The property which my grandfather owned was a mixed farm with orchards, a dairy and sheep which were mainly bred for quality wool. When my father took over it became a farm of beef cattle, fat lambs and potatoes, all of which was much less labour-intensive with the potatoes bringing in a good cash crop every year.

The cattle more or less managed themselves; the calves ran with their mothers until they were ready to be sold. The bull was an overweight Hereford. When the vet told my father that it had to lose a quarter of a ton in weight it was put into an electrified enclosure in the cow paddock where he quite went off his food in his efforts to get to his wives.

My grandfather's sheep were mostly merino crosses which were primarily kept for their wool. He had a number of Dorset Horn rams which had large curly horns and were quite aggressive. I was very small at that time and was afraid of them. They used to fight amongst themselves by charging each other crashing their heads together - quite spectacular to watch, especially when their horns tangled.

My father's rams were were Southdowns and were strictly meat producers . They were thickset and ugly with course wool. Bred with the crossbred ewes they produced lambs which were good for both meat and wool; but like the bull they tended to become overweight. One of my jobs, before the breeding season, was to try to run some of the fat off them which meant keeping them on the move - not an easy job as they were as lazy as they were fat. There were about twenty of them and they had to be kept together or they would break away and disappear off to do their own thing, which was to eat. They only had to work for about six weeks every year and spent the rest of their lives eating their heads off.

The lambs were born in the late winter and the sheep were all shorn in the spring which meant that the heavily pregnant ewes carried a thick layer of wool. This was trouble because if they lay down they had problems getting up again and my father and I used to "go round the sheep" every evening looking for any ewes lying on their backs with their feet in the air. They had to be rolled over so that they could stand up as they were an easy prey for foxes if they were helpless. When the lambing season started the object of the evening round was to stand any pregnant ewes up, deliver any lambs whose mothers were in difficulties and to light hurricane lanterns around the paddock to deter the foxes which came after the newborn lambs.

If the winter was harsh there would be a number of lambs which had either lost their mothers or whose mothers had abandoned them or died and they were brought up to the house to be hand reared. Mostly ewes who had lost their lambs would not adopt an orphan but skinning the dead lamb and putting the skin onto the orphan sometimes worked as the smell was transferred to the orphan lamb - and sheep are not very clever.

One memorable year there were nine lambs which had to be hand-reared. My favourite was named "Cockles". Cockles was a Corridale cross but her wool was not good quality, being too yellow, and she was a bad mother who regularly abandoned her lamb every year but my father, bless him, kept her anyway. Her companion, "Mussels" looked to be pure Southdown and was therefore destined to be meat. I'm not sure just when he went off to market but every week, when the ration sheep was slaughtered, my father would announce, "This week we are eating muscles."

It took a while for the penny to drop.