Chewing the Cud Read Online Free PDF Page B

he called her, and he always carried a mackintosh on these forays to lay her upon and save her from the damp. And there was me, only remarkable for the large cage that I kept in the bedroom, containing some hamsters. Unfortunately, these in due course escaped, and Lackham House (which is nowadays a very reputable agricultural college) suffered a hamster infestation, as the creatures colonized it and bred at speed. The German prisoners of war who were doing thecooking pursued them through the kitchens, brandishing soup ladles.
    Our course turned out to be a great deal shorter than planned, because the winter of 1947 froze everything solid and we were all sent home for many weeks. But at the end everyone, dullards and laggards alike, was given a certificate, and we all set out to look for work in the agricultural industry, as cowmen or stockmen of some sort, perhaps as farm managers. Some, a very few — Pat for one — actually bought or rented a farm and began in business on their own account.
    As for me, the family business came to my rescue. In the early years of the last century Grandfather, Charles King-Smith, had moved from a paper mill in Devon to take over one in a village called Bitton, in Gloucestershire, midway between Bristol and Bath. All paper mills need plentiful supplies of water, and the Golden Valley Paper Mills stood beside and fed off a tributary of the River Avon called the Boyd Brook, which ran slowly down the Golden Valley. The mill (oddly sometimes singular, sometimes plural) was a fairly small one, specializing in the making of high-quality paper, from rags rather than from wood pulp, and it was very much a family firm.
    After the Great War, Grampy K-S was joined by my father and by his next brother down, my uncle Joe, whohad been a prisoner of the Germans. He was really named Philip, but apparently as a boy he had had a favorite cat called Joe, who somehow lent him its name. Possibly they exchanged and the cat became Philip. I don't know.
    Twenty or so years later, Grandfather, Father, and Uncle were joined at the mill by my brother, Tony, my cousin Beresford, and my uncle Terence. There would, I suppose, have been space for me, but by then I was set upon farming. (What chaos I would have caused in the business had I had anything to do with its accounts!)
    Golden Valley Paper Mills had done well during the war, and Father, with the agreement of Grampy K-S and Uncle Joe, decided that the firm would buy a small farm and there install me as manager, ostensibly to supply the mill canteen with milk and eggs. So off I went with my little diploma tucked underneath my arm to look for a place of my own.
    Hindsight makes Clever Dicks of us all, and it's easy for me now to see the long string of mistaken judgments that threaded through my farming life. Hastily and inadequately educated in the science and business of agriculture, after a spasmodic practical training on a huge downland chalk farm with no milking herd, I then, with no further experience, settled hastily upon a much too small dairy farm in poor order (heavy soil, no drainage, low fertility, goodpercentage of useless woodland). It was called Woodlands Farm (logical really, because seven or eight of its fifty acres were, indeed, covered in trees) on the edge of a village with the unromantic name of Coalpit Heath (again logical, for there had been opencast mining there).
    But at last we had a home of our own, our first proper home, and now at last we were to be farmers.
    I shall never forget the day of the dispersal sale at Woodlands Farm, when the previous farmer was moving out. The last lot on offer to the crowd of bidders was the bull. Six feet away, the Shorthorn bull stared fixedly at me with hot eyes. I don't remember thinking much about the length of his horns. But they did look sharp. He was blowing hard, and he shuffled his forefeet in the straw of the ring, like a boxer. Then he put his head down.
    Up to this point it had been an unremarkable