On the way to the farm he even demonstrated its powers of acceleration, speeding past three cars on a straight stretch of moorland, flattening me to the back of the upholstery before nipping back to his own lane seconds before I saw the eyeballs of the bloke driving the Vauxhall (oh yes, I was close enough to see the logo) coming towards us on the other side of the road.
We drove through what, if it isn’t James Herriot country, or as it has now come to be known, Emmerdale country, then it must be pretty close to it: tiny villages with winding streets of stone cottages, dry walled edged fields, hedgerows, rolling dales washed with trees, dotted with sheep.
‘They film that Heartbeat over there,’ says Tim pointing across the moors where the heather is just starting to turn and patches of purple are peeping through. ‘And The Royal’s at Scarborough, I think,’ he adds. Television as geography. Not that it’s any different back in London where I regularly tell Americans I live where they shot Four Weddings and a Funeral’ before I see the dawn of recognition break over their face that other descriptions like ‘world famous Portobello Road’ fail to reach. However, this countryside is a lot more of a photo opportunity than that bloody blue door (which they’ve now painted black to try and confuse the tourists – they aren’t fooled!)
We drive through Lockton then Tim stops the car. On a blind corner. On a narrow lane that you’d have to throw yourself off if another vehicle came towards you. There’s a deep wooded valley plunging down to an invisible river and across the gully a long flat field as smooth as though it has been ironed into the hillside, flecked with white sheep like hundreds without the thousands sprinkled over the grass.
That’s the farm over there,’ he says. ‘With that blue plastic on the roof’ he adds, breaking the romance. I later discover the blue plastic covers the new bathroom in his house where you can sit in the bath under the exposed eaves and hear birds chirping insistently overhead through the felt, and a few ominous rustles that may or may not mean there’s been a breach of security.
The village is called Levisham. And if Tim with his ruddy face, blue eyes and farmer’s girth is straight from Yorkshire Central Casting, then the tiny village is a location shoot waiting to happen. It’s a single street with lawns on either side, lined with golden stone houses, a little postbox stuck on the right like a red lolly on a stick and a square matchbox church on the left. A stubby horse grazes, head down, on the grass, unperturbed by the thrum of the Porsche’s engine. I’m sure it was put there seconds earlier by a stylist just to complete the scene.
‘Common pasture,’ explains Tim when I comment on the horse.
Facing us there’s a picturesque pub decked out with hanging baskets of geraniums in which I imagine red faced, multi-chinned countrymen, one wellie on the rail, one elbow on the bar, knocking back ale while their trusty shaggy dogs slumber by the fire.
‘It’s more of a restaurant than a pub,’ says Tim, ‘…unfortunately.’ And full of hikers in full-body Kagouls, dripping water and binoculars I see later, as Levisham Moor, where Manor Farm has grazing rights, is a hundred yards up the road and Levisham Station, a curling, ever descending, mile away on which they can arrive and depart.
Tim’s farm is a mere sausage’s throw away from the pub. I mention that he could have a good business frying up bacon sandwiches from his brand new kitchen housed in what used to be the pig sty.
Maybe it’s just wishful thinking after my long Odyssey from London to Malton via Newcastle, which I forsee the farm hands will still be laughing about in ten years time. I’m never going to be able to live it down.
‘So you’re fond of Newcastle then?’ jokes David, the Farm Manager. ‘Why didn’t you get off the train when you found out it was the wrong one?
‘Because it was already five minutes outside the station.’ I answer.
‘I thought you must ‘ave fallen asleep,’ says Sarah, Tim’s fiancé.
‘No, that would have been mildly less embarrassing. I actually got on it, thinking, my there’s a lot of people going to Scarborough for their holidays.’
Ha ha ha ha. They all think I’m mildly retarded. Mildly retarded and flashing red sunglasses which I insist on wearing. I realise I need to get a label printed that says: Prescription Lenses – Legally Blind without them. But no matter. They think I’m a poncey Londoner, posing in her shades, so ditsy that I can’t get on the right train.
‘They were only three minutes apart,’ says Anne, Tim's ex wife who lives on his other farm with his mother. It's nice of her to try and spring to my defense, but it's too much fun to let me off the hook.
There’s what appears to be a large, none too clean mop hanging over the stable door leading to the kitchen. Then it barks.
A tongue appears, dangling like an unravelled belt, and big, big teeth in possibly the biggest woolliest face I’ve ever seen.
‘Big dog,’ I say (as I said mildly retarded).
‘D’you like dogs?’
See blogs passim. ‘I quite like dogs,’ I say, approaching reluctantly and see that it’s not so much of a dog as a bloody pony, with sharp claws on paws the size of saucers.
‘Naw, big head, short legs,’ he says, unlatching the bottom half of the door and revealing the dog which looks not unlike one of those things you lie along the bottom of the door to stop draughts. But with four short legs. It greets me, shall we say ‘enthusiastically’. It’s oversized nose stuck in my bum in seconds.
‘It’s French. No manners,’ says Tim. ‘A hunting dog. Got a great sense of smell.’ It’s certainly checking me out. It’s like being hovered by a wet nose.
The room has a long oak table down the middle, big cartwheel kitchen chairs and a huge Aga at one end, gently radiating about as much heat as a baked potato. Mind you it is summer.
‘So what d’you want to do first?’ Tim asks.
