One word? When seven would do…

We went over for breakfast this morning and ate with Bob who appeared in the house just after we did. We’d been wondering about the domestic arrangements of who sleeps where as Bob and Mary are no longer a couple – but more on that later. Bob is like one of those teachers at school – really easy to get onto his favourite subject so he talks for ages and you don’t have to do any lessons! As it happens all of what he is talking about is actually very interesting – this morning it was details about subsidy cheques, grants, how the payments to farmers have changed over the years, historical stuff about butter mountains and wine lakes and other such financial stuff to do with farming. He is incredibly knowledgable and very good at explaining things.

The original plan was for us to do some fencing today – Bob had said he’d teach us how and then we could continue over the week. We have done a little fencing at various hosts but as always we said we’d never done it before. This is the best tactic as it doesn’t assume any prior knowledge and therefore means we get shown properly rather than being left to our own devices, everyone seems to do things slightly differently so we’d rather be taught ‘their way’ at each host and it reduces the expectation on us too! But Bob talked for so long he ran out of time to show us before he had to go off out to do something.

He set me up with the lawnmover and the kids with wheelbarrows to empty the cuttings on to the muck heap and then took Ady off to show him the beginning tasks for the morning. The mower was definitely older than me and far more grumpy! It was a bugger to start and then I couldn’t actually get it to stop at the end. It may have been self propelled at one point but it certainly wasn’t any more so pushing it up the slope of the lawn was interesting and there were loads of bits of bone, tennis balls and other dog detrius strewn on the lawn which I either didn’t want to touch to pick up, or missed in the long grass. Despite all that I got it mown pretty quick, the kids got rid of all the clippings and we went up to see what Ady was doing.

Ady had been tasked with digging out a mound ready to lay a fence and move any stones that would be in the way. So he was armed with a spade (couldn’t find a shovel) and a grumpy disposition. The kids made us tea and coffee and we listened to Popmaster. The other tasks associated with the fence were gathering some posts and some barbed wire from a heap of wood, behind the wheelbase of a caravan, lying on a bed of nettles. The nettles were taller than me, the wheelbase was rotten and uneven and kept wobbling and creaking as I climbed on it, there were rusty nails and screws at every corner, and the barbed wire was right at the back in great tangles. I dug out the posts but as getting the barbed wire would have involved clambering up the jenga-esque pile of rotten wood with only nettles or barbed wire to fall on if you wobbled I decided that was a definite NO and forbade Ady from doing it either. As that effectively left me redundant I went off to chop some more wood for an hour and the kids went off to crush some cans.

Lunchtime was called and we went in to find the rather offputting fishy smell from the morning that I had assumed was catfood was infact lunch – fish pie. There was a note to say ‘fish pie in the oven, sprouts as per instructions’ on the table and a bag of frozen sprouts making a puddle next to it. Ady put some sprouts on for him – the rest of us declined and upon serving out the pie I decided not to even try it and Davies took one bite and refused to eat any more. Ady and Scarlett ate it although they both said it wasn’t very nice. Davies and I went and made sandwiches in the van and brought them back over with us.

As we were finishing lunch which Bob joined us and then Mary appeared and asked me to pick some more fruit, showing me a place behind the polytunnel with nettles taller than me in and cautioning me not to cut down more of them than I had to (clearly we’d cut down too many yesterday) and to ensure I picked the blackcurrants leaving them on their stems. So I put on very long gloves and stamped and pulled nettles around the bushes and got two large bucketfuls. I actually quite enjoy fruit picking although I would rather it was not in a forest of stinging nettles and I’d rather be doing it with company than all alone but I was not going to get the kids in the middle of that and Ady was off doing something else. I stuck it for just over an hour before deciding I’d picked enough.

I went to find the others – Ady had been in the tractor collecting fire buckets and checking out the cows and Davies had been along with them which he’d loved. Bob is great with the kids but I guess being a father of four you’d expect that really. Ady had been talking to Bob though as he’d asked Mary last night if we could have a shower and been told probably not as the girls sometimes walk around naked upstairs and they might not like it. The caravan we are parked next to has a shower in it but the pump is battery driven and despite there being about 5 batteries here not a single one is holding charge so it doesn’t work. Last night I boiled a kettle and we all had a flannel wash in the sink which was fine but my hair was now disgusting and desperate for a wash and Ady had been digging for several hours so really needed a proper clean (don’t forget the campsite we were on at the weekend had no showers either, so although nothing to do with our hosts here we have not had a shower since we left Lynda’s on Thursday morning). There is also a really strange atmosphere with both Bob and Mary asking us to do different things and us not really knowing which to listen to, we’re being left to our own devices with regard to food which is fine but needs clarifying as to what is happening really. Bob apologised and rang Gill to come and meet us.

