The Good Life

When I was three, my father had a mid-life crisis. He didn’t buy a Ferrari or run off with a supermodel, though. He packed in his job, bought a cow, and stuck it in the back garden.

As a family, we knew nothing about farming. We were Londoners. We arrived in West Oxfordshire in the early seventies – even before The Good Life was on the telly – trying to be self-sufficient.

We couldn’t afford a farm, so we got a house with a biggish garden, no proper central heating, and an attic full of rats.

We bought a psychopathic cockerel and a small flock of chickens from a local farmer who saw us coming; we dug up the garden and tried to grow things in the Oxfordshire clay, and we got a Dexter cow: not because it gave a lot of milk (they don’t) but because it was an ancient British breed and my dad reckoned that was an authentic touch.

Every morning the cow would kick him away from her hairy ancient British udders and stamp on his feet, or knock the bucket of milk into the dung, or smack him upside the head with her powerful skull.

The chickens turned out to be menopausal and the cockerel tried to kill me every time I came home from school.

For years, I tried to pretend all this wasn’t happening. You think your parents were embarrassing when you were a teenager?

It’s much worse when they’re the only eco-freaks in the village. If your mum turns up to parents’ evenings with chicken muck and baler twine in her pockets and your family pets escape to leave cowpats all over the neighbours’ front lawns, you tend to stand out, and not in a good way.

But as I got older and started to tell people some of the odder things about my Good Life childhood, I realised it was actually pretty funny. I even started to be proud of my mum and dad. They may have been crazy, they may not have been even slightly self-sufficient, but they had a go.

A couple of years ago I wrote about the experience for a national newspaper and was amazed to find complete strangers, recognizing me from the byline photo, wanting to know the full story. What I’d thought of as a vaguely amusing tale of a 1970s fad turned out to have some real relevance to people.

Why is it so fascinating? Well, the Grow Your Own age is back in force. There are loads of us out there, reading Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, digging allotments, dreaming of quitting the rat race; and picking slugs out of our potatoes.

So I wrote the full story: Grow Your Own Cows. I started by putting up samples on a website – you can read them if you like, at www.growyourowncows.com – and asking mates, work colleagues and anyone else I met to have a look and vote on the site if they thought I should publish.

I contacted the brilliant Maria Smedstad, who now does a cartoon strip for the Sun, and asked her if she’d consider doing a cartoon version of me for the story; she agreed. And suddenly Facebook and Twitter started humming and in just two months I’d had over 2,000 visitors to the site.

How on earth did they know about it?

I’d got fans I’d never met emailing from across the UK, from the US, New Zealand, Croatia, even Malaysia. I’d never done any advertising or marketing. It was all electronic word of mouth, from friends to friends-of-friends and so on to people I’d got no personal connection with at all.

Best of all, all these people voted with an overwhelming ‘yes’: publish the book.

So I did. I published it for all of us who aren’t quite brave enough to give up the day job; for people like me whose allotments only ever seem to produce maggoty courgettes, and for readers everywhere who like a good English eccentric and just want a laugh.

And finally, where did all this self-sufficiency lark take place?

Well, all the names, and some of the stories, have been changed very slightly.

The village I grew up in is Fineham, which doesn’t exist, near Wightley, which isn’t real; but if you were in West Oxfordshire in the 1970s and 1980s, you might just recognise it. Maybe you helped us catch the cow… again.

* Reb Williams’s book Grow Your Own Cows is published by The Mund Publishing and is available from www.growyourowncows.com.