Chewing the Cud (18 page)

Doubtless there are even less pleasant situations than to squirm on your belly in liquid manure with your finger trapped in a frontloader scoop, but my agony would have been even longer had it not been for Tom's presence of mind. Tom had replaced Gladwyn as my cowman, though in fact I did most of the milking to leave him free to do those mechanical jobs at which, not understanding machinery, I wasn't much good. Finding that his efforts to lift off the weight were unavailing and merely incited me to louder shouts of pain, he leaped into the driver's seat of the tractor, started the engine, engaged the hydraulic lift, and very gently, very slowly (for too rapid a rise would
simply have chopped my finger off) eased up the scoop till I could pull free.

Myrle drove me straight in to casualty, filthy and stinking as I was. Damage to one's extremities is especially painful, but through my anguish I still noticed that everyone stood up and moved away, leaving me sitting all by myself. After a while the sister came in with a large aerosol. Ah, painkiller, I thought. As she sprayed it liberally on and about me, I saw the label on the can. It said “Spring Violets.”

What a strange awakening there was for me on that first morning after the dispersal sale. No cows to milk. After twenty years, no need to get up at the crack of dawn. But what were we to do? Where were we to go? The first stroke of luck was that a friend called Anne had moved out of her cottage, intending to sell it, but seeing our plight offered it to us to live in for the time being, rent free. We had
somewhere to go. Then came the next stroke of luck when along came another friend, Pat. He offered me a job, a temporary job, for six months only, but it meant that I had something to do and it got me off the dole. Pat manufactured, among other sorts of clothing, special fire-fighting suits made from aluminized asbestos and guaranteed to withstand very high temperatures. So now I became a rep, a traveling salesman driving all about England, to airfields, to motor-racing tracks, to petrochemical works, trying to sell aluminized asbestos fire-fighting suits, boots, and helmets.

I had to use my own car (and the mileage I covered pretty well wore it out), but Pat paid for the petrol and I stayed in a good many rather nice hotels at his expense. I quite enjoyed myself, seeing bits of England I'd never seen before, but it was no fun at all for Myrle, stuck on her own in the borrowed cottage all week.

The one thing that I was terrified of was that on one of my visits, someone would say to me, “So this suit will protect the wearer in a really hot fire, will it?”

“Oh yes! Up to one thousand degrees centigrade.”

“Good, because we've built a nice big bonfire all ready for you. We'll light it now, and when you're all dressed up, you can walk into it.”

Mercifully, no one ever did this. At the end of my six months as a rep (I did sell a few of the fire-fighting suits
but nothing like as many as a professional salesman would have done), there I was, back on the dole again.

For the next three and a bit years I worked in a shoe factory, a job that I landed through the kindness of another friend, David. I was a work-study engineer, but having to drive into Bristol each day and walk about the factory floor dressed in a white coat and carrying stopwatch and clipboard was something, I found, that I could take only for so long. I resigned, just in time — I'm sure they were about to sack me.

So, I was on the dole for the third time. First, as failed farmer. Next, as time-expired salesman of aluminized asbestos fire-fighting suits, boots, and helmets. Now, as ex-work-study engineer.

So — what to do? I was only forty-nine. I had no private means. I needed an income. Someone suggested teaching. But I'd need qualifications. My only academic achievements were credits in the school certificate, thirty-three years ago.

Along comes another piece of good fortune. An old friend, Charles, was in turn a friend of someone who was a tutor at a teacher-training establishment, the College of St Matthias in Bristol. Charles brought the man to see me and I was given an interview and, in the nick of time, got a place on the impending three-year course and a grant. The
grant was not generous, but Father topped it up a little, and so now I found myself, at the ripe old age of forty-nine, being taught to be a teacher.

Best of all, at last we had a real home of our own. We found a very old, very small cottage in a little village (no more than three miles as the crow flies from the house in which I'd been born) and were lucky enough to buy it at auction. Early in the summer of 1968 we moved in. And, as she had done at Overscourt Farm, Myrle set about putting the inside of the cottage to rights, painting and decorating and — hardest of all — painstakingly removing from the good old oak beams the layers of paint that had been slapped on them.

It was all fun, those three years as an elderly student, so much so that I determined, with Myrle's approval, to stay on for a fourth year, in order to gain a degree in education from Bristol University. Which I duly did. So there I was (it's 1975 now), a qualified teacher with no one to teach. By now I knew the sort of job I wanted. One, it had to be near home — I didn't want to have to drive miles to work for years and years. Two, it must be in a country school. Three, it must be in the primary sector — I didn't want to have to deal with people over the age of puberty.

Once again, fortune smiled. I had an interview — just one — at a village primary school five miles from my door,
and as I drove back down the lane to our cottage, there was Myrle, in the garden, eyebrows raised high in hopeful query. Happily, I stuck my thumb up.

