Bess was a cow with attitude. If she thought that she had waited too long to be milked she let her milk down in the dairy yard and there was little left when it came her turn to be milked.

Cows are creatures of habit and know very well in what order they are milked. They like to be in the same milking stall at the same time and in the same order every day.

My early memories of "the dairy" was of a three-stall milking shed where Bert and his wife used to milk the cows by hand every morning and night. Being the "cowman" is an onerous job since it is necessary to be there twice each day seven days per week and at the same time each day because - see above. There is no sleeping in on Sundays or holidays for the cowman. The warm milk foamed into a bucket with a rhythmic "shhhhh shhhhh" and it used to astonish me that one cow could produce so much milk at one sitting, as it were. Bert and his wife used to sit at the milking in the classic style of milkers all over the world - head resting against the cow's flank. I am not sure where the expression "kicked the bucket" came from but those cows who indulged in the habit had their hind legs tied to the corners of the stall just in case they got carried away and upset all the milk.

The cows were all named after my grandmother's friends so there was always a May, a Una, a Joan and a Bess. I don't know what my grandmother thought about this arrangement but there was no changing the system. My sister and I were told that we could name one of the calves and called her Judith Petunia (Judith was my sister's contribution and Petunia was mine. At that time I had a doll called Flock since I thought that it was the singular of Phlox - I was obviously going through a floral stage in my development.) After Judith Petunia had produced her first calf and had taken her place among the milking cows she metamorphosed into yet another Joan, much to our chagrin.

Since my grandfather did not hold a city milk license the cream was extracted and sent to the butter factory. It was extracted using a hand separator which was a series of metal discs contained within a metal tank. The handle was cranked and the cream would come out the top spout and the skim milk out the bottom one. The skim milk was used to feed the calves.

I can remember a time when there was a glitch in this arrangement and I suddenly had to learn to make butter - a very physical task without a churn. It took endless stirring and the fiction was that all the stirring had to be done in the same direction or the butter would be unmade again. I used to secretly change direction when my arms got tired and had an anxious time of it until the cream "turned". My grandmother would then use wooden butter pats to shape the butter into blocks. The butter pats were ribbed and left a lovely pattern on the butter.

Years later my father built a new dairy and obtained a city milk license. Milking became an almost automated procedure with a milking machine and a cooling system for the milk before it was stored in large containers to be collected twice daily by the milk company. But the cows still expected to be milked in the correct order and still let down their milk if they thought that they had been kept waiting for too long.