The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – With Cows

Tags

1967, blue, brother, brown, cows, eyes, faces, food, hedge, herd, imagination, intelligence, Kent, meadow, Michael J Redford, milk, parents, reading, running, skill, sound, the Boats of Vallisneria

With Cows

Cows can be frustrating to say the least.   If you are in a hurry, they are not; if you want to turn left, they will turn right; if you want them to come to you, they will walk slowly but surely from you (except, of course, when there is food in the offing).   You can shout until you are blue in the face and, unless it is milking time, the only resultant effect will be an all pitying gaze from two enormous brown and blue eyes set in the most imperturbable face that nature has created.

My first introduction to the bovine species took place when I was about seven years old.   My parents, brother and I were on a picnic in Kent and on that particular day I was a fearless explorer penetrating the depths of the African jungle.   This had stemmed from the fact that I had just finished reading a book called the Gorilla Hunters which had sparked my imagination into a riot of fantasy.   Slipping unobserved into the undergrowth, I crawled upon all fours until I came upon a high, mossy bank surmounted by a thick, prickly hedge.   Hearing an unfamiliar chomping sound coming from the other side, I wriggled into the hedge and poked my head through into a small meadow.   I turned and gazed upwards and at the same instant, a cow who was hiding behind the hedge and who I swear was no less than fifty feet tall, turned and gazed down at me.   Then, unable to contain herself any longer, the cow blew violently down her nose at me, turned on her heels, and shot across the field like a bullet kicking the air behind her as she went.   I cannot recall ever seeing a cow move with quite so much speed.   Neither, I suspect, would an observer have ever seen a small boy move with such speed.   I rejoined the family scratched, breathless and as pale as a ghost, and shamelessly told the face-saving lie that I had been chased by a bull.

My opinions regarding the intelligence of cows has pendulated with the acquisition of experience.   When I first worked with cows I noticed how, on entering the shed at milking time, they all went to their own particular stands, and had an animal for any reason entered the wrong stand, she was very soon ousted by the rightful occupier.   This, I assumed, denoted intelligence.   However, I was very soon to discover that cows are animals of habit and habits are no criteria of intelligence.   Eventually I came to the conclusion that, because of its indolence and obstinacy, the cow was a complete and utter dim-wit.   But once again, experiences of the past year have led me to the final conclusion that cows have a very good measure of intelligence.   I milk for a local farmer one day a week to give his herdsman a much needed break from the seven day a week routine.   He owns a large farm with two herds of cows, a herd of Jerseys and a herd of Friesians.   Milking is carried out in a modern tandem parlour with automatic feeding and ‘all mod cons’.   When the animals enter the parlour they are fed by pulling a lever which releases just the right amount of food from a hopper into a manger.   When the lever is pulled down, two pounds of food are released and when pushed back up, another two pounds.   After a surprisingly short period of time, the cows become aware of the connection that existed between the action of the lever and the delivery of food.   By contorting their bodies in a manner quite out of character with their natural movements, the cows discovered that they were able to reach the lever and very soon began pushing it down and returning it to the upright position to obtain an extra double helping of food.   Indeed, one of the Friesian cows developed the knack of tossing the lever violently up and down in order to obtain an almost continuous supply of food.   When her manger was almost full, she would struggle back to her normal position and attack the gargantuan meal before her.

However, with cattle cake costing over thirty five pounds per ton, this state of affairs had to be dealt with.   We eventually overcame their antics by tying a piece of cord to the stanchion and looping the other end over the lever, so that in order to feed the cows, we would merely remove the loop, pull the lever and replace the loop.   This system worked beautifully – for a while.   It wasn’t long before the animals overcame this obstacle by pulling the loop from the lever themselves, despite the fact that this is a somewhat delicate operation for their great, cumbersome muzzles to perform.   An interesting point that came to light during this period was that the Friesian cows were the worst offenders, whereas, out of a herd of twenty five Jerseys, only four managed to reach this standard of reasoning and acquired the knack of working the lever.

