A Job for All Seasons

by Phyllida Barstow

  Whistling through gappy teeth, Grouch fetches his game bag from the foot of the ladder and bundles both foxes into it, then trudges back across the field to his mud-spattered Land Rover.

  Dishevelled and pale but quietly triumphant, Jenny Twolegs is back in the kitchen before her visitors emerge from their bedroom.

  She found the distressed ewe in the nick of time: another ten minutes and she would have been dead. After Bill Twolegs has carefully scooped her up on his tractor’s foreloader and deposited her in a newly strawed pen, Jenny had managed to push back the lamb’s swollen head, straighten out the bent foreleg, and deliver another little ram. Anxious moments followed until he could be persuaded to take an interest in life, and while Bill worked to revive him, Jenny fished inside the ewe and drew out yet another good strong lamb.

  A large syringe full of the vet’s magic potion – glycol, cobalt, and calcium – had miraculously resurrected the young ewe. For a few minutes she stands groggily, looking shell-shocked. Then her lambs’ nudging and bleating spur her into action, licking and nuzzling their tails, and encouraging them to feed.

  ‘Good mum,’ says Bill approvingly. ‘Incredible. Half an hour ago I’d have said she was a goner.’ He looks at his watch. ‘Should be OK now. How about some breakfast?’

  Jenny leans over the pen. ‘Poor lady, she’s zonked out. What they all need now is a bit of p and q.’

  They agree to say nothing of the early-morning drama to their guests.

  ‘How did you both sleep?’ she asks, pouring coffee, as – fresh, smiling, bathed and brushed – they come into the kitchen.

  The visitors are effusive. ‘Oh, wonderfully well, thanks. It’s so blissfully quiet here. No noise, no streetlights, no sirens – just peace, perfect peace. We never heard a sound all night long…’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Fast Forward

  Peaceful it certainly seems to humans, snug behind drawn curtains, unaware of dramas played out in the hours of darkness, the continual, intense life-and-death struggles that go on while we are asleep. Animals and birds that hunt and feed in the secret world between dusk and dawn must eat to live, they must kill or be killed, they must find a place to live and breed without, as far as possible, attracting our attention. That they manage it at all in an age which has acquired the technology to penetrate the deepest mysteries of wildlife: to peer down burrows and into nests, to capture on film the dive of a gannet, or follow migrating cuckoos from British woods to the rainforest of sub-Saharan African, is nothing short of miraculous.

  Now and again as I go about my daily rounds I notice small signs that the night has not been as peaceful as it seemed to Jenny’s visitors. She herself is going to be puzzled when she notices a newborn lamb’s leg sticking out of a molehill some distance from the Home Paddock, and Bill Twolegs may well wonder how his rat-trap, set so carefully in the drain under the mare’s manger, comes to have been sprung by an addled egg.

  In the same way I see nibbled corn-cobs lying in the grass over a mile from where they are grown, or find a mildewed ham bone buried a foot deep in the soil of the herbaceous border. Who put it there – and where was it stolen from? Greyish-white drifts of pigeon feathers hint at a sparrowhawk, while patches of soft, flecked fur caught on barbed wire show where a rabbit has been dragged through the fence.

  Each of these small mysteries adds to my respect for the way in which our frontier tribes manage to carry on their lives and loves just beneath the radar, taking from us what they need to survive despite our efforts to frustrate them. It is true that they have more time to devote to robbing us than we do to exterminating them. Untroubled by VAT returns and diktats from DEFRA, with no need to shop or cook or drive or clean, foxes, rats, badgers, moles and their like are able to spend all their waking time single-mindedly pursuing their aims. We, on the contrary, fidget from one task to another, perhaps devoting an hour to it before hurrying on to the next.

  As a result, we may be astonished at – for instance – the number of molehills that have blossomed overnight on the lawn, and wonder how such a small animal can shift so much soil in so short a time. Or how roe deer can massacre a row of runner beans, nip the leading shoots off fruit bushes, and strip off an entire bed of budding roses, all in the hours between dusk and dawn, or a family of badgers dig up two hundred daffodil bulbs over a single weekend, or the speed with which a couple of fat, elderly wethers can gnaw the bark off a quince tree to a height of four feet.

