Introduction The Journey to Kite's Nest It is the winter of 1947 and the village where I will be born in six years' time is completely cut off from the outside world. The drifts are fifteen feet high, and my father and grandfather have worked all morning to dig a tunnel through the snow across the road from the farmhouse to the farmyard in order to milk the house cows and feed the sheep. My grandmother collects snow in every available receptacle to melt for water as all pipes are frozen.
According to Grandpa's journal, the first snow starts to fall on 18 January. It stays till the middle of April. It is many weeks before some of the village men manage to walk to the nearest town, but they return with just nine loaves. In the interim, my grandmother makes awful pastry with coarsely milled flour and lard; she doesn't attempt bread. My mother, just twenty years old, develops pneumonia and Doctor King skis several miles across the fields to treat her.
Once a day, whenever possible, the heavily pregnant ewes are encouraged to walk round the perimeter of the unfenced field known as Witchcraft, to give them the exercise they need to stay healthy. When lambing gets under way my grandfather brings two orphan lambs, Sally and David, to the house, to be reared by my mother and her younger sister. Only in such exceptional weather would my grandfather ever have permitted 'pets' of any kind in the house. A fire is lit in the sitting room every afternoon and allowed to die down slowly before bedtime. Sally investigates the embers and, as soon as she deems them sufficiently safe, lies down on top of them and stays there till daybreak. David curls up where the brown woollen blanket that hangs inside the blue-velvet door curtain gathers in a pool on the floor. Both of them become totally house-trained. They are fed on fresh cow's milk and they thrive.
As soon as they can venture outside, the two lambs invent a game they never tire of playing: bounding up the snow-covered road that separates the farmhouse and farmyard, climbing the stone granary steps, leaping off the top and jump, jump, jumping back to the garden gate to start again.
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My mother's father was thirty-nine when she was born and she was introduced to every aspect of farming from a very young age. When she was eighteen months old her sister arrived, followed six years later by her brother. A son to take over the farm was considered essential, and he was deemed the most important member of the family by everyone including his sisters.
My mother became a lonely child, sent for extended 'holidays' to her paternal grandparents from the age of two. It was a daunting time; her grandmother was very kind, but seriously overworked and under-appreciated, and her grandfather authoritarian and difficult. He insisted that my mother eat everything on her plate, even if it took her two or three mealtimes. She later believed that it was the generally poor and unappetising food she received, both there and at home, that set her on the path to lifelong ill-health. From the age of four, she found an escape of sorts in reading. It seems likely that her family, like the theatre director Joan Littlewood's, would have thought that 'to be found reading would be worse than lying in bed all day'.
In those days, everyone who lived on a farm became involved in the daily and seasonal round of work. When my mother was ten, her father told her to take a load of hay home. On asking how she would navigate the frighteningly narrow river bridge, she was assured the horse would 'know', and of course it did. My grandfather had been deeply affected at having been ordered to abandon his horse during the First World War, when the Warwickshire Yeomanry was disbanded and amalgamated with a foot regiment. According to my mother, as compensation he received just ten shillings (i.e. 50p, worth about £30 in today's money). His devotion to horses never waned: he never learned to drive a car or tractor. Grandpa died unexpectedly when I was a baby, but my brother Richard was three and he remembers sitting on Grandpa's knee and being given the reins to hold when driving through the village in a horse and cart.
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My father was a first-generation farmer, inspired by a schoolfriend on whose father's farm he learned to milk cows and love farming. His first job, at the age of fifteen, was delivering milk in seventeen-gallon churns by pony and trap in the town where he was born, doling out measures to the women who came out carrying jugs. They sometimes brought him freshly made cakes, and he loved every minute. After a tough apprenticeship on a Northumberland farm, he left his native county of Durham while still in his teens to milk the small herd of Dairy Shorthorns on the farm of my grandmother's cousin, Jack Hodges, in Warwickshire. My mother, who was the same age and lived nearby, was invited to supper to meet him. As she leaned her bicycle against the wall, she saw my father's kindness towards the cows and decided there and then that she would marry him. She wanted to spend her life with someone who cared about all animals. He insisted on cycling home with her later, lending her his scarf as the evening was chilly.
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I was born in June 1953 in the cottage on my grandfather's farm in the village of Condicote, but we moved when I was less than two weeks old to a remote smallholding in Clapton-on-the-Hill, rented from Gloucestershire County Council. It was truly off the beaten track but in the early evening of the first day, thirteen cats appeared on the doorstep asking to be fed! The fields were steep and the soil was heavy and waterlogged. It had been occupied since 1919 by an invalided First World War veteran. My father set about draining the wettest fields, digging almost a mile of trenches by hand with a ditching spade, laying red clay pipes in the bottom of the trenches and then back-filling with soil. We lived in a bungalow in the middle of nowhere, several hundred yards from the farm buildings, with magnificent views but no telephone, electricity, or easily accessible water supply, just a temperamental pump in the back kitchen. Within a few months, though, a telephone line and mains water were connected. Electricity was laid on too but the council wouldn't pay to wire the bungalow, so my father did it himself.
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There is a grainy photograph of me aged around two years, bottle-feeding a lamb in my grandmother's orchard. It would be more than half a century before I was able to decide to keep sheep myself. The intervening years were spent with cows and pigs and hens. 'Other people' kept sheep and the only ones I ever saw were in huge flocks. I'm ashamed to say that I believed what I was so often told, that they didn't have individual personalities.
