Spring
1. Let no one say the past is dead.
The past is all about us and within.
Haunted by tribal memories, I know
This little now, this accidental present
Is not the all of me, whose long making
Is so much of the past.
…
Let none tell me the past is wholly gone.
Now is so small a part of time, so small a part
Of all the race years that have moulded me.
Oodgeroo Noonuccal, ‘The Past’, from The Dawn is at Hand (1992)
And yet all these impressions, and a thousand more, add up only to a one-sided, personal and entirely superficial memory, which ignores what the mountain may mean to those who have lived for years beside it.
Norman Nicholson, The Lakers (1955)
2. I respectfully maintain that work, business and the undisturbed customary use of centuries should be set before idle amusement.
Mrs Heelis (Beatrix Potter) in a letter to The Times, January 1912, objecting to an aeroplane factory on the shores of Windermere
My second daughter, Bea, has come to work with me in the lambing fields and has seen a ewe lying against a wall, down the field, paining on its side. It is lambing. She has come to lamb a sheep, determined to keep up with her elder sister, who lambed one two days ago and is crowing about it. She appeared in her work clothes as I was leaving the house at first light, and got on the quad bike with me. I tell her that it is cold, and that she may not get a chance, but she seemed to know that she would and came anyway.
3. As I shout the ewes up to their feed, I see three pairs of large round ears appear out of a sea of sun-bleached sieves. The roe deer know my voice, and that I offer no threat to them, so they hold tight each morning and watch, unless I approach them. Bea and I drive down the field, the roe deer bounding off in half-hearted leaps. Floss pushes behind us in excitement because she knows I may need her to hold this ewe until I have caught it. I tell her ‘Steady’, because I do not want to jump off the quad bike and stress the ewe if I can help it. The ewe is fairly oblivious to us arriving and in three steps I catch her and hold her down before she can struggle. She lies on her side. With each contraction, she raises her head and throws it back against herself. I can see two legs and a nose breaching – as it should be – so my daughter can do this.
4. She looks nervous, as if she is trying to be brave. She hates her elder sister doing anything that she hasn’t, so there is a grit behind that nervous smile that says she will do this thing whether it is fun or not. She is small, just six years old, and the lamb coming (judging by its feet) is on the large side. But she grabs a lamb toe in each fist and pulls. I talk her through it. I tell her to give the ewe a moment between pulls. I can tell she is a little unsure whether it feels right, but with each contraction the legs slip out a little further. She gets a hand around each leg at the first joint of the foot. Then the nose is breaching. She wants to stop and let me do this, but I reassure her, tell her she can do it, and if she does, she will be able to go back and tell her mum and her sister she did it.
5. Then the smile toughens and she starts to pull. My daughter is tired now. She nearly stops when it resists her pressure at its hips, but she knows enough to pull it further and get it out now so it can breathe quickly. She slops it down in front of the mother, whose tongue is already manic in its determination to lick it dry. My daughter laughs because the ewe licks her bloody hands as she sets the lamb down. She stands over the lamb, which wriggles and shakes itself free of the afterbirth slime, her face a mixture of pride and awe. The sun is shining, so we will leave this lamb and its mother.
6. Then my daughter remembers something. ‘We have to go for breakfast, Dad, and tell Molly I lambed one. And it’s bigger than the one she lambed.’
I used to follow my father (and grandfather before that) around the lambing fields. Now my children follow my father around the farm in all seasons and learn from him. He comes to the farm each day, he teaches my children his values and his knowledge just like my grandfather taught me. My son worships him. The thing comes full circle.
But this lambing time he is not here.
7. He is in Newcastle hospital where they are trying to kill the cancer with chemotherapy. I don’t know whether they will beat it or not, but when you love someone, you have to believe they might.
Once, I wanted to kill him, and now I want him to live more than anything. He has lived his life by his values, a modest, hard-working life that I admire. But now he is in hospital and I can do nothing to help him. So I send him commentary and pictures of his best ewes and their new lambs on my phone so he can live this time vicariously through me. I am forbidden to go and visit, because he wants the farm looked after right more than he wants visitors.
8. I lamb the sheep alone this spring, but it is not the same. Dad couldn’t care less about money and would drive twenty miles without a thought to help a friend with work if he thought he was needed. My grandfather might have bought this farm, but it is my father who has tended it. He is stoic, but we know it is killing him to be away from his sheep and from the work. Recently he became a pensioner and someone rang to ask if he would stop working. He just laughed at the idea, as if it wasn’t even a serious question.
In the weeks that follow, my father recovers. He is in remission and almost back to full strength. We dare to hope it is gone.
9. I am on edge. I can’t settle. It is a week before the lambs are due to arrive, but I am ready. Fretting. I go round the ewes more often than necessary because I’m nervous. Helen tells me I am a fool; that in a month’s time I will be worn out and the work will start soon enough, that I should save my energy for when the lambs actually arrive. I know she is right, but I still go anyway. So much can go wrong in the week or two before lambing. Ewes can suffer from conditions brought on by the stress of carrying lambs, like twin lamb disease. They have come through winter and now are tired but heavily pregnant. There are countless things to worry about, and I fret about all of them.
