Toffee Pennies

Sunday morning and Liam squelched back down the lane at the end of a solo dog walk looking like a sodden assassin, sealed head to foot in black waterproofs with his beanie and two hoods pulled low over his eyes.  Even Bruno - who loves all things water - shivered by the back door, clearly fed up of the gusty wind blowing rain into his ears.

Liam peeled his wet clothes off layer by layer, dropping them in a circle around his feet.

            “There’s some cow bother up at the farm,” he said, unzipping his outer coat.  “Ian reckons that you’ll want to go up there.”

            “What’s happened?” I shouted over the boiling kettle.

            “It’s that calf,” he said.  “The toffee looking one.  It’s back.”

I dropped teabags in our mugs and tried to make sense of ‘the toffee looking one’.

            “Do you mean Lissy-Calf?  The August surprise?”

            “Yep,” Liam kicked the tangle of waterproof trousers away from his dry socks.  “The calf with the white face.  She’s back.”

            “Why?”  The last thing that I knew, this late-born calf had been moved to a farm in the next village to over-winter with her mother.

Liam gathered all his wet kit into a dripping bundle, “Her mum wasn’t feeding her.  She is in a bit of a state - all bony and miserable.  Ian says that you’ll want to read her stories or something.”

After my mug of tea, I texted Ian to ask if the wee heifer did indeed need stories, hot water bottles and chocolate milk.  The reply came: “I think she is past the hot chocolate stage but nice stories and human contact would be good for her she may not agree with me.”

Ian was right: the hungry heifer did not agree with him, not one bit.  I waited until the brink of nightfall before I walked up the farm, knowing that I might catch Ian doing the second round of feeding, which could be a good moment for a situation report.  I found the heifer in what Ian and his family call ‘the old cow hulls’, a series of wooden pens inside a small stone barn.  She was in the hull just to the left of the door and I slipped in as quietly as I could, easing back the lock in order to avoid the harsh metallic clunk of the sliding bolt. Even so, the heifer stumbled to her feet, scuffing straw with her hooves in agitation.  Eyes wide with fear, she backed into the corner of her stall, her rump against the whitewashed stone.  I stood still and said hallo to her as softly as I could. 

After several minutes of impasse, Ian appeared in the gloom with a bucket in each hand. 

            “She’s not keen,” I said.

            “She’s not crying for her mother either,” he said, setting the buckets down.  “Not once.  It’s never a good sign.”

            “What went wrong?”

            “Dunno,” he said.  “Milk might have dried up or Mum lost interest.  Or both.  Mum seemed surprised to see the calf when we went to get her.  It’s a shame.  She should be much taller and you shouldn’t be seeing these.”  He gestured to the heifer’s protruding pelvic bones. 

            “Is she rescuable?”

            “She’ll have to be.”  Ian sighed.  “She’s got a name hasn’t she?”

This little heifer had in fact managed to collect an aristocratically long list of names after her unexpected birth in the misty dawn of August 22nd.   When I rounded the corner of the lane beside the farmhouse that morning and caught my first glimpse of her, I thought that she was a mist-made wraith and I blinked and blinked to check that the tiny caramel dollop in the dewy grass really was a calf.   

            “Yes, it’s a calf,” Ian confirmed the following day.  “But I thought we were done.”

            “Ah,” I said, helpfully.

            “When Vicky told me the cow was in calf I thought she was having me on.  But she was right.  She must’ve got bulled late.”

            “Ah,” I said again, unsure of quite what noise to make in these circumstances.

            “Her name’s Lissy.  And her mum is Lissy too.  Not Lissy Two. But two Lissys.”

            I was on surer ground now: “Right. Why Lissy? Twice?”

“For my granddaughter.  She’d hurt her arm when the first heifer was born so I said that she could name it.  And she did, after herself.  And she’s just had surgery on the damaged arm so I told her that if this calf was a heifer then she could name it.  So she has - Lissy again.”  He shook his head ruefully, “It gets complicated when they have names.  They have to stay alive, if you see what I mean.”