  On discovering such outrages, one’s first reaction is usually black fury, combined with a fierce determination to avenge the desecrated lawn, flowerbed, or whatever has suffered the attack with an array of nets, traps, barriers or foul-smelling chemicals, but as one’s initial rage subsides, one has to recognise that not only do such deterrents look ugly, they also tend to be horribly expensive. Lion-dung will certainly keep deer off your roses, but scattered around the flowerbeds it quite spoils the scent of the blooms. In the same way, growing your own vegetables is no economy if you spend a hundred pounds protecting them with fleece and netting.

  Should one then be philosophical – shrug and laugh and do nothing to stop the frontier tribes’ predations, or is there a middle way? This is the question every smallholder must answer for him or herself and, gender differences being what they are, he and she are unlikely to agree. But neither of them would deny that the tribes’ attacks keep us on our toes, and add drama to life’s rich tapestry for, the moment we relax our vigilance, the jungle – both vegetable and animal – begins to take over.

  Say we go away for a fortnight in summer, leaving only a caretaker presence to check that all the animals are the right way up, on our return we are sure to find that tough, opportunistic nettles, docks and thistles have encroached on every field, hinges have sagged and rails snapped; the best pasture will have grown shaggy and coarse for want of topping, and a riot of bittercress is certain to be smothering the kitchen garden. There will be a new audacity among the frontier tribes, too, as they include the house and garden in their hunting-grounds instead of keeping at a respectful distance, and it will take us at least a week of concentrated work to regain an acceptable measure of control.

  Knowing how quickly our efforts can be nullified does away with any illusions that we are, or will ever be, in full command of even our small patch. Far from it, and – when not breathing fire and brimstone after discovering some felony against what I consider my property – I can’t help feeling glad that despite our constant attempts to regiment and regulate Nature, her indigenous cohorts still have ways of striking back.

  Thus in a never-ending game of Tom Tiddler’s Ground, we and the frontier tribes share the resources of this smallholding and, were we content with a pretty basic diet, would harvest from it quite enough to feed ourselves, despite the inevitable seasonal dearths and surpluses. The difficulty is finding an outlet for the surpluses without becoming entangled in a mass of red tape.

  Compare and contrast the case of today’s smallholder with that of his jolly, self-sufficient counterpart of yesteryear, as he sang:

  Let the wealthy and great

  Roll in splendour and state,

  I envy them not, I declare it.

  I eat my own lamb,

  My own chickens and ham,

  I shear my own fleece, and I wear it.

  Lamb, certainly. Chickens, on occasion. Ham, no. Free-range pig-keeping wrecks a smallholding for other livestock, and indoor pigs remind me of condemned prisoners, pining to leave their cells. Besides, their smells and squeals would rupture relations with the neighbours. We do, however, wear the fleece of our alpacas, even if we don’t shear them ourselves.

  I have lawns, I have bowers,

  I have fruits, I have flowers,

  The lark is my morning alarmer…

  Ah, now we’re singing from the same sheet: half an acre of orchard and vegetable patch provides as much of what we eat as the rest of the property altogether, while the lark – or more often the current cock of th
e walk – makes sure we don’t oversleep. Living off foodstuff grown on one’s own land is a unique pleasure, worth all the work that goes into it, embued as it is with that particular quality that the French refer to as terroir, the ‘essence of the land,’ whose taste originates in one special, clearly defined place, and therefore cannot be reproduced anywhere else.

  Thanks to the deep-freeze, meat, legumes and soft fruit often last us the year round, but luxuriating in terroir-grown food is necessarily a selfish pleasure, for it is when we try to sell what we don’t need that our experience diverges sharply from that of yesteryear’s jolly farmer. No shrink-wrapped meat or date-stamped eggs for him: he was free to rent a pitch in the local marketplace and sell to the general public without spending time and money battling with bureaucracy, and being compelled to upgrade his preparation and storage facilities in order to acquire the obligatory licence.

