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INTRODUCTION

THE JOURNEY TO KITE'S NEST

It is the winter of 1947 and the village where I will be born in six years' time is completely cut off from the outside world. The drifts are fifteen feet high, and my father and grandfather have worked all morning to dig a tunnel through the snow across the road from the farmhouse to the farmyard in order to milk the house cows and feed the sheep. My grandmother collects snow in every available receptacle to melt for water as all pipes are frozen.

According to Grandpa's journal, the first snow starts to fall on 18 January. It stays till the middle of April. It is many weeks before some of the village men manage to walk to the nearest town, but they return with just nine loaves. In the interim, my grandmother makes awful pastry with coarsely milled flour and lard; she doesn't attempt bread. My mother, just twenty years old, develops pneumonia and Doctor King skis several miles across the fields to treat her.

Once a day, whenever possible, the heavily pregnant ewes are encouraged to walk round the perimeter of the unfenced field known as Witchcraft, to give them the exercise they need to stay healthy. When lambing gets under way my grandfather brings two orphan lambs, Sally and David, to the house, to be reared by my mother and her younger sister. Only in such exceptional weather would my grandfather ever have permitted 'pets' of any kind in the house. A fire is lit in the sitting room every afternoon and allowed to die down slowly before bedtime. Sally investigates the embers and, as soon as she deems them sufficiently safe, lies down on top of them and stays there till daybreak. David curls up where the brown woollen blanket that hangs inside the blue-velvet door curtain gathers in a pool on the floor. Both of them become totally house-trained. They are fed on fresh cow's milk and they thrive.

As soon as they can venture outside, the two lambs invent a game they never tire of playing: bounding up the snow-covered road that separates the farmhouse and farmyard, climbing the stone granary steps, leaping off the top and jump, jump, jumping back to the garden gate to start again.

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My mother's father was thirty-nine when she was born and she was introduced to every aspect of farming from a very young age. When she was eighteen months old her sister arrived, followed six years later by her brother. A son to take over the farm was considered essential, and he was deemed the most important member of the family by everyone including his sisters.

My mother became a lonely child, sent for extended 'holidays' to her paternal grandparents from the age of two. It was a daunting time; her grandmother was very kind, but seriously overworked and under-appreciated, and her grandfather authoritarian and difficult. He insisted that my mother eat everything on her plate, even if it took her two or three mealtimes. She later believed that it was the generally poor and unappetising food she received, both there and at home, that set her on the path to lifelong ill-health. From the age of four, she found an escape of sorts in reading. It seems likely that her family, like the theatre director Joan Littlewood's, would have thought that 'to be found reading would be worse than lying in bed all day'.

In those days, everyone who lived on a farm became involved in the daily and seasonal round of work. When my mother was ten, her father told her to take a load of hay home. On asking how she would navigate the frighteningly narrow river bridge, she was assured the horse would 'know', and of course it did. My grandfather had been deeply affected at having been ordered to abandon his horse during the First World War, when the Warwickshire Yeomanry was disbanded and amalgamated with a foot regiment. According to my mother, as compensation he received just ten shillings (i.e. 50p, worth about £30 in today's money). His devotion to horses never waned: he never learned to drive a car or tractor. Grandpa died unexpectedly when I was a baby, but my brother Richard was three and he remembers sitting on Grandpa's knee and being given the reins to hold when driving through the village in a horse and cart.

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My father was a first-generation farmer, inspired by a schoolfriend on whose father's farm he learned to milk cows and love farming. His first job, at the age of fifteen, was delivering milk in seventeen-gallon churns by pony and trap in the town where he was born, doling out measures to the women who came out carrying jugs. They sometimes brought him freshly made cakes, and he loved every minute. After a tough apprenticeship on a Northumberland farm, he left his native county of Durham while still in his teens to milk the small herd of Dairy Shorthorns on the farm of my grandmother's cousin, Jack Hodges, in Warwickshire. My mother, who was the same age and lived nearby, was invited to supper to meet him. As she leaned her bicycle against the wall, she saw my father's kindness towards the cows and decided there and then that she would marry him. She wanted to spend her life with someone who cared about all animals. He insisted on cycling home with her later, lending her his scarf as the evening was chilly.

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