PROLOGUE
Feminist
Growing up on a farm, I had seen a lot of sex, birth and death by the time I was nine. The mating animals were 'fighting', we children were told. Probably not the best preparation for a lifetime of balanced adult intimacy, but I have been happily married for 38 years at the time of writing, so I must have negotiated this particular maze OK at some point. The births were miraculous and messy, as is life. The deaths were unbelievably sad and final. Watching that spark leave the eye. I still prefer animals to human beings. Not you, of course. You are unique and wonderful. Do tell your friends about this book. But I am probably going to greet your dog before I notice you. For which, my apologies in advance. Your best friend, however, understands entirely. I loved spending my quiet time in childhood leaning against a ruminating cow, draped over a sleepy horse or nose to snout observing a piglet's complicated facial expression. Home is standing in a Leicestershire field, this heart-shaped county in the centre of England.
Mischief and mayhem came naturally. Still do. The local refuse collectors, aka ´bin men´, were in accordance that my rendition of Sandy Shaw's 1967 Eurovision-winning ´Puppet on a String´, complete with barefoot dance moves and an encore, was a triumph, if lacking any musicality. By way of rehabilitation, aged three, off I was sent to Mrs Dunbar's Academy for Young Ladies and Gentlemen. I went three times a week. Singing ´Puff the Magic Dragon´ in the car with my Dad or my Mum on the journey to and fro, I made up for in volume what I lacked in accuracy. Dad always had a nice car, most memorably a burgundy Daimler, and Mum drove a sporty banana yellow Escort MK 2.
The daily sticking point on arrival was that I liked the colour orange, and Mrs Dunbar had decided that the towels for girls in the bathroom should be lemon yellow. She was clearly influenced by the nursery rhyme, 'Orange and Lemons say the Bells of St Clements' which we sang most days. Saint Clements-style, our towels were arranged in alphabetical order, boy-girl, orange and yellow. The boy before me was called Ian, so he had an orange towel; and the boy after me, Justin, did too. I just could not understand this illogical system where I got a yellow towel. So. I'd swap the towels. Every day.
Mrs Dunbar was keenly aware that I was a forceful child. It may have been a coping strategy as I am from a large family, but it could just have been my personality. The other Academy children had an hour´s nap after lunch. This mystified me as being a complete waste of time. When Mrs Dunbar invited me to sleep after lunch, I replied that I'd rather keep her company. I suspected she would have preferred to nap herself, but instead we made cakes and I chatted to her in what I imagined was a companionable way. I could see that her facial expression was a little tired sometimes. She once kindly asked, would I like a little cookie dough from the bowl. I was offended as I had never heard of this abomination. 'No thanks, Mrs Dunbar I'd sooner wait until the cake is baked, like at home.'
The Dunbar Academy Christmas party was worse. We were each given a toy to take home about an hour before the party ended. Instinctively I could tell Justin would not like his-the shiny red sportscar, but I loved it. Instead of the car, Justin coveted a fashion book I was given, where the cardboard girl models could be dressed in paper mix and match items to make a full outfit. The clothes were pressed out of the book and fitted onto the dolls with little paper tabs at the back. Justin and I swapped toys and played happily until it was time to go home, when we were made to swap back again. The fate of the car remains a mystery, but my paper dolls lay unloved until they were used as kindling to light the coal fire at home.
Mrs Dunbar seemed relieved when I started school aged five, and baked me a cake to send me off. I still remember the little white picket fence of her house with great affection. It was rumoured she retired soon after and returned to the Highlands and Islands. Some folks said she went as far as the Isle of Skye. No forwarding address was ever forthcoming.
Infant school was a pointless blur of sticking, colouring and singing. Frankly, the other children seemed too easily distracted by playing house, making fuzzy felt pictures and other nonsense. I had that dreadful realisation at the end of Week One that I would have to go back. The horror! As someone who was down the farm by 6.30am each morning, I would reluctantly have my day interrupted to go to breakfast and then school about 8am, and then waited impatiently every day for three in the afternoon so I could return to the animals. Summer holidays were bliss! September still fills me with dread.
