This Cold Country Read Free Page A

her overcoat, put on her hat and gloves, and opened the front door. She bicycled through the icy darkness down the avenue, the cold of the frozen metal handlebars penetrating the worn rubber grips and thick gloves to her aching fingers. There was enough light from the moon to silhouette the trees on either side. Nothing moved; it was as though they were frozen in place. Had she not been so cold, Daisy would have found the landscape mysterious and beautiful.
    The winter—the first winter of the war—was bitter, the coldest in many years. Flocks of birds had swept down on the berry-bearing trees and bushes and stripped them of every edible particle. Birds that now were to be seen dead, frozen in place on branches of the leafless trees.
    Daisy was used to the crunch of her bicycle wheels on the frozen mud, and puddles that looked as though thin, opaque glass had been shattered to show the dark brown water beneath. The leafless trees had become sculpture, the evergreens self-contained or, in the case of the rhododendron, drooping and defeated, playing dead and waiting for the spring thaw. Frost, ice, and freezing cold were common at Aberneth Farm; snow was unusual and its consequences visual rather than practical. All that winter it could be seen covering the top of the distant hills.
    Five minutes later she arrived at the milking shed. The cows were moving slowly, but with purpose, toward the shed. All but one—Duchess, the only mixed breed in the herd of black-and-white Friesians, and Daisy’s favorite—would amble to their places, stick their heads through the bails, and begin to munch the hay provided to keep them from becoming restless while they were milked.
    Daisy worked in the milking shed washing the milking machines and, if the milkers were shorthanded, stripping down the cows—hand-milking the last drops that the machine had not squeezed from their teats. Stripping down was the part of her work that Daisy enjoyed most. She liked cows; she found their unhurried gait calming. She liked their dreamy gaze and the way, in summer, they would stand immobile, chewing the cud, occasionally flicking away a fly with a swish of the tail, while staring at the horizon. She liked the sound milk made as it hit the metal pail and the simple rhythm set by the alternating jets bouncing off the bucket. She liked the smell of cows, and most of all, on those winter mornings, she liked their warmth. Sixty cows in a milking shed generated a certain amount of heat; an individual cow provided a warm flank for Daisy to rest her forehead on as she stripped down the teats so much warmer than her painfully cold and stiff fingers.
    Unfortunately, though this morning was a stripping down morning—some of the milkers having claimed accumulated time off to sleep in before chapel—the greater part of Daisy’s work took place in a cement-floored room adjacent to the shed. It was where she washed the milking equipment. The milking machines and churns were washed in cold water. They had to be kept spotlessly clean; every surface needed to be scoured and every angle and crevice thoroughly scrubbed. Daisy had a hose with good water pressure and scrubbing brushes of different shapes and sizes, but she suffered dreadfully from the pitiless cold. Cold water on the cold damp concrete made her feet ache, and her hands were raw, red, and, this winter, covered with chilblains.
    The chilblains, three on her right hand, one on her left, had developed when the weather had first become relentlessly cold. In every other way, Daisy was healthier than she had been when she joined up. She took more exercise, she slept better, and she ate more and probably healthier food. The jacket of the coat and skirt she had worn on the last prewar Sunday no longer fitted her, although the skirt did; her shoulders were broader and she was sometimes surprised by the hardness of the muscles in her upper arms.
    Daisy was hungry; she was tired; she was