Read Chewing the Cud for Free Online Page B

Mobbs were also within. All the curtains would be drawn. Only then would Old Mobbs bring the cow down from the cowshed on a halter while with the bull pole Gladwyn fetched out the bull from the stables and stood by during the short ceremony.
    Old Mobbs's eyes, Gladwyn assured me tearfully, flicked anxiously from window to window the while. Then the two beasts would be put away, Old Mobbs would go to the back door and order the curtains to be opened, and the family would continue their polite way of life, unsulliedby the facts of it. When they left Woodlands Farm, the Mobbses went market gardening. Vegetables, after all, are so much more circumspect.

Chapter 5
W OODLANDS F ARM
Sunday 29 February
3rd in Lent.

Buttercup calved, bull calf. Myrle had baby girl 10:50 A.M. (7 lbs.). Both well.
    I n fact, we did not move into the farmhouse until early in 1948, Myrle and I and the baby Juliet and our three dogs, Anna the dachshund, her son Jonah (he was to become a champion), and my terrier, Susie, whom I had bought as a puppy from Jack the horseman at Tytherington Farm (the price was two packets of Woodbines). Our move was only just in time, for Myrle was heavily pregnant, and the first of my thick stack of farm diaries carried the above announcement for Leap Year's Day in 1948.
    The previous afternoon we had been to the cinema in Bristol. The fact that Myrle was thirty-nine weeks pregnant was not going to interfere with one of our routine pleasures.
Mine Own Executioner
, the film was called, and about halfway through the pains began.
    “What d'you think happened just now?” Myrle said after we had fought our apologetic way along the row to the gangway.
    “What?”
    “A man pinched my bottom.”
    “It's very dark in here.”
    By chance we had left the car in what looked like a public car park but must, in fact, have belonged to some firm or business premises. As I approached it, supporting the mother-to-be, I could see that its tall iron spear-pointed gates were shut. There was a latch, but it was on the inside and I couldn't reach it through the bars. The high stone walls on either side were topped with bits of broken bottles. Inside, passport to home and warmth and safety and doctors and midwives, stood the car. I began to climb the gates. By the time we reached Woodlands Farm, the pains had stopped.
    By five o'clock on Sunday morning, it was plain that this baby was in no mood to wait for March the first, when the monthly nurse was booked to arrive, and so I was on myway to fetch the local midwife. On arrival she was greeted by the three dogs, Anna, Jonah, and Susie. She drew up her skirts in distaste. “We shall want them shut away,” said the midwife, and on entering the bedroom, “We shall need newspapers, plenty of newspapers. And boiling water.”
    Then, as I still don't, I never saw any use for the boiling water, but the armfuls of newspapers that I carried upstairs were laid everywhere — on the bed, under the bed, all over the floor, even upon chairs and tables. By the time the doctor arrived, the place was a sea of newsprint. Myrle was being extremely stoical, only seeming every now and then to give voice to a curious whining sound. Ventriloquially, it came not from the bed but from beneath it.
    Suddenly the midwife dropped heavily to her knees and, splaying herself out like a giraffe at a water hole (for the bed was very low), peered beneath it.
    “There's a dog here!” she cried.
    All dachshunds are stubborn and Anna was especially so. Our bed — we still sleep in it — is a large one. The baby that was about to arrive would be of the third generation, following myself and my mother, to have been both conceived and born upon it. The space beneath it was too cramped for anyone to get hold of Anna, and she was deaf to threats or blandishments. So she was present at the birth.
    Later in the day, Father arrived to view the new (red-haired) baby girl. Never the most tactful of men, he excelled himself on this