Most times it’s a hard day, but now and then you get a little chance to sit down on a bale of hay in the cowshed and listen to the great cows munching in a delicious satisfying crunching way at the hay you have just given them. A dog bounds in the yard outside and you see its shaggy back run and then an empty churn clangs over and you know that something’s amiss; through the small window cluttered with hosepipes and tins of udder balm you see the eleven heifers rampaging on the yard, looking for all as if they own the whole place. You jump out past the solid heaving milk cow backs and slither out of the door. The dogs are with you in a moment – they have been waiting for just this command you now give – Ho! Ho! Halley d’r’ma – fetch them – Go on! and smack! the two dogs flip like greased lightning across snapping at the cow heels – There go the heifers slithering and icing splaying up the snowcaked yardroad, desperate in their efforts to avoid the worrying dogs – all just one thing to contend with in a day’s run you think as you walk back through the iron gate which clangs irritatingly behind you.
The cobwebs are many that droop from the cowshed roofs, thick with haydust – and where the late sun, cold, brown-yellow, falls its light through the choked-up skylight the bare knotted wood is picked up and illuminated. The cattle drool on each other and lick where you would not think a cow could stretch its neck to for odd pieces of hay – and swish water with their noses as they slup the contents of the drinking cups. Groaning, breathing heavily, dung splattering and urine gushing, tie chains rattling and bleak eyes staring, these poor creatures wait for five o’clock and milking time.
It is now Saturday 12 Jan. 1963, about 3.15 pm. The sun is shining cold and golden on the trees and the numerous birds flutter about the hayricks. I can see their oscillating shadows on the snowy ground. The old grey dog licks up and stands, his grey eyes blank. He always looks at your knees for directions, never your eyes. His pink tongue flips, and he strolls forward to sit at my feet. I am in the process of barrowing turnips, icy and frozen, into the warm smelly cowsheds to thaw out and be used as feed. The crows or rooks glide overhead, waiting for a chance to alight, and the afternoon lapses into a calm silent interlude. The far mountain hillside is beginning to grow pink as the sun sets, and it appears textured like a ploughed field.
I can see small birds, varicoloured, green ones with yellow wingstreaks, black mottled larger ones, pink breasted bullfinches and a multitude of tits, all feeding on the strewn oats and barley – grain blown from the crusher and the grain loft.
Mon. 14 Jan 1963 – the sky was the moist vivid steel-blue this morning over the sea and headlands. It was overcast but the yellow rays of pre-sun were advancing over the saddles in the hills. More snow had fallen during the night and the banked drifts were tricky to walk upon. You couldn’t help turning now and again to see the stupendous bluegrey touching the oversides of the bubbling cloud. The vast panorama of white etched fields and moorland devastates the eye. It is now afternoon and I am throwing bales of bad hay down from the top of the next bay in the barn, and straw, but most of the bales have rotten string on them and are bursting into showers of smaller chunks! It is quiet up here, and shadowed, but the golden light is shafting across the opposite bale-wall. A black and white cat scuttled away on top when I mountaineered it to the summit a while back, so life still inhabits these airless heights! A few minutes ago came a rush and a batter on the roof and splatter on the ground of sleet, almost hail; then it ceased as suddenly as it began and all the myriad birds re-settled to peck incessantly at the brown grain strewn amidst the dirty hard snow. A black cat has just curled its tail round itself an sits watching and waiting for the unwary bird. A hollow whoosh hails from the sky as a jet plunges onward along this air route that passes unseen through the clouds above the farm. It had become a white bright light now, the snow reflecting and blinding: but only for seconds, and it now returns to its normal drab un-whiteness. It feels somewhat (I should think) like sitting at the very top of a smaller version of St Pancras station bookinghall arch, to sit in this lofty sweet smelling paradise. A protected feeling, strong and bulky, the dusty grassy smell of bad and good hay wafting in my nostrils. The cat has sprung onto a beam where no-one would think an animal would dare to go, and traversed half the barn, then has disappeared behind a pile of bales on my left. It will probably pounce on the back of my neck in a while! Once again the silence is all pervading and the afternoon grows colder with the expectancy of dusk; in my shirt sleeves I am feeling a little nippy too, so the heat of work will have to serve as a toasting-toe fire.
