Lame farmers and crocked bulls
As North Yorkshire farmers go, Dave Land, owner, operator of Hartley Castle Farm and Austin Hogg, owner, operator of Windy Dale Eggs, could not have been more apposite, both physically and mentally. Austin Hogg was squat and bald. Dave Land was immensely tall and silver headed. Austin Hogg was a bigoted sociopath. Already Dave Land had struck me as an open-minded, gregarious, yet gentle man. Just as critically, and despite having lived and farmed in North Yorkshire all his life like Austin Hogg, he spoke English. As ostensibly a beef and mutton farmer, he was in the business of raising and ultimately murdering animals, so he was off to a bad start with me. Yet I found myself liking him.
Already he was popping in and out of our lives on a regular basis – the main thoroughfare to the farm’s north and west fields was along the top road, down our driveway, across our courtyard between Hartley Castle House and the cars and through the main gate behind the castle, a route he or one of his underlings drove regularly on various green tractors. They also had a tendency to stop off at two large wooden, tin roofed outbuildings to the east of the courtyard; each the size of a primary school gym and used mainly for storing farm equipment – ploughs and…other farm equipment. Two high, wide but decidedly old and ugly combine harvesters sat end to end under a two storey overhang behind one of the sheds.
Among other things Dave Land had imparted to me so far, Hartley Castle Farm covered four hundred acres – small by national standards (all the one and two hundred acre farms had already fallen by the wayside) – and would one ‘sad’ day soon become unviable due to foreign competition, at which point he would call it quits and rent it out to his much larger neighbour. Having groomed two sons to carry on the family tradition only to have both abandon him for the big city in the space of a month, this was something he was perfectly resigned to. Most of his income was now generated by five rental houses and the odd cash crop – potatoes to McCain’s and sugar beet to anyone that would have it. Strangely sheep and cattle were his least assured earner. Yet he kept raising and killing them.
One other notable Dave Land disclosure was the source of his limp: a rampant bull. Not bullock, bull. Bulls, he informed me, tended to be somewhat more aggressive with their manhood intact. A fact he was able to confirm when a particularly large bull charged a slightly ajar gate he happened to be standing behind throwing him twenty feet into a wall. The bull escaped and he was in intensive care for a week, the damage to his back and right leg permanent; the damage to the bull equally permanent – it was hunted down and shot.
‘You’re not from the country, are you, Bailey?’ he said eyeing my abandoned wheelbarrow in the field with Duncan and Archie.
‘You noticed,’ I said. Recent events still as fresh as the road kill between here and Cragmoor, I had been loathe to divulge anything of my past to Dave Land (aside from saying ‘No. Kiwi,’ when asked if I was Australian and ‘I write ads,’ when asked what I did).
‘I couldn’t help noticing,’ he said. ‘That’s a shiny wheelbarrow you’ve got there. I’ve never seen a wheelbarrow that shiny before!’
I twitched a smile. ‘Glad to share a new experience.’
He grinned down from that great height of his and I knew what it must feel like to be Gabriel. And there was something about that whopping great face of his and that grin. Something deeply self-assured and…I was going to say mocking. But it wasn’t mocking – I’d learned that already. It was just Dave Land, a man so utterly comfortable in his own skin and so at peace with himself and the world that he just grinned. A lot. In a smug, patronising, twinkling blue-eyed sort of way.
It was confronting. He was confronting. A clean cut, square jawed monster of a man with enough chiselled good looks strewn about his vast gorilla-shaped head to keep King Kong witticisms and small aeroplanes at bay.
‘So how are you settling in then?’ he asked nestling his immense backside on the metre high stone wall and I'm sure I heard it crack.
‘Fine, I think. Yeah. Everything’s pretty good.’ I nodded stupidly and tried to keep my muddy ass angled away from view.
He grinned. ‘Good…Good.’ His great head swivelled to the bullocks on an industrial strength neck. ‘Apart from these two.’
There was no point pretending. ‘I think I might have over-reacted when they charged.’
‘Charged?’ He roared with laughter. ‘Can’t walk, let alone charge!’
With effort, he hoisted himself off the fence and limped to the gate. He opened it with one hand and swung it wide. I waited a safe distance away. ‘You coming?’ he said.