I nodded, deciding – privately – that because the mother was a caramel colour and the calf a toffee shade with a sweet white face they could be Caramel and Toffee (aka Lissy #1 and Lissy #2).  But our friends Bernadette and Matthew thought differently.  They live next to the farm and, for them, the mother cow’s quiff made her Elvis and therefore the calf was Baby Elvis. 

Unfortunately, by early December, Baby Toffee Elvis Lissy#2 was malnourished and frightened of absolutely everything.  Because she had been accidentally weaned by her neglectful mother, Ian fed her barley pellets and hay but she was reluctant to eat.  One morning, I found him grooming her flanks with a soft brush.  

“Got to get her used to human contact,” he said as she shuffled anxiously, bumping against him in her worry.

“Anything that I can do?”

“Pop in,” he said.  “She’s got to eat.  Then she has to calm down. Then she will need friends.” 

The four calves in the next stall were younger that Lissy #2 but calmer and two of them had begun to raise their wet noses towards the frightened heifer in a friendly manner.

I did as Ian suggested and visited the unhappy heifer at the start or end of my dog walks.  Bruno was content to sniff at the straw in the narrow walkway between the hulls while I stood quietly, my arm outstretched towards Lissy#2.  Ian’s advice had been to rub my hands in hay before reaching out to her and I did that too.  Nothing seemed to work so I kept my movements very slow, using the gentlest voice that I could to say hallo to her.  Standing there, achieving not a lot, I felt the shadow of other similar experiences but could not quite bring them to mind.  I knew that I had never tried to comfort an anguished calf before and yet this unhappy companionship felt familiar in some way. 

My memory finally took a recognisable shape when I investigated the etymology of the word ‘hull’.  When Ian first referred to the small barn with stalls as the ‘old cow hull / houles’ he explained that he was not sure of the spelling.  I tried spelling it ‘hulls’ or ‘holes’ but my dad – a Yorkshireman by birth – suggested that it might be ‘houles’, a word that he had heard across the fells through Yorkshire and into County Durham and this sent me to the online dictionaries.   Houle, I learned, came from the Old Norse ‘hol’ for cave or hole with the verb form ‘houles’ for ‘to hold’.   I loved the ancientness of this noun-verb that came with the Norse folk to describe the cave-like stone holdings that they made to over-winter their livestock.  Centuries later, and pronounced ‘hull’, the word survives in the farming community who still need wooden holding pens in stone barns to shelter their cows during Cumbria’s long, wet winters. In this hull, with its flaking green door, patchy whitewash and thick cobwebs, the young heifers grow strong on the summer’s wildflower hay and sleep in deep straw.

One afternoon close to the winter solstice, I stood in gathering darkness alongside Lissy #2, my mind baggy and vague with winter lethargy.  As I held out my hay-scented hand and Lissy #2 rolled her eyes in panic, my memory began to form definite edges and then actual shapes.  The old cow hulls became bunk beds and the toffee-coloured calf became the gold-wrapped pennies of Quality Street selections.  I waited, conscious of my breathing, until these objects made sense.  And so, it came: my second school and homesick girls, just a few days into boarding school life, sobbing with distress at the absence of their parents.  This sort of abject misery is incredibly difficult to comfort and it took me at least a year to learn the trick: Quality Street toffee pennies.  It is absolutely impossible to weep while eating one of these discs of solace because they are so chewy that you have to breathe regularly to avoid choking. You cannot breathe, chew and sob.  This makes toffee pennies the perfect remedy for homesickness, a sadness made bearable by companionship and distraction.    

Despite my conscientious visits, I got nowhere with Baby Toffee Elvis Lissy#2 but Ian, with the benefit of a lifetime of knowledge and experience, did succeed in calming her with plenty of food and consistent routines.  When I last slipped into the hull, I found her alternately scoffing hay and lifting her nose to meet the inquisitive snuffles of the calves in the adjoining stall. 

“Like I said,” Ian muttered in passing, “next step – friends.”