A Job for All Seasons Read online

  A JOB FOR ALL SEASONS

  My Small Country Living

  Phyllida Barstow

  Illustrated by Lucy Milne

  For Duff

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1. On the Strength

  2. First Friends

  3. Tales from the Tackroom

  4. The Small Holding

  5. Trials and Tribulations

  6. The Shepherding Year

  7. The Frontier Tribes

  8. The Farmyard at Night

  9. Fast Forward

  Also published by Merlin Unwin Books

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  On the Strength

  LAYERS FOR SALE. 2/6d EACH proclaimed a tatty cardboard notice pinned to a gatepost I passed daily on the school run. Each? Even in the early 1960s this seemed absurdly cheap for a whole live chicken, when a 3lb roaster still cost several pounds. Since moving from London to Oxfordshire the previous year, we had once or twice mentioned keeping hens, but so far done nothing about it.

  Half-a-crown each? How could one go wrong? On impulse I turned in the direction of the pointing arrow and drove down a bumpy track between unkempt hedges into a muddy yard flanked by three long, grey, asbestos sheds.

  For such a knockdown price, I wasn’t expecting show specimens, but even so I was shocked when I saw what the burly, green-overalled baldie in the little wooden office was selling.

  ‘How many d’you want?’ he asked, lumbering from his chair.

  ‘Well… six, I should think.’ Having made no preparations for housing them, I didn’t want to overdo the numbers.

  ‘Make it eight – that’ll be a quid,’ he said jovially. ‘They’re good birds, mind. Eighteen months old. Plenty of lay in ’em still.’

  ‘Oh, OK. Thanks.’

  I followed him across the yard. When he opened the heavy steel door of the first shed, a blast of thick, hot, ammoniac air assailed my nose, a combination of dust, feathers and chicken-droppings made my eyes stream, and we stepped into a scene to haunt any animal lover’s nightmares. Under the roof of corrugated perspex, a double wall of wire cages as high as you could reach, separated by a narrow aisle, stretched away to the end of the shed like apartment blocks in New York, making you feel as if walking in a canyon. In each cage, whose sloping floor was no bigger than a sheet of typing paper, were crammed five clucking, cackling, jostling, pellet-pecking chickens, their constantly-moving heads pale brown, their staring eyes round and mad, and their bodies almost completely naked.

  Working methodically along the line of grille-like shelves that formed an extension to the cage-floor, two lank-haired youths were collecting the eggs that had rolled out through a narrow gap at the bottom and come to rest against a small ledge just out of the birds’ reach. Now and again they would open a door, reach in and remove a sick or dead hen, throwing it into a barrow full of grey-white guano, then quickly relatching the cage door.

  The din was incessant, the heat and smell overpowering, and the continually bobbing heads made me feel sick and dizzy, liable to suffocate or vomit. I wished I had never turned off the road. How could people work in a place like this? How could anyone treat living creatures in such a way?

  ‘This here’s the batch to go,’ said my guide, stopping at the end of the aisle. ‘There’s a new lot coming in Wednesday, so we’ll be wanting to clear this section.’

  I felt too zombified to ask what would happen to the birds he didn’t sell. It seemed unlikely that one small notice would attract buyers for several hundred birds before Wednesday.

  ‘Go on,’ he urged. ‘Plenty of choice. Pick what you want.’

  ‘I’ll leave it to you,’ I gulped, struggling with nausea.

  ‘Right, then. Ten, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Eight.’ I would have liked to take the lot and release them into some form of chicken paradise, but just retained enough grip on reality to see that even eight was more than we needed, and some urgent carpentry was going to occupy the next few days if the poor creatures were to be decently housed.

  He nodded and ran an expert eye over the cages’ occupants, pulling out a bird here and there, holding them by the legs in one hand until he had enough. It reminded me horribly of a guard at a Nazi concentration camp deciding which prisoners were fit to work and which should go to the gas chambers.

  ‘Right,’ he said after a couple of minutes. ‘These’ll do you. Got a box in the car? Don’t worry. I’ll find something,’ and preceded me out to the blessed fresh air.

  When I got home an hour later and opened the flimsy cardboard carton, the birds looked more of a liability than a bargain. Huddled miserably on top of one another, naked and scrawny, they were obviously feeling the change in temperature and, although it was mid July, I abandoned any plans to put them outside in a shed for the night. Instead we rigged up temporary quarters in an old playpen beside the boiler, but even when I placed them on its floor they continued to crouch while pecking frantically at the pellets in a dish in front of them, having apparently lost the use of their legs.

  They had left inside the carton two brown eggs.

  Seventy weeks of close confinement had eradicated all normal chicken behaviour apart from the functions of eating and laying, recycling food into eggs as automatically as machines, and voiding the residue. Their feet were lily-white, with soft nails, quite unlike the tough, scaly, yellowish legs and sharp claws of free-rangers, and their beaks had been clipped short to discourage them from pecking out their mates’ feathers – not that that particular mutilation seemed to have had much effect, seeing their semi-naked condition. They had never heard the clucking of their mother or copied her in scratching the soil. They had never been given the opportunity to preen their feathers or scuffle luxuriously in a dustbath. They had never even breathed properly-fresh air. Suspended above the ground in perpetual light, barely able to move, they knew nothing of the changing seasons or the difference between night and day, and whenever they laid an egg, it had rolled out of their reach before they could brood it for even a moment.