  In his day, what was clean enough for his family to eat was wholesome enough for the general public, and he knew very well that if he sold any dodgy produce his customers would vote with their feet. Today, the opposite is true. Unless you turn professional and can assure a steady quantity of produce all year round, few shops are prepared to buy a smallholder’s surplus eggs, fruit, or vegetables, while the meat trade is so tightly regulated that only your own family can benefit from home-bred carcases, and even they have to be precisely accounted for.

  So our small attempts to make money from delicacies du terroir have generally been strangled at birth, one more victory for ‘Elfan Safety’ and loss to gastronomic diversity. The recent proliferation of farmers’ markets is a step in the right direction, but even they are stringently controlled, with packaging, pricing, labelling and hygiene requirements too restrictive for amateurs like us to circumnavigate.

  As a result, neither of us has ever been tempted to give up the day job, and anyway, running a smallholding is more a way of life than of making a living, since there is small hope of earning more than just enough to cover the costs. Even that requires some care. Buying-in forage is the killer expense. Between Christmas and Easter my feed bills always soar, but as soon as the grass grows again they settle back to sustainable levels. Seen as a hobby that can be fitted round the edges of real work, a micro-farm is much more pleasure than toil, a welcome break from desk and screen, and a constant source of interest, entertainment, and drama.

  Taking your first sniff of the morning air, you never know what the day will bring. So much depends on the weather, the joker in the pack which no one can accurately predict. Will it be wet, dry, warm, cold, clear, misty, windy, still, or any of a hundred variations in between? Are all the animals you can see in their proper places? What were the noises half-heard through your dreams? Break-ins? Break-outs? The heart-stopping clatter of horseshoes on tarmac late at night, the scream of a mating vixen, or the hoarse screeches of an abducted chicken. There may be unlooked-for births, sudden deaths, disease or injuries striking out of the blue. There may even be miraculous recoveries or improvements in cases which looked hopeless. Whatever happens between now and nightfall, it won’t be dull, nor is it likely to follow yesterday’s pattern.

  Originally part of the in-bye land of the great Cotswold sheepwalks that stretched from Burford to Gloucester, this little farm has grown and shrunk over the years as the fortunes of local landowners have flourished or declined. As recently as forty years ago it boasted fifty acres and supported a dairy herd, but now, whittled down to a mere four fields, it is little more than what estate agents call ‘amenity land,’ a cordon sanitaire of protection against encroachment by developers, and can provide only enough year-round forage for a small flock of sheep and assorted four-legged friends.

  Watching the sun set over the Welsh hills from our top-field bench above the valley, I sense the ghosts of others who once enjoyed this vantage-point. Shepherds with their panting collies; journeymen on their way from Berkeley to Tetbury, setting down their packs to take a breather before tackling the steep slope of the escarpment, or pallid, crouchbacked weavers, blinking their watering eyes after long hours at the loom, as they emerge from their hillside cottages into the evening light.

  Their gaze would have been drawn across the valley, as mine is now, to admire the long shadows thrown by the low sun on a patchwork of hedges and small fields, trees that lean away from the prevailing sou’-westerlies, and the shining thread of a slow-moving stream looping and twisting between rushy margins spanned by little humped bridges.

  On the far slope, already shadowed by the hill, straggles the long, single streeted village where a few windows have begun to show lights. There are well-spaced, handsome stone houses built by eighteenth-century mill-owners, before the invention of the Spinning Jenny crippled the local cloth industry, and these substantial dwellings are flanked by narrow rows of cottages, a green, a pub, a shop, a church. Small figures stroll along the stream-banks, their chatter and the occasional bark of a dog floats up to me and my ghostly companions watching from the heights.

  On a clear Spring evening the farmers and shepherds among them would have been checking their livestock, watching – as I am watching – the animals prepare for the coming of night, the lambs leaping and racing in mad games of tag to get their blood circulating before frost can crystallise the grass, while the ewes chomp stolidly in line from one side of the field to the other and back again, cramming their bellies as long as the light lasts.

