My Animals (and Other Family)

by Phyllida Barstow

  By late afternoon the rain had set in steadily, drumming on the tents, and we ate the last of our porridge, chocolate and raisins in our sleepingbags, uncomfortably propped on our elbows, with heads out of the flap and Lucy lying lengthways beside me, edging me off the groundsheet. There was no wood so no question of getting a fire going, and though I had a couple of chapters to go in my whodunit the light was too poor to read easily. It looked like being a long night, and my spirits were at a low ebb when faintly in the distance I heard voices.

  ‘What’s that?’ I was out of the tent in a flash.

  ‘What’s what?’

  Before I could answer, Lucy had realised that her long long walkies was over and she could safely abandon us. With ears cocked and delight in every portly line, she bustled away into the murk, and a few minutes later led into sight the rescue party – Mummy, Daddy, Olivia, and her schoolfriend Jenny, carrying baskets of food and drink, with Scot bringing up the rear. Never was there a more welcome sight.

  Finding the river in spate, they had backtracked to the nearest bridge some five miles downstream, abandoned the car in a farmyard and then followed along the bank to where they thought we must have set up camp.

  Six humans and two dogs in two bivvies with a groundsheet draped between them was hardly a recipe for a comfortable night. Whenever you tried to move you found someone’s feet or elbow or tail in your face, but well fortified with wine, pork pies and fruit cake and serenaded by one another’s snores, we all managed a few hours’ sleep, and woke so stiff that we could hardly crawl from our nests of rugs and blankets.

  ‘I’ve been sleeping on the living rock,’ groaned Mummy, combing her hair with her fingers and searching her pockets for a lipstick.

  It was a beautiful morning. Overnight the stream had returned to its normal width and placidity, and as we loaded up our kit for the last time and made our way back to the car, I forgot all the low points and felt I would happily make the whole expedition again.

  By degrees, two steps forward and one back, Mummy was learning the basics of hill farming, what could and couldn’t be done on thin, poor soil in an unforgiving climate, but as usual she wanted to run before she could walk. She devoured books about animal husbandry, read Farmers’ Weekly cover to cover, accumulated a shelf of teach-yourself manuals: pigbreeding, egg production, the proper management of turkeys.

  A revolution was taking place in British agriculture which, since the war, was no longer the preserve traditional farming families. Businessmen, institutions and large companies were buying and amalgamating run-down farms, slapping up steel-and-asbestos buildings and, by applying business methods to livestock production, turning them into agri-factories in which cattle, pigs and poultry were intensively reared.

  In the drive to cut costs, time, and labour, a good many corners were also cut in the matter of animal welfare. Beasts were crowded together, their movements restricted and any natural behaviour that interfered with the production-line’s smooth running was ruthlessly eradicated. Chickens were de-beaked to stop them pecking one another. Calves were deprived of roughage to keep their meat white. Cattle and sheep were doused with noxious chemicals that not only killed parasites but did no good at all to the animals’ nervous systems. Pigs were mutilated in a number of ways to facilitate handling and stop them fighting, while sows were confined in farrowing crates so narrow that they could not turn round. This prevented them from lying on their offspring, but often resulted in them having so many survivors in each litter that they could not rear them all.

  The new vogue for high-protein concentrates enormously increased the yields of dairy cows, but the stress of carrying such a burden of milk also wore out their udders and placed a painful strain on their hoofs. Despite these obvious drawbacks, those who got in on the ground floor of this new style animal husbandry made a lot of money, and Mummy wanted to be among them.

  She couldn’t help being aware that Daddy was not – and never would be – a farmer. Though he was perfectly happy to drive a tractor at weekends and apply his mind to any problem she could not solve, his career lay elsewhere. He enjoyed the variety and complexity of his work as a London solicitor, the company of his colleagues and the mental stimulus of legal problems. Many of his clients were old friends who had been with Trower, Still & Keeling for generations, and given the choice he would not have lived so far from London.

