“THE SHEPHERDESS LOOK for Spring” reads the caption in the glossy magazine propped up on my kitchen table. I gaze at a model clad in pure white frilly broderie anglaise petticoat, dainty white satin shoes and shady straw hat; make-up apparently by Revlon, perfume by Dior.
I’m left wondering whether to send the editor a picture of the outfit worn by this particular Shepherdess – muddy wellies (2 sizes too big to allow for three pairs of socks,) woolly long-johns under moleskin trousers, two thin jumpers topped by my brother’s old school cricket pullover (I was given this indestructible item as a hand-me-down when he outgrew it and this antique garment gets bigger with each wash- the hem passed my ankles about five years ago and is now heading for my ankles); oiled canvas jacket with ‘poachers pocket’ for carrying orphan lambs, a piece of sacking tied elegantly round hips (invaluable when lying full length in the snow to pull lambs from a ewe.) The look is completed by a knitted balaclava covering mouth, nose and ears. Skin-care by Pears soap and as for perfume – there’s been a lingering, undefinable scent clinging to the cuffs of the jacket ever since I had to untangle twin lambs that had been dead, in utero, for several days. Could this fashion look catch on?
There’s a good practical reason why you traditionally find as many shepherdesses as shepherds on the hills. It’s the one area of farming where women have always been equal participants – a small female hand can often reach inside a ewe to sort out a tangle of twins or triplets which a horny-handed male fist could not get near. So the lambing season is the only time of year when I don’t have cause to regret my lack of physical strength.
I know it’s time to start assembling the lambing equipment when I hear Dan Archer, on the radio, start his lambing on Lakey Hill – for he always puts his tups in with the ewes a good three weeks ahead of us in the autumn. I need time to find the old scalpel – it comes in very handy for skinning dead lambs – this ghoulish task is necessary if we need to pair up an orphan lamb with a ewe who’s birthed a dead lamb. A section of the dead lamb’s skin is fitted over the orphan and tied with baler twine. Ewe, lamb and the soft old Labrador are then penned together in the barn. The theory is that the dog barks ferociously and this brings out the ewe’s protective instinct strongly enough to overcome her natural rejection of a strange lamb, so she lets it suckle. What actually happens is that the friendly dog rushes up to the lamb and tries to make friends by licking it all over; this makes the ewe think that the lamb is about to be eaten so she head butts the dog away, and allows the lamb to suckle immediately. Then, once her milk has passed though the orphan and can be smelt it on its tail (combined with the temporary coat smelling of her dead lamb), the ewe fully accepts the orphan as her own – and all is calm again.
Another pre-lambing job is to clear space in the deep freeze. Then, when a cow calves, some excess colostrum can be taken from her and frozen into 5ml portions to give orphan lambs. A lamb will not survive if it does not get some form of colostrum – the poor creatures usually perish within a day of birth. They characteristically have an uncoordinated mouth and protruding tongue, leaving them unable to suckle. Feeding via a stomach tune with artificial milk may lead to a temporary recovery, and I’ve often thought that we’ve saved one of these orphans only to see it drop dead for no apparent reason three weeks later.
So colostrum is essential because a lamb which has sucked even a small amount of colostrum shows a remarkable ability to survive. Last winter, we brought a ewe in from a distant field with her small sickly new-born lamb. She had plenty of milk in her udder so the lamb recovered once in the shelter of the barn. It must have been two days later that I walked over that exact spot again and there found a tiny shivering lamb, curled up in the lee of a boulder. I carried him down to the barn, whereupon he rushed up to that same ewe and began to suckle. She accepted him immediately, and as his markings were identical with her other lamb, we realised that they must be twins. The lost lamb had survived two days and nights of freezing weather on the strength of the colostrum he’d had from his mother shortly after birth.