Chewing the Cud by Dick King-Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

were as varied in their origins as the cows and, proportionately, as unproductive, there was hardly one that hadn't been an absolute bargain. And there are few sights so attractive as that of newborn kids skipping around.
    We didn't have horses, if you don't count Bob and we didn't count him for long. As a colt (a very long time ago), he had put one eye out in a thorn hedge, and this affected his idea of a straight line, whereas the Ferguson tractor was young and didn't move diagonally or grind its teeth. Bob was given one last good gallop among the blackberry bushes in the woods and then sent to Doyle the slaughterman, who, to our horror, turned up later that day. He carried two large, still-warm lumps of meat.
    “Oi thought ye moight loike a bit for the dogs.”
    I can't think why we didn't have any donkeys. Delightful creatures, I feel sure we should have made some excuse for keeping them.
    But we kept a great variety of poultry. Chickens — growers, layers, table birds, of a host of different varieties — game birds both full size and bantam: pheasants, guinea fowl, geese, ducks; again, why no turkeys?
    Last of all there were the pigs, supposedly second only to the cows as a commercial enterprise, but for mymoney — which is what they gobbled up — far superior in native intelligence, good common sense, and beauty of form and feature.
    And all these mooing, grunting, bleating, squawking, quacking things were of surpassing interest to us, characters with names and personalities.
    There was always something fascinating going on. But did they pay their way? I hear you ask. Sorry?
    This motley conglomeration of creatures that you seem to have surrounded yourself with'were they commercially viable?
    Well, we got a lot of fun out of '
    Surely you kept proper accounts?
    Yes, of course. After a fashion.
    Well, did they show a profit?
    Oh dear.
    The play had only just begun, the curtain hardly risen, but, had we known it, the fateful figure of that bank manager already stood in the darkness of the wings, awaiting his entry at the end of the second act.

Chapter 6
C OWS
Sunday 21 November
26th after Trinity.
My day off, but Gladwyn to see his
father in hospital so I worked.
    T here's always something to do on a farm every hour of daylight, every day of the year. On a small place like Woodlands Farm, so much, with proper planning, could have been done single-handed. At most it was man-and-a-boy stuff. Yet there we were, Gladwyn and I, solemnly sharing the milking, the care of stock, the cultivations, the field work. Mind you, I couldn't have done without him when it came to the mysteries of the internal combustion engine, which to me have alwaysbeen Eleusinian. All I knew, and know, is how to satisfy the liquid needs of tractor or car.
    But generally the labor of the farm was shared. Gladwyn and I milked the cows on alternate days, the other seeing to the feeding of the remaining animals. We took alternate Saturday afternoons and Sundays off, and every year, scrupulously, one would have Christmas Day off, one Boxing Day. As for holidays we took, in turn, two weeks' holiday each in the summertime between haymaking and harvest.
    By 1953 Myrle and I had three children — the two girls (by that date aged eight and five) and Giles, who had appeared presumably much to Father's approval (“Right sex at last, eh?”). For our holidays the five of us went — as always — to West Wales, to Tenby in Pembrokeshire.
    Some time in the 1890s a great-great-uncle had been there and reported that it was a very pleasant place, so all members of the family then went there every year for the next sixty or seventy years.
    Indeed it was on the Royal Victoria Pier at Tenby in Pembrokeshire that my father first saw my mother.
    It was the summer of 1920, and she was recently eighteen years old. He, nearing twenty-six and with a DSO and an MC to show for his service in the Great War, was still on crutches after having being badly wounded.
    Somehow he