Yet despite their apparent superior intelligence, I have in my experience, found fewer ‘character’ cows among the Friesians.   By ‘character’ cows I mean the bovine equivalent of the human being who is ‘a bit of a lad’ or rather ‘quite a girl’, the one who stands out in a crowd.   One such a cow was Magatha, who was just about the ugliest little creature that I have ever seen.   She was sway-backed, had a fawny-coloured coat with grey patches all over it and had a face too concave even for a Jersey.   One ear had a lump torn from it and her ridiculous little head was beset by two crooked horns.   Despite her lack of charm and elegance, for she waddled along in a most ungainly manner, she was the most endearing and affectionate cow I have ever met.   At milking time she would always be last out of the field and last out of the shed and during the short walk between the two, she would creep up behind me and push her ugly little head under my arm and we would troop up the lane behind the herd like a couple of young lovers.   On one occasion (I think it must have been a ‘morning after the night before’, for I wasn’t in a very benevolent mood), I failed to reciprocate her affections and instead gave her a hefty whack on the rump to speed her on her way.   She countered this breach of etiquette by doing a half-passage and forcing me nearer and nearer to the side of the road.   I realised too late what she was up to when I landed full length in the ditch running with effluent from the much heap.   However, like all good lovers we made up and until the end of my stay at that particular farm, we could be seen every morning and every evening strolling arm in arm together along the lane.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

blue & brown wormhole: TO A SOLITARY DISCIPLE by William Carlos Williams
eyes wormhole: thought
faces wormhole: ‘oh my girls and muse …’
hedge wormhole: travelling // arrival
reading wormhole: … the underleaves show
sound wormhole: moon- // washed

 

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Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – intemperance

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2016, 8*, air, ale, breathing, countryside, earth, field, gaze, ghosts, grandfather, green, honeysuckle, Kent, life, Michael J Redford, noon, nose, quiet, sound, speech, suburbia, summer, Sunday, time

 

                on Sundays my father downed tools and was
                led by the nose – the Redford bequest –

                drawing us into the quietude of Kent,
                out from the crust of suburbia,

                plunged deepening into green
                carrying bags of sandwiches towards noon;

                when, he would gaze around awhile
                and “let’s try over there” as if he were only

                wondering, “landlord’s name is Bert,”
                he’d trail behind quietly to himself, breathing

                even ghosts in through his live and open nostrils
                (back, even, to the seventeenth century,

                 looking out over the tombstones,
                creaking & checking, drinking, ale); taught me

                to fathom honeysuckle
                on a damp summer’s air carrying far before

                the meet, to flare to the earth
                of a muck heap ‘made’ well, to bask

                and loiter by ammoniac stables
                breathing for to clear the head, to “foller yer nose”

                and find the green bean field –
                cup of sweet wine drunk with intemperance –

 

 

read the collected work as it is published: here
this is an appliquiary to: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Follow Your Nose; this piece is, of course, written from the uncle-person singular, therefore his ‘father’ was my Grandfather, who died when I was still a baby – I knew him about as much as a ruffle on the head from on high that I can remember; I have grown familiar with him through Mick’s writings and old pictures I have acquired to try and trick time out of its progress – AND IT SUCCEEDED!

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

air & green & Sunday wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Follow Your Nose
breathing & speech wormhole: ah … // oh … // meanwhile … // … // tha ya ta …
field wormhole: ‘field of corn …’
ghosts wormhole: passersby
life wormhole: passing below
quiet wormhole: sleep now
sound wormhole: 1967
time wormhole: time

 

The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Follow Your Nose

Tags

1967, air, brother, countryside, Essex, father, fields, green, honeysuckle, horse, Kent, London, Michael J Redford, morning, mother, nose, pub, smell, suburbia, Sunday, the Boats of Vallisneria, trees

