The Carpet Harvest

I was brought up on a farm in rural North Yorkshire, where my family have farmed for generations and still do so to this day.  My brother Charles and I lived quite a free existence, involving cattle, chickens, ponies and toy tractors!  Every harvest we would happily cut all the carpets in the house with our matchbox combines.  Charles’ cut was wider than mine so he was allowed to travel more quickly than me! My cousins, Simon and James, were usually tasked with the job of leading, coming along side with the tractor and trailer, whilst we carefully emptied our carpet cuttings!!

One summer, we must have been about 7 and 5, we abandoned our harvest to borrow a kitten off the farm!  Charles had decided he wanted to domesticate a lovely black and white kitten and take it home to live in his bedroom.  Obviously being a farm, cats very much lived outside, the spot in front of the Aga was reserved for Patrick our English Setter.  We took a small box and punched in some air holes, put some straw in the bottom and put our lovely new kitten Patchy in the box and sneaked through the fields at the back of the house.  I was trusted with diverting my mother’s attention, while Charles put the box below his bedroom window, now all trusted up with billyband (bailer twine) He stayed there while I sneaked up to his room with a broom used to hoist box and kitty into her new comfy abode.  I was then dispatched downstairs to fetch some milk and a saucer.  Further distraction tactics were required to ensure kitty was fed.  From memory we managed to keep Patchy hidden for about 2 days, my Mother became very suspicious of our preoccupation with the harvest of the carpets in Charles’ room!

 

Patchy stayed as a house kitty until her death at the age of 18, she was joined by a rescue kitten, Astrix, who lived in the bottom oven of the Aga and was fed from an ink dropper for the first few weeks of her life.  Patrick learned to tolerate the two kitties and even moved up the mat in front of the Aga to make space for them.  They were later joined by Freddie the pet turkey, that’s a whole new story!