10. We start lambing at the beginning of April. In theory, this is the point at which winter becomes spring here, but sometimes winter isn’t aware of our plans and the weather is still gruesome until well into lambing. Snow. Rain. Hail. Wind. Mud. We brought the ewes quietly into the lambing fields in the valley bottom a few days ago. These fields should now have some grass, after being cleared of last year’s lambs, which were fattened and sold to butchers in February and March. But there isn’t much grass, so we are praying for some warmth, begging for spring.
11. I feed the ewes in long lines on the hillsides. They line up behind me, with their heads down, like a massive scarf. I walk up either side of them and check their rear ends for signs. One ewe has blood on her woolly tail. But she isn’t lambing. She has miscarried. My heart sinks. There is always a dread lurking behind our excitement each lambing time, a fear that something might go wrong. This is nature, not some cute movie. I call the vet. She tells me that there are a lot of failed pregnancies going around. It is probably a virus. Bad news: there isn’t much I can do. The virus will have gone through them weeks ago, early in the pregnancy without any outward signs. They may all have it, or just a few. Those that have it will miscarry a week before the due date. I inject all the ewes with antibiotics to help them get over the disease. The vet isn’t sure whether this will work or not, and doing anything to the heavily pregnant ewes can induce stress and create new problems, but it is the only weapon I have and we always try to do our best for the flock. Half a dozen ewes abort in the next week. Some of the lambs breathe briefly, then die. I wake up feeling sick each morning.
12. It is not the loss of these half dozen lambs that upsets me, as sickening as that is, but the pressing fear that this could escalate. But thankfully it doesn’t. With each passing day, the fear that the whole flock will have dead lambs passes, and it stops as soon as it started. We come through this thing. It starts to look like a minor setback. As the miscarriages are found, I skin the aborted lambs as people here have always done. I cut around the legs and the neck and then peel the skin off, leaving the head and legs black and the rest of the body naked. It isn’t a very nice job, but it takes some skill to do it neatly. Ideally the dead lamb’s skin forms a kind of jacket that can be put on to a live lamb without a mother. You soon learn to get over your squeamishness on a farm. My children watch all of this, and I let them, because it is real.
13. Blood was everywhere when I was a child. Sheep lambing, bloody hands, dehorned cattle, zombie-like, with spurting blood as they careered off across the yard before being let out in the fields for spring. Cow Caesareans, men with armfuls of guts and blood, then shoving it all back in and stitching it up. One night we calved a cow and the vet said, ‘There is something wrong with this blood … Christ, this cow is a haemophiliac.’ It bled to death despite our best efforts to stop it, but we rescued the calf. My father’s hands were always torn, scraped, grazed, kinned and cracked with sores or dried blood. He never bothered about it and would call skin ‘bark’.
14. ‘You’re cut, Dad.’
‘Aw, it’s nowt, just knocked a bit of bark off.’
We accept blood as normal as long as it stops flowing, and the skin scabs over and heals. In traditional communities, blood is part of day-to-day life, something even children are familiar with. Asian families still often slaughter a goat in full view of the whole family in the hallway. Middle-class English sensibilities suggest this is somehow in bad taste. But I grew up with blood. I like blood.
I would rather my children saw the blood and knew it was real than had a childish relationship with farming and food – everything in plastic packaging and everyone pretending it had never lived.
15. Everything and everyone is at times covered in shit or snot. It is just part of farm life. You learn to accept that you will get spattered in shit at times, or slaver, or afterbirth, or snot. That you will smell of your animals. You can always tell how alien someone is to our world by how terrified of the muck they look.
A friend over the hill from our farm lambs a fortnight sooner than us and has some lambs without mothers, so I go (six times) for a lamb from her. Orphan lambs are shared like this so that everyone makes best use of the ewes with milk and the lambs. No one really wants to rear a ‘pet’ lamb on a bottle. They don’t do as well in the end. The orphan lambs are a different breed to the casualties, but it doesn’t matter. The mothers judge them mostly on their smell at this age.
16. I take the lamb in my hands when I get it home. The skin of the dead lamb forms a tight-fitting waistcoat, with the orphan lamb’s legs poking through the leg holes and its head through the neck. With legs and head in, the skin cannot come off. I put the lamb in a small pen with the grieving ewe and hold my breath in the hope that she will mother it. The ewe sees the lamb with the false skin on and glares at it suspiciously. Then she sniffs at it, and is confused. It smells just like the lamb she had a short while ago. She turns around in the pen a few times as it approaches her hungrily. She is not convinced this is hers. She gives it a head-butt or two to knock it down, while she tries to reconcile the competing urge to mother something that smells right with the suspicion that I have had something to do with this situation. And perhaps she knows her lamb is dead.
17. But these old shepherding tricks work, because all six of the ewes take to their orphan lambs. Some take them within five minutes, a couple take half a day, but all are back in the fields with a lamb after two days.