Follow Your Nose

My father had a nose for pubs, there’s no denying that!   Noses were always a prominent feature of the Redford family and very sensitive instruments they are too.   I remember when my brother and I were still at school, how mother would pack a shopping bag with sandwiches, apples and flasks of tea and early on Sunday mornings the whole family would disappear into the countryside.   We were then living in South East London and we would take advantage of every opportunity to escape into the freedom and quietude of Kent.   I was born in Sydenham and my father also was a native of that area, but when he was a boy, the green fields of Kent came rolling to within easy view from his back door.   Now alas, time has stamped these green fields with the concrete monotony of suburbia.   So it was that many a fine Sunday morning would see the Redford family making a bee-line for Shoreham just north of Sevenoaks.   Shoreham was our stepping off point and in those distant days it seemed a million miles from London.   My grandmother used to work at the Crown Hotel there and we were permitted to leave our bicycles in the garden while we plunged into the green depths of the surrounding countryside.   Towards noon father would suggest that we find a pub where we could revive our flagging energy and eat our sandwiches and, pausing awhile, he would gaze around and say, “Let’s try over there.”   Over the hill we would go and, sure enough, the very first building we would come to would be a pub.   Now this never failed.   It mattered not what part of the British Isles we were in, ‘Dad’s Nose’ was an infallible receiver and every pub a homing beacon.   In this way, father had built up over the years, a storehouse of information concerning pubs in Kent, Surrey and Sussex.   Sometimes a friend of the family would arrive at the house and suggest that we all take a trip out somewhere and have a drink.   “I’ve found a nice little pub at Luddesdowne,” they would say, “The Red Lion I think it is.”

Father’s mental filing cabinet would whirr into action and he’d say, “Ah yes, you mean the Golden Lion.   Lays down in the dip alongside an orchard.   Landlord’s name is Bert.”

I have never known my father to be caught out by a pub he didn’t know, although there was one occasion however, when father’s probosciscal (sic) infallibility received a severe jolt.   While living for a short period in Basildon New Town in Essex we sometimes took a stroll to Stock on Sunday mornings.   This was a distance of some ten miles and we usually timed our arrival at Stock to coincide with opening time.   On our first expedition however, we mistimed ourselves badly.   We had walked only as far as Great Burstead when the pubs began to open and so we decided against going on to Stock that morning for it would almost have been closing time by the time we reached our goal.   Following Dad’s nose, we turned off the main road and climbed the hill in the direction of Little Burstead.   At the top, among elm and oak, stood an old grey church.   Nestling beside this in the shadow of its spire was a small weather-boarded building that displayed all the characteristics of an Essex pub.   There were only a dozen or so other buildings in sight which were quite obviously private dwellings, so we walked up to the leaning timbers beside the church.   I was stunned and father was puzzled. Above the door was a sign which read ‘Village Stores – Newsagents – Tobacconists – Confectioners’.   This was something I could never have dreamt possible, father had failed and the honour of a long line of Redford noses had been thwarted.   This nagging failure prompted my father to do a little research, the results of which, in our collective view, reinstated the Redford’s nose to its rightful place in history.   The village stores was once the King’s Arms, a very old inn that dated back to the seventeenth century.   It stands along one side of the graveyard and, in days gone by, when the worthy patrons drank their ale in the back parlour, they could look out of the bar windows onto the tombstones, and it was for this reason that the inn was also known as Dead Man’s Rattle.

However, I must not give you dear reader a false impression of the Redford’s standards of propriety and morality.   We are not inveterate drunkards, but merely people who enjoy a pint of beer in congenial company and in congenial surroundings.   The Redford nose is not sensitive to only yeast and hops, but is also most appreciative of other aromas.   The nostalgic scent of honeysuckle on a damp summer’s eve for example.   It is surprising how far the scent is carried when the air is damp.   I have on one occasion been aware of the sweet tangle of honeysuckle a full two hundred yards before reaching it.   Of course, not all the smells of the countryside are as attractive, and here most people will automatically think of the many muck heaps dotted about the landscape and although one can hardly describe the scent of these as attractive, I personally do not place them in the unattractive category, for a muck heap that has ‘made’ well emanates a virile, earthy aroma that gives promise of future bumper crops.   The smell which immediately comes to mind in this category is that of the Stink Horn, the woodland fungus that gives off an overpowering stench of putrefying flesh and is attractive only to the bloated blue-bottle which is the curse of all rural ramblers.   The ammoniac-al smell of stables is offensive to some people, but I have many happy early memories connected with horses and I find it difficult to pass by a stable without pausing and conversing with the inhabitants, and even if there are no horses at home, I will stop, stand and stare.   Anyway, it is surprising how it clears the head.

One fine spring morning I visited a farmer friend of mine, but I arrived five minutes after he had left for Monk’s Tye, a fifteen acre field somewhere on the other side of the farm.   I told his wife who had opened the door to me, that I wasn’t familiar with the layout of the fields.

