I’m going to post a bit about the three strands of my life – Countrying, Mumming, and Writing – that I’m trying to weave into one glorious plait of happiness.
Today: Countrying.
I’m from London (for those of you who are Londoners and therefore care about such distinctions, I’m from North London).
Husband and I met in the proper countryside, in a beautiful village in the Peak District called Edale. Part of my heart will always be tied to that place. Soft hills cradle the main, ie only, road that enters the village and kind of runs out of steam as it reaches the farm campsite and second pub and transforms into a charming country track which also peters out after not very long.
The gorgeous shallow stream C1 and I have dubbed Silvery Waters hugs the village on two sides and has a great mossy stone Pooh Sticks (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poohsticks) bridge tucked conveniently behind the second pub. The air is like a food. Stuff is built from stone. It’s a good place.
I was taken to Edale a lot as a kid (my mum is from a Derbyshire village and wanted her London kids to know what it was to walk the moors aka peat bogs, and since we had no car Edale with its Youth Hostel less than a 3 mile trudge from the railway station was a firm favourite).
I had the seeds of countryphilia planted in me well before I realised. It took having two kids in two different London flats, and finally tearing ourselves away from the London life (but what about the culture? All the theatres and Stuff going on? The energy and nightlife and buzz and patent Best-City-Evs vibe and all the top quality classes and events for our little darlings??) to finally make me realise I was a Country Girl at heart. We drove along tree-tunnelled roads and played I’m Gonna Be a Country Girl Again (Buffy Sainte-Marie) and it brought a tear to my eye.
My London friends were unsurprised. When I delightedly, and somewhat sheepishly, announced we’d got actual chickens who laid actual edible eggs we could just pick up and use, my London friends were unamazed.
“Of course you do. You’ve always been a Country Girl at heart. I thought you’d have goats too by now.”
I was amazed. I was a London Girl, proudly born and bred. Wasn’t I?
We fled London with C1-2 and our two cats, leaving the culture and buzz we no longer had time to sample, the top quality dance classes and multilingual playgroups and friendly, overwhelmed mums trying to find connection in the quicksand of transitory living (move on, move out) and hoards of nannies who, while lovely, just didn’t have the same understanding of the relentlessness of night-time parenting, the crazy Otherworld of birth, the annihilating joy of getting your child to finally sleep…
We rented a bungalow in a small Sussex town pretending to still be a village, and promised ourselves we could always run back to London if we really couldn’t love anywhere else.
In London you can walk everywhere (ok, some destinations may take hours, but we’d happily spent those hours roaming the streets, parks and canals, sampling the unique vibes of all the little micro-cultures, eating street food and in my case also walking off the first few hours of labour with C1). There were a lot of good memories we were abandoning. And we knew our lives were going to be different without Deliveroo, Uber and a public transport system where waiting 5 mins is something to tut over.
We trembled. On Moving Day I took C1-2 ahead by train so Husband could be 1000% more efficient and I could attend the “village” yoga-for-mums-and-their-kids class and Make Connections. We had a day mostly outdoors as Husband and the key to our new home inevitably took longer to arrive than anticipated. It was November. C2 stress puked. I questioned the wisdom of our choices.
Within half a day we swore we’d never go back. I mean I had to go back for a while on Saturdays, I had a piano student taking her grade 5 in a few weeks and we hadn’t planned to jump at the first place to rent we saw and move within the week. Our new landlords were equally surprised. But we weren’t going back back.
And we’ve only gone forward since. Those 6 months in the happy bungalow are golden in my memory. We could still walk to tons of stuff in the town village. But now I could also walk to a massive wood, along a stream. I got pregnant with C3. Drivers waved and smiled at each other and took turns. There was a pond in the garden and I built a rope swing (with much Googling). We’d arrived in lala land. Things we assumed had died out decades ago (like eye contact with strangers) had been alive and well all this time. There was bunting.
We found our forever home (with no small amount of luck and goodwill from the sellers, including babysitting C1-2 while we looked round, bless them forever). Felines 1-2 rather companionably decided to join me in my pregnancy. F1 cemented her special place in my heart by refusing to go into labour until I sat down and she could arrange herself on me. I midwifed her first two kittens, and resurrected the third when she lost it under a cushion while Country Self had been temporarily vanquished by Pregnant Self who insisted dinner can only wait so long, no matter how precious it is to be a cat’s birth partner.
F2 inevitably birthed the other 5 kittens the night before we moved. We arrived with a car full of kids and kittens and all settled in together to our new country home in the country.
Countrying definitely seems to go hand in hand with animals. During that third pregnancy we managed to acquire a flock of chickens and two shetland ponies. Husband tilled the earth and we excitedly uncovered a rockery beneath the weeds and turned it into a herb garden. We had our first run in with the true nature of foxes (turns out they don’t just rummage in bins and look cute on clothing designs). Foxy sadly got our cockerel and one of his hens their very first night with us.
I wept to rehome two of Favourite Feline #1 ‘s kittens, and Husband caved to the special relationship of C1 with F1’s remaining, much loved ginger kitten and he was promoted to Feline #3.
We learned that Countrying, at least the way we were doing it, meant becoming Poo People. There was kitten poo, chicken poo, baby poo, and endless endless horse poo that all had to be collected and relocated. I discovered how to reassemble a chicken coop in a tight space despite my sizeable Bump. Little Red Chicken fell prey to a mysterious disease that thankfully missed the rest of the flock. There were triumphs and failures. We Countried.
C3 arrived, and No-Longer-Pregnant Self held sway while Country Self dreamed of smallholding in the small hours of nursing and nappy changes.
