Dairy buy-out

A great deal of the pleasure, for me, of doing these talks is the fact that I have no way of knowing which talks will appeal to which sorts of people.

I remember, years ago, being approached in an airport waiting room by a learned judge of the High Court, an English judge, that is. He talked very affably about this and that, but then said, 'What I really wanted to tell you was that many years ago you did a talk I have never forgotten'. Of course, I took a very quick, mental guess at what it might be, something possibly about the great American jurist, Mr Justice Holmes; an obituary talk about the former Secretary of State, Dean Acheson; probably the landmark decision of the Supreme Court in 1954 that abolished the segregation of the races?

Not at all. It was one I'd long forgotten. I've had to look it up. About a barely literate black girl, childless, who'd sneaked into a New York hospital on a perishing winter night and stolen from an incubator a ten-day-old baby, premature, two pounds at birth.

And, about a month later, after the FBI had sent out a 20-state alarm, all the way down to New Orleans, they found the girl because they heard a baby's cry coming from a tiny cupboard above a heating cistern. It was in good health because this slightly crazed girl had bought a 25 cent paperback about baby care at a drugstore and had somehow acquired baby formulas, a pan of water, sterilising tweezers, baby oil, cotton wool, a thermometer kept in the steaming cupboard at the exactly correct 96 degrees, and the essential feeding weapon for a two-, three-pound baby, an eye dropper. So you never know, do you?

I wasn't surprised, some time later, when a golf writer told me that he'd remembered most the talk on Dean Acheson, but in recent years, if there's one talk more than an other that more people write to me about – several people this year wondered if I'd repeat it now – it's a talk about spending Christmas in Vermont with my daughter and son-in-law and their two sons, one four, the other a bubbling baby of, I think, then, six months.

Well, I'm not going to repeat the talk but we did, this year, repeat the pilgrimage and just to make clear and sharp what's happened since, I'll read over the final paragraph which I'm shocked to see was broadcast on the last day of December 1976. It went like this:

On Christmas Eve we sang carols in close, if creaking harmony, with the four-year-old Adam, piping 'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen' right on pitch. Next morning I woke up and he was on his skis. They are small skis and he was plumping up the hills and skimming down with the poles helping him on the turns. And I thought what an extraordinary childhood. Born in 20 below zero, 50 below freezing, knowing few winters that have less than a hundred, 120 inches of snow, May – the squishy, melting month, summer banging in with 90 degrees, fall – a fountain of scarlet and gold, and here at four, he's skiing over the deep and crisp and even like a Disney doll. And this is all the life he knows. One day, he will grow up and, I'm afraid, taste of the forbidden fruit. One day he will read the New York Times and Adam will be out of the Garden of Eden, out of Vermont, forever.

Well, ten years ago, we flew into Montpelier which, though it's the state's capital, is a small town and had then a small airport with a small runway that would only take propeller planes, so it was always very dicey whether you'd get in there in a blizzard or after an ice storm. It's closed down for commercial traffic now and you land 40 miles away at a big town, Burlington, which lets the jets in and out in all sorts of weather.

We'd been told, this time, that it was a remarkably mild Christmas. No snow. By which they meant that, of course, all the fields as far as the eye could see were under a deep blanket of snow, but not too much in the mountains so that the ski season has hardly got going. They were right. It never got much below 20 degrees or 12 below freezing. Even so, the fun and games were mostly indoors due to a natural increase in the size of the family.

There are now, counting my daughter and her husband, seven of them. Three girls ranging, or bouncing, from six to four to 20 months. The six-month-old boy, Zeb, is now, surprisingly, ten and he was out most of the time tending to the horses – a neat, modest boy the size of a jockey, not surprising since he won the fall Junior Show Jumping Championship of the state, the junior competition being open to entrants from age nine to eighteen.

Adam, the Disney doll on skis is 14 and looks down on me from a height two and a half inches above my head. Adam, remember, was the one who, I feared, would lose his four-year-old innocence by getting to read the New York Times. He does that, but he was too busy this Christmas to bother much with the papers. He was just finishing his science project which had to be handed in next week. 'And what', I asked indulgently, 'might that be?'

