Chewing the Cud (6 page)

Up to this point it had been an unremarkable farm dispersal sale. They had dealt with the machinery and the implements and all the usual job lots — old tins of paint or grease, bottles of medicine for stock, coils of rusty barbed wire — for which there was always someone to bid half a crown or five shillings. There had been a few crates of ancient hens and a couple of fowl houses. They had sold the young stock and then the sixteen dairy cows, of which I had bought two, paying the top price and wearing a carefully contrived expression to show the assembled company
that there wasn't much about a good milker that I didn't know. And then Lot Eighty-seven was called.

“Now then, gentlemen,” said the auctioneer in a voice rich with promise from his perch upon a four-wheeled wagon beside the rough circular sale ring out in the yard. “Now then! Last lot of the day, and worth waiting for as you will soon see.” He paused and looked up towards the open door of the cowshed. “Bring him out, please.”

Heads turned as a confused noise arose from inside, of snorting and shouting and a low roaring.

“Lot Eighty-seven,” went on the auctioneer. “Two-year-old light roan Dairy Shorthorn bull — come on, please, bring him along.” And at that moment there appeared in the doorway the son of the outgoing farmer and the bull. It was not quite clear who was bringing whom along. Young Mobbs had hold of the bull pole certainly, had the bull's head well up by the pressure of the pole on the nose ring, but there was a certain air of desperation about him.

For a moment the bull stopped dead, bemused by the sudden sunlight and the crowd of people before him, and then three things happened. Young Mobbs lowered the tip of the pole, trying to drag the animal on into the ring. The bull, disregarding the pain in his nose, set his feet and pulled him back. And then a helpful bystander raised his stick and with a loud cry of “Get on, yer girt hummock!”
brought it down upon the broad back of Lot Eighty-seven.

Five seconds later, the bull stood in the center of the sale ring, and as he swung his head from side to side, everyone could see the snap link of the bull pole dangling from his nose while at the cowshed door Young Mobbs gawped helplessly at the broken-off staff.

For the whole of that morning I had been in a dream, an understandably selfish dream. For me, this was no ordinary sale. Old Mobbs was going out and I was coming in. Things that I had bought — pig troughs, poultry fountains, pitchforks, fencing stakes, rolls of wire netting — would remain here, be used here. Lot Seventy (Buttercup) and Lot Seventy-one (Barbara) would stay and be milked in that cowshed, my cowshed. Dreamily I had stood among the press of local farmers around that makeshift ring of straw bales with a token fence of some old posts and a couple of strands of plain wire. Now suddenly there was an eruption of noise and movement.

Round the ring went the bull like a circus performer. Old Mobbs was standing with his hand resting on top of a fence post as he watched his cattle sold, and one of those short horns sliced the meat off his thumb as neatly as a butcher's knife. Warning shouts drowned Old Mobbs's cry of pain as the crowd melted away, into the cowshed, onto the wagon bed, behind walls, into sheds and loose
boxes. Old men, fat men, even lame men leaped for safety with the speed and agility of gazelles. Only the dreamer remained.

By chance, I was standing at a point nearest to the open orchard gateway. Out in the orchard the sold cows grazed happily, only the red-numbered labels glued on each between pinbone and hook bone showing this to be an unusual day. When, after several more circuits, the bull stopped and focused upon them, only I, frozen now into the inertia of nightmare, stood between. He put his head down.

Man can fly. I did. As the wire burst and the posts cracked and the straw bales exploded like so much Weetabix, I flew, overcoat, boots, and all, striking with my shoulder the closing post of the orchard gate and snapping it off like a carrot. Inches behind came the thunder and wind of the bull's passing, and then he was gone, out into the herd, and away they all went in a mad gallop among the apple trees. I picked myself up, and then I heard my father's voice as he emerged from the nearby loose box.

“Damn brave of the boy, Fred,” he said to a farmer of long acquaintance. “He tried to stop him.”

“Stop un?” said Fred. “He never. He were trying to bloody miss un.”

The “boy” at that time was twenty-five. It was now
three years since that hand grenade had blown me sky-high in that dark Apennine wood. At last I was fit again, fit to fly for my life. We looked about for the bovine bomb that had just gone off and saw him being shepherded back into the cowshed, safely hedged about with puffing, blowing cows. Nobody, it seemed, was keen to buy him, and when I went to see him later, they had made a belt-and-braces job of his security. Round his thick neck was a heavy plaited chain, and a short rope led from his ring to a stanchion at the back of the standing. As bulls do, he screwed his head round slowly and rolled one eye at me. I'll be happier when you're gone, you rascal you, I thought.

A week later, the lorry came to take him to the slaughterhouse. We tied a length of rope through his ring and led it right up the shed and through a pulley at the far end of the lorry bed. Helpers unchained him, and carefully I took the strain and winched him up. He went in like a lamb.

“Fuss about nothing,” said the lorry driver as we locked up the tailgate. “Wouldn't hurt a fly. I knows a bad bull when I sees one. Thissun won't give no trouble.”

Later the news filtered back. The smells, the sights, and the sounds of the slaughterhouse were by no means to the liking of Old Mobbs's bull, and he had come out of the lorry like a tornado. Around the slaughterhouse he went, smashing anything in his path and refusing all attempts
to pen him. I don't know what the proprietors of china shops do, but these slaughtermen kept a high-powered rifle for such a contingency as this, and they called up their marksman. So the Shorthorn bull perished, but not at the first shot. In the general confusion the rifleman must have loosed off a little carelessly. The bull kept galloping, but above the rumble of his hooves was heard a cry of pain as an onlooker fell with a bullet in his shoulder.

