An optimum load
I am in disgrace at the farm. Again. Despite my best efforts to be just a little bit useful during these cold and soggy winter months, I keep getting it wrong. As it turns out, the most helpful thing that I can do as a volunteer labourer is to labour, in silence. Failing that - which everyone admits is a near impossibility for me - I need to learn to offer comments only about the weather or the robin that keeps me company in the cow holes. Everything else should be off limits for the sake of community relationships and farmer Ian’s sanity.
Except I am not very good at keeping my mouth shut. By nature, I am a chatty soul but I am mostly on my own while I muck out so when I pause to drink lemon and ginger tea from my thermos flask, I wander over to the nearest cow for a blether. I’ve spent lots of tea breaks chatting away to the black heifer calf who has been her own in the biggest of the cow holes. She was born on the farm last summer with a spinal deformity that gave her a hump and Ian was concerned that, as she grew, she would struggle to eat grass or bear a calf. Privately, I have thought of her as the farm’s hump-back whale calf and I’ve hoped that she might have a good cow life despite being a slightly odd shape. In recent weeks, she has been isolated in the largest of the cow holes while Ian tried to get on top of her ring-worm with treatments of anti-fungal cream and engine oil. (Before you ask, the oil - as I have learned - keeps an itchy cow’s skin lubricated.)
Liam did his best to hide the news from me when he returned from a dog walk last Saturday morning. We’d divided the morning’s tasks: I got kitchen cleaning duty while Liam walked Bruno. But he seemed reluctant to make eye contact when he got home.
“Any news from the outside world?” I asked from the fridge where I was looking for coffee.
“Not much,” Liam muttered while he dried Bruno’s paws.
“Is everything ok up at the farm?”
“Hmmmm …” Liam mumbled from the utility room.
That was enough. I crossed the kitchen in two strides, “What’s happened?”
“Ian wasn’t keen for you to know, really.”
“WHAT HAS HAPPENED?”
“Calm down, love, It is just that Ian took0 some calves to the auction yesterday.”
“Yes, I know: six were going to be sold.”
“Well, seven went.” Liam avoided eye contact.
“Seven? Wait …. that doesn’t make sense! Seven?” And then the penny dropped, “He hasn’t has he? He wouldn’t. Surely not?”
Liam grimaced at me, his frown a dreadful confirmation.
I had my hands on my hips. “What? HE HAS SOLD THE HUMPBACK WHALE CALF???”
Liam did his best to rationalise the situation. “He didn’t have much choice, love. She kicked him. In the balls. That really hurts, you know. She had to go after that.”
It only took me seconds to grab my phone and send Ian emojis of a whale and cow and about 700 question marks. His reply took the form of a terse reminder that good stockmen don’t keep bad tempered animals.
I fired back a response: “But lots of people have kicked me in my life and I haven’t sold them!”
Ian replied just as quickly: “Perhaps that’s where you’ve gone wrong.”
He had a point. In fact, he was right. So I did the mature thing and slid my phone out of sight behind the breadbin and went to crash about with the hoover at the other end of the house.
I sulked for a few days and then leaned on the farmhouse doorbell and offered to muck out the humpback whale calf’s cow hole.
“And don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll wear gloves in case of smallpox.”
“Ring worm,” Ian sighed. “Not smallpox.”
“Oh yes,” I said, “That.” Then I retreated into the darkness.
I gave myself a firm talking to before I started to muck out the biggest cow hole: this time, I would keep my trap shut. With my gloves (well, Liam’s gloves, borrowed without asking), my rusty wheelbarrow and Ian’s mighty fork, I set to work with a Radio 4 podcast for company. Nearly two hours and many barrow-journeys to the muck heap later, I heard Ian rumble the tractor to the door of the big barn, which he calls ‘the cubicles’. I carefully wobbled the barrow around the tractor on my next trip and paused to wave at Ian who was just visible through steam rising from damp silage and the warm puffs of cows’ breath.
Despite my cast-iron resolution, waving didn’t feel quite enough so I called towards the fluorescent jacketed figure moving back and forth behind the cows, “So Ian, what is the optimum height for a full wheelbarrow?”
Ian stepped out of the deep murk at the back of the cubicles and raised his eyebrows at the mountain in my wheelbarrow. He shook his head. “Never overload your barrow,” he said.
I looked down at the leaning tower of muck that I had tried to stabilise with a few hefty pats with the fork before setting out across the farmyard. Several clods of straw-poo dangled over the side of the barrow and I had yet to negotiate the partly frozen slush of the no-man’s land between the silage store and the muck heap. I bit my lip and nodded meekly. Dammit: he was right again. “Never overload your barrow” is a sensible motto to live by.