  Little remains of the weavers’ cottages behind me but heaps of stone at the edge of the wood, with unexpected clumps of snowdrops or thickets of gooseberry bushes growing nearby, but the soil just below them is black and rich where their privies once stood, a boon to flourishing swathes of nettles. Their roots are deep, their vigour inexhaustible. Cut, pull, poison or strim them, and yet enough will survive to kickstart new growth as soon as you turn your back. No doubt our predecessors in the valley did their best to destroy them, too, but with no more success than we have had.

  It seems a timeless, unchanging scene, yet to the ghosts crowding behind me this valley would have been a busy, noisy workplace rather than an oasis of tranquillity. In their day these lightly-grazed fields would have been thick with sheep contesting every fresh blade of grass, their plaintive bleating piercing through the background thumping of water-driven fulling-mills, their wooden hammers battering the woven cloth as the wheels turned slowly, night and day.

  The river, now so clear, would have run scarlet with the dye for redcoats’ uniforms, and instead of wafts of balsam poplar, the noxious stench of dirty fleeces immersed upstream from the mills would have poisoned the evening air.

  There would have been many more people about, hurrying to and from the village on the well-worn footpaths, working men in drab, shapeless clothing, bonneted women and children in ill-fitting, hand-me-down boots. Plenty more farm animals, too: milking herds, beef cattle, useful all-purpose cobs and draught horses would have thronged the farm buildings, which are now used mostly for storing agricultural machinery.

  Eight generations and two world wars separate that busy, bustling scene from the serene emptiness of the valley today. Though many of the same houses can be seen from my vantage point, some have shrunk while others doubled in size, becoming family homes geared for leisure and pleasure rather than places of work. Most of the field boundaries, however, remain just as they were two hundred years ago, as one can see from old maps of the parish, and some prominent aged oaks surely date back to the weaver-village’s glory days.

  So what will come next? Where do we go from here? New technology coupled with the ever-rising cost of travel may have brought us to an interesting tipping point. Will tomorrow’s young men and women rebel against the boredom and expense of commuting to offices in distant towns, and decide to rebuild the weavers’ tumbledown cottages and work from home, sitting at laptops instead of looms? Their brains and energy could revitalise the rural economy, and their needs bring new vigour to local trade as shops and services spring up to keep them supplied.<
br />
  Or will things go in the other direction, with the last smallholders like us driven out of business by agricultural red tape and diminishing returns, our few pastures snapped up by neighbouring farmers and merged into large, machine-friendly fields, ancient hedges ripped out, windbreaks flattened, narrow, rutted cart-tracks turned into concrete highways?

  Or will this smallholding descend into mere horseyculture, the stone barns bursting with ponies and each field sub-divided into tiny paddocks separated by white electrified tape? Will the banky ground, suitable for nothing but sheep and wildflowers, be chosen as the site for concentration camps of intensively reared game-birds, untold thousands of beautiful, harmless pheasants and partridges which, after a few months of life, rich businessmen pay to blast out of the sky?

  There’s no telling which way it will go, but were I to peer down from my cloud a hundred years hence, it’s a safe bet that the view from our bench under the wood would be very different. Autres temps, autres moeurs: our successors will have different priorities, different mindsets, different ways to earn a living. Yet there would also be constants: the undulations of the stream, the gentle curve of the hills, and the square-cut solidity of the Iron Age fort above the village. No one is going to move that in a hurry.

  There would be animals, too, and people working to feed and protect them just as we do in the age-old bargain between the species: I’ll feed you if you’ll feed me. Which of them was the servant and which the master would be just as unclear as it is now.

  I would also be prepared to bet on the survival of the luxuriant swathe of nettles now flourishing below the old weavers’ cottages under the wood. Everyone who has lived here has tried to eradicate them, but none has succeeded. Man proposes, God disposes, but Nature always wins in the end.