A Job for All Seasons

by Phyllida Barstow

  I didn’t see that, was my shameful first reaction; but there was no denying what had happened. Below the fence, a man was on his hands and knees, while above it Agamemnon stood glaring through the wire.

  Pulling on boots, I ran outside. The victim was shaking all over and plastered in mud. In one hand he still held the fork he had been carrying on his way home from work in our neighbour’s garden. He had a perfect right to be on the footpath, and must have been taken completely by surprise by Ags’s swift charge. If he had used the fork to defend himself, he could have done the ram serious harm.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I asked anxiously, but the man seemed too shocked to speak. ‘Come in. Have a wash. Have a cup of tea.’ I tried to urge him towards the kitchen, but he wouldn’t come.

  ‘N-n-no! Want to – want to get home,’ he gabbled, backing away, and scuttled downhill towards the village.

  I watched him, thinking hard. He was more frightened than hurt, but next time we might not be so lucky. Two of our three fields are crossed by footpaths, so that put them out of bounds for Agamemnon in future. Our options for places to keep him were becoming extremely limited.

  Another problem loomed – genetic, this time. All but one of our older ewes were unrelated to Ags, so he could continue to serve them, but by now the ewe lambs I had been retaining to increase the flock were his grown-up daughters. I needed a second ram, in order to run parallel bloodlines for the next two years, but how could we accommodate him?

  ‘Put masks on them both,’ advised an experienced shepherd. ‘Just for a few days, until they get used to the smell of one another. After that you shouldn’t have any trouble with them fighting.’

  The new ram was called Rivet – a year younger and more lightly built than Ags, who had become very portly. The leather masks I bought fitted over the ears with a complicated arrangement of adjustable straps, and covered the cheeks and frontal bone halfway to the muzzle, tying under the chin. The eyeholes had sideways projections, like sticking-out blinkers, which blocked the view forward, making it difficult to aim a charge.

  Neither of the rams seemed to resent this restriction of vision, and after circling and shoving each other a bit while we watched, ready to intervene at any sign of aggression, they settled down to graze alongside the three old wethers. As darkness fell, the group was lying together – a gentlemen’s club – and we went to bed thinking all was well.

  Peace reigned among them for a week, until by rubbing against a tree Ags managed to twist his mask sideways, so that he couldn’t see out at all. I found him blundering about, bumping into things, so penned him and removed the mask. Afterwards – with difficulty – I did the same for Rivet, who was not used to being handled. Surely, I thought, they’ve been together long enough to know one another’s smell?

  Wrong. Next morning I could only see one ram in the paddock, plus the three wethers. Rivet had vanished. I thought he must have jumped the fence, but as we searched the thick hedge, something moved in the brambles where poor Rivet had been thrown or taken refuge. He was trying to rise, but his hind leg had been broken above the hock, and there was nothing for it but to shoot him on the spot.

  Another very black mark against Agamemnon, and reluctantly I faced the fact that it was time for him to go. At the age of five, a ram’s fertility declines, so it was unlikely I could sell him on, and in any case I would have to come clean about his psychological quirks. A bullet was the obvious answer, but from day to day we kept putting off the date of execution, until an unlooked-for solution presented itself.

  A friend, who kept pigs and a few sheep in his orchard, had a German wife with a blunt, no-nonsense approach to livestock. She had seen Ags at a show, and wanted him to serve her ewes. Yes, she was perfectly familiar with rams, and knew how to handle them. No, his reputation didn’t worry her in the least. If we would bring him over in our trailer, she undertook to give him one last season of domestic felicity before taking him to the nearby abattoir.

  It was only a stop-gap solution, and I can’t say I was keen on it, particularly when they asked me to leave Ags in a former pigsty with a wooden gate while they went to fetch in the ewes. He climbed up with his forefeet on top of the gate, and I wondered how long it would withstand his charges.

  Later that evening, we had a reassuring telephone call. Ags was fine. He had settled down well. They would put him out with the ewes in the morning.