  He had bought the Fforest because Mummy wanted it so much, but as a realist he must have known from the first that far from ever paying for itself, it was likely to prove a bottomless hole of expense. This didn’t worry him too much, because he saw it as a good place to bring up his family and besides, in those days losses made by the farm could be set off against tax on his income as a solicitor. He saw that to make money on a Welsh farm you had to live like a frugal Welsh farmer, forswearing life’s expensive pleasures and luxuries, and to underline the point, he commissioned a cartoonist friend to illustrate an old verse on agricultural economics, which he hung on his office wall. It went:

  Man to the plough, wife to the cow,

  Boy to the barn, girl to the yarn,

  And your rent is soon netted.

  BUT…

  Man tally-ho, Miss piano,

  Wife silk and satin, boy Greek and Latin,

  And you’ll soon be Gazetted!

  What with private schools and hunting high on the winter agenda, our family was plainly embarked on the second course, but although there were sometimes edgy sessions with accountants and bank managers, it never prevented my father backing Mummy’s new ventures, with each of which she was certain to earn a fortune, pay off the farm’s ever-growing overdraft and incidentally make her name as an agricultural pioneer.

  In-barn egg production was the first of these short-lived enterprises, entailing (as in every case) much upheaval plus considerable financial outlay. A brand-new deep-litter house was built, floored with layers of hardcore, sand, bark, and finally thick wood-shavings, and equipped with nesting boxes and tiered perches which the younger children enjoyed using as a climbing-frame before the hens took up residence.

  It looked and smelt lovely for the first year, and brown eggs fairly poured out of the handsome hybrids, whose feathers glinted greeny-black in the sun since they counted among their mixed ancestry Plymouth Rock, Black Sumatra and Rhode Island Red genes. They pecked around in the litter and took dust baths in favourite corners in the most satisfactory way.

  Unfortunately, as with all honeymoons, the glamour didn’t last. Chickens have an astonishing talent for degrading their surroundings, and since poultry-keeping was in Wales traditionally women’s work and Mummy was often too busy to attend to it, once again we children found ourselves landed with a particularly unattractive holiday job, which in this case meant scraping encrusted guano off the perches with long-handled hoes.

  As the powdery calcified deposits came loose, they showered the toiling scrapers with feathers and mites, very itchy in the hair; and disinfecting the woodwork with a strong solution of Jeyes Fluid made our eyes sting. Very soon cobwebs had begun to blur the outlines of the shed. The straw in the nesting-boxes became glued into mats when soft-shelled eggs broke and, worst of all, certain villainous hens developed the depraved habit of pecking out the yolks. This was a hanging offence, but unless you actually caught the culprit red-handed – or in this case yellow-beaked – the difficulty was first to identify her, and then to force yourself to nab her and carry out the execution.

  Nor did their vices stop at egg-eating. Despite the carefully balanced diet and relatively liberal house-room, the hens developed aggressive tendencies, pecking one another’s bare patches during the moult until they became raw.

  Mummy sent for a de-beaking instrument, but the diagrams showing how to use it were so reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition that her nerve broke and she decided the hens’ bad behaviour must be due to a lack of green fodder. Armfuls of bolted cabbages, hedgerow weeds, lawn clippings were distributed among them but made no
difference except to befoul the hitherto dry deep litter, and at last she admitted defeat and opened the door of the shed – which of course was what the hens had wanted all along.

  Out they poured, clucking and scratching all over the nearest fields but, being hopelessly naïve about predators, most of them soon fell victim to foxes and the survivors, rejoicing in their liberty, took up residence in the stables, laying eggs in the hayracks and mangers in the good old traditional way.

  Though it was now clear that intensive egg-production was not a quick or easy way to pay off the farm overdraft, Mummy was not through with poultry-keeping yet. As soon as the deep-litter house had been thoroughly cleaned with blow-torches and its woodwork given a fresh coat of creosote, a large and handsome Broad-Breasted Bronze stag turkey with a pompous gait and flapping wattles whom she named Whimsical Walkern and his six meek wives were installed there instead, and this little flock settled down to raise their families and provide Christmas cheer.

