Here is a picture of me pretending to drive a tractor. I am sort of driving it. My mate Blokesy Stokesy is guiding my feeble efforts. He is doing the gears. I think. I don’t drive. I know nothing about gears. People have tried to teach me to drive. The problem with my driving was that if I saw a thing, I steered at it. I steered through a boyfriend’s mother’s wooden garage door. I steered at some hapless jogger on a road in the Waitākere Ranges. He had to leap into a ditch.
This scenario – me and Blokesy on a tractor in his paddock – is weird. We have both ended up, just around the bend from each other, here in Wairarapa. We were kids together in Kaitaia. Our family used to visit his family farm. We would play in the paddocks. He, also weirdly, tracked me down through this column about 50 years later. And now here we are on a tractor, playing in a paddock. He’s kind of a stalker. I kind of love him. I am writing that to make him cringe. Blokesy does not do emotion.
We have little in common. He’s a right right-winger. I may not be a right right-winger. He likes rugby and beer and talking shit. I like reading and wine and talking shit. So, we do have one thing in common.
I am pretending to drive a tractor the same way that I pretend to be a farmer. I will never be a farmer, but Miles the sheep farmer indulges me in my fantasy. This morning, he sent a message asking me to go to Apple Tree paddock where he was shearing the pet sheep. He wanted me to walk up to the gate, have a look at something, and come back and tell him what to do.
I walked up to the gate, saw nothing, and walked back and said: “What am I supposed to be looking at?” He said: “Becky. Twin lambs.” We had decided some months ago that my ewe Becky was definitely not up the duff. No ram had marked her bum with his tupping chalk. She didn’t have a lamb last year. She’s a bit unreliable when it comes to getting up the duff. She is too tall. This year’s young ram would need a ladder, we decided.
But suddenly, this week, two months after the lambing season, she’d had twins. Somehow, despite seeing her every day and pretending to be a farmer, and observing pregnant sheep for the past seven years, I had missed the obvious sign: her enormously enhanced udders.
I like reading about real farmers. What is reading but escapism? I can go on pretending to be a farmer by reading books about farmers.
Currently, I am reading Where the Nor’wester Blows: Roland and Betty Clark of Staveley, by Bee Dawson (Quentin Wilson Publishing, $60). The Clarks farmed in the foothills of Mid-Canterbury for 30 years from the 1950s to the 1980s. The author is their daughter. It is a handsome book, full of the sorts of pictures I like: Roland in a white shirt with sleeves rolled up and baggy trousers, a look I long to emulate, with a lamb; there is Roland and his 1929 Model A coupé, which cost the princely sum of 30 quid. “Mud doesn’t bother it.” When he arrived at Staveley, he knew even less about farming than I know now. He had to ask his neighbour to teach him how to plough a field.
His wife, Betty, grew up on a sheep farm in the Queensland Outback. Her great-grandmother once ruined a prized umbrella when she used it to kill a snake. Betty knew a bit about sheep, and a bit about the tough life that is farming. There were diversions at Staveley: “tennis, bridge, dancing and sheep trials”. Betty did the cooking, of course. The menu was good, plain fare: “hot or cold roasted hogget, stew of the Irish sort, chops or mince. Once a week, the leftover meat was a curry, mixed with sultanas and served with Betty’s redcurrant jelly.”
It sounds delicious. It sounds like a farming life: hard and simple and rewarding in a hard and simple way. It is a nice book, and it perfectly reflects what it is to be a farmer. Also, it has really great pictures of tractors.