  Two days passed, and Jutte rang again. The ram was so friendly, so biddable. She didn’t know what we were worried about. He came when she called. She could lead him about like a lamb.

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘He’s very good to lead. It’s when you take the headcollar off…’

  Another day, another telephone call. Jutte again. ‘Please will you come and fetch your ram? Yes. Now. Immediately.’

  We were just leaving to go out to dinner. ‘Won’t tomorrow morning do?’

  ‘It is better now.’ She sounded agitated. ‘We can’t wait all the night.’

  ‘Why? What’s happened?’

  ‘He’s got our neighbour up a tree.’

  So the final throw had failed. When I rattled some cubes in a scoop, Ags came trotting away from his prey, and put his nose in the head-collar, ready for the journey home.

  We gave him another month with his fat pals, and I asked my sister, the artist Olivia Stewart-Smith, to paint him. We tethered him between two strong posts, and he stood composedly while she started work on a frontal view, concentrating on his great head and noble, sweeping horns. Presently he grew bored, as sitters do, and leaned sideways, gently moving his right horn to and fro.

  The artist worked steadily, and had already achieved a striking likeness when she realised that her subject was using the sharp inner edge of his horn to fray the head-rope. Only a few strands remained. She began to work faster.

  ‘You can’t have finished already,’ I said, coming out with coffee and finding her folding the easel.

  ‘I’ve got enough. I’ll take a few photographs and finish it in my studio,’ she replied, snapping away at a safe distance. Ags gave an experimental tug at his tether and, as the last strands parted, I understood the artist’s haste.

  The portrait was a great success. Outlined in strong brushwork against a clear blue sky, the ram’s head with its curled horns menaces the observer, seeming about to charge out of the canvas. The artist has caught his split personality, too. One eye looks kindly, almost melancholy, its eyelid gently drooping, while the other fixes you with the cocksure, aggressive glare which foretold mischief.

  As summer ended and the goodness went out of the grass, Duff finally put a bullet through Agamemnon’s head, and I resolved never again to make a pet of a ram.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Trials and Tribulations

  EARLY IN 2001 another hammer blow struck British agriculture. This one was to bring not only farming life but also tourism and free movement within the countryside to a grinding halt. Once again it was triggered by dirty farming practice and illegal cost-cutting, and this time the scourge was the well-known, much-dreaded Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD), a highly contagious and easily transmissible viral infection which can affect a wide range of farm livestock: cows, sheep, alpacas and llamas, buffalo, pigs, and goats, as well as a variety of wildlife, with deer, rats, and hedgehogs being among the animals known to be susceptible to it.

  The origin of this outbreak was traced to a run-down farm at Heddon on the Wall in Tyne and Wear, where the pigs had been fed with untreated swill from a local restaurant. The precise nature of the infective agent was never identified: most likely it was illegally imported meat from a country where the disease was endemic.

  Because so many local abattoirs had been forced to close by the stringent and expensive regulations that came into force after the BSE epidemic, animals were routinely being transported long distances to slaughter. By the time the characteristic lameness and blisters in the mouth were spotted, the pigs from Tyne and Wear had travelled to a slaughterhouse in
Essex, spreading disease all the way.

  Nor had the contagion followed this route alone. Blown by the wind from the farm at Heddon, it infected sheep in fields nearby, and after these animals were sold in Hexham Market, stock-lorries distributed them far and wide throughout the country. Outbreaks flared with terrible speed along the north to south-west line of the M6 and M5, and to either side of it, taking in Anglesey, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall.

  In late February, 2001, we had just returned to the torrid turmoil of New Delhi after visiting Indian friends on the Indian-Nepalese border. As I idly flicked through newspapers for the first time in three weeks, a paragraph in the foreign news caught my eye: FMD in England, and bang went our peace of mind for months to come. I could still hazily remember how, during an outbreak in 1967, healthy animals had been compulsorily slaughtered and country activities suspended until it was stamped out. That had been limited to Worcestershire and the surrounding counties. This time even the initial reports made clear that it was far more widespread.

