Wally the Bull

Wally the bull LOVED apricots. He would stand at the rough post and rail fence that ran out to the left of the cowshed with his head and thick neck

hanging over the top rail, look at you benignly while chewing on an apricot and then with a sloppy sound spit the pip out of the right side of his mouth. His primary role was to impregnate cows and look powerful, but his utter Spring time pleasure was eating apricots.

Wally had been raised as a calf. I remembered watching my father struggling with him to get his head into the right bucket to feed him. I could remember hearing him noisily slurp his milk that we kids had mixed with a white powder and boiling water in the diary. There would be no sign of any of the calves until the stick was banged against the tin buckets. Then seemingly out of nowhere calves would appear from over the undulations in the surrounding paddocks, bleating and racing for their food. Wally always seemed to be last, but being the only’ boy’ in group would bullishly push his

way through and it would need my father’s strength to pull him into line and into the right bucket.

Seemingly overnight Wally had grown big. His big broad head sat proudly on massive shoulders and his bulky body covered in red/black fuzz stretched way back and 4 stumpy little legs grew out of each corner of his big square body. I had learnt in a none too pleasant fashion that Wally had stopped being cute and cuddly when one day walking through the paddock, I heard a snort and turned round to see Wally, head down, looking at me through half closed eyelids and scrapping his right foot menacingly in the ground, his pawing graphically highlighting his annoyance at my presence. This instinctively necessitated me sprinting to the fence and leaping over it in great haste. Not long after this Wally got a ring put through his nose. ‘Jacob’ the local vet had come and with great difficulty had helped my father to put Wally’s head in a big wooden vice where he had then grabbed Wally nose and while Wally let out an indignant and ongoing roar of complaint he punched a hole through the tough septum of his nose and inserted the gold

ring. This greatly added to Wally’s forbidding look, but his apricot loving ways have always softened my memories of Wally. Wally and the apricot tree

were the 2 constants in my childhood in an ever changing home on a busy dairy farm.

The apricot tree was not a particularly pretty tree for most of the year. Its knarled body, craggy branches, stunted growth and sparse foliage gave it the look of an ancient old lady propped against the old fence by the cowshed. Squat and silent she would lean there unnoticed, but come Spring time she would don her white/pink cloak and she would herald the ending of the frosts and the warming of the weather, the calving time for the cows, the early morning bird choruses and provide a hint all the other pleasures that that this glorious time of the year would bring. Then her cloak

would change rapidly to green baubles and then the baubles would quickly change colour to the pale orange of the ripening apricots.

Participating in the apricot harvest was the right of passage of all of the children in my large Catholic family in this home on a dairy farm. It marked the ending of toddler-hood when you had to take a bucket and go down to the apricot tree and pick the apricots and bring them up to the house. First

you would start by picking up all of those that had fallen on the ground while the bigger kids tackled those apricots still on the branches. I still remember wishing I was big enough to scale the branches, but it seemed no time at all I was being told I had to scale the branches, and could never understand why I had wished I could! We would only ever pick up those apricots on the human side of the post and rail fence, those apricots on the ground on the other side belonged to Wally, and the birds that would fight him for the spill.

The first indoor job of apricot harvest time came when you were stood on a stool at a strategic part of the kitchen table in Mum’s apricot production line. To begin with you would have to swirl the apricots in water using your hands – this was fun, but by the end of the day your hands would be itchy and pruny looking. The apricots were then handed on to the next step; this was always the older kids as this involved a knife. The apricots were pared in half and the pip removed. Then they were handed on to be stewed, blanched, put in bottles that would disappeared into Mum’s big saucepan

on the stove boiled and monitored with a thermometer and preserved, or put into another big saucepan with sugar to be rolling boiled and then poured into jars for apricot jam. Stewed apricots went into pies or were pureed for the latest baby, blanched apricots were put in the fridge to be eaten over the next few weeks and preserving jars full of plump apricots pushing against their glass sides and jars of bright orange apricot

jam lined the upper shelves of the pantry and were eaten all year round. The harvest was a sweaty, sticky time that brought good things to eat all year round and let you know that summer was on the way.

The milking shed would be in full swing at this time of the year, everyone was busy. The older boys and Dad did the milking. Wally had become a father, many times over in the beginning weeks of Spring and the lactating cows required relief twice a day. Watching him with his eyelids half

closed chewing on his apricots and contemplatively spitting the pip out of the right side of his mouth, I often wondered if his was smugly watching the

cowshed packed with his conquests. A bovine Casanova surveying his harem knowing that his work was done and he now could rest with plenty of grass and apricots to eat, until his ‘work’ would commence in the Autumn. At this time of the year the great big milk tanker would thunder down the drive way beside the house and back into to the cowshed to decanter the milk from the vat to the tanker for transport to the local factory. The milk would metamorphise into cheese, yoghurt, ice cream and be put in bottles to sit in the local supermarket for the town people. This was all part of the rhythm of a dairy farm’s life. It was the rhythm of Wally’s life; it was the rhythm of our home.

Wally lived 15 Springs chomping on apricots. Today as the last chill of Winter leaves us I still think of Wally the Bull and the promises of Spring, I think

of my home and the pleasures in the promises of Spring. I am sure that Wally loved his life of amorous pursuits and sweet things to eat. Long after he was no longer required for impregnation Wally lived in glorious retirement in the old paddock beside the cowshed. The farm life was ncomplicated, it ran to a rhythm and that rhythm corresponded with and respected the rhythm of nature. The rhythm of nature dictated our home and its tasks. The house was a simple construct; the home was the seasons and Wally and the Apricot Tree were Spring.