noticed, but she was so concerned that she rushed me off to hospital to get it checked out. She’s still amazed today that I didn’t realise there was blood dripping from my arm. All I wanted to do was to keep playing. I guess, looking back, I was always a prop forward in the making.
In this idyllic childhood there was always so much going on in and around the farm. It was all outdoors in the fresh air and I was always surrounded by family. My sister Helen was born three years after me, which didn’t please me a lot, apparently. Mum says she can remember coming home from hospital and announcing that we had a new sister and Mark and I looked at one another and frowned in disappointment. We didn’t really see the point in having a sister. What were sisters for? They weren’t interested in climbing things and causing the mayhem that Mark and I enjoyed, so the two of us pretty much carried on as we had done and tried to forget about the small female who had just joined the family.
I think I spent most of my childhood completely covered in mud. I remember sitting in the sink absolutely filthy after a morning outside, and being cleaned from head to toe by my grandma (with a big lump of old-fashioned soap and some sort of scrubbing brush - I imagine that’s the only way they could get the mud off me). When I was clean, I was dressed and then sent back out into the fields where I’d get muddy all over again.
One side of the farm house was rented out when I was growing up, and we lived in the other half. We weren’t supposed to mess about around the rented half of the farm. I can remember the sound of Mum’s voice as she told us to keep away from there but of course that didn’t stop us at all, and if there were no adults there, that’s where Mark and I could be found - with a football.
Belting footballs through the windows of the house was something that Mark and I did quite frequently. We’d be kicking the ball backwards and forwards to one another, and trying to kick it over the house and round the house, but our kicking skills weren’t as refined as we’d hoped, so invariably there would come a point where we kicked the ball through the house (via the window). There’d be that horrible sound of smashing glass and a split second of silence in which we looked at one another and realised that we were in big trouble.
We knew that Mum would go nuts when she found out we’d smashed a window, so every time the ball crashed through the glass we’d stand there and look at one another for a minute, then run away from the scene as fast as we could. It makes me laugh to look back now. What did we think would happen? Surely we must have realised that Mum would take one look at the broken window, the football lying on the kitchen floor and the glass all around and realise straight away what had happened. It seems odd that we ran away, thinking that we might just get away with it. We never did.
My first experiences of life off the farm were at a local nursery school, where I went a couple of mornings a week, then it was on to Kilkhampton Primary School for slightly more serious schooling and, more importantly, the chance to get involved in lots of different sports like cricket, football and rounders for the first time. I’m not from a sporty family, and my parents aren’t sporty at all (the only sports event I ever saw my dad compete in was a young farmers’ tug-of-war one year), but when I got to school I became very interested in all sports, and I wanted to get involved with everything that the school had to offer. Mark was the same as me and we would play all sorts of sports together.
We even enjoyed darts - that was fun. We would practise at home with a makeshift set-up. We’d fix up a dart-board on the chair leaning against the kitchen table, and throw arrows at it, practising our technique as we competed against one another to get the better score. Again, this was a case of our skills not being quite as good as we envisaged, and we’d miss the dartboard frequently, and leave loads of little holes all over Mum’s best chairs and table. Once again, we’d run away from the scene and hope she’d not notice. She always did.
As we got older our love for darts continued to blossom, but we moved ourselves from hurling arrows at Mum’s best furniture to throwing them at the dartboard in the pub where we could do a lot less damage, get into a hell of a lot less trouble and drink pints. We even went on to play in the local leagues against other pubs in the area; we all took it very seriously.
Back on the farm, we spent a lot of time razzing around the place on tractors and when I look back now I can see that I was a bit of a liability. I just seemed to crash the bloody thing all the time (I think you’ll notice there’s a theme developing here… I did have a habit of breaking a lot of things). There were these small walls all around the farm, and I have to tell you that small walls and big tractors don’t make a very happy combination. You’d drive along in the tractor and just not see them. The trouble is, even though they were only small and didn’t look like they’d do any damage at all, if you hit them with the tractor, you would end up ripping the tyres off, which cost hundreds of pounds to repair. Dad would go mad.
As we got older, so the trouble we got into became bigger. One particular story I remember was of my brother racing around the farm on a quad bike. He and I were out doing the fencing (repairing holes in the hedges to stop the sheep breaking out). We had just finished the job and were heading for home when we realised we’d left something right at the bottom of the field. It was a really foggy day, so Mark went off on his quad bike to get it, and I waited on the tractor for him to come back. He disappeared into the foggy mist, out of sight, while I waited patiently. The next thing I knew, there was the most almighty crash - he’d driven straight into an electric pole and smashed the front of the quad bike. Luckily he went flying off to one side and was uninjured. To be honest, though, his injuries were the least of my concern. I saw the front of the quad bike and the way it was all smashed in, and all I could think was, ‘What the hell are we going to tell Dad?’
Again, Dad was really unhappy. But not quite as cross as he was when it came to tractor mirrors and windows. Christ, he’d get pissed off with us. Not that I can blame him because we did smash a lot of them. The windows at the back of the tractor were a particular problem because they opened outwards, so I’d shove them open on a pleasant day, and immediately forget that I’d done it. I would reverse the tractor up to something, forgetting that the windows added another foot onto the length of the tractor behind me, and hear a loud crash and the smash of glass. Shit! This happened so many times that Dad eventually refused to replace the back windows. On freezing cold winter days we would always regret our recklessness, as we sat there wrapped up in coats, hats and gloves, freezing bloody cold.
Although Mark and I played around a lot, we also helped out on the farm from quite a young age. Certainly by the time I was four I was doing chores regularly. The rule in farming tends to be that as soon as you’re strong enough to do something, you’re old enough. I remember having some funny little jobs, like filling gaps in the hedge to stop the cattle running through. I guess it’s like an apprenticeship. You master all the tasks that your father does by watching, helping him, then doing them yourself. That’s why farms are passed down through the generations, because of all the small things you learn growing up. As soon as I was able to lift bales of hay, I would be lifting them, and as soon as I could milk the cows, I did that. It was a gradual thing, until I could do everything on the farm for myself.
I loved farming but it’s a hard, hard job because it never stops. One thing that people tend to forget about farming is that there’s no such thing as a weekend. The cows need milking every day, and that includes Christmas Day, birthdays, and every weekend, morning and night. In fact, in order to minimise the workload on Christmas Day we used to double up on everything so that we wouldn’t have to work like mad on 25 December itself. It meant that the period leading up to Christmas would be very hard work, ensuring there’d be enough hay, straw and feed to allow us to get through. Christmas parties were a thing that other people did.
Without doubt, the most difficult thing to happen when I was young was Mum and Dad splitting up. I was around eight years old at the time, and though I was very young I remember it all clearly. There had been lots of rows in the house and lots of tension in the air leading up to their decision, so looking