  FMD is not necessarily fatal, and most affected animals would, left to their own devices, eventually recover from the lameness caused by blisters between the cleats or foot-pads and around the mouth, which make feeding painful. Leaving them to their own devices is not, however, an option. The disease is highly infectious and easily spread by breath and body fluids, borne on the wind, carried on boots, paws, wheels – in short, once established in a country it is extremely difficult to contain, let alone eradicate.

  Both the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), and the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) – with whom they maintained an all-too-cosy relationship – were determined not to compromise Britain’s status as a FMD-free country, or the flourishing export trade in meat and breeding stock, and to protect these they were prepared to slaughter enormous numbers of healthy animals as well as the comparatively few actually carrying the disease, simply because they were located near enough to the outbreak to be considered at risk.

  But how near was too near? On neighbouring farms, or on the neighbouring farms to farms adjoining the farms where the disease had been confirmed? In a circle 3km in radius from the outbreak – or 5, or 10? Across a river, or the other side of a hill? It was difficult to decide, and as the disease progressed, new boundaries marking infected and non-infected zones were continually drawn – and scrapped – and redrawn, with restrictions of varying severity arbitrarily imposed by faceless bureaucrats and panicking politicians.

  In some zones farmers were allowed to move livestock within its boundaries but not across them into the next zone. In others, even moving animals from field to field within a farm that spanned a lane was forbidden. March and April are hungry months, when last year’s grass has been grazed to soil level, and new grass is barely showing. Muddy months, too, so the strict rules demanding disinfection of the wheels of every vehicle used to carry hay or silage every time it left the farmyard became a long-running nightmare.

  Early spring is also lambing time, and many in-lamb ewes were still ‘at tack,’ ie boarded out in winter quarters for the last weeks before being brought into the home lambing-sheds. Desperate to get them under cover before they gave birth, some sheep farmers hired marquees in which to erect lambing-pens, and themselves lived in caravans on the tack-owner’s fields in order to care for their ewes and lambs at this most vulnerable time.

  Though the outbreak was still in its early stages, as we hurried home we realised how serious it threatened to be when we saw evidence of lock-down at every farm entrance we passed. Tubs of disinfectant and thick mats of soaked straw blocked gateways, with large official notices warning people to keep out, wash their boots, no dogs, no admittance, and we were glad to find that our friend Diana, who had looked after our livestock in our absence, had taken the same precautions and placed handwritten placards warning Do Not Enter on each of the stiles where footpaths crossed our fields. It was like entering a plague zone.

  Day by day the news got worse and regulations proliferated. Ministry vets and Animal Health Officers dressed from head to foot in protective suits made surprise visits or insisted on blood-tests at short notice. From our worm’s eye view at the very bottom of the farming chain, many of these tests with their accompanying forms and paperwork seemed not only useless but counter-productive.

  Why was one team, which was led by a paper-suited, rubber-gloved and booted temporary inspector, who haled from the FMD hotspot of Dumfries and Galloway, sent to bring possible contagion to our nice clean farm? Why did he wear a hairnet but nothing to cover his bushy red beard?

  ‘Ma beard’s clean enough. Ah wash it evrra day,’ he snapped when I mentioned it as a possible hazard.

  ‘If you washed it in the disinfectant we’ve got at the gate, you’d have no beard left,’ I retorted. It was rude, but we were all on edge.

  I wasn’t the only one to be suspicious of interlopers. Vets and inspectors were being recruited from all over the place and some hardly spoke English. As a result, xenophobia flourished. Walkers and ramblers were definitely non grata, and strangers with unrecognised car-numbers were instantly reported or warned off.

