Sweethearts and Wives

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 954, 22 November 1957, Page 26

Sweethearts and Wives

by

SUNDOWNER

NOVEMBER 1

RE is a question to which I can’t supply an answer. I have 70 ewes, of which seven are pets-three of them six-tooth, and the rest full-mouth but not old. The others are five-year-old ewes which, when I bought

them and_ brought them home _ in

March, were in poor condition, and had been only two days off hard dry hills. Running with the seven pets throughout the year were my two rams, one an ageing Southdown and the other a four-tooth Shropshire. From the day the old ewes arrived there was only one flock, and there is still only one now that all the lambs are tailed. But the

pets were the last to lamb-the last by three weeks. Though they were in better condition than the others to begin with, a little younger and fresher, and always with the rams, only two of the other 63 ewes were as late with their lambs, Last year, with the same situation and .the same two rams, the pets were as far ahead with their lambs as they are this year behind. The only explanation I can think of is romantic, and probably ridiculous: that the rams were not interested in the seven ewes they saw every day, and all day, throughout the year, and ignored them till there were no more strangers to pursue. I have considered the possibility that the pets were too fat to

mate successfully in March. They were certainly fatter than the other ewes, but not excessively fat, and in any case not fatter than they were a year earlier, actually or relatively. Even sheep, I suspect, are a little more than grass and husbandry. They have their likes and dislikes, their moods and their unpredictable fancies, and they do not fit into the uncomplicated patterns sent out by agricultural colleges. ae ae Bg

NOVEMBER 3

ABOUT a year ago, or it may have been longer, I found difficulty in accepting a_ scientific pronouncement that cows don’t and can’t sleep. Fortified by Elsie and her offspring I said that they could sleep, and often did.

But I was a little impetuous. Cows do

not, like horses, take long sleeps, and I accept the physiological and anatomical reasons why they can’t. :

But in pursuit-of truth dog will sometimes eat dog. Dr Milligan has sent me from Mangonui this report of some work done at Aberdeen: Research workers at Aberdeen University Farm, after painstaking observations, have exploded the age-old theory that sheep do not sleep throughout their lives. They sleep so soundly that it takes an alarm clock to wake them,-according to an address to the British Association in Dublin by Dr Joan Munro, describing the work done at Aberdeen. Pictures were produced by Dr Munro of a sheep so soundly asleep that a dog was able to creep up and lie beside it. Other sheep did not wake up, Dr Munro said, even after their favourite foods linseed cake or chocolate — were waved under their noses. Even a loud ticking alarm clock placed close to their ears did not disturb them. That is the sleepless legend of ruminants turned inside out. Although sheep are not cows, both have similar internal works, and I can’t doubt that if there are reasons, I mean anatomical. and physiological reasons, why cows can’t sleep in more than brief patches, and can seldom lie flat out completely relaxed, the same reasons apply to sheep. If Aberdeen is right about sheep, Reading can hardly be right about cows, and I am thrown back on my original impudence of saying that both are wrong. It would, of course, be safer, and more mannerly, to say that both contradict my own observations-Reading in saying that cows hardly sleep at all, and Aberdeen in finding sheep such heavy sleepers that it is not easy to wake them up. I have seen my three cows asleep for 15 minutes-two of them lying flat, the other with her head folded against her side. I have often seen sheep sleeping, but not often succeeded in seizing them while they slept, and never been able to sit down beside them without waking them, or even stand beside them for more_than a second or two.

* bod * A FRIEND, about as old as I am myself, urged me today to read a book called (I think he said) Teach Your Wife to be a Widow. If he had been a Presbyterian I would have suspected that he was in Christchurch for (continued on next page)

NOVEMBER 6

the meeting of the General Assembly, |

and was. troubled by the pamplet John

Knox is aliegeda to have written and handed to his wife on the morning of her marriage. I have forgotten the title of that production, but the subject was the wife’s duty (or duties) to her husband. Knox would be then in his 60’s, and his wife about 16. Now I have never seen that pamphlet, and have no proof :that it exists and that Knox was its author. But since I\ first read about it many years ago I have found it an effort to pay my debts to Knox, and without the help of Carlyle I might have found it impossible. Yet all the incident proves, if it happened, is that Knox at 60 was a solemn old man. It does not make him a fool, as every man is who undertakes to teach his wife. Knox was not a fool, and even in his old age would have seen the joke in teaching his wife how to live without him. There was much that he did not know about women, and much that he did not allow himself to know, but he did know with what determination they survive their husbands, with what resilience they remake their lives when fate temporarily wrecks them, and with what patient courage they endure us while they must. I don’t know how cheerful women were when marriage meant enduring their husbands through all eternity-crossing the Styx in the same boat whether they wanted to be passengers or not, and attending to all their husband’s ghostly needs as promptly as: they served him on earth. It was not worth learning to be widows when widowhood lasted a few minutes. But it is as necessary today to teach wives to be widows as it is to teach grandmothers to suck eggs. They know all about it far better than we can teach them. (To be continued)