Four Babies And A Funeral

There must have been something in the water in March last year. In the last four weeks four friends of mine have had children. Even the most statistically-challenged should be able to figure that’s a rate of one baby a week. First Rufus arrived on 24th Jan, with a brief hiatus before Amadeus popped out on 11th Feb and a mere day later, Annabelle. Finally Rupert was delivered on 17th Feb. Except for Amadeus, all are firstborns. 

I don’t quite know how to process this sudden influx of human life. Each one is a miracle. Each firstborn has propelled their parents from a world of spontaneity and lie-ins to another of sleepless nights and staying-in. All four little ones have responsible parents who will make sure their children are brought up in a loving and stable environment. Pause to consider that this new generation will be taking over from us in thirty years time, one wonders what kind of a state we will have got the world into by then. Perhaps Rufus will end up leading the first human rebellion against our evil robot overlords.

On Valentine’s Day I got a call from Lou, my neighbour when I lived in Waterloo in London, to say that her husband Len had died. He was in his late eighties, suffering from Alzheimer’s, and had been living in a nursing home since Lou wasn’t well enough to look after him at home. His death was unexpected as his health had seemingly not been too bad, and yet there is some sense of relief that this unhappy situation has come to an end.

I have never known such a kind, funny and inspiring elderly couple as Lou and Len. They had been living in that tower block of council flats in Waterloo since it was built in the fifties, in fact they had had a hand in designing it. Lou was born just a few hundred yards away in the late 1920s and has lived her entire life in Waterloo.  Len had been a tank driver on D-Day and was the first on the scene at the liberation of Belsen concentration camp. Both have been committed to social justice in the local area, having helped to set up and run the Waterloo Action Centre which provides advice and support for people in need. Lou has spent her life looking after others in their small flat, first her wheelchair-bound mother, then her uncle Arthur who died a few years ago. Now she is housebound and barely able to look after herself.

Here at Pilsdon the cycle of life and death continues in the animal kingdom. Our sow Annabel sadly keeled over a few weeks back, completely out of the blue. The silver lining was that her ten progeny were almost old enough not to need her milk so we kept them going with milk substitute for a week or so. The vet couldn’t be sure whether it was a heart attack or some bacterial infection, but poor Annabel’s corpse was carted off anyway to the pig graveyard, her flesh prohibited from being turned into sausages. We’ll just have to select the most fecund-looking of the female weaners to grow up to become our next sow.  

Any day now we await with bated breath our first calf of the year as Angelica is extremely heavy with baby cow, noticeably jostling within. Hyacinth, the matron of our three Jersey milkers, will follow suit not long after. The five sheep have all been “tupped” by a couple of rams who were eventually brought in to replace an earlier ram who just didn’t seem to have it in him, so we can expect the first pitter-patter of newborn lambs’ trotters in a month or two.  Maybe we’ll start naming them Rufus, Amadeus, Annabelle and Rupert...