Miles the sheep farmer was coming to Lush Places to fix our leaking water troughs. He sent a text message to say he was here.
I hopped over the stile, in my stylish, mud-smeared, sheep-bitten paddock shorts and saw him at the far end of our pear orchard paddock. There was a woman with him. An elegant, pretty, blonde woman. She was wearing nice clothes that were not smeared with mud. I don’t know any elegant, pretty, blonde women in nice mud-free clothes.
What was she doing in our paddock? She came towards me, arms outstretched. I went towards her, arms outstretched. We may have both been a bit teary. It was my friend Helen! She is Miles and Janet’s eldest daughter. But she lives in Brighton in England. What was she doing in the paddock? She was here, as a lovely surprise, for her ma, her two sisters, and me, for her parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. She and Miles had concocted a top-secret plan to smuggle her into the country, and their house, and our paddock.
I have adored Helen from the first time I saw her four years ago, when, back in this country for a summer, she popped up like some exotic bird in the narrow paddock. She was wearing denim dungarees and a bright plastic flower tucked behind an ear.
She is a bit nutty, in the best possible way. One day, we went to pick her up to go to yum cha in town. She emerged from the house wielding a half-polished-off bottle of rosé and a large slab of meat. She is vegetarian. The meat was for Red, her dad’s kelpie sheep dog.
She is also one of the most intrepid people I have ever known. Many years ago, she set off, alone, to live in Darjeeling, in India, and established a successful cake shop. She was known about Darjeeling as the “Cake Lady”. The job had its ups and downs; she was once detained at an Indian airport when quantities of suspicious white powder were discovered in her luggage. It was cake flour.
The return of the intrepid one called for a celebration. We picked her up for lunch a few days later. She had a present for me. While helping with a clearout of her parents’ house she had unearthed a Country Life Annual from 1969. She thought I might like it. I do.
This country life bears little resemblance to our country life. It is all posh people and their insanely grand rooms. The bedrooms at Scotland’s Blair Castle, seat of the Duke of Atholl, are the maddest. A four-poster bed, made in 1700, in the Tapestry Bedroom is smothered in so much drapery that if you happened to be claustrophobic, you wouldn’t have got a wink of sleep. Atop this bonkers bed are four porcelain urns containing dyed ostrich feathers.
There are stories about posh golfing nitwits wearing ridiculously unflattering plus-fours. There is a brilliant piece about a Northumberland farm. To my delight, there is quite a lot about sheep.
A farmer called George Cully, whose family had been on their land for 200 years, was stern about the qualities of desirable sheep: “A large and well-proportioned form, an ability to fatten quickly …” My pet ewe, Elizabeth Jane, is a desirable sheep. She certainly fattened quickly and has since devoted her career as a sheep to becoming ever fatter.
I went out to see whether Sper’iment, who is also enormously fat, had finally decided to have her lambs. I had been waiting for weeks. She resembled a giant, woolly plum pudding on legs. She lumbered about, grumpily and inelegantly.
“Where are those bloody lambs?” I’d say, numerous times a day. Oddly, she refused to answer. She just gave me the stink eye and waddled off as fast as she could, which wasn’t very.
On a morning not long after, Greg came into the kitchen and said: “Are you ready?” The plum pudding had had a lamb. A boy. Then she had another. A girl. She’s a bit nutty. I’ve named her Helen.