Tuesday 15 Jan 1963. I saw such a flaring pink sunrise as I was walking across the mountain on this rather stuffy uncomfortably cold winter morning., with old hardpacked snow lying under an inching sprinkling of a recent fall; it shone with such contrast to yesterday’s heavy blue and sickly yellow. Two young foxes chased in the reverberating distance, and one blackaway rabbit played catchtail with another ahead of me. Over the windy mountain the horse-herd stood cut out, silhouetted in the snowy moor, foot-dabbing, scraping an existence deep under the crisp white snowcover.
The sky is ominous with cloud now, in the the late afternoon and minute spots of sleet-rain are falling sparsely. There is a cold thaw, yet warm and sweaty when you walk in the fields. This white silence is down again over the countryside, and the loudest noise comes from a pounding bulldozer clearing the ten foot deep snow from the mountain road.
Thursday – Even though the icy wind was wailing over the mountains, I thought it would be cold, wintry, but sunny. I was not prepared for what did occur. From the shoulders of the Eastern mountain a constant mist was heaving, only looking bleak and wispy as it showered across the moor. As I neared the thing, I realised it was blown snow, and not at all serene! One moment I was strolling on a nicely bulldozed road, the next precipitated into an icy stinging blizzard. The coldness was much more than ordinary snow and there was a howling wind, strong and buffeting to make matters worse. The road, which had only been cleared the previous night, was now drifted over higher than the actual snowing had been. But it was up and down, the drifts being soft, my wellingtons packed with snow-blow. Spectacles caked up with ice, hair iced, the numbing cold was terrible for an English winter. My left hand froze so that it was difficult to move the fingers, with no feeling, and I blundered on through this night of day.
Saturday – By all that’s fiery, it’s cold! It chills right through you when you stand and direct cattle in the white frozen lane, and the cold sun penetrates little into the icy wind.. My hands are like sausages in a fridge. The cold bites into every one of your exposed pores, to chavel away into the roots of your nerves, until you become a living snowball rolling down a slippery hill! Thursday 24 Jan 1963 – There is a white glare this afternoon on the snowy fields which makes it difficult to distinguish shapes; the sun remote through a veil of misty cloud shines whitely bland, stripped of all enchantment. The woods are still, the tracks of animals the only sign of life, the sooty gaunt thicket stark and silent. The hum and thrum of the David Brown tractor, powerfully driving a screeching cicular saw out at the furthest corner of the yard, against the woodpile, sings through the thawing air, to add colour to the desolate monochrome of mountain and woodland. Friday 15 Jan 1963 – At last the thaw is here! I can hear with joy the welcome sound of dripping water, melted snow and ice falling from the packed nooks and crannies that have not seen warmth for a month. The sky, for again, is cloudless and pale blue turning to a white vapourous haze low on the horizon. Hoar frost was over the moorland vegetation this morning as I trudged through the softening snow, and on each hillside a fox meandered arched and black-quick amongst the static fox-boulders. Imagine a leaping stone, a get-up-and-walk dark stone in the whiteness of crisp snow; yes – every one of the deep boulders lodging on the mountain is an animal, and in your eye-corner he moves a little, to weasel-curl his lithe spine, nimbly smooth to walk across, tracking the snail-print, or with those rock feet stride proudly menacing onward, sideward, out beyond the ghosting eye. Meanwhile the drips still drip, the afternoon makes a supreme effort to carry the zenith warmth, and I know in all of the farms and houses people are anxious and waiting, following with their mind’s eyes every drop of falling snowmelt, anticipating the re-emergence of the good land.