“That’s alright,” she beamed, “Yer can’t miss ‘im.   ‘E’s fixing the fence ‘longside the bean field – just foller yer nose.”

I went to the end of the stackyard, sucked my forefinger and stabbed it into the air.   A mild breeze from the west was moving the tree-tops and borne upon it was the unmistakably sweet, and to my mind, the most glorious country smell of all, that of a bean field.   I faced the zephyr and tacked across the fields.   It was a cup of sweet wine that I drank with unashamed intemperance.

At one period during my military days when I was transferred to Egypt, we embarked upon an exercise that took us trekking across the Sinai Desert to St. Cathrine’s Monastery.   In the heart of that leafless and shale-covered land cradled in the depths of silence and time, it struck me how different was the smell of the air to that of an English day.   I have always been of the mind that pleasure is the product of sensual contrasts and this certainly holds true in this instance for, although I had always delighted in the scent of a field of well-made hay or a breeze heavy with the sweet scent of a bluebell wood, I have never appreciated them more than on my return from that arid land.   So marked was the contrast and so great the ensuing pleasure, that I was moved to write the following lines:-

            Ne’re before, ‘till I went away
            From England, did an English day
            Seem quite so fair.   No line ‘twixt earth
            And sky so soft, no scene so dearly
            Held within the memory’s store
            For man’s old age to reap.
            A golden sun o’er greenest grass,
            The whitest clouds the azure dusts,
            And gentle is the soft warm breath
            That lifts the lark and cools
            The summer’s day.
            Low wind the lanes ‘twixt hedgerows
            Honeysuckle scented, trees clasp their
            Fingertips above in trembling sway,
            And softly rustling chestnut leaves
            So green, turn gold against the sun,
            Their echoes of a year gone by –
            The hunting ground of stoat and fox.
            The slow warm hours the humming
            Insects ride and dart, the trickling
            Streams the hot stones smooth,
            And slowly pass the whiles of dusk
            Across the silent fields once more.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

air wormhole: just saying, is all VI: // accountable / for my own outbreath / …
father & Sunday wormhole: familiasyncopation
green wormhole: industrial estate
London wormhole: time
morning wormhole: 1964
smell wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – mmpph’
trees wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Snow

 

The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Bowl of Gourds

Tags

1967, balloon, black, blue, buildings, clouds, colour, cottage, countryside, creativity, distance, earth, end, garden, gourds, green, heart, herbs, humanity, Kent, life, light, line, Mars, mathematics, meadow, Milky Way, name, nature, now, oak, orange, pattern, poem, shape, silence, slugs, solar system, space, speed, stars, start, sun, thought, time, toad, uncle, universe, valley, vow, wind, windows, yellow

A Bowl of Gourds

On the kitchen table in front of the window that looks across the paddock to the piggery reposes a bowl of gourds.   I had always associated ornamental gourds with the exhibitionistic bric-a-brac of Victoriana, something which I could well do without in my small cottage.   Then one day a friend gave me some seeds among which were those of ten gourds.   Having never before imposed censorship on any form of life, I heeled them into the soil beside a trellis and forgot them.

Now, here upon the table is a bowl of colour, a bowl of shapes so varied that it seems quite illogical that they should all come from the same type of plant.   Their names also are just as demanding for attention: Bishop’s Mitre, Ohio Squash, Red Turk’s Cap, Squirting Cucumber and numerous others.   In the centre of the bowl is a warted gourd which, despite its bright orange colour, reminds me of the old fat toad who lives behind the water butt in the yard.   We call the toad Bebe after the initials of her species Bufo Bufo, and if the sun is particularly fierce, I water her retreat to prevent her becoming dehydrated from loss of water through her skin.   After all, one must take care of a creature such as Bebe who appears to be more effective of clearing the lawn of slugs than a hundredweight of poison and who knows, if it wasn’t for Bebe, perhaps I might not be gazing at a warted gourd at this very moment.

