Fleur Adcock: Cattle in Mist

A postcard from my father's childhood—
the one nobody photographed or painted;
the one we never had, my sister and I.
Such feeble daughters—couldn't milk a cow
(watched it now and then, but no one taught us).
How could we hold our heads up, having never
pressed them in the warm flank of a beast
and lured the milk down? Hiss, hiss, in a bucket:
routine, that's all. Not ours. That one missed us.

His later childhood, I should say;
not his second childhood—that he evaded 
by dying—and his first was Manchester.
But out there in the bush, from the age of ten,
in charge of milking, rounding up the herd,
combing the misty fringes of the forest
(as he would have had to learn not to call it)
at dawn, and again after school, for stragglers;
cursing them; bailing them up: it was no childhood.

A talent-spotting teacher saved him.
The small neat smiling boy (I'm guessing)
evolved into a small neat professor.
He could have spent his life wreathed in cow-breath,
a slave to endlessly refilling udders,
companion of heifers, midwife at their calvings,
judicious pronouncer on milk-yields and mastitis,
survivor of the bull he bipped on the nose
('Tell us again, Daddy!') as it charged him.

All his cattle: I drive them back
into the mist, into the dawn haze
where they can look romantic; where they must
have wandered now for sixty or seventy years.
Off they go, then, tripping over the tree-roots,
pulling up short to lip at a tasty twig,
bumping into each other, stumbling off again
into the bush. He never much liked them.
He'll never need to rustle them back again.


Published 1988. Adcock, like Katherine Mansfield, is a writer divided between New Zealand's settler society and the British "home"; she re-emigrated back to the UK in her late twenties. This poem is rooted in the tension of being from two homelands. It seems unfair to call rounding up cattle "no childhood": there were far, far worse childhoods, then and now.