I taught at Farmborough Primary School for seven years, that is to say from age fifty-three to age sixty. Part of the school was very old, built in 1857. Part was brand-spanking-new. For four years I taught eight-year-olds in one of the new classrooms. For the final three years I taught six-year-olds in one of the old classrooms, its walls crying out for a lick of paint, its roof so leaky that in a real downpour, bowls were needed on the floor at strategic points to catch the drips. But actually I preferred the old classroom because I was happier in it, and thereby hangs a tale.

My headmistress, a woman about the age of my elder daughter, became, understandably, worried at the end of my first four years. Not because I was the only male teacher, but because my problems with understanding mathematics were not helping my pupils.

She decided to move me from the juniors to the infants, presumably on the basis that though I couldn't understand long division, I could just about add two to three to make five. So then I had three good years with those young ones and very rewarding I found them. Many years later I wrote a book (
The Schoolmouse
) set in that very classroom.

Being the only man in the school, I was also in charge of football, as coach (not a very good one) and, at school matches, as referee (weak on the offside law).

But all this time I had been not only teaching, but also writing. In the summer holidays of 1976 — when I should have spent my time preparing next year's classroom work — I wrote my very first attempt at a children's book.

I'd had the ideas for it twenty years earlier in the middle of the farming era, when that passing fox had murdered a whole lot of my chickens. One day, I said to myself, I'll have a go at writing a story where the weak are victorious over the strong, where the chickens vanquish the foxes.

So long had the notion been in my mind that I actually wrote the first draft of
The Fox Busters
in three weeks. The first two publishers to whom I sent the manuscript rejected it, though with polite notes (both houses published me later, I'm glad to say), but the third, Victor Gollancz, actually expressed a deal of interest in the story, thanks to a wonderful editor, name of Jo. She pushed me and pulled me and bullied me and encouraged me until at last I knocked the story into publishable shape. I owe Jo a great deal.

When first you learn to ride a bike, you fall off quite a lot, and the same goes for learning anything quite new, like writing books for children. I had some false starts
and made a lot of boo-boos, but in fact I found I was reasonably well equipped. I'd had a good education, at my prep school and at my public school, at both of which I'd studied Latin and Greek, languages that teach you a lot about words. I love words (just as I hate numbers) and had always written a lot of verse, though never before had I attempted a children's story.

I've written well over 100 books now, mostly about animals, and there I had a lot going for me, the boyhood pet keeping (and not only boyhood, I had loads of guinea pigs in my fifties) and of course the twenty years of farming. Also I found, once I'd buckled down to the job, that I had masses of ideas for stories and that I was getting a whole lot of fun writing them.

My first sight of
The Fox Busters
in a Bristol bookshop excited me no end, and I said to myself that now I was a published children's author, no doubt they would welcome a second book. I set to work on a zoo story, its hero a sparrow named Riff-Raff.

Jo's response to it was lukewarm. “It's not terribly exciting, is it?”

I responded by a rewrite, which I made incredibly bloodthirsty.

“I can't publish this,” she wrote. “It's far too blood-thirsty.”

Undeterred, I produced my first pig story,
Daggie Dogfoot
.

“This is more like it,” said Jo. “But it's far too long; it's about forty-five thousand words. I don't want more than twenty-five thousand at the most.”

Stupid woman, I thought, losing all those words will ruin the thing. But it didn't of course, it was the making of it, because it tightened the whole book up and kept the pace of it going, and she published it.

The Fox Busters
was published in 1978. Then followed
Daggie Dogfoot
(1980),
The Mouse Butcher
(1981), and
Magnus Powermouse
(1982), all written during my time at Farmborough Primary School, which time was soon to come to an end. Teaching children was to give way to writing books for children.

I wasn't ass enough to think I could make a living as a children's author — only the Dahls of this world did that — but Myrle and I worked out (with help from a financial adviser) that it should be possible for me to give up teaching and try my luck as an author.

N
ow began for me a new full-time career, where I hadn't to go out to work, but simply climb the stairs to my study, get paper and pen, and write and write and write. Yet another piece of luck came along with perfect timing. For, sadly, both my parents died in 1980, and thanks to money that they left me, we were able in 1982 to build an extension onto the cottage that itself had been built, we were told, round about 1635.

For years we'd had to put up with a lean-to bathroom
and loo next to the sitting room. Now the plan was to build a new upstairs bathroom on top of a new downstairs dining room, and by great good luck there was just room to make a very small study for me beside the new bathroom. (I'm writing in it today, and I can touch the walls on either side of my chair without straightening my arms.)

I write in all the wrong ways. I don't plan a story out as I should, I just get an idea and blast off into the wild blue yonder, hoping that things will turn out okay and that it will eventually have what all successful stories must have, whether they be for children or adults, namely a Good Beginning, a Good Middle, and a Good End. Usually it works, sometimes it doesn't, but it suits me.

In the mornings I scribble away with a pen on rough paper (in fact I use the back sides of old letters — Granny K-S would approve). The handwriting is awful, there are arrows and crossings out and asterisks and additions in red ink or green: if I died one lunchtime, Myrle wouldn't have a clue what I'd written. Ah, but then in the afternoon I get out my little old portable typewriter and, with the index finger of my right hand, I carefully type out the morning's work.