The Bull in Grandma’s Garden

May 27

R.M. Hamilton

“I wish I had a farmer for a father.” I said bitterly.

Mum, stung into defence of her husband, glared at me. “Oh no you don’t. If he was a farmer, you’d never get a horse. Your father might have said no this time, but if he was a farmer, there would be no chance he’d ever change his mind. Farmers hate horses. They only have them if they’re on a sheep station and the horse is a working animal.”

“Why? They’ve got lots of land, haven’t they?”

“Horses ruin grasslands. They’re picky eaters. They only eat certain plants, and they leave the weeds. Cattle eat everything. That means that the field regrows evenly. That’s why if you were a farmer’s daughter, you could just forget about ever having a horse.”

“Well, I still don’t have a horse, even if Dad isn’t a farmer.” I said crossly. I was twelve and life without a pony seemed unbearable. “What’s the point of living in the country if I can’t have a horse! It doesn’t even look like the country!” We were passing Grandma and Granddad’s tidy brick house with its giant glass ranch slider that Grandma polished every week until it turned into a mirror. The house and its immaculate town style lawn fringed by its neat, dull little display of carefully weeded flower beds annoyed me.

“Grandma didn’t want to move to the country,” explained Mum. “Granddad had to promise her a town style lawn or she wouldn’t have come.”

“Well, I think it’s boring.”

“It is rather boring,” admitted Mum, looking at the perfectly cut triangle of velvety green grass.

“Granddad stabs it with a gardening fork once a week.”

“He’s aerating it,” said Mum. “It’s supposed to help the roots feed more deeply.”

“Then he rollers it. I don’t know anyone else who rollers their lawn. Not even in town.”

“Nor do I,” admitted Mum.

I returned to the subject of horses. “Mum, I really want a horse.”

“I’m on your side about this,” said Mum. “I want one too. But currently, ‘Getting a Horse’ is a new idea to your father, and you know what he’s like with new ideas. We have to be patient and let ‘Getting a Horse’ become an old idea. Then he’ll probably agree. We’ve got the land for one. Or two,” she added dreamily.

Despite Mum being on my side (a powerful tactical advantage that I seldom enjoyed in my schemes); Dad refused to be budged. As far as I could tell, he had no good reason for denying me a little thing like a pony. Mum’s system of patiently waiting for Dad to adjust to the idea was irritatingly slow.

I decided to engage directly in the negotiation myself. This was unwise. Mum had a distinctive knack for dealing with Dad that I did not.

I found him doing his taxes. He was always doing his taxes. He had been known to say ‘yes’ to outrageous requests just to make us kids go away when he was doing taxes. Last week, I’d been particularly lucky. It had been raining for days and in the damp environment, half the sugar jar had cemented into a horrible, sickly sweet lump of poison. I had extracted this awful thing and gone through to Dad. “Can I eat this?” I had asked without much hope. I had expected him to start yelling about dirty little girls who put their bare hands into sugar jars. Instead, he had said, “yes, yes, yes,” in such an impatient and disinterested manner, I was sorry I hadn’t asked for the entire jar.

If I could get a giant lump of sugar out of him, I reasoned, I might also be able to extract a pony. Dad never went back on a promise. The trick was to get him to promise without noticing. Once he was committed, he would be as fastidious in preforming his vow as the unfortunate Jephthah in the book of Judges.

I approached him cautiously. “Dad,” I said softly. “Yes, yes, yes,” said Dad impatiently without looking up from his desk.

I brightened. This was just the sort of thing I wanted to hear. “Do you like animals, Dad?” I asked with deep cunning.

“Yes, yes,” said Dad, tapping furiously at his keyboard.

He wasn’t listening.

Excellent.

“Dad, can I have a pony?”

“WHAT?”

Oh no. He was listening. That was bad. Very bad.