I thought back to the smelly days of Bunsen burners and litmus tests and panicky moments when some slob spilled a test tube of sulphuric acid. 'Well,' said Adam, taking a long, tolerant sigh, knowing that he was going to have to be the patient one, 'it's a model,' he said, 'for planting a human colony on the moon'. He went off and he brought back a big plastic bowl and he began by pointing out two or three artificial mountains. 'Artificial?' I screamed. He explained that you'd have to rearrange the contours in order to confine an atmosphere into which you could introduce and maintain a steady layer of oxygen.

There's no point in my going on. I thought then of taping the whole story, but for every 14-year-old who'd understand it, there'd be legions of the old and middle-aged as stupid as me, what with enveloping skins of this element and that, baffled ultrasonics, vegetable elements synthesised for food and reflector shields for the galactic portisfriggis and the anti-meteorite whatnot, or some such.

'Let me rough it out for you,' he said, moving to the computer and starting to punch numbers and wait for telephone rings and command instructions. 'Help!' I cried and told him I hadn't even moved on to an electric typewriter. I use a manual. 'Gosh!' he said, 'A manual! I'd like to take a look at that next time I'm in New York.' I left him to it and retreated to the Burlington Free Press and such life among the locals as I can understand.

I was pleased to see that 30 students from Steeple Ridge riding school were out on their horses, riding around the country roads and reigning in by farms and other habitations to practise their Christmas tradition, 30 teenagers on horses forming a chorus and singing Christmas carols. On the last day of school at the Main Street Middle School in Montpelier, four youngsters had got together to organise a state-wide mission to relieve hunger in Vermont. They have a garden on their playground and they give its produce to poor people on the back roads.

This year, though, they circulated a letter to sixth graders across the entire state asking each student to take a tin of food to the nearest church, all of which would be collected and distributed to, as the boy said, all those family farms that may go out of business by the end of the year because of the federal whole-herd dairy buy-out.

That puzzling phrase is no puzzle in Vermont. It's the four-alarm fire siren announcing the state's acute, present problem. It's not difficult to explain and not painful, except to the farmers impoverished by it. The country – the United States – is hopelessly floundering in oceans of milk. So the federal government offered to pay farmers to quit dairy farming for five years only if they sold out their whole herd for slaughter, for beef, that is which, of course, deflates the price of beef. They were required, last February, to submit bids, so much per hundred pounds of milk, according to their guess at the value of their dairy cattle, as beef, and what they would need to go comfortably, well, safely, out of business.

Later, when all the bids were in, the government would announce its maximum price. That was the tricky part, the perilous gamble. If you bid too high, you were out of the programme altogether and stuck with milk at ruinously low prices. Bid too low and you let the herd be slaughtered anyway and found work where you could.

One lucky farmer nearby bid $21, which everybody thought was gamblers' madness, but the government came through to announce it would pay up to $22.50. The man had a huge herd and picked up $800,000. He's taking it easy for a while and thinks of going, first, to Florida and then to Europe. But his luck is unique.

Another, more typical farmer is John Levesque – lots of French Canadians settled here a couple of generations ago. In February, Levesque bid $18 per hundred pounds of milk and then he got cold feet and resubmitted $11. In the lush years, he'd mortgaged more land but he didn't put in modern equipment. He had no milking parlour. He and his sons carried 50-pound milk pails to each cow. He had 3,000 cattle. He sold the lot.

He's still way in debt for the extra land he bought to accommodate the big herd he'd built up. He's made a little pin money chopping wood and next year he hopes to pick apples. And the other day he sat in his meagre kitchen and said he'd miss most 15 May when the cows come out in the open and run around and kick up their heels. He looked out to a barn and broke down. 'I don't know why all this is happening' he said.

So we walked back home and looked at the fat smoked turkey and decide two things in the world are insoluble. The farm programmes of Europe and America and peace in the Middle East. And we open the presents under the tree and feel a little guilty.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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