Just before Christmas I had a request from a teacher at our local primary, wanting to bring all her Infants to the farm for a morning so that they could learn a little about food and farming – one of their topics for the year.

No problem I said. Our excellent village school only has about 25 kids all told and so the infants would only be about a dozen at the most. These would all easily fit into our ‘schools’ trailer with several bales of hay and we could take a tractor ride around the farm feeding the cows as we passed.

It was a cold (but fortunately dry) day and having let out and feed the chickens & ducks I loaded up 8 bales of hay, 14 kids and the 2 teachers into the trailer and off we went.

Up in the first field the cows obligingly crowded round the trailer with the children looking right down their nostrils. “Now children, before feeding the cows it is most important to count them and make sure they are all here – how many can you count?” Several minutes passed and after a lot of shouting and arguing a general consensus of 12 was reached by the noisy congregation. “Ah” I said knowingly “I thought you would find this hard – are you sure you haven’t missed one of the calves?”

At this point I caught the eye of one of the teachers, who was gesturing with her head to the far corner of the field where there was the unmistakeable outline of a dead bullock with two legs sticking in the air – stiff with rigour mortis.

“Oh no – that’s right. Twelve it is – well done”, and I quickly chucked over a couple of bales and hopped back into the tractor. I drove smartly round the edge of the field (as far from the poor recently deceased as I could) and had nearly reached the next gate when one sharp-eyed youngster started shouting and pointing “Dominic…look…over there…in the corner!”

There was no hiding it – so I swung the tractor round and parked a respectful distance from the corpse. As you can imagine, this was going to be the highlight of the trip, with the cherry on the cake being the fact that a fox had eaten away some of the calf’s nose in the night!

I always like to give kids the plain facts if I can, but I was quite unprepared for the barrage of questions coming from the trailer. I imagine his is what it must be like to be Prime Minster in a time of national crisis – emerging from Number 10 into a wall of microphones and cameras.
“Why did it die?”
“Well…it’s a bit hard to tell really”
“Did a fox creep up on it while it was asleep and bite his nose off??”
“Well…no – a fox couldn’t kill a great big calf like this. It must have been dead already”
“Won’t his mum be very sad???”
“Well…I expect so. In fact yes here she comes over now.”
“Won’t his dad be sad as well????”
“Well, no…not really. You see, he’s in the next field now with another 20 cows and…” at this point I looked up at the two teachers who were leaning against the remaining bales and smugly giggling to each other as I dug myself deeper and deeper in.

“We didn’t know when you were going to stop” they confessed to me afterwards. To be honest – I wish I had never begun!