She arrived at Lush Places with tight curly wool and a sweet tiny face on September 12, 2018, the day before my birthday. She was the smallest lamb born that season. I named her Elizabeth Jane after one of my favourite writers, Elizabeth Jane Howard. Howard wrote of cats that they “smell like biscuits”. My Elizabeth Jane smelt of milk and spring mornings. She was all long, gangly, not-yet-co-ordinated legs.
She slept in the kitchen on a cushion, on a crocheted blanket, while I cooked. She had a bottle every four hours, and her little tail, which looked like the tassel on a fez, waggled in ecstasy. When she was a little older, she galloped up and down the hall with her bigger sister Xanthe, Greg’s lamb.
We all played in the garden. I would produce a once-posh mohair jumper from another life, now riddled with holes from country life, and wave it about while shouting “toro, toro”. They, like tiny woolly bulls, would rush to butt the cape. Lambs have a sense of humour. But only to a point. I decided once to make Elizabeth Jane and Xanthe jump hurdles on the lawn. You can imagine what a success that was.
At night, she and Xanthe lived in a den in the garage made somewhat haphazardly from baby gates. They would escape and jump on and off our stored garden furniture. They were toddlers now, hell-bent on creating mayhem.
Later still, when they were enormous grown ewes, they would, if they saw a gap in the garage door, charge in and leap on and off the same garden furniture. They were reliving their toddlerhood. The garage was their tūrangawaewae.
Elizabeth Jane was greedy. She had a passion for cashew nuts and biscuits and apples. Miles, the sheep farmer, who bred her and gave her to me, would say by way of greeting: “Hello, fatso.”
What was she like? People who have not been around sheep tend not to believe this, but they have distinct personalities. They learn their names. They learn faces. Up to 100 of them.
Elizabeth Jane was affectionate, but only when it suited her. When, say, she wanted her backside scratched, or when a treat was in the offing. I choose to believe she loved me for more than the biscuits.
I sometimes went out into a summer night and lay down with my sheep. There is no pillow as pillowy as a sheep. Or as fragrant.
I will never lie down with her again. I couldn’t save her. I tried. I treated her fly strike wounds twice a day, and cleaned those wounds. She was losing condition, and was hollowed out. We fed her barley and sheep nuts. Then the storm came. She got hypothermia and pneumonia. Miles came and moved her into our tractor bay. We put blankets and towels over her and tucked in empty milk bottles fashioned into hot water bottles. In the morning, she was floundering, on her side. I phoned Miles and the vet. The vet could come that morning.
We found a digger with a driver. He and his wife came that afternoon. The only creature they had never buried was an ostrich, they said.
I kissed her on her head. Then I walked away. I couldn’t watch her being euthanised. Poor Greg had to do that. He loved her, too. I couldn’t watch her being put into her grave. She died on Saturday morning last week.
The garden is almost bereft of flowers at this time of year. I cut the last of the hydrangeas and made a sad little bouquet and put them on the sad little mound in Apple Tree Paddock where she had lived with her sister sheep. I sent Miles a message: “Thank you for giving me Elizabeth Jane. She has been one of the greatest joys of my life.”
I suppose some people would say she was just a sheep. They can get stuffed. Elizabeth Jane will always be the best birthday present I will ever be given. It is not often that you are given the gift of pure joy.
