Farmer's Wife (eBook)

The cockerel crows. 5.30 a.m. I pull the blanket over my head, trying to hold on to the night, just a little longer. Some days there is a blurry moment just before I wake up, when I exist in a dreamlike state. I forget which bit of my life this is, forget that I am a mother and a wife and that I have a thousand things to do. I didn’t always have these roles, but I knew them well. I grew up in a busy farmhouse. My bedroom was in the attic. Some mornings I would lie staring through the skylight to the clouds, with a headful of teenage ideas about how I’d escape the farm. The noises of the kitchen would drift up the stairs. The kettle boiling. Dogs barking. Doors banging. Mum calling for help with the work or for me to get ready for school. I dreamed of being an artist and travelling, with days that opened out before me to create things, and with lots of time to think and read. I didn’t want the life of a farmer’s wife. The women and girls worked indoors and smelled of soap. Their chores never ended – washing, ironing, cooking and cleaning. Men and boys did the outside work; they smelled of muck. They lived by a dirty, wet and cold routine of milking, feeding and shepherding, and didn’t talk about much else. I hated the bind of ‘the farm’.

But, despite all my girlish ideas, I am now here, in my own farmhouse on a hillside in the Lake District, just six miles from where I grew up. I live with my husband, James, and we have four children – Molly, Bea, Isaac and Tom. There are also six sheepdogs, two ponies, twenty chickens, five hundred sheep and fifty cattle to care for. I am a farmer’s wife, and this is my story.

My dad often says, ‘You make your bed, you lie in it.’ I recoil every time I hear it, usually because he says it when I am struggling with something. I don’t find it kind or helpful. I know what he means – that we all live by our choices and they have their costs. It is kind of true, we can’t ‘have it all’. But that hard old saying doesn’t offer any possibility for change. It suggests that a bed, or a life, is made once and is then fixed like that forever. It suggests that you can’t ever grow and change but must simply suffer and endure. But I think we make our beds anew every day – life is really a constant remaking and reshaping of ourselves and our days. I am always looking for different ways to ‘make my bed’ and for ways to avoid becoming stuck.

A fly is buzzing at the window. I get up and open the latch to let it out. A cuckoo calls across the green valley. James has already gone out to check on a cow calving and the rest of the house is asleep, despite the racket outside.

I wrap my pale-blue dressing gown around me and carry three cups downstairs that the children have abandoned. There are telltale crumbs of stolen biscuits on the carpet.

I take my stainless-steel kettle to the sink, tip it out and refill it, light the gas on the stove and put it on to boil. I circle the kitchen, the room we live, work, cook and eat in. After shaking the cushions back into shape, I place them neatly on the grey velvet sofa. I pick up toy dinosaurs and discarded socks from the floor and tidy a pile of papers and yesterday’s post. The flowers from our garden have wilted so I gather them up and put them out, setting my grandma’s old vase in the sink to wash later. It would have been her birthday today. I wipe the table and straighten the wooden chairs around it. The flagstones are cold under my bare feet, so I find my slippers. Floss, our retired collie, is still in her bed with no desire to get up so early. She wags her tail at me gently as I pat her. I make some tea in my favourite mug and clutch it in two hands, the tea steaming my face. I go and sit snug on my nursing chair. I have kept it near the fireplace, beside the arched double doors that lead onto the patio in front of the house. I no longer need this chair, but it is my cosy place in our busy family home. Rocking back and forth, I am nostalgic for the days and nights that I nursed my babies, but relieved too that I no longer have a little one clamped to my breast or needing to be rocked to sleep through the restless stages. I am through those all-consuming baby days and the best memories are warmly tucked in my heart.

The sun’s rays pierce through the leaves in the trees and a red squirrel hops along the top of the garden wall, oblivious of being watched. I pick a book up from the footstool in the window and try to read, but my mind wanders across the words on the page.

I love this quiet time in the house. Soon it will be noisy and chaotic.