So Gill is Bob’s new partner, who he has been with for a couple of years and they live together in a caravan on the land. Most of the time. They live in the house in winter as their caravan gets too cold and Gill is currently living somewhere else looking after her dying father, along with her sister who she doesn’t get on with. And told me all about in great detail, along with slagging Mary off, also in great detail. Mary and her new partner apparently live in another caravan and only the daughters live in the house. There are four dogs all of whom seem to live in various places, mostly wherever they can palm them off to – Mary asked Ady yesterday if we wanted one to come and sleep on our bed – erm NO! and they all hang around us of an evening. On the plus side I am no longer really scared of dogs – certainly cautious of unknown ones but not terrified any more having spent so much time around them, but I am far from in love with these ones. The split is by no means amicable and Mary will eventually be leaving the farm altogether at which point Gill and Bob will move into the house and clean everything up and it should all be returned to the type of place mentioned in the WWOOF directory and their website but for now it has much more in common with a war zone really.

Gill got us some sausages for dinner tonight and with prompting from Ady also provided some rolls. Not at all sure that this constitutes feeding us properly really and as there is no shop in walking distance we will likely be resorting to our food stash in Willow to help with dinners if this continues. Ah well, only two more nights…

So all now much clearer we helped Bob drive some cattle down the fields, through the farmyard and into the shed. Two calves needed ear tags, three cows needed replacement ear tags. We’d done a bit of ear tagging on sheep before but never cattle and they are a different matter altogether. Scarlett and I watched from the other side of the railings as Ady and Bob moved them about into the cattle crush to tag their ears. Interesting stuff and with plenty of interesting tidbits of information from Bob about pedigree naming of cattle, milk and suckler herds and so on.

That took us to gone 6pm so we got the fire lit to cook on and banked it right up to burn off and make ashes. Ady put the kettle on and realised we were out of milk so nipped down to ask Mary if we could have some milk for tea. He got a really frosty response and a ‘I suppose you can have a little, just for tea’ and came back with half a mugful. This was the last straw for me so I went storming down to deal with it. We had just worked a 9 hour day, dealing with nettles, cow shit, jealous ranting of some sort of love quadrangle participant, wood chopping, ditch digging and dog sitting, been refused a shower and now more or less refused milk. I asked if we were able to have a shower, fully expecting the same response Ady had got last night and ready to reel off my full list of grievances and got a rather scared ‘yes’ in return. So I asked where it was and was told and said ‘fine, I’ll get everyone else’ and marched off again. When we came back one of the terriers was attacking the gosling Scarlett has been cuddling even though Scarlett was holding it up and Mary was yelling at Scarlett ‘just smack it!’ I got hold of the dog, which is just really poorly discplined and gave it a bit of a shake and shouted which no doubt really showed Mary my temper. All very fraught and just far harder work than it needs to be really.

We had our shower and very lovely it was too, despite the house being in utter disarray and chaos and then came back up to cook our tea. We will stay for the week but it has been arranged for us to visit a neighbouring farm on Friday for the day anyway and we’d already decided to leave on Friday night as I don’t see any purpose to hanging on here on our days off which means we only have two days left to work. It is a great shame as I can see how much there could be here and how much we could learn. I was reading their visitors book today and it goes back about 10 years with loads of lovely comments from previous WWOOFers saying what a fab place it is. Bob is hugely knowledgable and happy to share what he knows and teach us things but there is just too much friction and atmosphere here with no one wanting to actually look after us as WWOOFers but both of them wanting to get us to do work. I really think that in this period before things get sorted out with their domestic situation they should not be taking WWOOFers in as it is not a fair environment to thrust strangers into and although I suspect they think they are coping well with it all they really are not. Domestic discord is one of the things I find personally most difficult to be around and we are certainly finding ourselves caught in teh middle of way too much of it this year.

On a positive note though we had a lovely evening the four of us 🙂 We ate our sausages and rolls, cooked over the fire, I found a stash of ketchup sachets in a McDonalds cup in the van which we’d forgotten we had and meant we could have ketchup after all as we thought we had run out 🙂 Just before sunset we all raced to the top of the hill to sit and watch it which was beautiful and fun. The others ran down too but I needed a wee and I don’t run well downhill anyway (running uphill, infact running at all is a pretty new idea), then we read bedtime stories by the campfire which was also very lovely before coming inside for hot chocolate. We’re laughing a lot at the moment – we have plenty of material here to laugh at 😉 and sitting round a fire chatting in the evenings is one of the very lovely things about this year. Being outside, getting to know each other so well away from the distractions of home and talking about what we’d like to do next, what our dreams are and how to make them come true is just so lovely. There are plenty of cautionary tales to be learnt from our hosts so far, we’ve seen more than our share of dodgy relationships which is very sad but I hope that in seeing all these examples of how not to do things we are getting the benefit of their experiences and strengthening our own relationships in order to ensure we don’t make these mistakes ourselves.