  Nastier still were the rumours that some farmers were profiting from the catastrophe, even infecting their own livestock in order to claim compensation when they were slaughtered. No one could actually pinpoint a culprit, but it was an ugly possibility. People muttered that the NFU and MAFF were in cahoots in their efforts to drive small farmers out of business, and thus reduce the amount of subsidy they had to pay through the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

  There was news every day of some fresh disaster, and television reports were dominated by gruesome footage, beamed into every living-room. The wholesale shooting of squealing pigs and terrified sheep; cattle, calves and new-born lambs lying in heaps in their own yards; farming families fighting back tears as the slaughtermen went about their grim work. Still more haunting were the images of foreloaders scooping up massed carcases to dump in trucks, which were then driven to burning pits where the tangled bodies twisted and blackened in the flames. A sickening sight, with seagulls swooping overhead, impossible to control as they spread the disease more widely still.

  Restrictions grew ever tighter. Hunting stopped. Racing stopped. Sporting fixtures of every kind were cancelled. Footpaths were closed, so dog-owners were forced to exercise their animals on the road. The tourist trade was badly hit, and the many businesses connected with it faced ruin: hotels, B&Bs, gift shops, restaurants, riding schools and coach-tour operators.

  The Lake District was officially declared closed, and in a stark illustration of the financial pain this caused, in a single March day one hotelier in the heart of the Lakeland Fells lost £35,000 worth of forward bookings. The General Election scheduled for April was postponed, but the Labour government was floundering, out of its depth, and in its ignorance of the way the countryside worked, it spread unnecessary alarm and despondency by making contradictory statements about which areas were, or were not, to be culled of all susceptible livestock, sick and healthy alike.

  Few politicians seemed to have read the wide-ranging, meticulous report of the enquiry chaired by the Duke of Northumberland after the 1967/8 outbreak of FMD in the north-west Midlands, let alone implemented the report’s many recommendations for dealing with a future epidemic. The painful result of official dithering and lack of effective organisation was that the backlog of slaughtered animals both infected and healthy constantly increased until the resources of the Ministry were overwhelmed. They had neither the manpower nor logistics to dispose of so many carcases.

  Instead of bringing in the Army at once, as the Northumberland report had recommended, they muddled along piecemeal using civilian slaughterers, knackers, and hauliers to transport the dead animals to disposal points, falling even farther behind with the work.

  When at last military personnel were ordered to assume responsibility for locating pyres and digging burial pits, and for trans
porting carcases, many of these were in an advanced state of putrefaction, and on farms where all the livestock had been killed, the family might have been marooned for a fortnight in their own house, surrounded by yards full of the rotting corpses of the animals that had been not only their pride and joy, but their livelihood as well.

  It could be argued that sheep and cattle are in any case ultimately destined for the slaughterhouse and the epidemic merely hastened their end, but this haphazard, wholesale destruction of young and old, healthy and sick, common or pedigree stock, with no possibility of appeal or reprieve, was deeply shocking. Bloodlines that had been carefully nurtured for generations were wiped out in a day, and on top of the waste, horror and grief, the bloody-mindedness and bureaucracy of officialdom sickened everyone who came in contact with it.

  Very early on in the epidemic it had become plain that Cumbria, geographically the centre of the United Kingdom, was also the epicentre of disease. The biggest livestock dealers regularly came to Carlisle for their cattle and Longtown for their sheep, and since large quantities of infective material carrying the FMD virus is shed before animals show any symptoms of disease, this year their lorries had been delivering beasts from the Cumbrian markets to all parts of the British Isles.

  Maps showed a giveaway pattern of confirmed outbreaks either side of motorways, where sheep and cattle reared in the north of England had been transported for fattening to the better pasture of the south-west, and the knowledge that its main route of transit was no more than five miles from us did nothing to calm our fears.

  As we grappled with buckets and haybales to keep all the animals fed in a long-drawn-out and very wet, cold spring, juggling the sheep, horses, and alpacas from one field to another and longing for the grass to get a move on and grow, I was thankful that we had only twenty ewes to lamb and enough sheds to get each of them penned and under cover when she decided to give birth. There was the usual sudden rush at the beginning, showing that the tup had been busy during his first few days of marital bliss; then production tailed off to a slow straggle, with nearly a month between the first-born lamb and the back-marker.