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TO BE A FARMER'S BOY
Malvern, Autumn 1955
She turned her head to look me straight in the eye. Her big brown eyes were open wide and a large expanse of white eyeball signalled she was afraid of me. I was probably more frightened of her but I gathered up my courage and stroked her face.
"It's alright, Lulu. I won't hurt you. You know more about this than I do. You'll have to help me."
She responded with another baleful look of those eyes. I couldn't tell if she was contemptuous of what I was doing to her or just impatient to get the business over.
Lulu was one of Farmer Tom's herd of Herefords who were milked twice a day. Some were milked by hand but most stood quietly in a stall whilst the machine noisily sucked the milk away to the collecting vats.
Apparently Lulu was an older cow who needed to be started with hand-milking before being coupled up to the machine.
"Just talk to her like a lady," Tom had said, "but don't get behind her. She has a fierce kick!"
I took his advice but my voice quavered with fear as I approached her very gingerly with my stool and two pails, one containing lukewarm water to wash down her under-parts and the other to collect the milk.
Tom had shown me the drill. "Keep talking to her. Place your stool by her flank so that, when you sit down, you can rest your head on her back quarter. Using clean water, wash her udder and teats. Then clean down her backside, back legs and tail. Then grab a teat in each hand between first finger and thumb and pull down, right hand then left. The milk should squirt out with each pull. Keep going until the udder is partially emptied, like this."
He had prodded the udder to make it wobble and show that it was not as distended as before.
It had sounded simple when he had explained the process, but Lulu was a cow weighing nearly half a ton and I was not at all certain that she was friendly. She knew Tom, but I was a newcomer and inexperienced in touching her intimate parts. I had been a farmer's boy for just one week.
Tom, having lost two of his farm hands to national service, had asked me if I could help out on his farm in the summer. I took the job, feeling that going back to the land would be a good place to start my new life. The farm sat at the foot of the Malvern Hills. Later, I walked those hills, looking down over the town of Malvern with its Georgian buildings, the nearby village of Hanley Swan and the distant River Severn, and marvelled at the countryside. With the hill wind in my hair, I could close my eyes and almost hear music from the festival choirs of the three cities of the area - the glorious music of Elgar.
Sitting on the stool and having done the washing bit, I blew on my hands to warm them. Lulu stamped her feet, probably, I thought, displaying impatience. I grabbed two of her teats and pulled. The warm milk flowed into the empty bucket with a tinny sound. Lulu settled down to munch feed from the trough in front of her. I poked her udder, got the right amount of wobble and connected the four suckers to her teats and switched on the milking machine. The suckers danced crazily as they extracted milk in gulps which were carried in clear, flexible, plastic pipes to the vat at the end of the milking shed. Her udder eventually drastically reduced in size and it was clear that there was little more milk to come.
"Have you finished, old girl?" I asked timorously, patting her neck.
She responded by mooing. I disconnected the machine and, of her own accord, she backed out of the stall and trundled down the yard to where the other cows were gathering to walk back to the pasture.
My life was now structured around the cows: the walk to and from the pastures; the twice-daily milking and machine cleaning routines. The day started at six in the morning with hastily gulped tea in the farmhouse kitchen. After morning milking, there would be a big fried breakfast cooked by the farmer's wife, Jane.
There always seemed to be jobs to be done on the farm: hedging and ditching, repairing the farm buildings. At midday, Jane would bring doorstep sandwiches and a thermos of tea and a bottle of brown ale to the place where we were working.
As July turned into August, the wheat ripened to that familiar golden hue and we brought the machines out of store and greased them for the long days of harvesting ahead. I learned to drive a tractor and to be patient with the walking pace needed for most of the farm jobs. Cutting and binding a field of wheat required more concentration than I expected. The cutting lines had to be straight and the turning circle, at the end of the swathe, planned and precise.
From time to time the machine got blocked and had to be cleared. Twine balls had to be replaced and a wary eye kept for untied sheaves. Whilst absolutely humdrum, wheat cutting never became monotonous. Rabbits and grouse often suddenly appeared, and sometimes Tom would be ready for them with his shotgun. There was no time to moon about the past, my lost career, my unfaithful fiancee and my father's rejection of my leaving the army.
After this, I planned to go to London, to start again at the bottom and work my way up. I'd show my father that I could succeed in civilian life. But right now, I was content to be `a farmer's boy'.
After the wheat cutting came the stooking, normally a job for two, each grabbing a pair of sheaves and thrusting them together with his partner's into a near-vertical stack. Some days later, hopefully after a dry, windy spell, the sheaves were collected with a tractor and cart and taken to the farmyard. The threshing machine was coupled up to the pulley of a tractor and the sheaves were thrown onto its conveyor where they were consumed by the noisy, shaking mechanism, separating out grain from the straw. The wheat grain was bagged and the straw re-bundled into sheaves. Using pitchforks, we placed each bundle carefully and systematically on the rick, which grew sturdily upwards until it reached its prescribed height and was then tied down and thatched.
September came and I was despatched to the orchards with ladder and a sack to pick apples and pears and, later, to the fields to dig potatoes and root crops.
I was now fit and strong and enjoying my outdoor life. The autumn dusk came earlier and I spent the longer dark evenings eating Jane's wonderful suppers, reading books in front of big log fires and going to bed thoroughly tired but happy. Tom and I had become great friends, despite our different backgrounds. He and Jane had not been able to have children but they loved their animals and accepted farm hands as their extended family.
The expected letter eventually came, enquiring if I was still interested in the factory job in London and asking when would I be able to start. Talking it over with Tom and Jane, I decided to leave the farm at the end of October. When the time came, I said my goodbyes to Lulu with a last milking.
Tom and Jane had friends who had rooms to let in Fulham, not far from the factory in Hammersmith, so now I had both a job and digs. Expressing my grateful thanks for my hosts' hospitality and the chance to metamorphose in their farm environment, I trudged down the muddy farm lane with my large suitcase to the bus stop on the main road, on the first stage of my journey to London. With much misgiving, I looked back along the lane to the farmhouse which had been my home and refuge for the past three months, the place where I had turned my back on the army, and then I squared my shoulders to the thought of living in London. I took the bus to Malvern station and caught the train to Paddington. From there, a tube train took me to Baron's Court and a short walk led me to Normand Gardens and the terraced house which was to be my home for the next two years.