‘No, you’re right,’ I said with a meek wave.
Mammoth mitts went to hips. ‘You want your wheelbarrow or not?’
***
‘Tame as you like this one,’ he said rubbing the head of the black and white bullock named Duncan with the sort of affection a man might reserve for a beloved dog. ‘That one’s a bit wild,’ he said of Archie. ‘Or was until he injured himself. We chased him halfway to Cragmoor about a month ago. Little blighter jumped the fence. There’s always one in every herd. A bit wild. A bit flighty. Might have been mistreated somewhere along the line. Not here, mind.’
Aware that death by horn or hoof was not imminent, confidence on the rise, I moved within patting range of Duncan. ‘Why are there only two in here?’ I said.
‘They’re lame,’ Land said.
‘I can see that. Why aren’t they with the others?’
He pointed down into the gully past the outbuildings to where a distant thirty-strong herd of cattle were moving along the edge of the wiske in a slow, bedraggled formation. ‘That’s a big paddock, that. The herd moves around as a group and a lame bull can’t keep up. He’ll try to but he can’t. It’s best to separate the lame ones so they can be as slow as each other and they’re not forced to walk around all the time. These two spend most of their time lying down.’
‘What’s wrong with the other one?’
‘Can’t say really. He was lame when we got him. Could have been hit by a tractor. Could have broken out. You just don’t know.’
‘Can’t a vet do something?’
‘Vet can’t do nothing for these two. Best thing for em is to fatten them up and send em as soon as we can.’
‘Send them?’
‘Aye.’ He grinned. ‘To auction mart in Millby.’
‘Is that like an abattoir?’ I braced for the answer.
‘No,’ he said with the strained tone of a primary school teacher. ‘That’s where buyers from abattoirs go to buy their cattle, Bailey. Have you…?’
‘Lived in the country before?’ Baby steps out of my authentic IKEA freestanding country closet. ‘Absolutely. I’ve just never had the time to learn the, ahm, ins and outs.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘Endless commuting.’
Dave Land wasn’t grinning. He was knowing and nodding. ‘A butcher,’ he said eying me suspiciously, ‘or an abattoir buyer picks these two up, they’ll be dead within twelve hours and I’ll be lucky if I get my money back.’
Only one part of this statement had offended my sensibilities – not the cold, hard farmer economics, the dead within twelve hours bit. Images of Duncan and Archie squashed wide-eyed into a slatted truck on a slow road to Armageddon flooded my mind and I felt vaguely ill. At the same time I needed at least one North Yorkshire farmer within my sphere of infamy to see me as an ally, not a threat.
Conversation waned momentarily as Duncan gazed up at me and I gazed nervously and guiltily back. I couldn’t imagine this beautiful, ‘cow’ eyed animal being prodded and bullied into a slaughterhouse. I couldn’t imagine his simple, safe life being so violently cut short, scared senseless one minute, hanging freshly dead, skinned and steaming on a hook the next. I couldn’t imagine him reduced to a piece of marked down sirloin on a Tesco shelf just before closing. I’d never been this close to a bullock before. Now I wasn’t sure who should be more scared of whom.
For no apparent reason, a new image flashed through my mind: a famously shocking image from England’s recent past; the image of a field full of dead cattle and a weeping farmer with a gun. I spat it out without another thought.
‘That whole foot and mouth thing must have been a nightmare.’
‘Ha!’ Dave Land said to the sky. His eyes narrowed and his jaw tightened. ‘Don’t talk to me about foot and mouth.’
‘Oops. Sorry,’ I said foot in mouth.
‘No apology necessary,’ he said the grin returning. ‘The whole foot and mouth thing was just a cock up. How they handled it was atrocious. The way they run the country…’ he shook his head. ‘It’s just amazing really. If we got foot and mouth again today, it’d be totally different. Do you want me to tell you about foot and mouth?’
I said I did. I didn’t.
‘All right. I’ll tell you about foot and mouth.’ With effort and careful positioning of his crook leg, he settled an elbow the size of my knee on the wall, gazed proudly out over the fields and began the first of what would become a regular (and life-changing) feature of my time at Hartley Castle House – the softly spoken warts and all monologues of Dave Land.
