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for at least a couple of weeks. He’s depressed, badly depressed. It’s not something Dad ever liked to talk about, she said, but he had been
depressed once before when he was much younger. And depression isn’t just sadness, she told me. It’s an illness that makes you feel very bad about yourself, that makes you feel
completely useless and lost, as if you’re living at the bottom of a deep dark pit of hopelessness that you can see no way out of. They’re giving Dad medication and treatment to make him
feel better, and he’ll be seeing a psychiatrist to help him come to terms with everything that’s happened, but it might be a long time before he’s completely better.
    I think Mum and I talked more about Dad on the way home today than we ever have before; but not like mother and daughter, more like best friends holding hands through a nightmare we long to wake
up from, but can’t. We know that all we’ve got now is each other.

 
Sunday, April 22nd
    Dad’s still in hospital. I really miss him being about the place. Mum goes in to see him every day after work, and I go with her at weekends. Today, for the first time,
he seems more like his old self. He was still a bit sleepy, but the crying has stopped. He even laughs a little. He’s been doing a few sketches each day, to stop himself from going mad with
boredom, he said. He didn’t want to show me at first, but I bullied him till he did. He’s done pages and pages of lovely pen portraits of the animals that died, Hector, Jessica, Molly
– every one of them, with their names underneath each one. ‘It’s so’s I don’t forget them,’ he told me. He didn’t seem at all sad when he said it, just
matter of fact. He’s so much better, but I’ve noticed that he drifts away from us sometimes into his own thoughts, into a world of his own. A shadow seems to fall over him, but then it
passes and he’s back with us again.
    He says the food in hospital is horrible. His friend in the bed next to his says they all call him ‘chimp’ on the ward, because he only eats bananas.
    Best of all, he’s making plans for the future, and when he talks about it he’s really excited. He says he can’t wait to get back home. He wants to get the farm ready for when
he buys in a new herd of Gloucester cows. We’re not allowed to have animals on the place for another five months. He’s already got the compensation money, but he’s going to start
slowly, he says. He reckons in a year or so the farm’ll be ‘just like it was, I promise’. And there was a real sparkle in his eye when he said it.
    Mrs Merton was right in her letter – there is going to be life after foot and mouth.

    (Dad's drawings, not mine)



 
Friday, April 27th
    Everyone’s saying that the worst of the foot and mouth is over now. There are still a few cases each week, most of them up north, but none around here. And for the first
time this morning when I went down the road to catch the school bus, I couldn’t smell the fires. And the birds were singing.
    I’m back at school now – have been for a few days. I felt a bit out of place at first. No one seemed to know what to say to me, except Jay. She’s been great. She’s the
only one I’ve told about Dad – that’s because I really know I can trust her. Most people at school don’t live on farms, so they only know what it’s been like from the
television. They know the animals are killed and burnt, but they don’t know how it affects people, the farmers, the families. It’s not their fault. How could they know? And then today,
Mrs Merton asked everyone in the class to think up questions to ask me about how it had been, about what had happened on the farm, about the animals. (She’d spoken to me first. I was a bit
nervous about it, but it seemed like a good idea so I agreed.) When I told them about Little Josh I could feel the sadness and the stillness in the room around me. It felt right to talk about it,
to tell them