  Again all went swimmingly at first. The big buff-speckled eggs hatched, the chicks flourished and grew into gangling adolescents, the young turkeycocks ruffled their neck-feathers and began to fight, and then disease struck. Four were found dead one morning, six the next, eight the day after. It was like the Black Death. Birds that were perfectly healthy one evening were obviously unwell next morning, hunched and listless, and by dark would be stretched out cold. No-one could tell us what was wrong.

  The vet hummed and hawed and sent samples for analysis. Turkeys were non-native, delicate birds, prone to heart attacks and nervous disorders, an easy prey for opportunistic viruses. Soon his fees and those of the laboratory swallowed up any hope of profit. Ever more toxic medicines were prescribed for the few remaining birds, and after poor Valerie’s near-fatal run-in with the arsenic tablets, Mummy decided to pull the plug on the turkey-breeding enterprise.

  ‘Would you really want to eat a turkey that had been regularly dosed with poison?’ she demanded rhetorically, and threw open the deep litter house door. Out strolled the survivors, two demure turkey-hens and old Whimsical Walkern himself, who gobbled merrily as they asserted squatters’ rights over the Dutch barn, roosting on the girders and spoiling a good deal of hay with copious droppings.

  Soon Walkern was behaving as if he owned the farmyard, wantonly attacking cats and sheepdogs and any child under four foot tall – which of course included George. He was the perfect caricature of a choleric Colonel. When something displeased him, his feathers would ruffle up and his little blunt train fan out, then his wattles would glow bright red as he flapped the rather disgusting long floppy finger of skin sprouting from above his beak. His gobbling would reach a crescendo before he launched himself at his enemy, and it was a bold spirit who stood his ground before that furious charge.

  Mummy used to arm George with a stick with which to fend off Walkern’s sudden savage lunges, though he was strictly forbidden to hit the old bully. It made crossing the farmyard quite an ordeal and, though he survived his wives by nearly a year, in a way everyone was relieved when a night raid by C. Fox Esquire terminated his reign of terror and nothing remained to remember him by but a fine portrait showing him in full display on the farmyard wall, with which Mummy won the hotly-contested photographic competition at the Hundred House Show.

  Apart from a brief flirtation with Khaki Campbell ducks, which swam away up the Colwyn Brook and were never seen again, that was the end of serious poultry-keeping, but hope – particularly hope of hitting the farming jackpot – springs eternal, and soon Mummy had a new enthusiasm: pigs.

  Understandably wary by now of intensive rearing methods, she decided to keep them in the most natural conditions she could provide, sheltered but free to roam and rootle as they would in their wild state. No farrowing crates, no tethering of pregnant sows, nothing but a stout rail a foot from the floor all round the inside of each sty to stop the sows crushing their offspring.

  The old farm pig-sties were renovated and re-roofed, their cobbled floors replaced with sloping concrete which could easily be swept down to the wide ramp that separated the line of sties from the muck-heap. The concrete troughs had drainage holes through which water could be sluiced. There were even self-fill water-bowls, into which a metal plate released water when pressed down by the drinker’s snout, but unfortunately this brilliant innovation was not proof against the destructive power of pigs. One after another, the metal plates buckled and jammed open, flooding the sty, for the Wessex Saddleback sows were unbelievably strong, like little piebald tanks of muscle and wilfulness. When they wanted food or water, they wanted it now, and woe betide anything animate or inanimate that got in their way.

  Old Rock King David the Forty-Eighth, a Large White boar of distinguished ancestry, was a much gentler character than his bustling, stroppy wives. His movements were measured, even stately, and he loved being scratched along the backbone with a stick. He also had the advantage of prick-ears, which allowed him to see properly. I always suspected that the Saddlebacks’ tendency to jump and squeal and threaten stemmed from the fact that their floppy ears hung over their eyes, and they were often alarmed by humans whose approach they had not seen. Though full of fun and character, they were unpredictable in their response to any strange situation. You could never tell whether they would charge at or away from any perceived menace, and although Mummy approved of – indeed relied on – us giving her a hand with the pigs, she made it a rule that no child was to feed them on his or her own.

