A Small Country Living Goes On, by Jeanine McMullen, with illustrations by Trudi Finch (1990)

 

For her radio programme A Small Country Living Jeanine visits the Baker family who keep Anglo-Nubian goats. Jeanine has often considered buying them but has been put off by stories of their possessive and neurotic temperament. She has more than enough to deal with at home already. 

However, when she enters the shed 'the goats were in a state of absolute calm as they sat dreamily cudding on their thick beds of straw'. 'It was a world away from the constant drama's of my own goat-shed, where I sometime feel more like the headmistress of a girls' school along the St Trinian's line, than a simple goat-keeper.
Perhaps, I thought, as we stood amongst the beautifully behaved Anglo-Nubians (...) goats, like any other animals, are simply reflecting the inward state of the people who look after them.  Given the steadying influence of the Bakers, my own British Toggenbergs might become models of rectitude; given my usually manic state of mind pervading their lives, the Baker Anglo-Nubians might turn into raging delinquints.'

I was glad Jeanine came to this insight because I was getting a bit tired of her constant state of panic. Always too late, too dark, too much work in too little time, too icy a road, not enough petrol, danger from the IRA, violent thunderstorms ... Nothing really goes wrong, on the contrary: she is welcomed everywhere and many people help her. But Jeanine makes the reader feel things will end badly regardless.

I found this book, the third of Jeanine McMullen's memoirs, at Barter Books in Alnwick.
Jeanine continues to tell us the story of her small country living in Wales, but mostly this is a record of het adventures while making her BBC radio programme of the same name.
Mrs P. (Jeanine's mother) is still there, as are her neighbours, faithfull vet Betie Ellis and of course her beloved animals.

We learn that one of the reasons for moving from Australia to the UK is her health: '... some freak of those ancient genes of ours has made it impossible to survive the Australian summer without being half-dead with asthma or hay fever ...'
Readers of other books covered in this genre may be interested in her visits to Ruth Janette Ruck in Wales and Derek and Jeannie Tangye in Cornwall.

Organizing the trips to make her programme is always a stressfull business: to save costs lots of visits have to be squeezed in as little time as possible. Sometimes she has a producer to help and accompany her. She also has helpers to 'house and mother sit' and then there are her faithfull neighbours, always ready to drive her to a far-flung destination. At home there is the farming life we got to know in her earlier books, with horse Doli and goat Dolores as the main characters.

Towards the end of the book Mrs.P. starts getting health problems, and is hospitalized for weeks. In the end she returns to Australia. 

I think this book will be especially interesting to lovers of her radio programme. Unfortunately, the Archive Hour of A Small Country living is no longer available

Wind in the Ash Tree by Jeanine McMullen, with illustrations by Michael Woods (1988)

  

This is Jeanine McMullen's second book on her Small Country Living.  It is about the people she meets, but mostly it is about animals. We know from her first book that Jeanine loves them and feels a need to surround herself with them. That book ended with her receiving a legacy from her father, her mother returning to Australia, and her proposal for a BBC programme called  A Small Country Living being accepted. 

In this book she backtracks a bit as once again she worries about paying the bills and hopes the BBC will take up her idea for a programme. She does not seem to be made for living alone and, after the death of her beloved whippet Merlin, and other animals falling sick, she is relieved to hear her mother, 'Mrs. P' is once again on her way to Wales.

Jeanine's small country living includes dogs, sheep, pigs, horses, ducks, chickens and goats. She is always determined not to buy any more only to succumb to temptation. First she finds a chihuahua called Winston for Mrs.P, then she is anxious to find a replacement for Merlin and a new puppy joins the pack: his great nephew called Merlyn. On one of the final pages we find Jeanine unable to resist a lurcher puppy: Lilly.

 

Most of the animals we got to know in the first book are still at the farm. A few halfbred Icelandic sheep are added when she meets a breeder for her radio show.

Doli, Jeanine's horse starts suffering from an assortment of ailments, which seem to be an indication of boredom, so she is sold to a friend who runs the Smallholder's Training Centre were there is plenty of work for her. A few years later, much to her delight, she is able to buy her back.

 

Halfway throught the book the BBC finally commissions her to make a programme.  Much to her relief it does well: 'For a success it was, in spite of being tucked away on a mid-afternoon slot and quite unpublicized. The morning after it was broadcast, there come a pile of letters which people must have written the moment we were off the air. (..) All of them were ecstatic.' Jeanine travels the length and breadth of the UK to find places, people and animals for her programme.

While this is certainly a book for people who like to read about animals, I enjoyed it because of the interesting people Jeanine meets. I had fun trying to find out more about them.

There is vet Bertie Ellis who had a long career and served on the RCVS Council.

Sue and Darrell Kingerlee ran a bookshop in Llandovery. Darrell wrote Llandovery Album: Pictures of a Welsh Market Town.

Muriel and Jack Sassoon who ran an antiques shop and a second hand bookshop in London.

Ian Wilson who wrote The Turin Shroud.