‘Farmers made an absolute fortune out of foot and mouth,’ he began punctuating the sentence with a short, sharp grin (oddly Dave Land punctuated just about every sentence with a short, sharp grin, even the grim ones). ‘Some farmers did suffer, but it was more emotionally.’ A short, sharp grin. ‘You know, they’d reared these pedigree herds and they’ve had to be killed and that was more of an emotional thing.’ A short, sharp grin. ‘Financially, most of the farmers, you know, who got foot and mouth, made a fortune.’ You get the picture. ‘It was a government cock up how they handled it with compensation; they were valuing things for far more than they were worth. They were getting paid extortionate amounts, the farmers. Tractors that were worth six hundred pounds, they were hiring them out to the government for a thousand pounds a week to clean up the farms.
‘It was an absolute racket. They got paid far more than they were worth. Farmers who didn’t get foot and mouth like us suffered the most. I could see them shooting cattle across at the Healy’s farm.’
I winced at Duncan.
‘We should have opened our gates,' he continued with a matter-of-fact meloncholy. 'We should have gone along and opened all the gates and let his cattle infect ours. That’s what we should have done. We’d have made a fortune. They’d have come along and we’d have said our cattle have got contaminated by the next door neighbour’s. Can you kill ours?’
I gaped at Duncan who was now licking my hand (affectionately?) with a coarse sandpaper tongue.
‘And they’d have come and killed all ours and we’d have put a claim into the government. We’d have got all our stock overvalued and we’d have made a lot of money. I tell you, Bailey, we could have spent the next twelve months clearing up the farm, disinfecting it and pressure washing it down. We could have packed up farming completely and spent the next year just tidying up really and all got paid twenty pound an hour to do it. Hired our tractors out at a thousand pounds a week. Sheep which were worth fifty quid, we could have got a hundred and fifty for them.
‘You had to get rid of sheep as well?’ I said, still trying to deal with the offhand way he’d just hypothetically got rid of his cattle.
‘Oh yeah. Everything. They even wanted to kill dogs! They wanted to take all the sheep dogs out, but the farmers wouldn’t let them. Dogs can carry foot and mouth, but they don’t spread it apparently.’
He shook his head, eyes raised to the ruins. ‘People were saying to us, oh you don’t want foot and mouth, you don’t want foot and mouth. We bloody did! You’ll be on a black list for the rest of your days, they said. For ever and ever, your farm will be on a black list. But no, the best thing that could have happened to us was to get foot and mouth. What would have stopped some farmers wanting it was pride – some farmers are very proud. They’d rather go without the money, the compensation. You don’t want the stigmatism, do you? Our next door neighbour made a hundred and fifty thousand out of foot and mouth. We lost fifty thousand.’
He lapsed into deep smiling thought. ‘Well,’ he said at length. ‘Won’t keep you. You’ve got work to do.’
And off he limped.
So began my obsession with the lame bullocks, Duncan and Archie. I was surprised at how fond of them I was. And with each wheelbarrow load of grass I wheeled into their paddock that afternoon, that fondness only grew. Gate conquered, confidence building with each ungored visit, I began to kneel with the bulls and stroke their heads while they ate. I let them sniff my hand, my face, run sandpaper tongues over my hand, my face. By the time the Hartley Castle House grounds were as immaculate as a miniature golf course, I was looking at beef in an entirely new light.
And while I was yet to fully confront their pre-programmed mortality, cogs in my brain were receiving much needed oil. I now had things to think about other than my continued victimisation. Positive things. More, the opportunity to do something positive. There needed to at least one survivor amongst the widespread carnage that had been my first two months in England – maybe two. There needed to be a redirection of Karma, a change in the flow of energy to dislodge the incapacitating blood clot from our lives; get us moving slowly, yet inexorably in the right direction again. Right now Gabriel and I were in a very comfortable but isolated boat becalmed near the Bermuda Triangle. Which way the wind would ultimately blow was out of our control. Yet, while there was air in my lungs, the time to puff was now. The further away we could float spiritually, the better placed we’d be when the wind decided our fate.
A plan was formulating. Not a very big plan, but a plan nevertheless.
