The Book of Sheep lives in the kitchen. I have been keeping the book, a red-covered notebook, a diary of sorts, since we arrived at Lush Places eight years ago. It is, really, a love letter. I don’t need to open it and I can hardly bear to open it. Inside are the names and ear-tag numbers of the sheep I have befriended and loved. Poppet and Sweet Pea and Sophie and Sylvie and Violet Shy Girl.
One year, Greg named his sheep Xanthe’s lambs Imogen and Jemima. He wanted them to be posh. Fat Freddy’s Plop – because he once pooped in the food tray – was not posh. He was a rogue, a much-loved ram. He loved to chase us. He, happily, found a home somewhere up north.
On Saturday, with the frost creeping in, the sun sinking in the sky, Greg looked out the kitchen window and said: “Miles is moving the sheep.” I grabbed my gumboots and went out into the paddocks. It was a chilly, misty, late-autumn afternoon, the sun so low you had to hold your hand up against the sky to see. I could just see, along the road, our mob, running. I knew they would stop at the neighbours’ oak trees to forage for acorns.
They were being chased along by Red, the kelpie sheep dog, who is a fairly useless sheep dog but a lovely girl. Country Calendar once came to film the sheep here at Lush Places and their drone captured a shot of Red being chased by them. She sleeps inside the house of Miles the sheep farmer and his wife Janet, on her brown velour La-Z-Boy chair.
I am used to seeing this scene, the ribbon of sheep on the road. Miles taking the sheep from our place to his to be milked to make his wonderful cheeses, for shearing, for drenching, for the myriad things a farmer has to do to maintain sheep.
We knew this day was coming. Miles is retiring. The flock is to be sold. We need to get another farmer to graze our paddocks. We won’t have milking sheep in our paddocks again. They will be meat sheep. I can’t make friends with sheep who will be sent to the works.
I stood in Apple Tree Paddock, with our last three sheep, Xanthe, Speri’ment and Beckie, and watched this familiar scene from a distance, across the neighbour’s paddocks to the road. It was just a glimpse, a blurry glimpse, because I was sobbing.
I was going to go to see Reginald on Wednesday to say goodbye. Time has run out. Miles is going to take a final picture of him for me. He is my now-deceased Elizabeth Jane’s ram lamb, who I fell hopelessly in love with. Years ago, so that he could stop being a breeding ram and become a teaser, he was vasectomised. It was done with him sitting on my knee while I sat on an upturned bucket in Miles’s milking shed.
Reginald didn’t know he was no longer a ram. He would later knock me down and bugger my knee. He was just playing. Or maybe teasing. But a ram is still a ram. He had to go and live at Miles’s farm to be trained not to be a thug. I have never stopped adoring him.
I have loved these sheep for eight years. I didn’t know all of them but I went out every day to check they were healthy. I learnt from Miles to know when they weren’t. I knew when a sheep had pneumonia or footrot or fly strike. I knew enough of them well enough that they would come to the stile to have a biscuit and a head scratch.
Many were in the book. Constance and Joy. Larry the Fatty. Trixie and Ethel. Dear little Nipper, who liked to bite. Posy and Bess and Esmerelda and Shirley. There are at least 100 names of my sheep in there.
I wrote the last line of The Book of Sheep today: The End. Do not fall in love with sheep. How can you not fall in love with sheep?
Can paddocks be achingly empty?
