1862 was the year of my birth. The time was May, the sweetest of all months, and the hour was early. As my mother would later tell it, our cockerel, Old Percival, crowed his biggest crow, and the next moment I arrived, and henceforth I was known as ‘Cockadoodledoo’, then, within time, ‘Doodle’, and it was said by those close to me that the spirit of the ancient idiot cock was in me. I was always the first up in the morning, always experimentally pecking at morsels I shouldn’t. I tried in vain to reach for objects that were beyond me, springing up in a flapping, futile fashion. It was hoped that this habit would change once I reached maturity, but, since my height failed to progress much beyond five and a quarter feet, such hopes proved forlorn. My mother, Dorothy, did not shred words when irate with me, frequently hurling insults centred around my stature. She was a fast squall of a person, a busy knapsack full of sharp stones, constantly taking charge of all situations, as she’d had to since her own childhood, living with her own mother, Katherine. Katherine, who died shortly before my birth, had been feckless in character, a serving girl at the Big House who’d been put in the family way by her employer Joseph Bamford when she was just sixteen. Therefore my grandfather Edward, a seller of kitchen utensils and mousetraps, was not my true grandfather, just a kind man who had stepped in to save the face of everyone concerned, with the exception of himself. Though not from a farming background, Edward, being his mild and easily plied self, in his later years came into the ownership of a cow named Mumble, as an alternative form of payment from a customer who was unable to remunerate him for a set of pots and pans. In the evenings, Edward and Mumble would graze the long acre, Edward, holding a rope attached to Mumble, taking the same route each time: a circle past the church, over the back of Stumper’s Cross and along Riddlefoot Lane. It was from Edward that I learned about the clairvoyance of cows. Nowadays I have thirteen of my own and I continue to place trust in their judgement as forecasters of fortune and weather. A cow, as it gazes on you, steady and vacant, takes in more about the core of who you are than most folk imagine.