In the absence of a bacon sandwich I ask for a tour of the farm. We walk through the yard full of barns, all of which are empty but for a tractor and a few other odd bits of machinery that look like instruments of torture. Lambs to the right of us (rejects – usually if a mother has more than two lambs she’ll reject the third, quite sensibly and worthy of emulation, I might think on a bad day), Pigs to the left. Most of the pigs are on another farm, but there are a few here, enormous Ginger Tamworths and a tank sized Saddleback, each with their own nissen hut. Tiny litters of piglets run in teams up and down the lanes. A lamb gets stuck in a fence trying to walk through it. Sarah lifts it by the neck and bum and throws it into the field.
Two men are leaning on a fence, chewing straw.
Okay, they are not chewing straw, but there’s a sort of implied bit of straw chewing going on.
Peter and Kevin.
Peter’s the Shepherd. Kevin’s the Pig Man. Kep is the sheepdog. The slightly cross eyed sheepdog. And he doesn’t look anything like Lassie. He’s brown and white and black in patches.
‘Aye t’colouring eets not t’ every folks teaste,’ he says. He has the most amazing accent, like a little hand organ, the words piping and wheezing out, like music, like humming. I want to get my tape recorder out and catch it like a butterfly so I can look at it later.
There is a huddle of shorn sheep, still with the razor marks on their pelts, standing in a pen, which the two men are watching, as though it was a job. Sheepwatching.
They’re the tups, I learn.
Waiting to go on ‘The Youws’ The ewes I must soon begin to call them as ‘lady sheep’ is not going to help my dwindling credibility.
I try to distinguish the breeds. The most curious are, perhaps not unsurprisingly, the two that look the most ‘built’ – think the Mitchell Brothers. Definitely the kind that are going to square up to you in a bar, looking for a fight, one nicer that the other (was it Phil or was it Grant?)
Here the lesser of the two thugs is a Blue Faced Leicester. A long, horse faced chap, taller than the others, while the ugly brute – something like a pugilistic Orc in the Lord of the Rings, is shorter, squatter, with what Tim tells me are good legs (got to be to carry all that weight – the bodies are bulked out like they’ve been going to the gym, pumping iron, and maybe a few steroids) and ‘a good arse’. The should be wearing studded collars and have a National Front tattoo on their forehead.
There are also Swaildales, smaller beasts with black faces and white snouts, easily recognisable by their round curling horns that in Vanuatu, where my daughter is, would be much prized as jewellery, and worth a fortune.
Dorsets are your nursery rhyme sheep, with sweet faces and round compact bodies, and Charolets recognisable by their pinkish ears, are also the sort you might use to illustrate a children’s story being more pretty boys.
All of them are scrunched together though the pen is large enough for them to spread out. It’s a gang. A shagging gang. All intent on rape and pillage. Up for it, as they say ‘oop north’. They butt each other, and scratch themselves on each other, and push each other, and tomorrow Peter will decide which ones get lucky with the ewes.
‘We see which ones run up to the front first,’ he says, but it’s all still carefully controlled to make sure the best breeders get to the best ewes, to get the best lambs.
‘We put a teaser in first,’ says Tim.
I look blank.
‘You know a castrated ram who’s firing blanks, so he has a good time and warms the ewes up, gets them going, and they start ovulating, then we bring in the big guns. No point in them wasting themselves.’
I saw it’s like a fluffer in a porn film.
‘What’s that then?” asks David, the farm manager.
“I’ll explain later,’ says Tim.
David still lives with his mother. Though he has a camper van they call the sex machine so conclusions need not be drawn!
‘So basically, these guys are all geared up for a sex holiday?’ I say.
‘Yep, farming is 30 percent sex and 70 percent violence,’ says Tim, smiling with the satisfaction of a proud parent.
‘We use these Texals because of their backside. Lamb is all about getting a good arse. You want a ewe with a good arse, to get a lamb with a good arse. It’s all about the back end.’
They could be starring in their own rap video.
'Baa baa got back.'
I say winsomely that I was sorry it didn’t translate into women.
‘Who says it dunt, Marion. All depends on your perspective…’
‘Aye,’ says Peter, ‘Ye’ve got te 'ave thee arse..’ It took me a second to realise he was still talking about the sheep.
So tomorrow is group sex day.
‘You should see them go. Some of these tups will do 20-25 a day, and they really give it all they’ve got. I’ve seen them have heart attacks going at it. They end up lame and everything,’ says Tim.
We come back to the farmhouse. I sit at the table and get my notebook out.
Peter, Kevin and Steve (Shepherd, Pig Man and Butcher) are sitting having their lunch, each with their tupperware box beside them. Kevin is reading BBC Good Food Magazine. Steve has a home made biscuit and a little cup cake in his.
'Do your wives do this for you?" I ask.
There's a chorus of ayes. It's like a junior cast version o f@Last of the SUmmer Wine'.
'Gosh, you're lucky, home baking as well!' I exclaim, impressed as all these wives have homes, families and jobs of their own.
'Dun't you pack lunch for your husband?' asks Peter.
'Oh I don't have a husband,' I say. It's the first time I've had to say it out loud and it's surprising how easy I make it sound while inside it's like swallowing tacks. Not that I ever packed his lunch for him. In fact the only thing I ever packed was his suitcase .
Steve the butcher who has been cutting up carcasses in the butchery next door is wearing a striped apron and a little grocer’s hat. He says something to Tim about a bucket of blood from the abbatoir, just as Brisket the dog disappears under the legs of my chair and reappears between my legs with his paws on my chest.
I wouldn’t have minded so much if he hadn’t had his mouth open.
I know I’m looking for some make companionship, but I had rather hoped it might not have a tail and dog breath.
