Tag Archives: smallholding

Cockerel

I think we called him The Little Nipper. He was a huge white cock. At age seven or so, I was pretty intimidated to find him waiting at the corner of the drive each time I walked home from school.

He jumped high in the air towards my face, red crest angry and fleshy, spurred feet flailing near my eyes. I’d ineffectually wave the stick my parents had had me hide in readiness, and run to the house in tears.

I guess maybe that’s the male role, at least in chickens. Perhaps he was doing what cocks do – protecting, defending, maybe owning the more numerous females. But I didn’t like nor understand it as a young kid with leather satchel on my back.

He pushed it too far, however. I know they say the squeaky wheel gets the grease. In this case, the squawky cock got the chop. A slow cooked stew.

I don’t recall if the hens were soon being picked off by the local fox, or by mink. Perhaps so – he was a nasty bit of work that would doubtless otherwise have given them pause.

Tomboy

I’m not sure the word has much meaning any more, based as it is in gender stereotyping. But in any case, Alice comes to mind.

With my father, hacking through the sheep carcasses with cleaver and club hammer. The smell of butchery in the kitchen on my return from school. Great piles of segmented body parts processed into plastic freezer bags and ultimately stowed away in the disguised chest freezer in the shed.

Once, thieves broke in and cleared it out. Ready-meal Reivers.

Curing deer and sheep skins, pinned out onto boards like impaled bat wings. Scraping off the remaining flesh and fat with a razor, then rubbing in salt – handfuls of crystalline, abrasive ooze. The boards stacked against the wall like work-in-progress masterpieces in an artist’s studio.

Soay sheep, uniquely, do not flock. Try to round them up, and you will fail. Essentially, you need to apply Rugby tactics. It’s all very tiring and undignified – wrestling wayward escapees to the ground, grasping the great ripple-textured horns, and the tup tugging his head, twisting, in efforts to escape.

Mostly it was to a new pasture – only rarely their impending final hour.

Cow

For a short time, we owned a Jersey cow. The morning milking, unstable on a round, 3-legged stool in the cramped stall. Washing the rough udder to remove straw and mud. Pink. Gripping the teats, pushing upwards to get enough in hand, then clenching with thumb and forefinger right at the apex to prevent flow-back, following with other fingers to force the thin jet of milk pinging into the stainless steel pan, bucket, pail.

Settling into a rhythm, long squirts alternating – early on, pinging the pail like a cymbal, later chortling into the reservoir of milk already there.

I feel her coat rough against my cheek. Her breath steams in the air and smells of comforting. She shifts above me slightly, and the fresh straw smells dustily wheaty.

Later, the milk will taste warmly of cream and reality. Straight from the udder of the cow that walks in the paddock of the house that Jack, or rather, my parents, built. May yoghurts and cheeses, hand-crafted, follow, served alongside apples and rhubarb and plums and blackcurrants and gooseberries and home-reared mutton, and really all that arises out of the land.

When we went on a long holiday in the USA, the local farmer looked after our cow. His children made her such a pet that they were so reluctant to return her that my parents allowed her to be adopted.