Good Husbandry: Growing a Family on a Community Farm, by Kristin Kimball (2019)

This is Kristin Kimball's second book. In her first, The Dirty Life, she describes meeting her partner, Mark, and moving to the small village of Essex NY where they start a new farm. This book is about life on Essex farm. Kristin and Mark run it with a mixed bag of helpers.

I have often wondered, when reading books for this blog, how hard life must have been for some of the authors. While the writers may mention setbacks they rarely talk about how hard it really gets, how they suffer mentally or if they are on the verge of giving up.
Kristin Kimball does write about this and that makes a refreshing change. This is the story of the farm, the village, the workers, the cattle, the produce, the horses, the house but most of all of her and her  husband and children. After a 100 pages I was beginning to think: how does she cope, why does she stay with this impossible man, who is obsessed with farming, does not care that the house they live in is in a terrible state (the access to the staircase to the bedrooms is outside), does not care they have no privacy and loves dangerous sports (He tells her: 'Worry is your choice'). 

 

By this time they have two children and, while combining working on the farm with looking after a baby was doable, 'A toddler plus an infant equaled one full-time job, and instead of splitting it between us or even discussing it much, we seemed to assume that job was mine.'

When helpers don't show up she still has to pitch in and the cold and sleep deprivation get to her.
'This was not at all what I had pictured, way back at the beginning, when I imagined raising children at the farm. (...) The winter weeks wore on. Milking was a liberation from the house, but it added to my exhaustion. On nights when Miranda didn't sleep well, it felt nearly impossible to get out of bed at four-thirty and continue all day. The house, meanwhile, seemed to be closing in on us, filling with visiting young farmers interested in our horses and our full-diet model. Mark loved company, new opinions and the constant underlying hum of youth and action, which fueled our winter work. To me, the house felt increasingly crowded and dirty, and there was way too much noise for a family with an infant.'

She decides to get all of the helpers (who, while living elsewhere, had been spending their time and eating in the house) out, and relocate the office to an old trailer. 

'The house was so quiet without the farmers in it. I took all the extra leaves out of the dining table (...) We would set a place for Mark, but most days, he didn't have time to come in. As winter faded, the separation increased.'

'As the baby howled and the rain fell, I looked at the cards on the table and thought: Sometimes the hardest hand to play is the one you dealt yourself.'

She is saved by wise friends ('He is so extreme, I complained. Yeah, you would never be happy with a normal person') and the marriage is saved by a therapist. Slowly she and Mark find a way to be together again.

Meanwhile there are droughts and, in another year, endless rain, when it seems the crops will drown. There is also is the completely unexpected kindness of a stranger who donates money which they use to install drainage in their fields. In the final chapter walls are torn down, new windows fitted, the rooms re-designed so that at last they don't have to go outside to go to bed.

Of course this book also tells the fascinating story of a small farm in the 21st century (especially interesting for those interested in working with horses) but I felt that it is in the personal story that this book really stands out. Highly recommended!

Kristins website can be found here and her farm's website is here

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.

The Moon's Our Nearest Neighbour by Ghillie Basan (2001)

 

Ghillie and Jonathan Basan have always longed to live in a remote spot. For two years they have been looking for a small cottage with some land and outbuildings. By chance, a friend spots an ad in Exchange and Mart and they set off to view Corrunich Cottage, in the Eastern Highlands.  

'The track seemed to go on and on, over pot-holes and through snow-drifts along the side of a dense plantation of spruce.' 'To our eyes it looked enchanting. Set in open moorland, 1,500 feet above sea level, with hills rising steeply behind it, it was indeed remote.' At last they have found what they were looking for. The cottage has no central heating, no mains electricity and no phone. By selling their Edinburgh flat they can buy it outright and live off the proceeds for a year. In the long term they plan to organize photography workshops in the converted outbuildings.

The book consists of a series of very short 'chapters', observations, of a few pages, concerning: The Move, Settling in, and Making a Living.

Slowly they settle in to the cottage and get to know their neighbours. They are surrounded by sheep, lambs and ponies (including a wild stallion) who eat their washing. They get used to struggling with the generator and doing without electricity from time to time. Ghillie is an experienced cook who is used to working in primitive surroundings with basic equipment.

'Indeed, the life that first winter was fairly idyllic. Simple and solitary. Time to think and reflect.' Although: 'There was the continual fixing and filling of the generator, digging the car out of the snow, walking up and down the track for mail and supplies ...' Much later in the book, Ghillie observes: 'And it is staggering how time-consuming just living can be. There's the walking out to fetch supplies, the wood to chop and ailing machines to fix. There are gas tubes to drag up and down and vehicles to drag out of snow. There's no end to the chores (...) We can't just call in a plumber, electrician or mechanic, as no one would come.'

Their plan to organize photography workshops does not convince the man from the Enterprise Board ('The way I see it is to open the barn to bus parties and to offer tea and cakes'), so they will have to think of other ways to make a living. So Jonathan starts working in Edinburgh a few days a week and does freelance photography work.  They also decide to revive a cookbook typescript, Classic Turkish Cookery, which has already been rejected by many publishers. But it is not easy keeping in touch with publishers and employers when you live up a track, with no phone or fax! In the end the book is published and it is even nominated for an important award. 

I found this book a very entertaining and easy read, perfect bedtime reading in fact, apart from the descriptions of the delivery of Ghillie's babies. She had the hardest time, with both her daughter (Yasmin) and her son (Zeki), and I found myself gripping my e-reader *) and wanting to close my eyes. Poor woman. But fortunately in both cases she takes home a healthy baby. They find the arrival of a baby changes the attitude of some of the locals: 'A couple on their own can cause suspicion and rumour. A baby makes sense. It conveys a degree of permanency'.