Gerald and Imogen Summers. Gerald wrote The Lure of the Falcon,  illustrated by 'the Artist ', Jeanine's erstwhile partner, whose name seems to be Duncan McLaren.

Madge Hooper, who wrote several books on herbs.

Antique dealer Barbara Leach.

Andrew and Carry Naylor , Sarah Pitt and Monica Sims, who all worked for the BBC

Diana Joly who bred icelandic sheep.

Artist Leesa Sandys-Lumsdaine.

Sedly Sweeny (who was really called Sedley Bell-Irving Sweeny) and who wrote The Challenge of Small Holding.

 Now I am on the lookout for book number three: A Small Country Living Goes On.

My Small Country Living (1984) by Jeanine McMullen

 Update (August 2025): if you are interested in Jeanine McMullen do read the comments from people who were inspired by her to move to Wales. There is also someone who now owns her car!

 

Jeanine McMullen and I are complete opposites. I like animals, which is why I don’t have any. I think they are best left to themselves. Above all I do not think animals are humans in disguise. Jeanine McMullen feels a strong need to surround herself with animals, even though by her own account she is an amateur and is often not equipped to look after them. Most of het animals are „ characters”, who „plot against her or put on acts” (most of the humans she meets are larger than life too).
Having said that I must admit I enjoyed these books: she is a good writer. I especially liked the glimpses she gives of her early life in Australia, with her mother, who worked as a nurse in the Outback. I wish she had given us more of those and of her life before becoming a broadcaster. Her obituary states she was a teacher and dancer, too. It made me curious about the rest of her life.

In her first book she tells the story of the impulse buy of a smallholding on a visit to Wales, and of her efforts to interest her bosses at the BBC in a radio programme on the subject. At first she shares the farm with „The Artist” who moves to live there full time, while Jeanine works in London, traveling to Wales in the weekends.
In 1975 she and The Artist separate. Jeanine moves to the cottage permanently, and later her mother, known as Mrs P joins her.  Although friends advise her to sell the cottage, Jeanine decides to stick it out, which means years of struggling to pay the bills. She is fortunate in having extremely nice neighbours, one of whom even moves in a few months to help her.
At the start of the story she owns several dogs, then she rapidly acquires homing pigeons, a rabbit, hedgehogs, chickens, ducks, geese, goats, pigs and a cart horse. They all come with special instructions, so to speak. Like Dolores the goat who wreaks havoc everywhere she goes: „ She was in truth the embodiment of every prejudice against the goat and she committed every single crime that legend lays at its door. But she did it with such zest, with such glory in her own wickedness and with so much joy in the sheer wonder of being alive that it seems impossible there had ever been a time when she hadn’t been effectively wrecking our peace and property”.
She meets vet Bertie Ellis: „ a battered red Mini, dragging its exhaust pipe noisily behind it, came to a halt at the gate. A face, adorned with round, granny glasses and a pair of luxuriant mutton-chop whiskers, appeared out of the window: I’m Ellis, it announced”. On his first visit Bertie tells her that her horse Doli, despite displaying all the symptoms is not in foal. „ She’s been having you on, the old sod." (…) I didn’t know who to hate most, Doli or Bertie.
The cottage is damp and droughty, and difficult to heat. Jeanine does not see her way to making any improvements, partly because of her finances and partly, as she quotes C.S.Lewis, because „nature laid on me from birth the utter incapacity to make anything”. She just adapts to her primitive surroundings.
In one of the final chapters her pig Magnolia, ill with peritonitis,  is put down by vet Bertie, who uses a very strong anaesthetic. The pig is buried on the farm.
Some months later she finds her whippet Merlin in a coma. He only just survives. It turns out he had been eating from the dead pig, which was not buried deep enough.
Even though her free lance work has virtually dried up, Jeanine keeps hoping to produce her programme on country life: „ the single most important thing I had learned, though, was that everyone who actually survives country life has a story to tell. I no longer wanted to do a programme about the happy peasant tilling his soil; I wanted to get on tape people like the men who drive the massive machines along tortuous lanes and down suicidal slopes to collect garbage from remote villages and farms, or the postmen who struggle through floods and snow and over icy roads to get the latest circulars safely delivered (…) As I worked and worried and walked in the wood, ideas for the programme multiplied. At the the same time, however, the memory of me as a professional broadcaster was fading fast, along with my credibility for the producers. So, as the programme took firmer shape in my mind, it became more and more obvious that I could no longer afford to stay in the place which would have given it birth… My earnings had dropped to a level which wouldn’t even service the mortgage…"
A totally unexpected legacy from her father in Australia puts her back on her feet financially. A year later she once again pitches her idea for a programme and this time she gets to make it. It went on to become a very popular programme on Radio 4. She also wrote two more books (which I will cover in later posts).

Jeanine does not give exact details as to the location of her cottage. Online, I found references to Llyn-y-Far-Fach.
Her obituary refers to her home in Llanddeusant.
She died  on 9th February 2010 at the age of 73.The funeral was at the Parish Church of St Simon and St Jude, Llanddeusant.