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Cows were not just part of our life but the very core of it. I helped to move the electric fence most days when I was not at school and tested its strength by holding a blade of grass to the wire, which gave me a small shock rather than the powerful one I occasionally got by accidentally touching the wire itself. I roamed freely among the cows from the time I could walk. Only Susan was a bit inclined to toss her head, so we always walked behind rather than in front of her. I frequently picnicked in fields of cows, or sunbathed, eyes closed, without the tiniest worry that they would harm me. They often surrounded me, snuffling at me with grassy breath and licking my wellington boots.
My days were filled with the routine of school, before the excited rush home to be on the farm. One of my jobs was bucket-rearing calves. We milked a herd of pedigree Ayrshires. The calves were kept separately and fed whole milk twice a day. I would carry four small plastic buckets each containing four pints of precisely warmed milk, two on each arm to leave my hands free for opening latches. The trick was to time my entry to the calves' home and swiftly position the buckets under each nose without any being spilled. I had of course watched this being done countless times before attempting it myself, and I knew that to spill any would not merely be expensive but would cause havoc. Four calves each receiving their allocation simultaneously spelled success and contentment. If one bucket or part thereof was spilled, the deprived calf would try to steal from one of the others, resulting in much if not all the milk being lost, and the whole procedure having to be repeated.
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Our Scottish Border Collie, Roy, was exactly the same age as me. He was bought by my father, by telephone, from a breeder he knew. At the age of six months Roy travelled unaccompanied in the guard's van, all the way from Scotland to the old railway station in Bourton-on-the-Water, on the long-gone branch line from Kingham to Cheltenham. This journey involved many changes of train, and we were all waiting anxiously on the platform. As soon as Roy alighted, my father called him by name and the dog ran straight to him. Evidently the various guards had all made a fuss of him because he seemed extremely happy.
Roy was fully trained - he responded to Scottish commands - and happily worked with any of us. He could distinguish between calves and cows in adjacent fields if we said the words clearly. He had a sweet temperament and we all loved him. But he was used only twice a day to bring the cows in for milking, up very steep fields on our first, forty-seven-acre smallholding. The rest of the day was his own. He enjoyed our company and could always be seen in family photographs, even when we had no knowledge he was there until the picture was developed. Every time he was given a bone he would immediately hurry away and bury it, but he could never remember where he put it. We had to get into the habit of secretly following him so that when he started looking for it we could tactfully show him where to dig.
From the time I was about six, Roy and I would walk along the drive between the milking parlour and our bungalow, lined with alternate bushes of double-white and purple lilac interspersed with laburnum, whose poisonous qualities are belied by its outward beauty. On and on we would walk, to whichever field the cows were grazing. On what today seems like a very small farm, the distance felt long to my short legs. Then I would stand at the top of one of the all-steep fields and call:
cuuuu'p, cuuuu'p, cuuuu'p, cuuum'-on, which would make some of the cows look up. I would say the magic Scottish command to Roy and he'd be away, but he always slowed down once he'd rounded the cows up, and walked them home gently.
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My tenth year, 1963, was the coldest for two hundred years. I enjoyed it immensely. The snowdrifts were beautiful and excitingly challenging. I had a hand-me-down teddy-bear suit, sent by an American relative, which zipped me into a warm and draught-free onesie. The walk from our house to the farmyard required the skill and courage of an Arctic explorer, which is what in my mind I became.
The trials my parents had to overcome that winter were huge. Frequently there would be no electricity for long periods of time, but my resourceful father managed to attach belts from the milking machine to the tractor pulley he normally used to saw firewood. With the pulsators connected to the tractor battery he managed to milk our herd of Ayrshires twice a day as usual.
Our neighbour, Frank Moy, took a three-legged stool and set to work to milk his Dairy Shorthorns by hand. He just had time for a very strong cup of coffee after finishing the morning milking before commencing on the afternoon stint. I learned more from his empathy with his cows and deep knowledge of most things than from any other person. Frank demonstrated to me just how much cows can be trusted when they are never hurried or bullied. He walked his Shorthorns in for milking through part of the village, winding slowly downhill to his farmyard. He opened the gate from their field and then followed behind them. They knew where to go and behaved beautifully, walking into the traditional milking shed and stationing themselves in their own individual stalls, ready to be fed and milked.
Getting the cows milked and the milk into ten-gallon churns in that cold winter was one thing, but taking it to rendezvous with the lorry that could no longer drive to the village because of the ice and snow was an altogether different and more dangerous adventure. In fact, for the first six weeks of Arctic weather, the milk had to be tipped away. By mid-February, my father, Frank and other men from the village had forged a passageway by shovel and fore-loader through one long section of snowdrifts, so that our tractor and transport box could slide down a very steep lane where the snow had not drifted, to meet the milk lorry on the main road each day. Richard or I sat in the transport box to make sure the churns of milk did not tip over. On the way back the tractor would gather speed in an attempt to get up the steep icy slope. Often we didn't quite make it to the top, and had to shovel more grit onto the road before having another go. After this, it became possible to bring in supplies of fresh food: the first for six weeks. I wonder how many people could manage without fresh supplies for six weeks today? It wasn't easy then and everyone went short in one way or another but it was a different world. None of us had heard of a supermarket, let alone seen one. Most people had some home-grown food stored away and went shopping only occasionally.
When summer finally arrived, our tiny, remote village organised a fete, the highlight of which was to be a hundred-yard dash, open to all ages, with an alluring cash prize of £5 that proved irresistible to a group of fit young men from surrounding villages. Richard, aged fourteen and wearing his shorts, running vest and prized spiked running shoes, was a contender. My thirty-seven-year-old father arrived a few seconds before the start, still wearing wellingtons and his cap, and outran them all.
Copyright © 2024 by Rosamund Young. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