  For the past seventy weeks, in effect, they had existed rather than lived. Whether they still had the capacity to revert to normality seemed, at that point, far from certain.

  By next morning two had keeled over and lay stiffly, necks extended – killed, I imagine, by the sudden change in conditions – but the others had begun to shuffle around the playpen, hoisting themselves along with their wings, rather like babies just before they learn to crawl. The boiler was in the dining-room, which already smelled unacceptably ammoniac, and reluctantly I agreed with Nannie that there was no alternative to putting them in the old hen-house in a sunny corner of the garden, and letting them take their chance.

  By evening, two had detached themselves from the huddle, and were staggering about in the sun, falling over and righting themselves, definitely more lively, though still pathetically weak. They made no attempt to escape when I approached to pick them up and shut them inside the house, but simply squatted to await their fate. Fear had been stamped out of them along with all other natural responses, and they would have done just the same had I been a fox.

  Rehab was painfully slow, but day by day our little flock made progress towards becoming real hens again. Eight weeks after I brought them home, their missing feathers began to sprout as stubble, making them look even more unappetising than when they were naked. Egg production stopped abruptly after the first week, which was rather a blow, but instead of looking at worms and insects with disgust, and ignoring all the leftover scraps from our table, they started to peck at the grass and make tentative efforts to scratch at loose soil.

  We scooped out a shallow pit in their pe
n and filled it with mixed sand and ash, and a few days later it was a joy to see the most adventurous bird carefully lower herself into the dustbath, scuffling with evident pleasure and afterwards risking a rudimentary preen.

  Perhaps the most surprising thing about these intensively reared, selectively bred, artificially housed automata was how quickly they developed individual personalities when living in natural conditions. One was bold and curious, a born leader of hens, and soon claimed her place at the top of the pecking order. As soon as they were let out in the morning, another would make a crazy dash for the wire-netting fence surrounding their run, and flutter against it as if trying to fly. They were quite noisy birds, but their clucking did not seem matched to the laying of eggs, as in normal hens – they just kept it up all the time. Pathetic as they were, they embodied something that had been lacking in our new home.

  Their chance arrival reminded me strongly of the way my parents used to add all manner of waifs and strays to what they referred to as ‘the strength’.

  Whenever it was suggested that yet another hungry mouth of uncertain value, dubious provenance, and visibly down on its luck should be added to those already thronging their Radnorshire farm, my father and mother would exchange a look and a nod, and one would say. ‘Well, why not? We’ll put him (or her, or them) on the strength,’ and with those words the newcomer or comers would acquire the right to a comfortable billet until death or some change of fortune removed him, her, or them.

  I imagined the strength as a sort of infinitely expandable tent-cum-trampoline, impartially supporting and sheltering the motley crew that sought refuge there, making no distinction between those with two legs or four.

  Among the human castaways taken on to it, I remember a morose submariner, who had unluckily developed claustrophobia. This so badly hampered his career that in desperation he turned his back on the sea and bought a rundown hill farm, which he had no idea how to manage. After a number of plagues, collapses, deaths and disasters, he turned to my parents for advice, and was taken on the strength until he should recover his equilibrium. Though he was gloomy company, seldom spoke and never joked, he did give me one piece of advice worth remembering. Never pick a fight on a submarine.

  I immediately assumed this was the cause of his troubles, and imagined him cowering in the bowels of the tiny vessel, deep in the dark water, trying to evade his enemy – but although his flirtation with agricultural life proved short-lived, it had a fairytale ending. About a year later, he met and married a clever, sensitive woman who owned a bookshop in Hereford; sold the farm, and left us to work as her business advisor.

  Several war-widows were taken on the strength while they mopped their tears and readjusted to single life; and so were a succession of Antipodean cousins. The glowing-skinned girls stripped off at every opportunity to bask decoratively in whatever weak rays the Welsh sun provided, and made a very welcome distraction for passing tractor-drivers.

  They threw themselves with enthusiasm into the social life of the Wye Valley, and one married a local lord, but the male visitors from Down Under were not so easy to please. They tended to be tough, spare, laconic young men with leathery complexions and eyes meshed in wrinkles from scanning the far blue yonder. They reckoned flocks and herds in thousands, and were dismissive of small-scale Welsh farming, hardly bothering to hide their contempt for people who called the vet when sheep were ill instead of simply cutting their throats. One went so far as to remark after a tour of the lambing-shed, ‘Back home, all these would be culls,’ a brutally frank assessment which greatly annoyed my mother.

  On the strength, too, were foreign teenagers who hoped to improve their English, lovelorn South Africans getting over marital ructions, and the less-than-academic sons and daughters of friends whose parents had despaired of seeing them gainfully employed in dark suits in the City, or even of getting them into Agricultural College. However willing, they seldom had the temperament nor the necessary skills to be much use on the farm. Nevertheless they touchingly believed they were working for their keep, and the strength supported them uncomplainingly.