Upstairs, Tom calls out ‘Mum’ but then rolls over and has gone back to sleep by the time I reach his bedroom. I take a bundle of dirty clothes from the landing, sort them and put a load in the machine. I hang wet things from the previous wash on the rack and fold a basketful of dry clothes. Through the glass door of the utility room I can see our two saddleback pigs snoozing among the tussocky grass. They have been rooting around a patch of ground that I want to grow vegetables in next year. They flick their ears and lie on their sides, nestled into each other.

The familiar sound of a lamb bleating makes me finish sorting the clothes quickly. I have been feeding her in the sheep shed for a week or so, as her mother was poorly and didn’t have much milk. Her mother has now recovered and they are living back outside in the field next to the lane, but she doesn’t have enough milk yet so I am still helping. The lamb now thinks she has two mothers. I go to the kitchen and mix powdered lamb milk from a tub near the sink with warm water, and put it into a bottle with a rubber teat. She has squeezed through the garden gate and waits noisily by the kitchen door.

I sit outside on the wooden bench feeding her in my slippers and listen to the birds chirping around me. She takes no time at all to suck the bottle dry and nearly knocks it out of my hands before racing off to find her slightly cross mother who is waiting for her. The blush-pink roses are blooming against the blue Lakeland stone of our house. As I walk down the garden steps Floss follows me. The lavender brushes against me from the raised beds by the gate. I am soon down in the paddock in front of our house, stamping on the nettles and dockens with my slippers to make a path. I let the hens out of their coop, check for eggs in the nest boxes and load up my dressing-gown pockets with five deep-brown-coloured eggs. I dip the hens’ water bucket into the beck and hold it under the flow to fill it. Back at the coop, the hens run and gobble up water in their beaks. They tip their heads back to let it flow down their throats. Floss sniffs the ground; there has likely been a fox here through the night. The hens cluck around me and I throw a little of their feed on the ground as I have no scraps of kitchen waste with me right now. I am always feeding or watering someone or something.

The fresh morning breeze in my hair feels good. I tell myself that I mustn’t stay indoors all day. It is easy to bury myself in the housework, doing everything for everyone else. It is up to me to share the load. The children need to learn to do some of the jobs themselves. I have to make my family see the unseen jobs and value them.

Sometimes I only see the pile of dirty washing on the floor and lose sight of the ever-changing world outside. Visitors tend to think our life is idyllic because they turn up on a sunny day, when all is green and the valley looks stunning, and we are all smiling, but we are much like any other family: we work hard to pay our bills and our individual moods change like the weather.

An hour later, everyone else is up and the house is humming with electric toothbrushes and chatter. The quad bike roars into the driveway and Bea jumps off it and runs in to reluctantly swap her farm boots for school shoes. She has been up to the barn to feed Bess’s litter of puppies – they will be off to their new homes next weekend. I manage to brush the hay off the back of her jumper as she walks to the car. ‘Quick, you’ll be late for the bus,’ I say. I pass James half my slice of toast as he turns and follows her to the car. ‘I’ll cook you some bacon. It’ll be ready when you get back.’ I can hear the girls arguing about who left the wheelbarrow full of muck and didn’t tip it out. They have to try and switch from being at home, working on the farm, to being stuck in a classroom all day, and I know which they would prefer. Molly is about to start her exams and can’t wait to leave school. As far as I can tell, nothing is inspiring her to stay there.

I chase Tom around the kitchen to get him dressed. ‘I need to put these on you so you can go to nursery – you can’t go in your pyjamas!’ He giggles as I grab and tickle him. ‘I want to stay at home and play with my dinosaurs,’ he says. ‘It’s OK, you’ll be back at lunchtime, it’s only a morning today. Granny will pick you up and bring you home. I promise I won’t touch your game on the floor. It will be exactly the same when you come back.’ He twists his body into all sorts of awkward shapes to make it more difficult for me to dress him. Once his socks are on, he does a wiggly half-naked dance and is now determined to do the rest himself. He gets tangled with his...