Growing Goats and Girls by Rosanne Hodin (2020)

 

Well, this is a first: a book endorsed by Salman Rushdie! The publisher seems to be hedging his bets by adding a quote from the Sunday Express. These quotes plus the book's title don't do it any justice, they made me expect one of those meant-to-be-funny memoirs of smallholders swimming in mud while the goats eat their clothes, the roof leaks and the electricity goes off. But it is nothing of the kind. Rosanne Hodin can write. And she really ís funny.

Rosanne does not tell us a story from beginning to end but she presents us with a collection of short observations, anecdotes and thoughts, sometimes only half a page long. I assume this makes for easier writing. It is also very nice to read, I would say it is a great bedtime book. However, the drawback is that you don't really get an idea of developments, and that you are kept wondering: what happened next? 

These are the first lines of the book: 'I am hunched and grey, spat out by the hospital. They have battled with my bleeding and doped and stupefied me and the baby has gone.' Wow. Not exactly what you would expect from 'perfect escapist reading'. But after those first lines the tone of the book quickly changes. Escaping from her noisy neighbour Rosanne drives into Liskeard and sees a farm for sale in an estate agent's office. Three pages further on the farm has been bought, the move made.

 

Soon after moving into the farm, bringing their beehives,  Rosanne and husband Michael acquire goats, a cow, chickens, ducks, geese and guineafowl. 'Soon our Large Bottom Farm is ringing with the sound of contented creatures. We feel like Noah and his missus.' Daughter Morwenna is born and Rosanne and Michael find their feet as parents and farmers. A few years later Georgiana is born.

Rosanne goes raspberry picking with Morwenna in a baby carrier. 'I'm suddenly aware that the burble and chat from the baby has stopped and I have a sharp flash of worry that she has fallen asleep before she should. I put my fruit-stained hand on her head to turn it and look down. I find a beaming creature whose face is smeared with mushed berries, juice and the fragments of leaves. Her hands are red and sticky, her face is red and sticky, my T-shirt is red and sticky.'

Michael starts work as a teacher, while Rosanna supplements their income by taking in foreign students who come to learn English. She converts cottages on the property into holiday lets. Later she goes back to university before also becoming a teacher. Combining al these tasks is not easy. At one time she installs goat kids, who need to be bottle fed, into the back of her car, so she can feed them in between classes. This nearly gets her into trouble. 'The NSPCC have been called to investigate why babies needing bottle feeding have been abandoned in a van."

Another time they are going away for Christmas, 'and we can hardly expect anyone to come over to milk the goats', so they also come to stay with Rosanne's parents. The goats are installed in the garage.'They allow us to milk them and feed them and shut the door. But all of this is too strange for them and as we adults are sitting and eating dinner, the call of our baffled goats bleating can be heard up and along the Daglingworth valley.
A sort of Christmas carol.' 

 

 

I will give you some more quotes to give an idea of the book.

Rosanne is invited to a Tupperware party, but there is nothing she want to buy. But wait, 'that box might do for putting a leg of goat in to thaw from the freezer. Oh, no, says the Tupperware lady, you can't do that, it's a cake box. Yes, I argue pointlessly, but it will be fine for the meat and stop the cat gnawing at it and dragging it about the kitchen. Suddenly things seem to have gone very quiet ...'

'The girls have asked for riding lessons. Michael puts on a grim face about this. He has decided that we will never initiate anything horsey, but if they beg, harass, hassle and torment us about having a pony and the begging lasts for at least two months, then we will consider it. Two months have passed and it seems that they have forgotten about horses altogether. Michael is packing away his horse skills with a smug look and is buying sailing magazines. I am alarmed.'

'Buddleia attracts butterflies and me. I see them now fluttering around the two bushes, a standard, pale mauve buddleia that grows in every waste land site, and our garden specimen in deep purple. (...) I am trying not to frighten off the butterflies, but I have my nose buried into one of the marginal flowers, whose point is drooping and not yet blossoming and whose swollen body is a mass of tiny flowers with a coloured inset. The smell is ... summer, laziness, childhood.'

'Someone is coming in through the catflap at night and upsetting dishes of dried cat stars and leaving poo. I ask the cats about this, and we look together at the mess and they give worried looks with big eyes. The girls and I become detectives and look for further clues. (...) Georgie finds another poo and we bend down to inspect it. Too small for fox. Definitely not rat, because rat poo is oval like olive pits. We keep looking until Morwenna sees the culprit curled up between the washing machine and the wall, pressed close to some insulated water pipes.
We have a snoozing hedgehog.'

This is a book about running a smallholding but it is also very much about family life. I loved Rosanne's down to earth attitude to raising children, her  'free range children' as she calls them. 

After thirty years Rosanne and Michael sell the farm and go and work as volunteers in Africa.

'We need to find home for all the critters. They must go because we must go. We have shed creatures before, when there have been too many or someone has wanted to buy; we have culled almost everything if we needed meat or when old age overtook a lingering animal, and we have even dispatched cockerels as severe punishments for bad behaviour. But we feel tender about our assorted flocks and herds and today we are bracing ourselves to hustle twelve ducks into the van and deliver them to a good home at Lantallack.
This is absurdly simple, the trail of food is an easily followed pathway to the van, the future surely is bright for a well-behqved duck. But we have heavy hearts, our innocent ducks will not know the new dangers.
Letting go is harder than I thought.'

A lovely book, highly recommended.