try to keep the children safe, of course, but I also like them to be busy outside. I’m always keen to introduce them to country pursuits, but on one occasion it ended in tears: Miles’s and mine. We had a burgeoning population of rabbits at Ravenseat, and I decided it was time to make a rabbit pie. I had been rabbiting before but I have always been hopeless at killing them. On the one occasion I reckoned I had caught enough to make a family-sized pie, I got home and realized that my rabbits had clearly not been dead, merely concussed. They had woken up and escaped out of my bag.

  Clive was equally unsuccessful at controlling them. He got so annoyed at the number of rabbits sitting in his newly mown hayfield that he decided he was going to shoot a few. He sat on the tractor and fired at them with his air rifle. His target would jump, look a little startled, peer quizzically at its rump, scratch, and then carry on grazing.

  We had a ferret called Brian, Brian Ferret, and the children were excited when I announced we would take Brian rabbiting. Many of our steep banks are a maze of warrens which are perfect for rabbiting, the idea being that you put nets over all the holes then send Brian down to scare them. The rabbits take fright and run out into the nets. That’s the theory, anyway . . . Brian was a lazy so-and-so and never took his job very seriously: we were sure he went down the hole, found a cosy corner and had a doze.

  We set off on a lovely autumn afternoon: me, Raven, Reuben and Miles, just a toddler in the backpack. We had Brian and all the time in the world. There was great excitement among the children, they could hardly bide themselves. It didn’t matter how long Brian spent down the hole, as I’d brought along some Milky Bars as a treat and to keep their spirits up while we waited. And waited. And waited. The children nibbled away on the chocolate, willing a rabbit to appear.

  Ferrets don’t have very good eyesight, but they must have a damned good sense of smell, because unbeknown to me Brian had come out of the hole, rabbitless, walked across to Miles, sniffed the air, smelt chocolate and then sunk his teeth into Miles’s cheek. There was a piercing scream. I ran over and tried to prise Brian off, but his jaw was locked on to Miles, and the more I pulled the more I was pulling Miles’s face. I remembered being told that the way to get a ferret to release his jaw was to stub a cigarette on him, but I don’t smoke, so that was no good.

  It’s all a blur how I managed to get the ferret off, but I did. I shoved him back in his box and ran back to the farmhouse, me in floods of tears carrying an inconsolable Miles. There were fang marks on his face, he looked like he’d been savaged – which he had – and I was beside myself. I was convinced that if I took him to the doctor I’d be reported to Social Services.

  ‘Clive, they’re gonna take t’kids off us,’ I wailed.

  Clive was calm, as usual. Miles was up to date with his tetanus jab, so that was all right, and we squirted some penicillin into the wounds and dressed it ourselves. He stayed in hiding on the farm for a while, until it was all nicely recovered. Because the wounds were only puncture marks they healed beautifully, and left only the tiniest of scars.

  A few superficial injuries are bound to be picked up along the way if you let the children run free.

  BEWARE: FREE-RANGE CHILDREN.

  That’s what my sign says on the road down to the farm and that’s exactly what they are: free range. They play in the fields, ride horses, dig, build things from the rocks they find in the river and g
enerally make their own amusement. They also have a freedom that is probably rarely found in this day and age.

  We live so far from anywhere that they don’t have ‘play dates’ and friends round for tea – not very often, anyway. We did have one little boy who came round to play with Reuben, dropped off for the afternoon by his mother who arranged to pick him up a couple of hours later. The responsibility of someone else’s child weighed heavily on my shoulders, and I forbade the children from straying any further than the farmyard. A little while later I went to check on them and found them in the corner of a barn very much engrossed in something. We’d had an invasion of rats and had put down some traps for them. A rat had been caught in one of the traps, and Reuben had decided it would be interesting to see who would win in a fight between a rat and a ferret. So he got Brian and put him in the trap with the rat.

  Although it wasn’t really my idea of a cracking way to while away your afternoon, I didn’t mind too much. Brian could see off a rat with no problem and I despise rats. But I don’t think the other boy’s mother thought much of it, when her son excitedly told her all the gory details after she came to pick him up. Needless to say, he never came back to play.

  It was after Miles was born that I started up my cream teas enterprise. As I’ve mentioned, we’re slap bang in the middle of the Coast to Coast walk, and there’s a constant stream of walkers, in good and bad weather, throughout the summer months. In fact, we get them most of the year: the only time they don’t come is in the worst of the winter weather. They often pause here to rest their weary limbs after crossing miles of bleak, boggy moorland. Ravenseat is a welcome sight, the first habitation they will have seen in nearly ten miles.