Older

As autumn deepens, grass growth slows perceptibly no matter how warm the days, and the spells of rain are more frequent and prolonged.  The cows become restless, watching my every move as I pass among them, wondering if today is the day for moving inside for the winter.  If I go through the gateway that leads to the cowsheds the more hopeful of the group rock their bulk to build the momentum to get to their feet, just in case I pin back the gate to let them through.  Not yet, not yet, I tell them.  The ground is starting to soften but there’s still enough grass to protect it from poaching.   I’m not ready to make a change that will alter the whole pattern of my day for months to come.

A week later my morning check finds the herd standing by the gate, and they uncompromisingly bellow at me, making their wishes known in no uncertain terms.  The cowsheds have been prepared with deep beds of straw, forage bales at the ready for breakfast and dinner, and all it takes is the opening of two gates; the one from the field and the other into the sheds.  I unlatch them both, holding them wide, and don’t even have to click my tongue in encouragement; the cows flow through, heading straight for a winter of being waited on, hand and foot.  The calves are less certain, but trustingly follow their dams who immediately curl their tongues around the hay in the rack. It doesn’t take long for the calves to burrow into the straw, chasing each other through the golden heaps. 

The year is a little older and so am I.  In the morning my first task is mucking out the cows.  I wander among them with the muck fork, picking out the cow pats in the bedding and turfing the muck on to the concrete pad, alongside any sodden clumps of straw.  I shut the cows back onto their loafing area and drive the skidsteer down the concrete, scraping the dung into a heap, flicking the bucket up at the last to capture as much muck as I can. Turning the revs low, I get out of the skidsteer and use my fork to throw the rest of the muck into the bucket, and drive out to tip the lot into the muck trailer.  Floor now clean, I open the gates to allow the cows forward and fill the rack with hay.  It’s at head height so I lift armfuls unwrapped from a large bale until the rack is stuffed full along the length of the shed.  I grab a builder’s dumpy sack and peel off pages of straw from a bale weighing a quarter of a ton, stuffing the sack to the brim.  I drag it into the shed and scatter the contents across the bed, repeating the exercise two or three times depending on how much straw is needed for building a cosy top layer.  

The muscle pattern is steady, repetitive, the picking up of the muck, the lifting of the hay, the pulling at the straw, the dragging of the sacks, and while I’m warm there are no twinges, but by the end of the day my left side aches from the twisting and lifting.  I know that this will ease after a few weeks, but a minor ache becomes a part of me which will only completely leave once the cows are back out at grass come the spring. 

Getting older on a farm is rife with dilemma.  You probably live in a glorious location.  The hills, the woods, the rivers, the wildflowers, the wildlife from bats to dormice, frogs to deer all enrich the day.  Your commute is a wellies’ breadth.  You never have to leave home to take the dogs for a wonderful walk.  The beauty is accessible from every window, each vantage point.  How could you bear to move away?  But the job is physical, no matter what equipment you engage with to ease the burden.  Can you go on doing it in your seventies and beyond? 

We talk about retirement, me in Saint Augustine mode, “give me a happy retirement – but not yet!”.  We talk about staying put, renting out the land so we can still inhale its beauty every day.  Who knows what will be possible.  The idea of moving to something convenient makes my skin crawl and brain shrink.  I remember the first house we lived in, bought to be near my work, and yes, convenient.  It was cheap, thinly bricked and perfectly adequate.  But nothing about it made my heart sing apart from the tiny gate at the end of the garden that opened into a field which we were allowed to walk through.  There was no particular pleasure in arriving home.  It was just a house.  The farm is not just a house; it is everything. It is life, work, air, fire, water and wind.  It is food, it is wildlife, it is an education, an experience, a joy, a provider.  It has history, so much history.  If you look beneath the plasterboard, there’s red cattle hair, the same cattle hair that comes off in my hand when brushing the cows at the end of the winter.  There’s a bible cupboard, deep fireplaces, weird sloping ceilings and door frames, the scullery floor is cobbled.  When you lift the floorboards in one of the upstairs rooms ancient barley husks are littered from when grain was kept up there.  My office still has wooden racks for storing apples.  The roof space has fencing stakes tacked in to keep the trusses from shifting. The fields haven’t altered since medieval times.  The dovecots at the end of the cob barn are silled with slate.  The pig paddock has a stoned wall where small medicine bottles were thrust after treating an ailing creature.  Pottery eggs are unearthed from rat tunnels which they mistakenly took for the real thing.  Every patch tells a story.  There are tadpoles, weasels, dormice, tawny and barn owls, red and roe deer, badgers, foxes, orchids, ragged robin, cuckoo flowers, yellow rattle, wrens, woodpeckers, herons and buzzards.   It’s a glorious, rich, teeming place.  I never want to leave.  The thought of being too old to live here is terrifying.  Give me twenty more years here, please.  Please.