I heard a fog-horning from the Apple Tree Paddock. I knew that voice. From over the gate in the Long Paddock, I also heard a funny, hoarse bleating, like a geezer who been too long at the pub the night before. I knew that voice, too. My kids were home. I know what they sound like. They know what I sound like. Welcome home, Reginald and Becky.
Just as human voices are always identifiable, even after years of not having heard them, so do you recognise sheep voices. And sheep recognise human voices. Even after seven years of living among sheep this is remarkable to me. Miles the sheep farmer calls Becky “Blunderbuss”, after the gun also known as a Thunder Gun. In other words, she is loud. I hadn’t seen her for six months. She had been at the home farm, Miles’s farm, after having very late and completely unexpected twin lambs, so he could keep his expert eye on them. She saw me over the gate and Blunderbustered me.
Our pet sheep are as unknowable to me as I, presumably, am to them. Or maybe not. That they know me is indisputable. They like me to pat them, to scratch their rear ends, to stroke their faces. They’ll sometimes lie down with me in the paddock while we go to sleep together. I know, obviously, that they know me. Do they love me? How do you define love in a sheep? Why would you want to? Why would you need to? They are, when they feel like it, affectionate. Especially when I have a pocketful of biscuits or a bucket of sheep nuts, and after, if they feel like it, that bum scratch. A sheep enjoying a bum scratch is a comedy. They twist their heads around and stick their tongues out in the sheep equivalent of ecstasy. All animals are hedonists.
So they are just like us. Because aren’t all emotional transactions just transactions? Sometimes sheep just wander off doing sheep business. Or because they’re bored, maybe. Who hasn’t wandered off to get away from a bore? I once jumped out of a toilet window to get away from a bore. I galloped off. Sometimes, sheep get the huff for impossibly unfathomable reasons and gallop away from me, as though I’m about to murder them. The cats, rescued from the wild and now pampered creatures, do this as well. Perhaps I simply bore them, too. There is no use asking. They, like the sheep, are inscrutable.
There are apples, amply, in the apple tree orchard. There ought to be, but this feels like a sort of miracle. Last year, because of the drought, we had not a single apple. We have hundreds of pear trees. Last year, we had not a single pear.
We don’t know what old variety of apple our single apple tree is, but it is a proper apple. It is like a good dessert wine: sweet but not sugary. It is crisp, unlike supermarket apples which are too often pulpy and thick-skinned. Our apples don’t look pretty. There is the occasional worm. Who cares? You just spit it out and a sheep will eat it.
I have been unable to get into the pear orchard because Reginald has been in there doing what is called “teasing” the ewes for the proper rams. Reggie’s ram bits have been vasectomised. But he thinks he is a real ram and he seems to regard me as one of his ewes. He has been away for a year because he knocked me down and buggered my knee. When he sees me he does this disgusting thing that involves sticking his tongue out and making Benny Hill faces. He kind of loves me. I still love him. From over the fence.
I feed the sheep the surplus apples and make apple sauce and pie filling to freeze. Bob the fencer, who is the most meticulous of men, gave me a tip. “I can’t stand waste,” he said. He stews apples for pie filling, then puts the contents in muffin trays in the freezer. Then he tips the individual contents into snaplock bags, and freezes these. Each muffin tin, he said, measures half a cup of apple pie filling. He told me this over the fence he was fixing. His batons were as straight as soldiers. I bet his apple pies are perfect.
