Oct 13, 2005
For the first twenty years of my life, my father kept a cow. Not the same cow of course, but a succession of cows, one at a time. This must have taken a good deal of persistence, to milk the beast twice a day, in all weathers and in all seasons, and a good deal of courage in the first place, for there was no tradition of dairying in his family. He was a schoolteacher by trade, and his father was a postmaster. His grandfathers on both sides were storekeepers, and I never heard that either of them ever kept a cow. Neither did his brothers. But country schools in those days always included a paddock for the schoolmaster’s horse, and since my father had bought a model T Ford about nineteen twenty four, the horse paddock was always redundant, and was a suitable place to keep a cow.
Of course there was never enough grass in the paddock to keep the cow supplied, - I presume the schoolmaster’s horse would be expected to have his rations supplemented with chaff, - so my early childhood consisted of afternoon sessions with my brothers, of gathering grass into a large piece of scrim while my father scythed it on the football field, or around the tennis court, or wherever it was long enough. The corners of the scrim were then gathered together, and the load was dragged or carried, Rumple Stiltskin fashion to the cow’s paddock. In winter, what with the lower temperatures and the school kids playing rugby and all, there simply wasn’t enough grass to sustain the cow, so it was supplemented with hay made on the same rugby field at the end of the summer holidays. Some obliging farmer would bring his horse and mechanical mower one morning and mow the whole area, and as it dried we kids would turn it with pitch forks, and finally rake it into wind rows, from which it would be carted on a wheelbarrow with a frame on it, to the hayshed, (actually the tennis pavilion), or built into a neat stack alongside the cow paddock. To avoid any waste, the stack would be covered with a cover made of split chaff sacks sewn together with a sack needle. In addition, my father would dig up an area near the paddock and plant maize, which was rationed to the cow, a few stems at a time, after we had gathered the cobs off it for our own use, and before the frost got to it. In winter he also fed the cow at morning milking, with a bucket of bran mash mixed with hot water.
So we learnt farming techniques as a sort of substitute for rest and recreation, and as we got older we would often go on Saturdays to nearby farms to help with turning and stacking hay with the help of real equipment like hay rakes and sweeps and hoists. I suppose we got paid for it, but it was mostly our idea of entertainment - nice to be put in charge of a real horse doing real work.
Looking back at it I can’t understand why Dad went to all that trouble, but he claimed it was well worth it, giving us free milk, cream and butter and junket, and adding a bit of zest to deserts of stewed fruit, or steamed pudding. The freshly skimmed cream was mostly delicious, as the pans were set out in a sort of ventilated cupboard on stilts (which Dad liked to dignify with the name of “the dairy”), under the shade of the plum tree, but by the time we had accumulated enough to make butter, it was usually getting sour. We also provided milk for neighbours, in exchange for vegetables or honey or whatever. I recall falling off my bike when the treacle tin billy got caught between my knee and the handlebar, and I learnt that it’s no use crying over spilt milk.
Mostly I regard it all now as an educational thing, for we knew where most of our food came from and what was involved in its derivation and preparation. We knew how to set the surplus milk out in pans, and after a couple of days to skim the cream off it and, with a wooden churn, just like the Three Little Pigs, churn it into somewhat rancid butter. The skim milk, if it wasn’t made into junket was recycled through the chooks, as a curds additive to their morning mash. If we had been stuck on a desert island, with a good cow and a few tools, I think we could have survived.
As we got older we learnt to do the milking. I don’t know where Dad learnt the technique, presumably from the farmer who sold him his first cow, for he used a technique known technically as “stripping”. In those days, when milking machines were still something of a novelty, dairy farmers held to a superstition that any milk left in the cow at the end of the machine milking process, would reduce the amount the cow would yield at the next milking. (Later when they actually tested it at Ruakura, they found it was utterly false). So when the machine had done its best and the cups had been taken off, the farmer and his family would sit down with a bucket by each cow and, with the aid of a bit of petroleum jelly for lubricant, would draw the thumb and forefinger down each teat, until it would yield no more. This was known as stripping. It was hard on the thumb muscles, and I don’t suppose the cow enjoyed it much either.
Before milking machines were invented, the technique was to squeeze the teat with all four fingers of each hand, a method known as “full hand”, only using the stripping method for the last of it. But I never saw Dad milk full hand.
When we moved to Kakahi, there wasn’t anywhere to cut hay, - the football field was composed of volcanic ash, and scarcely grew anything, - but Dad got the use of a piece of railway land about a kilometre up the road. I got the job of taking the cow up there before school each day and bringing her back after school. Most of the time, except when she took it into her head to explore side roads, it was a pleasant enough task, and my classmate Don Taumata would often accompany me just for the yarn and the company.
There was a loft above the car shed which got filled with hay, bought I presume from some local farmer, and Dad also had the idea of buying pig potatoes,(too small for sale) that he boiled in a kerosene tin and fed to the cow with its bran and molasses. We also fed the cow by tethering it on the vacant section at the back of our house, but it often pulled the peg out and wandered off during the night, and we would spend an hour or two tracking its footprints in the pumice roads, and finally bringing it home.
I don’t recall that any of our cows had names, except Dahlia, whose name I think was conferred on her, as a bit of a joke by the farmer we got her from. Dahlia had a shortened tail. The story was that she had been a pet calf and had been raised in company with a pig. It was said that one night the pig had had a dream, more of a nightmare really, and believing it was under attack, had woken suddenly and had bitten the tail off its bedfellow. It was never revealed who had interviewed the pig on the subject.
Of course we had pet calves too, which we taught to feed from a bucket by letting the calf suck your fingers and gradually lowering its muzzle into the milk. If they were bobby calves they went off to the works, but the heifers were ultimately sold to a local farmer. One, I recall, yielded 10 shillings which paid for a luggage rack for the back of the car, to carry the tent when we went on holiday.
I feel sorry for my little grandson, who would love to be involved in such things, at least for a while.