It was Gladwyn who told me the final twist in the tale of Old Mobbs's bull. Gladwyn was a Welshman from the Valleys, a year or so younger than me, who had worked for the Mobbs family and stayed on to work for us, for fifteen years as it turned out. We were mucking out the pen where the late beast had lived in semidarkness. It was in a section — two stalls' worth — of the old stables, lit by a small window only. No ray of sunlight had ever entered. In the gloom at the far end, another of my purchases, Bob the one-eyed carthorse, stamped and ground his teeth.

I said, “You can't wonder that that poor devil went wild on getting out of this dim poky hole. Did he ever see the light of day?”

“Oh, we used to take him outside for service,” said Gladwyn. “Mind you,” he said, “it would have been awkward with the roof being a bit low, but they'd sooner have brought the cow in here.”

“Why?”

“More discreet, see.”

“Discreet?”

Gladwyn had a sudden high, shrieking laugh, often ending in copious weeping if the joke was funny enough. He whinnied loudly now, and Bob started against his head rope.

“Mr. Mobbs thought it was rude,” said Gladwyn, and he began to cry. When at last I got the facts from him, between snorts and snuffles and much mopping of the eyes, they were these.

Whenever a cow or heifer in the Mobbs herd had come on bulling, an unvarying routine took place at Woodlands Farm. First Old Mobbs would order Young Mobbs, then rising eighteen, into the house and would ensure that Mrs. Mobbs and Miss Mobbs were also within. All the curtains would be drawn. Only then would Old Mobbs bring the cow down from the cowshed on a halter while with the bull pole Gladwyn fetched out the bull from the stables and stood by during the short ceremony.

Old Mobbs's eyes, Gladwyn assured me tearfully, flicked anxiously from window to window the while. Then the two beasts would be put away, Old Mobbs would go to the back door and order the curtains to be opened, and the family would continue their polite way of life, unsullied
by the facts of it. When they left Woodlands Farm, the Mobbses went market gardening. Vegetables, after all, are so much more circumspect.

I
n fact, we did not move into the farmhouse until early in 1948, Myrle and I and the baby Juliet and our three dogs, Anna the dachshund, her son Jonah (he was to become a champion), and my terrier, Susie, whom I had bought as a puppy from Jack the horseman at Tytherington Farm (the price was two packets of Woodbines). Our move was only just in time, for Myrle was heavily pregnant, and the first of my thick stack of farm diaries carried the above announcement for Leap Year's Day in 1948.

The previous afternoon we had been to the cinema in Bristol. The fact that Myrle was thirty-nine weeks pregnant was not going to interfere with one of our routine pleasures.
Mine Own Executioner
, the film was called, and about halfway through the pains began.

“What d'you think happened just now?” Myrle said after we had fought our apologetic way along the row to the gangway.

“What?”

“A man pinched my bottom.”

“It's very dark in here.”

By chance we had left the car in what looked like a public car park but must, in fact, have belonged to some firm or business premises. As I approached it, supporting the mother-to-be, I could see that its tall iron spear-pointed gates were shut. There was a latch, but it was on the inside and I couldn't reach it through the bars. The high stone walls on either side were topped with bits of broken bottles. Inside, passport to home and warmth and safety and doctors and midwives, stood the car. I began to climb the gates. By the time we reached Woodlands Farm, the pains had stopped.

By five o'clock on Sunday morning, it was plain that this baby was in no mood to wait for March the first, when the monthly nurse was booked to arrive, and so I was on my
way to fetch the local midwife. On arrival she was greeted by the three dogs, Anna, Jonah, and Susie. She drew up her skirts in distaste. “We shall want them shut away,” said the midwife, and on entering the bedroom, “We shall need newspapers, plenty of newspapers. And boiling water.”

Then, as I still don't, I never saw any use for the boiling water, but the armfuls of newspapers that I carried upstairs were laid everywhere — on the bed, under the bed, all over the floor, even upon chairs and tables. By the time the doctor arrived, the place was a sea of newsprint. Myrle was being extremely stoical, only seeming every now and then to give voice to a curious whining sound. Ventriloquially, it came not from the bed but from beneath it.

Suddenly the midwife dropped heavily to her knees and, splaying herself out like a giraffe at a water hole (for the bed was very low), peered beneath it.

“There's a dog here!” she cried.

All dachshunds are stubborn and Anna was especially so. Our bed — we still sleep in it — is a large one. The baby that was about to arrive would be of the third generation, following myself and my mother, to have been both conceived and born upon it. The space beneath it was too cramped for anyone to get hold of Anna, and she was deaf to threats or blandishments. So she was present at the birth.

Later in the day, Father arrived to view the new (red-haired) baby girl. Never the most tactful of men, he excelled himself on this occasion. “Wrong sex again, eh, Myrle?” he said, and earned himself an earful from his furious daughter-in-law.

The next morning, Sister Cartwright duly arrived, a round, comfortable, smiling person. Everything looked good at Woodlands Farm. Mother and child had had a restful night. Gladwyn and I had milked the cows. (I'd bought about ten by then. Fancy! Nowadays one man milks a hundred or more.) The horse, Bob, and Molly, first of the pigs, had been fed. The dogs lay happily about in a bedroom free of newspapers, and the kettle was being used for the understandable purpose of making tea. What was there for a newly arrived highly qualified monthly nurse to do? Hardly had she taken off her sensible belted gray tweed overcoat than Gladwyn's head came round the kitchen door.