After a while they start converting some of the barns into a studio, dark-room and office, they build a greenhouse and make a kitchen garden, all the time struggling to stay afloat.

'So why do we stay? People often ask us this. Wouldn't it be easier to live in the city and come to the cottage for weekends? Maybe. But now that we've had a taste of the wilderness  and isolation, it's difficult to step out of it. '

'For here, in the depth of the highlands, more than any other place we know, we can give our children the chance to run free in the wild open spaces. And, to us, that's the biggest dream of all.'

Ghillie seems to have found her calling in Scotland and still lives in the cottage, without Jonathan. She writes cookery books, gives workshops and rents out a converted barn. Her children have their own businesses in Scotland but also join forces with their mum. You can read all about it here

*) I prefer to buy paper copies of all the books I write about on this blog, but in this case I was not able to.

The Kerracher Man by Eric MacLeod (2007)

 

 

In 1976, after Eric MacLeod's father inherits his brother's croft in a bay near Kylesku (Sutherland), Eric and his wife Ruth impulsively decide to go and live there. The croft is accessible only by boat or by a 1,5 mile walk from Kylesku. At the time their two daughters Ruthie and Clare are aged 5 and 3. The decision means Eric, who has been working as a management accountant for an international company, quits his job.

'My mother was horrified and so was Ruth's. Indeed we soon discovered this was the reaction we would get from most people. Neither of our mothers could understand why we would give up such a comfortable and secure life for something akin to living in a cave.'

In the hot summer of 1976 they pack their belongings and move north. The house is in such a bad state that at first they move into a caravan (which had to be floated in on a raft!). Later kind neighbours offer them their house to stay in during the winter.  Bit by bit the house is restored, and a water supply and, much later, electricity are installed. Meanwhile Eric tries to earn some money by doing the school run and by gathering and selling seaweed and lobsters. Ruth works as a hairdresser.

 

 

Eric and Ruth get to know many people in the area and find that there are always neighbours willing to help them and offer hospitality. For a while they keep sheep, and they also develop their kitchen garden, using John Seymour's book as a guide. The children go to primary school locally (this involves a long walk to the road) and later board during the week in Drumbeg.

'Ruthie and Clare explored the surrounds of Kerracher with great freedom, and they learned about the natural world when they were very young. Their proximity to nature meant they discovered at first hand what other children could only learn from books.'

'We were conscious from the start that we were sharing our lives with the wild creatures which had always inhabited this landscape - and the sea.' They share their surroundings with otters, porpoises, seals, killer whales, birds, badgers, deer and foxes.

Making a living remains a problem: selling seaweed and lobsters and vegetables from their garden does not bring in enough. Later Eric makes money odd jobbing and doing accounts work. Then for a few years they are successful fish farmers.

After the children finish school and leave to go to university they decide to sell up and move house, but much to Eric 's pleasure in 2011 his niece buys Kerracher.

When I heard about this book I ordered it right away as it is one of the few I know of to feature a family. I must say I was slightly underwhelmed by it. It is a perfectly nice story, but somehow it all is a bit bland and it did not grab me like some of the other books I own.

Faint Heart Never Kissed a Pig, by Ann Drysdale (1982)

 

This is the story of Ann and her children Andrew, and twins Robert and Nancy who live at Hagg House in Yorkshire. They move in in November and that first winter Ann and Andrew explore their surroundings while the twins sleep.  The first animals to arrive are a goat, ducks, chickens and a guinea fowl. Later arrivals are a pig and a Shetland colt. She offers 'a safe haven for the overspill of other people's teeming back gardens, and this furnished many of our most interesting companions". Hoping to build up a flock of sheep she is also keen to look after any orphaned lambs which are offered her. This only works for a while as 'in previous years I had been able to have the pick of the local foundlings. But all at once, the womenfolk of the dale rediscovered this among many other lost arts of farmwifery, and it was more than a man's life was worth to let 'her' have a lamb, no matter how sick and hopeless, so I bought lambs from newspaper advertisements". In this way she does establish her flock and presumably (she's not clear on this) makes a living selling sheep, pigs, eggs etc.

There is hay making and sheep shearing, a long hot summer and the long cold winter of 1977/78. Life is hard. 'In a friend's house, I saw their daughter, struggling with a dropped stitch, throw her knitting at her mother without a word, confident that she would sort out the problem and hand it back so that she would be able to carry on. I think I wanted to drop the whole worrying muddle our life here had become onto someone's lap, just as she did, and have it all sorted out and handed back to me, fresh and ready to start again.'

She ends on a bitter sweet note. Although she has learned a lot about moorland life and wanted to become a farmer because it seemed a way of life that was geared to the community, to working together, to sharing basic tasks, it seems it is not about that anymore. 'I am witnessing the passing of the way of life I have fought so hard to attain.'

Yes, there is more to this book. It is just that it mostly about animals and animals and I found the endless chapters on goats and ducks hard to take, and am struggling to write about this book. This is all the more irritating as I think Ann writes very well, and I wish she would have paid more attention to people instead of animals. Her children, who are very young at the start of the book, only make an appearance now and then. Andrew, who still has to start school in chapter 1, is a teenager on page 46  There are some very interesting observations on being a single woman and mother in the country, but somehow these chapters deteriorate into meant-to-be-funny descriptions of trying to move a piano on your own, or dealing with plumbers.

Ann went on to write two more books about her smallholding, poetry, a memoir, and a guidebook to Newport.