Potato picking in the freezing October rain of 1970s Britain instilled in me my first feminist sensibility. The middle child of five, 'Being Useful' on the farm was important. I prized icy tubers from mud so heavy with clay that it sometimes retained my wellie boot, and hurled them into the wire basket before dragging it to the sack where one of the men would lift and return it to me. And on, and on, and on. A wet sock, a dribbling nose, hands with hot-aches, toes with chilblains, and a soaked anorak were the main rewards, along with the potatoes. I knew, even then, that people who were nostalgic about the nobility of unskilled manual labour probably didn't have to do much of it. Now, I am not pretending for a moment that, aged nine, I did a 37-hour working week. But I did do every day of the October half term for several hours, helped by sweets from neighbours, and the camaraderie of a joint task.
Until I went to university in 1982, October half term holidays consisted of brown mud, grey mist, and potatoes. At least on Thursdays there was Top of the Pops. Fridays there was the cheery children's programme on TV at five minutes to five called Crackerjack! As soon as I was in charge of my own destiny, I endeavoured to spend October half terms somewhere sunny, where the only potatoes I encountered had already metamorphosed into golden chips.
The feminist education came courtesy of assumptions about men's and women's work that saw my elder brother Michael, by then almost 18, not actually collecting the spuds but driving the tractor. Although he was my childhood hero, Michael found many creative ways to torture us. Glorying in being in a warm cab, with the radio on, a place for both the farm dog and hot coffee, Michael would gurn as he passed us with the 'tater device on the back of the David Brown. His tractor-work theoretically raised the King Edwards to the surface for our collection, but in icy ground this was only partially successful. Once bagged, the sacks of potatoes would be collected on the back of a trailer pulled by a Massey Ferguson. So, there was a lot of driving to do, and also a lot of opportunity for him to warm up in the sheds out of sight of the frozen souls in the field.
Michael was in absentia too often for my liking. At the end of the week, we children were each given 50p. Pretty good wages and probably worth the equivalent of £15 pounds now. But Michael got £5. It was plain economics so far as I was concerned, ignoring the age difference.
I resolved then and there to be the one who drove the tractor.
I soon got my wish and was steering the Land Rover around fields. This had begun about age 10 when Uncle Ted, who lived on the farm, would put the vehicle in a crawler gear, and get out, walking just behind the door so I couldn't see him in the mirrors. About 100 metres from a hedge, I'd shout- 'Ted, Ted we're going to crash!' and he would open the door, laughing, hop in and turn the wheel. Eventually, I could steer around corners, and Ted could stand on the tailgate at the back to throw feed to the animals who followed the truck. Not strictly legal, but very empowering. More perilously, Uncle Ron would tow us on sleds behind tractors, weaving around to try and throw us off into the snow. But we became very self-reliant. There were all kinds of kit to drive on the farm, with tractors legal on the fields, but not the roads, from age 13.
My friend June and I used to drive a Mini around fields on Sunday afternoons, using goats as slalom posts until one occasion when she failed to break in time and nudged a dozing animal over. The billy goat was more offended than hurt. He went on to live a very long life. I can assure you that no goats have been harmed in the writing of this book. I still love to drive, and would love a pale lavender Porsche Targa with colour coded ceramic brakes if this memoir takes off, so have tried really, really hard to make it good. As I said, it would make a great gift for your many, many friends!
Youth, and being young, were very politicised during the whole of the 1970s. Youth unemployment ran rife after the 1973 oil crisis, with yacht-owner and Prime Minister Ted Heath unsympathetic to families. I distinctly remember my Mum making complex dinners in the evenings followed by family board games during the power cuts in 1972 when the lights were off for nine hours at a time. The scale of the miners' strike which occasioned the electricity rationing, was the first such widespread industrial action for 50 years. In 1974 during the three-day working week Mum was cooking by candlelight on a Gaz-powered camping stove for seven people, and after with no television, we read books by candlelight. At least on a farm...
