Three years old is no age to become a matador
Muriel Grimwood and
her father Chris Grimwood, snr
BORN under the sign of Taurus
I must have an affinity for bulls, or maybe it saved me from a terrible
fate! We had a poor incarcerated creature on the farm – a very large
black bull. He belonged to Uncle Chris and was only on loan to the Parsonage
for servicing the milking herd. He’d been quite docile when he was
young; treated as a pet, he’d become fully grown and feisty before
anyone realised. Compared to being free in the fields with the cows at
Hawks Hall, where Chris farmed, his visits to the Parsonage were less
than satisfactory. He was housed in a small corner of the cowsheds with
only a high window to the outside world.
Clearly his quarters were not in favour on the day
in question, or one of the cows was particularly tempting; so he decided
to escape. He battered the door of his pen so much that it opened. Free
and purposeful, he made a dash through it into the stable yard. His bellowing
and battering had been easily heard so it was not long before folks were
alerted.
I didn’t considered him a danger; I was only
about three years old and that day I was playing in a large heap of sand
in the yard.
Out into the yard the bull raged. Mum ran out of
the house and into the yard. She spotted me, ran across to pick me up,
and dashed towards the stables for shelter - the bull in hot pursuit.
Against the stable was a large elder bush. Elder was believed to keep
flies away and was thought useful near to animal sheds.
Mum reached the wall ahead of the bull and took
shelter beside the elder bush. Without hesitation the bull charged, head
down, horns out and bent on destruction. In his ‘red haze’
he must have thought the bush to be the more important adversary. Consequently
he buried his horns into the trembling shrub and started shaking it to
bits, only inches from mum and me. Mum was
DESPITE growing over a mere 83 acres, the crops and produce of Parsonage Farm were truly mixed and variable. What an interesting place to live and experience in those early days! We grew wheat, barley, oats, beans, peas, potatoes, turnips and, later on, sugar beet. Uncle Tom looked after the milking herd; Uncle John looked after the pigs, and mum looked after several hundred chickens. We ground our own meal, cut our chaff for feed stuff and grandma still made butter on the premises; we were certainly never short of food. Our produce was for many years organic! Manure from the sties and cowsheds was spread on the fields and clover was grown for its nitrogen as well as its valuable seed. Even the outside toilet – a two holer with one large and one small seat, was emptied once a year and spread I’m not sure where, but it helped the soil. It’s odd, but I can easily imagine this type of farming coming back again. Uncle John’s interest in machinery grew and he became the natural choice to maintain it. I used to watch him sharpen the binder and hay cutter blades by clamping the cutter bar along the top of a five bar gate.
Uncle John was innovative, artistic, and a great vegetable gardener. His strengths, coupled with Uncle Tom’s energy, sociability, determination and gift with animals made the Parsonage a very successful small farm.Today’s photographs of the Parsonage cannot do it full justice because all the hedges and trees are missing. The whole environment around the farm was much prettier when there were shrubs, protective hedges, flowering vegetation and mature trees. Winter tasks in the 50s included tending to the ditches and hedges – all cut by hand. They weren’t layered at the Parsonage but they were cut short every once in a while and were a haven for wildlife. Hedging and ditching was a tough job and I’ve seen Uncle Tom pitch eight-foot long branches and cuttings into an enormous pile to be burnt. When the middle burnt through, he would roll the whole pile over to get it started again. Incidentally, the hazel sticks were retained for supporting runner beans in John and Tom’s vegetable gardens.
In the 1950s the Grimwoods
used a Massey Harris tractor at Parsonage Farm