  Adjoining the pig-sty complex was the spinney where we had camped before the house was fit to live in, and here the little foundation herd settled to an idyllic life, rootling and wallowing, scratching luxuriously against the rough-barked pines, and eating their high protein ration of pig-nuts from a shallow concrete tray which could be filled from the far side of the fence. They were such fun to watch that ‘pig-gazing’ became Daddy’s favourite way of winding down after a busy week at the office.

  There was no need to go in among them unless something was wrong, and if you did, you had to be careful, particularly when there were piglets running around, because one high-pitched squeal was all that was needed to bring the furious mothers galloping.

  An attacking sow will slash backward, so you were allegedly safer in front of her than behind, though I never put this to the test. Mummy’s cousin Pamela, however, a tall, athletic redhead, happened to be taking a shortcut across the spinney when my sheepdog Scot, following at a distance, failed to clear the fence cleanly. He caught a paw on the barbed wire and yelped as he landed. The sows raised their snouts, saw Pam, and in an instant they were after her.

  ‘I ran,’ she said breathlessly, ‘as I have never run before, but they nearly caught me.’

  In the nick of time she reached the stile and vaulted it in a flash of long legs, still anxious lest her pursuers crashed their way through and trampled her to pulp. Everyone agreed she had had a lucky escape, and pretty soon a decision was taken to move the pigs farther away from the house, letting them roam free on several acres of woods and boggy ground adjoining the common known as Hungry Green, and bringing them back to the sties when farrowing was imminent.

  The first part of this plan was very successful. The pigs loved foraging in the wood, and ploughed up the bog like mechanical rotovators. The downside was that the trampled ground became so soft that it was difficult to feed their high-protein nuts without wasting half of them, and removed from the vicinity of humans, the pigs grew steadily wilder.

  This made the second part of the plan hard to implement. Chasing heavily pregnant sows through deep mud was no-one’s idea of fun. Perhaps, thought Mummy, it would be easier to give them individual shelters and let them bring up their families in self-selecting groups. There were bound to be more losses among the piglets, but that was Nature’s way of balancing population against available food.

  ‘After all,’ she said, ‘if every piglet that was born survived, the world would soon be over-run by pigs.’

  A charm
ing village of mini Nissen-huts made of corrugated tin sheets over wooden frames sprang up on the driest, flattest part of the pasture, each with its farrowing rail and plenty of straw, and the sows took to them at once like house-proud matrons, pushing the bedding into comfortable mats and carefully defecating out of doors. As far as we could see, there was no quarrelling over sites and, like his Biblical namesake, King David presided genially over this happy extended family, welcome in any hut he chose to honour with his presence.

  Though it was far from easy to separate the weaners from their mothers when the time came for them to be sold, the system of outdoor rearing worked reasonably well until poor King David was struck down with erysipelas, which brought him out in blotches all over, paralysed his hindlegs, and in those days before broad spectrum antibiotics were widely available, soon proved fatal.

  The son who took his place (Solomon, naturally) was a very different character, for whereas King David had been shown in his youth, petted and pampered and shampooed before his appearances in the ring, and therefore looked benignly on humans, Solomon was practically wild and potentially dangerous. Two-Legs, for him, were enemies. They harried his wives and stole his children, and if he got one in his power he meant to destroy it.

  The pig-bog became a no-go area which we children dared to cross only by darting from the shelter of one tree to another, always ready to take to the branches if Solomon spotted us.

  Even the wooded slope above the bog was treacherous soft ground, and I remember a terrible scene when a neighbouring farmer who was shepherding on the adjoining common noticed that a two-year-old chestnut filly whom Mummy had bought for ten shillings in a farm sale and named Fforest Fawr (The Great Fforest) was struggling in a bog-hole and sinking ever deeper. Why and how she had left her companions on the other side of the fence and broken into the pig-enclosure we never found out, but when we got there she was submerged to the withers and had given up struggling, only her desperate rolling eyes under her long fluffy forelock and occasional grunting whinnies to show she was still alive. Solomon the boar, with his sows in attendance, stood a few yards away, staring with baleful curiosity at this apparently legless interloper.