I would like to present to you memories of a bunch of goats who shared our patch for a couple of decades, and what we learned from that episode in our life. Personal Story...
Dear Christine,
I would like to present to you memories of a bunch of goats who shared our patch for a couple of decades, and what we learned from that episode in our life.
The first two moved in quite unexpectedly during the winter of 1976. Snow had set in on the mountain above our home and Mr. D., a salesman from a neighbouring village, who owned a field a couple of miles up, was struggling to reach his two goats, which were becoming iced in. As conditions worsened, Mr. D. finally retrieved his goats and before our wits were aware of it, both the nanny and her three-month-old billy kid were foraging on our ample lawn while Mr. D. had installed himself in our kitchen, downing the obligatory cup of tea and explaining to us why he considered us to be just the people for a pair of goats "to keep down the weeds in our garden".
We could not dispute that our acre-plus of garden grew weeds with vigour and the case for keeping goats took on such a plausible emphasis from the mouth of this desperate salesman that we couldn't imagine why we had never thought of it before. Indeed, even before Mr. D. had made his hurried exit, turfing out from the boot of his car a bale of hay and, in parting, bestowing upon us the gracious gift of full rights to "Emily" and "Billy the Kid", we had donned the role of novice goatkeepers and were already planning tethers and sheds and plots on which to cultivate lots of carrots and curly kale.
However, we hadn't planned for a milking parlour and it was with great surprise that we noticed, as days went by, that Emily's bulk and udder were increasing out of all proportion to the browsing and fodder she was receiving. Our first big lesson about goats was that even a three month old billygoat can be a daddy! Swiftly, Billy the Kid found himself in another new home, courtesy of a friend who possessed not only a wealth of weeds of his own but also a hemp sack and the help of a passing lorry.
Alone and pregnant, Emily had our full attention and revelled in all the petting and fuss, but her full udder began to become inflamed and hot and she needed milking - and I had no idea how. I paused on the pavement below our holding, torn between two courses of action: borrowing a book ( How to Milk Your Goat by Ann Expert) from the local library , which was the cheaper option, or calling in a vet to show me how to tackle the milking - the potential cost of which was making me wince. A voice hailed me from the opposite side of the street, and with a surge of joy I saw George, a one-time smallholder himself and a veteran milker of goats, despite having only one arm due to an accident long ago. Realizing my dilema, he kindly let me lead him to Emily, and demonstrated for me his own patent method of how to milk a goat. I took to it like a duck to water and within days was milking not only one goat but two, for we purchased a pedigree in-kid nanny to "keep our Emily company" and share with her, twice a day, our hastily erected milking shed.
Our young sons took an instant liking to goats' milk, goats' cheese, goats' butter, goats' yoghurt, etc. - which was all very fortunate. Emily produced a female kid called Amy, whom we kept to be part of the herd, and her pedigree Toggenburg colleague, Joy, brought forth a male kid, Claudie, who we also kept once we had de-horned and neutered him, and who became the tamest, cleanest, gentlest male goat in the village.
Our "goats-are-us"/"back to the land" phase was to last for more than two decades. We went into goats in a big way, supplying friends and family with milk and products and filling our freezer with milk (but not meat) from our herd. We learned to barter goat-produce for honey, fruit, the loan of garden machinery or anything we needed. We learned all we could about goats and shared our knowledge with others.
After a time, we took our goats and moved from the village up onto the mountain. The goats we ended up with: Emily, Joy, Miranda, Claudie, little white Annie and Sian-with -horns, all lived out their days in leisurely paddocks, stress-free and well tended, under a blue and white patchwork sky - or that's how it seems now in retrospect.
One day, a fellow goatkeeper visiting at milking time stared at me with a puzzled frown. "Why on earth do you milk your goats with only one hand?" It had never occurred to me that other people milk goats with two hands - I had slavishly copied George, my one armed friend when he had taught me in my hour of need, and never questioned his example! No wonder milking time took me so much longer than everybody else. It was at this juncture that we introduced a milking machine into our twice-daily routine. The results were quick and efficient, but it couldn't replace the priceless times I had known sitting for so many hours alone with my nannies, over months, years. Machine milking is no substitute for the quiet times, the intimacy, the warm breath and cud-chewing of the creatures next to your shoulder, the candle-lit early mornings and the lamp-lit nights, the singing and lulling to let the milk down, and the bond which grows between animal and human as your lives go by together.
Just like the relationship between "a man and his dog", there is a special closeness between a smallholder and his/her goat. It's a trust thing, an understanding and a kind of joint intuition which grows up steadily and becomes precious. A goat's life span is around the same as a dog's, and inevitably there comes a moment when we have to face the laying down of all that has been built up over those years.
For me, I have had to face that moment many times, each time just as painful and extreme as the first. They breathed their last, each of my friends, with a vet present and their heads trustingly on my knee. I couldn't desert them at the end: I loved my nannies, all of them, and Claudie, the gentle giant, was as sad to part from as the others. They were pets, they supplied food - and yet more than that, they were a part of our identity and bound in inextricably to the season of our life which we were living. They amused us endlessly and gave us stores of memories to relive and recall. It was a learning season, to be marked off on life's calendar. The goats at length returned into the dust of the ground beneath our feet and marked that season over. Yet those days are etched forever onto my memory and onto the individual memories of my family, never to be forgotten. The sunny days and blue skies can live on, days when goat kids frisked in the paddock, days when the nannies would gang up on gentle Claudie and push him, using him as a battering ram to remove a section of fencing and allow them to reach forbidden fruit trees. Long days, when bats replaced the swallows as dusk began to fall, gliding silently between the file of goats returning from the coolness of the woods to the security of their night-time sheds and the comfort of their hay.
If I had to select one precious moment from it all to sum up what it has meant to have known the blessing of goats in our life, it would be this one, and I'll end now with these lines:-
It is late on Christmas evening Glad, I nestle in to milk them, Far above the flickering shadows Oh, the glory of those echoes, © Jean L. |
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With much love,
Jean Ladd
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