Ive always lived in farming areas, amongst the hard-working and pragmatic attitudes that go hand-in-hand with the way of life. We know that farmers work hard, but it is the women who amaze me most: from the ones who chatted as they wrung chickens necks in the battery hen farm where I worked as a teenager, to the Peruvian island farmer who I helped haul her children and tools up a mountain each morning, dig a sackful of marble-sized potatoes, then lug them all back down the mountain (with her knitting as she went) before cooking them on an open fire - and even making them taste nice!
Of course, the most galling thing is that they still get called farmers wives which conjures up an image of a rosy-cheeked woman baking a ham and egg pie, rather than one covered in chicken muck hitting a pile of sacks with a shovel trying to get those b*@**!*d rats that lurk underneath.
Therefore, when I decided that my book, Cold Enough to Freeze Cows, was to be set in a mid Wales farming community, I wanted to do justice to the level of getting stuck in that these women farmers do. At lambing time in my village, for example, instead of chatting at the school gates, these women screech to a halt on the double yellows, jump out wrapped in overalls that are slopped in every possible bodily fluid, shout, GED IN, GED IN! to their children who are sprinting down the pavement instead of their usual dawdle, and then they zoom off back to the farm before the next emergency happens.
When writing my novels, I make sure I do lots of research to try and stop the jarring that occurs when you notice an author has made an error. For Cold Enough to Freeze Cows, I spoke to a number of farming women to try and glean what their days entailed and what exactly was their way of life, and although every farm is different, a few regular themes cropped up.
The women typically did the stock related side of the farm the checking, feeding, drenching, tailing, lambing side of it, whilst the men did the bits (and this was a regular comment too!) that required sitting in a tractor or mucking about with machinery.
There are downsides to this split, the main one being that when stock needs seeing to, it needs seeing to now - be it morning, noon or the fifth night in a row. The upside was that the women were able to sneak through some of their favourite little characters mostly ones that should have gone to the butchers some time ago! More than one said that she was glad that she had the powers to allow the little ewe that she took care of as a tiddler during a previous season, to hobble through to be kept for another year: even busy farmers are suckers for a cute little face it seems!
Of course, doing any job is difficult when you have small children in tow and many farmers rely heavily upon extended family and friends during the busier times. Despite this, it seemed common enough to have a separate sheep pen for the toddler to doze in and even an industrious two-year-old who would take the dead lambs away in her pedal tractor and trailer! Farming children have to grow up fast; as soon as they are able to do anything useful, they are required to do it, but the general consensus was that this was a positive thing, something that turned the next generation into people who can cut the dags off 500 sheep on an open hillside in horizontal sleet...
The need for pragmatism had spilled over into their sense of humour too. What do a group of women farmers joke about? I asked. Someone else having to deal with foot rot, they replied (it stinks) or someone else getting covered in bodily fluids and the smellier, the better. A friend stepping back onto a dead rat was funny when I was a child and it seems that this hasnt changed either.
The overall thing that struck me as I chatted to these women was their attitude to their farming. It was not a job: it was very much a way of life. Their farms were their responsibility - not just in terms of an income and the welfare of the animals, but also as part of the local community and the landscape. If diversifying a sheep farm to growing, say, grapes was a viable and more profitable option, would they do it? No, was the carefully-thought-through answer.
The proof of the pudding: would they want their daughters to do it? No, its too hard, was the reply then they would think about it, then proudly relate how, actually, maybe the middle one would be up for it: she was already pretty good