You never could tell when he would start listening and when he started listening, he often said some very tiresome things. That was certainly the case today. “No! I don’t want horses! I don’t like horses! Horses ruin paddocks! We’re not getting horses! I told you no horses!”

So much for that.

“I told you to wait,” said Mum when I relayed the conversation to her. “You have to pick your moment with your father. It’s no good just rushing in.”

A few days later, Mum picked her moment. “I know you don’t want horses, Darls,” said Mum sweetly.

“That’s right,” said Dad fiercely.

“And they are expensive,’ said Mum in a chummy sort of voice.

Dad, touched by this show of support, smiled at her. From across the table, I eyed Mum suspiciously. This didn’t sound helpful to me.

Dad, excited by Mum’s apparent betrayal of the ‘We Need A Horse Campaign’ drew himself up and poured himself out to her. “They’re very expensive! They ruin grass, and I don’t like them and we’re not getting one!”

“Quite right,” said Mum. “How wise! Err, of course sometimes you can get them for free you know.”

“I don’t care! I don’t want a horse! It’ll ruin my paddocks and we’ll be stuck with it forever.’

“Well, not if we borrowed one,” said Mum. “For free.”

“What?” said Dad. “Really? We can do that?”

“The local riding school closes for the summer, and they farm out their ponies. They take them back in the Autumn.”

“Hmm,” said Dad. “That might be alright.”

But the head of the riding school didn’t think it would be alright. The field had been ungrazed for a few years. “Too much grass,” she said gloomily. “If we put horses in here, they’ll eat themselves sick. Get the grass down and we’ll let you have Biscuit and Charlie for the summer.”

“Maybe the farmer up the road can help us,” said Mum. I was sceptical.

The farmer’s favourite saying in life was “too much hassle” and he was quite capable of backing up this statement with a maddening inactivity. Even when he did move, it was about as fast as stalactite growth. However, he himself was being tackled about horses by his daughter.

“We need to borrow some of your cattle,” explained Dad, humbly. “The girls and Wendy want to borrow a couple of horses for the summer and our grass is too long.”

The farmer pursed his lips. “Two horses, did you say?”

“Yeah, apparently they need a paddock mate.”

The farmer scratched his chin.

We lived a ten-minute walk from his farm.

“Think the girls would let Lucy come over and ride sometimes?” he asked thoughtfully.

‘I’m sure they’d love that,” said Dad.

The farmer smiled a rare smile. “Lucy wants a horse. But I hate horses. Always ruining grassland. But if you’ve got horses and Lucy can borrow them…Yeah, I’ll bring some cattle down.”

That weekend, the farmer would herd fifty cows and a very large, prize-winning Murray Grey bull down the road towards our house. The Murray Grey was a warlike beast with a temperament that made Genghis Khan look like an excitable Quaker.

Even his owner showed him a certain deference.

It was decided to push Mr Bull and his harem down Grandma and Granddad’s driveway instead of ours. According to the farmer, “Arthur and Shirley’s driveway is narrower and they’re less likely to wander.”

Grandma and Granddad’s house sat in its town garden at the end of a long drive. The lawn was blocked off from the drive by a gate, a gate we were all very, very careful to shut and latch. Grandma and Granddad had gone to town for the day.

The farmer, aided by a couple of dogs and a big stick for waving, slowly walked his cattle down the road. We were stationed strategically along the way to keep things moving in the right direction.

“Mind the bull!” Yelled the farmer. “He’s in a bad mood.”

He certainly was. He rolled his eyes about in his big ugly head in a manner that suggested he’d relish a little violent goring. He scowled about at his bodyguard of fifty wives. Where, his sneer seemed to ask, was a spongy little matador when you wanted one?

By the time the bull and his entourage reached the top of Grandma and Granddad’s drive, his mood was so bad, even the farmer was moving at a regular pace. “Let’s get them in the paddock as soon as possible!” yelled the farmer.

By now the bull had stormed his way to the front of the pack. The herd was supposed to swing left, pass Grandma and Granddad’s house, down the bend in the drive and into the paddock beyond the stream.