This is perhaps the most perfect afternoon since I have been at Mynydd Melin. Ken and Kendal have gone to another farm to help with the corn, and I suspect Mrs Evans and little John have gone for a walk.That leaves me the sole defender of the fort. If anything did go wrong, I probably would not have the faintest idea what to do; but until now I have just carried through with my chores and let the peaceful sunny afternoon soak lovingly into my bones. But the peace and overwhelming force of Nature that I had hardly dared hope would come has descended like a brilliant backcloth today, and very humbly I can perhaps enter into the government and control of natural things. It all becomes astoundingly clear like a revelation – the land, the sun, and the forms of life upon the earth, the natural order of tender control that is exercised by Nature through Man, and in Man himself, and so right down to the lowest form of life. Growth seems to be moving under the earth now – the white mantle of snow has covered many secret evolutions that are, with the thaw, making themselves felt along the semi-dormant nerves in the soil. Saturday – The sun was not so red, warm or spectacular as yesterday. Again the temperature has been above freezing, and the water-melt has been with us, under our feet, down our necks, in the air. There is cloud over the Preseli peaks, a little nightcap, and the hill horizon is dark with the luminescence of the evening sky, which filters in its upper reaches to blue-grey; but in the spaces in cloud an azure and pink tinge and a faint mauve with the nearer smokelike cloud obscuring some of the undulating and switchback panorama echoing the rolling intermoulding mountains. On the opposite side of the valley a haze spread about the half-frozen fields, the sun shining coldly from a dull blue sky, the haze folding about the etched woods as on an aquatint. The mountains have barely shrugged off the cloud garlands that threatened to enclose them; the sound of melting snow shakes through the still air. March 1963. Thick wet cloud is down all over the mountain today and the visibility varies from 40 to 100 yards. The cold cloud appears to want to inhabit warmer regions, for it billowed into the cowsheds when I was mucking out this morning in vapourous breaths.The yard looked white from the cowshed door, everything covered in a shiftless blanket – it reminded me of a Spring morning with the dew rising, a little misty, but this is wet and clammy with a wind attached to it from the SouthWest, nippy too if one is exposed to it long enough. The cattle seem to be statues encased in cottonwool, the sides of the box being the edges of visibility.It makes it seem more lonely, remote, but the wind seems to bring with it happy promises and the leafless branches pick up waves of hope like radio antennae.
THE THRESHING MACHINE. It’s a monster of a machine and the men who run it seem as old and worn as the machine itself. It has claimed one victim, falling, pulling, catching, tearing, pulping and ejecting in a shower of straw and bits, chewed and digested, the wooden levers lunging, belt twisting and slapping, engine throbbing and dying, rising and falling, a bright orange fairground-type contraption with cages and wheels and mechanisms. They wouldn’t use the machine for a long time afterwards, perhaps afraid of the entity, the mind of the thresher. But here it is outside, churning, feeding the baler, men feeding it, a man-made fearsome monster.
There is a strong fierce wind storming over my head as I squat under the windless side of a mosscovered stone wall. The snow has almost gone now and a few radiant greens have appeared in the moss, in one or two areas of untrodden grass. A little plant of the brightest translucent green I found, growing shoots in the warm bottom cowshed by the lichened age old cowdunged window. The gnarled cold elders over me sway and knot and creak and the wind noise is louder and more rushing.
It’s a very pleasing feeling to come upon a clutch of seventeen brown and ochrey hen eggs in a nest of loose hay amongst the bales in the barn.One of them was misshapen, oddly squashed and lovely to hold. I gathered them up in a satchel, gently placing them one by one. How perfect they looked clustering there.
I’ve just let the cows in and all except one have come down, this errant one is without a horn on the left hand side looking at her. I remember when she lost it – it was dripping thick dark red blood and she looked so forlorn. Nobody else is about. Kendal is up on the top fields ploughing his guts out, Ken has taken three steers to Cardigan mart, Leila and John have gone in the car to Fishguard and even old man Evans seems to have disappeared.I am supposed to fork a bit of the high garden, which should have been done earlier, but for the frosts. There is quite a cold wind blowing from the South, but the light is bright. Felix the cat has come to sit on my lap and purr contentedly. I am sitting on the earth bank flanking the garden, and to my left the old waterwheel splashes a trickle of water over its old paddles. It used to drive the crusher, or hammermill, grinding the corn into a more palatable food, but the mill is now driven by tractor and belt – thus the wheel has fallen into decay, and rusted tin and debris have collected round its once-grand form.
27 April 1963. Low cloud, wet and clammy, blown by a cold wind, has shrouded the mountains all day – the sun has been just a light in the fog. The cows are out at night now, as from yesterday, and this makes things a little easier in the mornings regarding mucking out. This morning has passed quickly and I am now out on one of the top fields rolling the hay (which is now very short blades). A lone sheep has kept me company, sitting and looking the way a dog will out of the side of the face, the whites of her eyes showing. About 3 o’clock the wind picked up and lifted the cloud, which began to swirl in great clots around the field and way off through the low pass into Dinas and the coast.It has now disappeared completely off the low moors and contents itself with busying round the high crags. Visibility is back to normal now, and appears pin-point clear after the obscurity of the morning.