They have reared them well. I see them each morning when I shepherd the different flocks, and I smile. I still owe my neighbour for those orphan lambs months later, but we run a kind of unwritten ledger and we will return the favour another year. She passes my lambing fields several times a day, on the way to her own lambing ewes. If she sees anything that needs my attention, she will bawl down the fields to my house for me to go and sort it. And I do the same for her.
18. One of my best ewes is lambing. She has been lambing for nearly two hours, and I was unable to come back until now to help her. She is in a good place and the rain has stopped. I daren’t leave her any longer, so with a flick of the hand Floss runs by her and I have her by the neck with my crook. I reach under her and pull her far leg so she gently rolls on to her side. Under her woolly tail I feel for lamb legs. A moment after catching the ewe, I have a bloody arm deep inside her. You never know what you will find. Sometimes it is a wriggling tangled mass of limbs inside. If there is just one leg, it means the other has been left behind and I will need to go in and fetch it forwards for a proper delivery. If there are no legs but a head, then the lamb can get stuck and die on exit, and I will need to push it back in and get the legs coming in front of the head, as they should be, like a diver. I have to guess whose limbs are whose by sticking my arm in and by touch alone. The ewe lies flat, lifting her head from time to time in contraction (my spare hand holding her down firmly and my leg holding hers from the ground like a wrestler). When I find the right combination of legs I get the first joint between my knuckles and start to pull. As my fist comes back into view I have two lamb legs between my fingers, followed, after some steady pressure, by the head. The nose, wrinkling with the pressure, shows – then breaches. Then the head peels out. I keep the pressure on as the body slithers out, then the pressure eases as the body follows in a gush of yellow afterbirth in a crumpled heap on the grass.
19. The lambs are born with a cough, splutter and a shake of the head. They don’t breathe for a couple of seconds, so I tickle their nostrils with a piece of straw or grass. Then they shake and cough into life. The ewe’s tongue instinctively licks the lambs dry. I turn them and can see that they are two ‘gimmers’ (ewe lambs). These are the future of the flock; they will live in the fells for most of their lives. I find myself talking to the ewe, telling her she has done well. She nuzzles them to their feet. Then, in minutes, on matchstick legs, they are stumbling towards the teats. Instinct tells them that they have one chance to live and it relies on getting hold and sucking.
20. The line between life and death is often paper-thin. It is essential that they get enough of the yellow creamy colostrum milk that carries the antibodies and nutrition they need in the first few hours. It is magic golden stuff, and half our work is ensuring that new lambs get to their feet and get their share. You rarely have to help a healthy Herdwick lamb on the second or third day if its mother is milking it properly, but a share of the Swaledales need a little assistance. When you skin a Herdwick lamb, you can see why they are so perfectly suited to this landscape and its tough weather. The fleece at birth is about half an inch thick, a leathery skin on the inside and a wiry weather-turning carpet on the outside. They are, literally, born dressed for a snowstorm or a rainy day.
21. A few years ago, we tried a tup from a modern lowland breed, a French type called a Charollais. When the ewes had lambed, it was snowing. The Herdwick lambs, at two days old, were racing against each other and skipping in the whiteout as if it was a sunny day. The French lambs of the same age were cowering and shivering behind the walls, and we had to lead them into the barn to keep them alive. I swore then that I was sticking with the proven native breeds on our farm.
22. I love lambing time. In the long, sodden and wind-lashed winter weeks, I sometimes daydream of escaping the muddy tedium, but I wouldn’t want to miss it like my father is now. Every minute of your time counts. I’ve always loved it, ever since I used to follow my granddad around helping him feed the ewes in pens of little hay bales, and the pet lambs, sometimes being given one to lamb like my daughters do now. He would trail endlessly round from first light to darkness and afterwards, until I could not keep up and was sent to bed. He would check and double-check for emergencies, ewes or lambs in trouble.
23. I always marvel at how gentle some of the men were at this time of year, how you saw them kneeling in the mud or the straw of the pens, delicately threading a stomach tube down an ailing lamb’s throat, over the little pink tongue. You could see how much they cared. My dad would be gutted if he lost a lamb; it would hang over him like a grey cloud, until he had put things right by saving others.
24. The arrival of lambs is on some kind of bell curve. It starts as a trickle of one or two each day, peaks a fortnight or three weeks later in a hectic blur of dozens, and eases off into a long tail of individuals over the following three weeks, until we eventually say enough is enough and leave the last few to lamb in the spring grass and sunshine without such regular supervision.
25. Lambing time has a kind of crazy daily rhythm. We are on a merry-go-round of responsibility, dictated by the need to get round the lambing sheep at regular intervals – every one to two hours. I know when I wake up that I will be at it for many hours. But I cannot predict what is going to happen on any given morning. I sometimes rush around the farm and do not see a single new lamb. Other times I find several new well-mothered and healthy lambs that don’t need my help. The sun might be shining, and all can be well with the world. Or, frankly, it can be a complete disaster, with the shit right and properly hitting the fan.