But the bull had other ideas. He marched towards Grandma and Granddad’s carefully latched gate, placed his enormous, prize-winning chest against the rails and shoved. The latch didn’t even try to defend its territory. It capitulated on the spot and the gate, (that coward of Chamberlain proportions), fled to the side.

Things began to happen very, very fast.

The bull stormed angrily into Grandma and Granddad’s lawn. With a kingly jerk of his head, he informed his harem that the pilgrimage was over, and he was setting up court on this plot of grass. The cows hurried in after their lord and master. They crashed about the lawn and piled into the dull, tidy flower beds. There were so many cows in the garden they could hardly move. Within minutes, Grandma and Granddad’s town style garden had turned into a stockyard pen on market day.

What happened next is hard to believe. For the farmer at the top of the drive ceased to move at even a regular pace. He leapt high into the air and uttering a whoop of horror began running towards the garden. And not regular running either. This was Olympic gold medal winning sort of running!

He charged around the edge of the fence that boarded the garden.

Then the true awfulness of the situation dawned on us.

THE BULL HAD SEEN HIS OWN REFLECTION IN GRANDMA'S RANCH SLIDER!

Unlike Narcissus of classical woe, the bull was NOT impressed. He glared at the bull in the glass.

The bull in the glass glared back.

He lowered his head and snorted.

The bull in the glass returned the greeting.

The bull pawed the ground, snorted, and began to back up. The bull in the glass did the same.

And then, a miracle.

Not perhaps as impressive as the parting of the red sea, or a floating axe head, but a miracle non the less.

Because that farmer, that glacial creature, for whom everything was always ‘too much hassle,’ and who never moved anywhere beyond a slow amble, tore around the side of the fence like a world class athlete and waving his stick with an energy none of us knew he possessed, screamed in the face of his beastly bull.

The bull was shocked.

Hitherto he had not thought much of his owner. He thought his owner was a bit of a twerp, actually.

But here was his fool of an owner, apparently in the grip of some sort of nervous breakdown, forgetting his place as a small, not very impressive human.

The bull was not interested in dealing with a lunatic in the grip of a breakdown. He forgot his antagonist in the glass and swinging around, he charged out of the gate. Followed by his wives he crashed round the bend and galloped towards the field that he was supposed to enter in the first place.

We ran after him and slammed the gate shut. The bull proceeded to give vent to some very forceful thoughts at the top of his lungs.

He was a scary creature. But it was not the bull that filled us with fear.

We gazed at Grandma’s town lawn and as we gazed, panic mounted. “Get the lawn roller,” said Mum frantically. “Maybe we can fix this.”

After an hour of all of us carefully forking and fluffing and rolling Grandma’s lawn, the lawn looked very, very BAD.

There’s just not much you can do to help a lawn that’s been trodden down by fifty cows and a giant bull.

“Well,” said the farmer. ‘I’m going home. Don’t bother trying to get in touch. I won’t be answering my phone or opening my door for the next three weeks. I figure by then Shirley will have cooled down.”

He slouched off, his miracle speed gone and never to return, followed by his dogs.

We watched him go, enviously.

“Maybe Mum and Dad won’t notice,” babbled Mum.

“Well, if they do notice” said Dad, unhelpfully, “remember you were the one who wanted horses and, in this family, blood fights blood, so you’ll have to deal with your parents.”

We won’t go into that part of the story. Forgiveness was eventually obtained, but it lacked the ‘freely given’ element that hymnists are so inclined to wax lyrical about.

As for the question of horses, the riding school never did lend us two ponies. It didn’t matter.

After the bull fiasco, horses seemed like a nice, quiet way to fill a paddock.

My own horse, Oscar, arrived within a few months.

Because after what that bull and his cows did to Grandma’s lawn and garden, no one ever told me that HORSES ruin grasslands, ever again.