My thoughts are diverted from the toad to a Montgolfiere balloon of yellow and green vertical bands, and soon I am rising gently through slate coloured clouds into the deep blue beyond.   What were the thoughts, I wonder, of the Marquis d’Orlandes and Pilatre de Rozier as they saw the Bois de Boulogne slip smoothly from beneath them in 1783.   As the cheers faded, so came the silence.   For the very first time man had lost all tangible contact with mother earth and the first step on man’s long journey to the stars began.   The stars?   I questioned the thought, for it would still take all of three thousand years to reach Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to Earth (apart from the sun, that is) should we travel at the impossible speed of one million miles per hour.   Even at optical velocity it would still take four years and four months to reach our destination.   The problem then is not so much one of distance, but one of time.   Theoretically it is possible to condense time, and if we could condense it to a sufficient degree, man could circumnavigate the universe within his own lifetime.   A paper by L.R. Shepherd, Ph.D., read to the British Interplanetary Society in 1952 explains through the medium of mathematics far beyond my comprehension, how a time distillation effect is produced at near optic velocities.   If, for example, an astronaut makes a round trip to a local star and records a journey of three years, on his return to Earth he will have found that twenty one years have in actual fact passed.   All the mathematical jiggery and pokery in the world however cannot possibly reverse the procedure; nature still gives us a one way ticket through time.

My mind came back slowly from its extra-galactic wanderings, back through our own milky way, through the local cluster to the fringes of our solar system.   Thoughts travel faster than any quantum of light.   Out there beyond the human eye, is a mass so distant that it is hurtling away from our own island universe at such a velocity that its light will never reach us.   Yet the mind can flick to all corners of the universe in a second.   Back come my thoughts past the giant planets, the asteroids and Mars, back into Earth’s sweet atmosphere, through the slate grey clouds and so once more to my bowl of gourds.

It is a bowl brimming with curves and circles reminding me of the rolling countryside beyond my window.   It reminds me also of the time I stayed at a friend’s house in Kent.   From his garden, heavy scented with herbs, I could see but one building across the small valley.   It was a modern house of straight and severe line, not at all part of the natural scene.   The lines of the countryside are soft and moving as the blue distant swell of the undulating hills; as the stem of the meadow fescue curved from the prevailing winds like the archer’s bow; as the blackened oak beams that rise from floor to gable of the labourer’s cottage and indeed as the back of the labourer himself whose broad shoulders have borne the weight of many years’ work.   Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so does she abhor a straight line.   But for that house across the valley time would not have existed.   Its rigid lines cut across the flow and caused discontinuance.   They shocked the mind back to the present from its meandering in eternity.   They almost screamed, “This is now, this is NOW,” imprisoning the mind in the confines of time.   We can release our minds into space, we can cast our thoughts out beyond the constellations and beyond the faintest nebula where time is meaningless, for the patterns above have altered but little since the dawn of man but we cannot plumb the depths of time with the same freedom.   The mind is confined to now; always there is something to remind us that this is the present.   Time is a gradation of eternity by conscious thought, therefore it is only when our bodies decay and conscious thought is no more that we can be truly free.

So man, upon his world so great
Has always wanted to create
Machines which, started once will never
Cease but carry on for ever.

Yet all the time O foolish man,
You’re merely part of that great plan,
A tiny part, hast thou not seen
This wondrous universe machine?

This motion so perpetual
Is the universe and all
That lies beyond in time and space,
E’en down to us, the human race.

There’ll be no end, there was no start,
There is no shape therefore no heart.
And to create it doth aspire
To use the debris of its ire.

Poor mortal look deep in your heart
And realise that you’re just a part
Of that which knows no boundaries,
Heeds not your trivial quandaries.

Servants of the cosmos vow
To play your part and take your bow,
Or servants you will always be –
Until you die, ‘tis then your free.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

black & blue & green & light & orange wormhole: Drug Store, 1927
buildings wormhole: constant hummm
clouds wormhole: being in love – poewieview #26
creativity wormhole: the both passive and transitive / non-presumptive pre-conceptualist attenuation of being
garden & life & sun & uncle wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – autumn
oak & silence & time wormhole: The Boats of Vallesneria by Michael J. Redford – Autumn Thoughts
space wormhole: Saturday – poewieview #3
thought wormhole: ‘on second thought …’ – poewieview #27
wind wormhole: furl-reach
windows wormhole: the coming of ‘The Boats of Vallisneria’ by Michael J. Redford
yellow wormhole: between thoughts