J.B. In Charge Chapter 4

Life On Our Farm

I shall now tell you about life on our farm. I would only be slightly stretching the truth to say it was all about cows.

Every morning and evening of the year on our farm, Dad, we boys and Bruce rounded up the cows and milked them in the cowbails. Every milking by the time we had completed all our jobs took around three hours. So that was six hours milking each day. There could never be any sort of an excuse not to milk, because the cows would come to us and moo more accusingly than any human could accuse us.

On Sundays when we only had to milk and go to Church, we considered our rest days! On Mondays to Fridays on most weeks, I still had school to go to. On Sundays, after morning milking, Church and lunch, Dad and we boys had our rest time, three hours each week! Then I stretched out myself in my hammock under the apple trees. Every muscle and bone in me relaxed deliciously. Then it was I who lived between the dog eared pages of Brian's second hand books.

I was not a reader of books. The stories in his books were told to me by Brian in his hammock beside me. There I found a pirate's treasure, floated down the Mississippi on a raft, was marooned on a desert island, was wrongfully imprisoned in a dungeon, bit my cruel guardian's finger, was taught to steal handkerchiefs from rich gentlemen.

Then at four o'clock it was back into the cowbails. After that was finished, it was tea time, followed by a snatched hour, catnapping by the kitchen stove, or doing my homework at the kitchen table. Then it was bed for slumber before the five o'clock milking.

Only Mum and Aunty Fan worked during our Sunday rest but they always worked except when they were sleeping. Aunty Fan had her little room at the back of the house. My earliest memories were dozing on Aunty Fan's bed while she spun all day with her spinning wheel.

Nothing was ever wasted in the Brown household. Before my startled eyes, an abandoned army jacket might metamorphose into a rug of many colours. All food scraps were sent either to Mum's kitchen pantry or to our animals. Wool from our sheep, every sort of material, wrapping paper, a piece of cut string, all were sent down to Aunty Fan. They reappeared in a thousand new forms to keep us Browns warm and prosperous looking. We were 100% recyclers even though we had never heard of the word.

In my earliest memories, Aunty Fan would never talk to a grownup, but she would, when alone with us boys, sometimes talk about her and Mum's life when they were children. Their dad, my grandfather, had died from coughing up stone dust as he had been a stone mason. Aunty Fan and Mum had to go to work in a cotton mill in Manchester in England.

One day she was teaching us how to lip read like the mill workers who worked where it was too noisy to hear voices. Mum walked into the room and told her sharply not to burden her boys with such useless knowledge. From that moment Aunty Fan stopped talking at all, although sometimes I caught her shedding silent tears in her room. She scarcely ever left the house and never strayed outside the farm boundary.

We were all used to Aunty Fan and were no more bothered than by the silence and lack of mobility of our kitchen horse hair sofa. We talked through her and never thought she might be listening. My estimation of my Aunt had been zero when I was a boy, now it has grown into a mountain. She did not say anything because there was nothing she wanted to say. She did not do anything except to spin and help Mum around the house, because there was nothing else she wanted to do.

When I was a little one and lay on her bed in her room, I often dozed. In the radiating sunlight, Aunty Fan's head shrank, her legs and arms disappeared, her fingers became hideously hairy legs. Still she spun. She had turned into a spider.

You might now think the lives of us Browns was all drudgery. The Brown grownups seemed to be drudges all year round but we Brown boys had our escape on Saturday night at the pictures in town. Brian went every Saturday night and when I was especially considerate to his laziness, he took me on the bar of his bike.

The town picture theatre was always packed with people. We kids always cheered and our hearts raced with the feathered whooping Apaches and their swift horses. But our idols were the cowboys. Their lean hawkish faces and polite manners, their silver buckled belts and shining boots, made our spirits soar.

How we kids groaned at the sloppy bits between the grownup stars. We kids never saw grownups slop over each other outside the movies, not even when they were in their best clothes for Church.