MMis complaining that there is no work to be had in the present distressed state of the economy. I sympathize with the young people today but I suggested to Lofty that he think about inventing a job for himself.
How would you do that? he asked.
I explained to him that apart from being a writer, the only job I have ever held for any length of time was milking cows. I believe I actually introduced the concept of relief milker to the Southern Hemisphere.
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When I got out of high school in 1969, I set off to Australia to spend the year touring and working, although the immigration agent at the Sydney airport warned me there was a serious downturn and jobs were very hard to come by. Within a week I landed a job milking cows on a dairy farm in the Murray River Valley in Victoria. The farmer s wife had just given birth to their second child and he needed temporary help in the barn and with the hay crop. Across the road, there was another dairy farm operated by a man named Bob who had a raft of young kids. One day Bob asked me if I would be interested in milking his cows for him on Tuesday and Thursday mornings so that he could take his kids in for swimming lessons. My employer, Keith, offered to advance his milking time by an hour so that I could get to Bob s cows by 7 a.m. And so, I stumbled upon the magic formula for seeing Australia on a limited budget.
Bob had a very pretty younger sister who came home on holiday from teacher s college after Christmas. She was staying at the home farm about 70 miles farther down the river on the New South Wales side of the border. When I finally left Keith s farm, I went in that direction, thinking of dropping in for a visit. Just before I arrived, I spotted another set of dairy sheds and on impulse, turned in the lane and asked the owner, Noel, if he needed a rest. Noel pushed his hat back up on his head and looked at me as if the thought had never occurred to him. He actually knew both Keith and Bob and he hired me on the spot. All dairy farmers have tricky backs and Noel took the opportunity to drive to Melbourne to have some treatments while I milked 150 cows and went calling on the schoolteacher.
The romance quickly fizzled but the concept of a relief milker proved very durable. I was never out of work for the rest of my stay in Oz. I picked the concept up again when I returned to Canada to study economics and even did one stint in the county of Wiltshire in England before I graduated from university. Then I got a job with a newspaper and started to assemble a proper resume that made no reference to my earlier profession.
Lofty thought about this story and said nothing but the next day he hauled out his bagpipe chanter and started playing it for the first time since high school. He was thinking about busking down at the bay where the ferry docks.
Just last winter my wife and I were walking along a country road in the hills above the beach house we rented on the west coast of Barbados. I looked over a fence and saw two dozen Jersey cows grazing in a paddock under graceful royal palm trees, beside an old plantation house. The sign at the gate advertised antiques and for once, I did not protest when she suggested we walk up the lane past a tropical dairy shed and 12-unit herringbone milking parlour. The owner, a tall middle-aged English woman, greeted us warmly and gave us a tour of the place. It was like stepping back in time as I watched her hose out the warm concrete floor and smelled the distinct aroma of dairy cows fed on tropical Imperata grass. She had inherited the farm from her mother just recently and was trying to figure out what to do with it.
It is completely exhausting! she exclaimed. I haven t had a break in months.
My wife raised one eyebrow at me. You don t like sitting on the beach much. Maybe we should arrange a farm swap. She turned to the Englishwoman and asked:
Do you ski?
