Chapter 11
Hunt the bullocks

I said in the last tale that I had met the fire brigade two times before.

The first was when I had ventured onto the roof of my parents' bungalow to adjust a television aerial that was no longer lined up with the transmitter from which we received our pictures. Having climbed up the valley I had edged my way along the ridge and dropped down the three or so feet to the chimney. Once there I aligned the aerial while my father reported any improvement or deterioration in the quality of the picture and sound. When he was satisfied I started my descent, but some time had lapsed since first I ascended and the wind, as so often happens near the coast, had risen.

I noticed the tiles rising fractionally as the wind caught their undersides and felt its increasing force on my face. I prepared to wait for a while until it would abate as I surely knew it would. After a few minutes my father, marginally more endowed with patience than I, decided that I was stuck. His remedy for this was to go to a neighbour's house and phone the fire brigade. In the meanwhile another neighbour went to the back door to tell my mother of my predicament, but she interpreted the news as a statement of fact rather than an indication of doom and disaster, and calmly said 'Yes, I know'.

By this time the wind had dropped and I would have come down on my own, but to save my father from the embarrassment of a false alarm I waited for the gallant lads to perform their intrepid rescue.

My second encounter with that rescue service whose passage I salute to this day, along with that of the ambulance service and the lifeboats, was perhaps stranger.

On a summer day in a year before I left school, Roger and I 'farm sat' just as others baby sit while Charles and Pat enjoyed a holiday in the Channel Islands. If my memory serves me right it was the year in which a road roller imported to the Isle of Sark gracefully failed to make the transition from boat to land and sank in the water beside the quay.

We milked the cows and fed the calves. We continued to work the soil. To all intense and purposes we had achieved our ambition, albeit briefly, to manage a farm. But on that Saturday afternoon, as I was mending a puncture in my bicycle, I saw a police car pass our house and continue on its way towards the farmhouse. Knowing that there was nobody there I started to walk the flint track where I met the police returning. Recognising my badge of office - the wellington boots - they stopped the car and asked me where they could find the farmer. My reply that he could not be reached caused them some consternation and they told me that some cattle had escaped from the farm at Worthing. I said that I would meet my colleague and travel there to recover the miscreant beasts. But that proved easier to promise than to execute.

First I has to mend my puncture and secondly we had to cycle the five or six miles to the other farm, neither of us being old enough to drive on the public highway. It was thus nearly an hour later that we arrived at the place where we kept a tractor to drive the mile and more from the outskirts of Worthing to the fields where the cattle were grazing. Well, they weren't of course, but we had not been told where they now were. So we decided to head for there and find out how and where they had escaped and to follow their trail.

In those days many tractors ran on vaporising oil - a sort of paraffin - and only used petrol to start and run the engine up to the temperature at which the oil burnt efficiently. They therefore had a small petrol tank that held less than half a gallon and a large paraffin tank that held twenty or more. It will therefore come as no surprise to you if I tell you that the petrol tank was empty. Between us we had a couple of bob (about tenpence today) with which to buy some petrol from the garage a few hundred yards away. Yes, we had the money - enough for a tankful with petrol at three shillings per gallon - but we had no can and the garage was loath to sell us less than a gallon, although they had no large can either. Eventually we found a two pint oil measure that they agreed to fill when we explained our predicament. This was, then as now, illegal because there was no way of protecting the fuel from a chance naked flame.

By the time we had started the tractor and arrived at the field it was two hours after we had first been told of the great escape and we still had no idea where the cattle were. Anybody will tell you how easy it is to follow the trail of a herd of cows. Don't you believe it. Normally it is but, perverse creatures that they are, at critical times they melt into nothingness. So we decided that the only way we could find out was to go to the police station and ask there.

The desk sergeant was not overly amused that the two scruffy schoolboys who stood before him were the only means of relieving his men from guarding the beasts, and even less so that we had taken so long to report for duty to him. We were dispatched, bikes and all in the back of a police van - a Bedford Dormobile - to where our boys in blue kept the herd from trespassing on the A24 main road from Worthing to London. My main fear was that my front brake cable had rusted through and that I would be 'nicked', but I escaped that. The police were more concerned with getting rid of the bullocks that were about eighteen months old and a match for any human runner. At any time they could escape again.

The geography of the situation is this:

1 On the east of the A24 are the bullocks in a clump of trees in the grounds of a large house or school where the London & Edinburgh Insurance Society now stands;

1 To the north and east of the cattle stands Hillbarn golf course;

1 To the east of the golf course, some three quarters of a mile distant is the field from which the bullocks had escaped.

Our mission was now to return beasts to field and stop their further ventures into freedom. We still did not know how they had escaped. So with police van in attendance we began to drive the cattle to their destination. Roger and I walked and ran around them as we knew their wily ways and could anticipate when the beasts would once more try to make a further bid for freedom. The police walked slowly behind to prevent their return to the road. At times the policemen who were on foot or we would hop onto the rear step of the van to gain a few minutes reprieve from the uphill slog.

When we were about halfway home we saw a fire engine driving slowly across the fairway. When they saw us they came to meet us, eager for a bit of gossip, an explanation for the strange behaviour of the police who drove across the golf course. We in our turn wanted to know where they had been. We learnt that they had attended a small fire that had been lit in one of the copses on the farm. This intrigued us as we knew of nobody with a lawful reason to burn anything there.

With fire engine and police van in attendance we steered the bullocks for their home in none too straight a line, criss-crossing fairway, rough and tees alike (no doubt to the consternation of passing golfers and later the grounds' men). When we turned the cattle into their field it was not by the regular expedient of a gate, but through a large hole in the barbed wire fence. The way that the wires were severed in the same place, each neat cut vertically above the other, led us to believe that vandals had cut the wire; for wire rusts through irregularly. Thus, although heavy beasts can break it with their weight, the strands break in different places along the fence's run. The fire in the wood had no doubt been started by the same vandals who in so doing had unwittingly provided us with more manpower to recover the cattle they had so thoughtlessly let out.

After that I (no doubt unfairly) had less sympathy for those inept golfers whose balls we regularly found inside the fence but who were too scared of the bullocks to venture to recover: those small hard spherical objects on which our stock could so readily choke. We were worn out trying to minimise the damage to their course, even though in dry summers they expected water that would quench the thirst of our cattle and ourselves on top of the hill to be diverted to provide them with verdant greens.

I still have an aversion to golf courses and a mistrust of sportsmen. But for Roger, I teased him that these experiences led to him seeking and gaining employment with the fire brigade some years later.