Chapter Six

      The farm buildings at Bank Farm were all in a row: the two-storey house, with a vegetable garden right in front of it, then the stables, a milking shed and a chicken shed. As well as keeping animals, Mr Gough had six fields where he grew corn and hay.

      ‘Seventy-two acres,’ he told me when I asked him how big it was. ‘Only small, but we get by.’ He looked at me. ‘You interested in farming then?’

      ‘Yes,’ I said keenly. ‘We used to help round the farm at the Connops’.’

      ‘You can help here as well. I’ll give you some jobs to see how you get on.’

      ‘What kind of jobs?’

      ‘Depends whether you’re good at getting up in the morning. I need someone to feed the animals – but I warn you, they get hungry at the crack of dawn.’

      ‘I can do that,’ I said immediately. ‘Denny and I will do it.’

      He explained the job. First we had to go all the way out to the horses’ field, which was on a hillside thick with bracken, and persuade them to come down to the stables for their hay. He told us to stand on orange boxes and climb up to slip a collar over each horse’s head so we could lead them down towards the house. As we were to find out, some days it was easy and other days those horses seemed determined to make our lives difficult and they’d canter off across the field at breakneck pace. We’d tear after them, our bare legs, clad only in shorts, getting scratched and scraped on the bracken.