Our much loved herb rockery sadly died despite all my careful planning of companion planting and different types of soil. I discovered that my pre-kid successes in our first London flat, my tomatoes, basil and sage (lovingly nursed back to health from a severe case of powdery mildew by frequent applications of vodka, of all things) counted for nothing. However green my fingers may have been in London, ironically despite our more rural environment I could now no longer grow things. Even my loyal sage, all grown up into a decent bush and lovingly set free from its pot at last, sadly bit the dust. Fortunately C1 had much better success with her lettuces, although predictably it turned out they weren’t the type of lettuce she liked eating.
9 months passed, we took the growing fam to Edale just for that extra strong shot of Country and Pregnant Self was reborn with the conception of C4.
We Countried further. We made mistakes. We learned from some of them, we stubbornly didn’t learn from others. We got a new rooster from a “backyard breeder” who arrived crawling with lice and had various other issues and Husband dispatched his first bird on my pregnantly orders.
The kitten I’d Googled back to life was returned home after the 18 months in his new home didn’t work out with the resident cat. I was delighted, despite his various escapes and a delicate cat-integration process (more frantic Googling) that took up the remainder of my pregnancy.
If there was ever a cat capable of walking through a locked door, it was the newly instated F4. He hated his initial captivity. He escaped within days of his arrival, and managed to live wild for a month (Pregnant Self and her motherly instinct were a heap of nerves). We set up a camera and watched his infuriating nightly visits in retrospect. Sometimes he’d eat the food we left, or sniff the cat flap, but he never came in. His old owners came down from London and camped out in the hopes of a reunion, but F4 remained aloof. We even left food in a live trap: he managed to enter, trigger the trap, eat the food, and then against all physical laws squeeze himself out the other end. We watched it all on camera the next day.
After a Facebook campaign and some good old fashioned word of mouth someone in the village alerted us to his presence in their garden, and eventually he was caught, reinstalled, and the settling in process began again. He escaped again within a day. That night I set the live trap again with little hope of success – any surprise element had already been spent. Just in case, I set it against the house. Even Magic Escape Cat would surely struggle to pass through a cemented brick wall.
Amazingly, thankfully, he did actually get trapped that night and this time the trap held. I collected a somewhat dejected F4 in the morning, removed a strange bean from his face which turned out to be alive and called a tick (cue frantic Googling on the dangers of ticks, Lyme disease and pregnancy exposure), and he was yet again incarcerated, this time behind two locked doors. We’d already discovered he could open shut doors unless they were properly locked. Eventually he settled and despite driving his mum F1 mad on occasion is now a well integrated member of the ever-growing fam.
Cockerel #3 (Handsome Galahad the Third) lasted much longer than his predecessors, and when Foxy struck hard a year or so later we gathered our precious final load of fertile eggs and learned how to incubate and raise chicks. The room that is supposedly my study where I write and watch the kids gambol in the garden (this has never happened in 4 years) has never smelled the same since I reared 16 chicks in it. There was further poo. Our new flock was born. So was C4.
After C4 we ramped up our Countrying. I learned to dispatch chickens, plucked and gutted my first bird (thanks YouTube) and we ate our first homegrown roast chicken. And it was actually tasty.
C1 went hunting wild rabbits with the former escape artist F4. I was exiting the house to buggy off C4, who was late for her nap, with C3 toddling in tow, when C1 proudly arrived cuddling a live rabbit.
I confess, I was somewhat distracted by the tired toddlers. Rather than marvel at her catch and praise her achievement, I said:
“Want do you want to do? Keep it as a pet? Kill it and eat it?”
London Self was a distant memory.
The verdict was kill it, so after popping the brake on the buggy I rather anxiously dispatched my first rabbit, three times just to be sure (C1 has since assured me that a rabbit’s heart beats for a little bit after death, but at the time I unfortunately did not know this) handed it back to C1 with dire commands to somehow hang it in the spare fridge as soon as possible, and took C3-4 off for the nap walk, trying not to wonder whether the murder of Wild Rabbit would be one of C3’s childhood traumas.
The rabbit was tasty. We had rabbit broth, pulled BBQ rabbit, hoisin rabbit. The fur is still in the freezer, held against the day I learn how to tan hides.
It turned out my gutting adventures were not over. The following summer a young deer expired on our property (after an unfortunate run in with our stock fencing) and I found myself gutting it near said fence while my in laws held the lunch fort and miraculously C4 accepted non-parental babysitting despite being due for her nap.
In the hot sun, listening to our rather more civilised neighbours entertaining guests in their beautifully manicured garden, I prayed they wouldn’t notice my rather bloody efforts.
I followed my YouTube tutorial faithfully. I’d gutted two animals already. Surely I kind of knew what I was doing. Deer, it turns out, are not like chickens and rabbits.
The kitchen knife was perhaps more suited to cheese than butchery, but it did the job eventually. I opened the carcass. I found the bladder. Unfortunately despite my precautions the bladder burst as per the video warning. I wiped deer urine off my face and groped up to my elbow for the windpipe that would apparently feel “like a hose”. I tried to carry what remained of the deer back to the house, and managed about 4 paces.
In the end I left a well gutted deer slumped over the kids climbing spot, our fallen ash tree. I washed the blood off my watch (sadly my sandals fared worse), sanitised myself and put C3-4 down for their naps.
Husband thankfully carried, hung and butchered the deer before the flies got it. I tried some new pulled venison recipes. Husband and I ate them under the suspicious gazes of C1-4.
We’d made it. We were Countrying.
Country Mum Writes 