  Four-legged refugees were made equally welcome, though their economic input was zero. In some cases it might even have been reckoned a costly burden, as when Shirley, who milked the cows and lived in a caravan, landed a promising living-in job in Worcestershire, only to find her prospective employer react with horror to the idea of accommodating Bonnie, her elderly Clumber spaniel.

  In her frolicsome youth, Bonnie had probably deserved her name, but now her joints were stiff, her lower lids drooped, and a whiff of her long curly ears made you gasp. Shirley’s choice was stark: she could take the job or the dog, but not both. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll keep her here on the strength,’ my father said equably when she broke the doleful news. So Bonnie lived out her remaining years stretched full length across the hearth-rug in front of the wood-burning stove, ensuring that everyone else sat in a whistling draught.

  An even less rewarding dependent was Blacky, a heavy-crested superannuated part-Shire horse from a neighbouring farm, rescued on her way to the knacker. Though she would happily carry several children at once on her broad back, she resolutely declined any meaningful work either in chains, which would have been quite useful and taken the pressure off the little grey Fergie 20, nor would she pull either cart or gambo. She would stand like a rock to be harnessed, and backed willingly enough into the shafts, but thereafter neither clucking nor whipping would induce her to move. You could lead her a few paces, and then on went the brakes in the equine equivalent of a sit-down strike.

  She took good care of herself though, did Blacky, in winter eating as much hay as three small ponies, and – worse – she seemed to be perpetually in season. Since she thought nothing of breaking through our admittedly rather straggly and fragile hedges in search of romance, much time and effort was spent either searching for her or blocking the resulting gaps – ‘glatting’ as it was known locally, and no one’s favourite occupation. Despite this wilful refusal to recognise which side her bread was buttered, the strength supported Blacky for several years before she finally resumed her interrupted journey.

  Then there was the bantam found sitting tight on her eggs in a load of straw, and a succession of unofficial dogs such as Joe, a skulking, shifty-eyed collie who had been turned out to live rough for some undisclosed crime, and was careful never to come within range of a stroking hand which might turn into a grabbing one. He would join in sheep-gathering operations on a freelance basis, and vanish again like a shadow, only returning to indent for rations when the other dogs were fed. His contemporary, Dawn, an emaciated pointer with a deformed jaw, was wished on my mother somehow, though she was a bag of nerves and useless on a grouse-moor; and another semi-permanent recruit to the strength was Bonzo, a canny, four-square, smooth-coated terrier who really belonged to the blacksmith, but would frequently put in an appearance at the witching hour of dog-dins.

  No one grudged him his ration for, although not built for speed, Bonzo was an ace rabbiter. While the other dogs raced yapping in circles after their quarry, wasting energy and making a lot of noise, Bonzo would trot quietly to the exact point in the hedge where the rabbit planned to escape and wait patiently in ambush until he could chop it with a perfectly-timed pounce.

  His rat-killing technique, too, was a marvel to behold. As the rick of oat-sheaves dwindled before the threshing machine, first a trickle and then a grey flood of fleeing rodents would pour out through the narrow gap between the barn door and the tractor whose belt was driving the machine. Positioning himself in the gap, like Horatius on the bridge, Bonzo would stand four-square, flicking one rat after another over his shoulder in a slick, almost casual gesture that broke their necks with a single shake, leaving only the slimmest of pickings for any boy with a gun stationed beyond him.

  Another dependent no one in their senses would have chosen was a beautiful, slinky, sealpoint Siamese queen whom Mummy saw dicing with death amid Hereford’s market-
day traffic.

  When neither vets nor police could discover her owner, Marquesa (as we called her) was taken on the strength, and by sheer force of will soon evicted the resident cats from the farmhouse. Confident that her beauty and charm would always disarm criticism, she shamelessly exhibited all the faults for which Siamese are noted. As well as yowling constantly in a loud, complaining voice, she was a sneak-thief and bird-killer, a torturer of mice and shredder of loose covers, but the single act for which she is best remembered in the family was when she secretly, silently, gave birth to four kittens while sitting on the lap of a visitor watching television.

  I liked my parents’ open-handed acceptance of the principle that every waif and stray who asked for asylum should get it. While I was working in London and coming home only at odd weekends, I was hard put to it to catch up with news of the characters and foibles of the latest arrivals who had been added to the strength since my last visit, and when to my great delight my husband and I, together with our baby daughter, moved from our sixth-floor flat near Paddington to take on the lease of the handsome brick-and-flint farmhouse in the Chilterns where Duff had been brought up, my private plan was to gather animals – though not so many humans – round us in just the same way.

  From the beginning, I recognised that it would have to be done on a smaller scale. Though the house was surrounded by a two-thousand-acre estate belonging to Duff’s godfather, our own domain only stretched to the garden itself and perhaps an acre and a half of former orchard in front of the house, dominated by a couple of huge old Whiteheart cherry trees and a few dwarfish apples, dock-riddled and bisected by a rough farm track, a perfect starvation paddock for any pony prone to laminitis, but definitely not the place for valuable bloodstock.