WHEN I was about 10-years-old, I was galloping up the lane from St Asaph to Cefn Meiriadog, North Wales, on my way home from school.
I was riding bareback on Bess, my fiery white Welsh mountain pony, when I was stopped by Isaac Chapman near his farm at Pen-Y-Clinc.
“Hey Dafydd”. He called me Dafydd because that was my father’s name.
“Go into my top field and ride to the far end. When you get there, near the wood, you will see a sheep with three new-born lambs. Catch the smallest one of the triplets and bring it back here for me”.
Eagerly I followed his instructions. I easily identified the smallest white lamb, picked it up, remounted my pony and galloped back to the waiting farmer, reins in one hand and the helpless little lamb in the other.
I handed the lamb to Isaac. He examined it and said. “Yes! That’s the one. You can have it, Davies. The sheep has two teats, she can only rear two lambs. You take this one home with you. It’s yours for keeps.”
“For me .... to keep,” I sputtered in surprise.
“Yes, you can have it. It’s your very own pet lamb,” Isaac confirmed.
It was an unbelievable surprise and I thanked him about six times before continuing on my homeward journey. My pony couldn’t carry me fast enough.
My little bundle of white fluff was frail and weak, so I had to hold him comfortably in my right arm as I gee’d up my pony with my left hand.
When I arrived back at the farmhouse, my mother, father and brothers had a good laugh when I showed them the new addition to the family.
My mother, an experienced farmer and shepherdess, immediately took control and put her maternal skills into action.
She put our cold, weak, new baby into a hastily-made intensive care unit in front of the fire in the living room because it was vital to raise the weakling’s body heat.
Then she gently but firmly gave him half a teaspoonful of whisky to warm him up internally. “Gin would be better for him, but we haven’t got any in the house,” Mother advised.
The lamb was too weak to stand on its own and Mother fed him frequently with a few drops of cow’s milk.
“Tomorrow we will buy a little baby-type teat to fit a small lemonade bottle and we’ll teach him to suckle his milk from the bottle,” she said.
We took turns to feed baby every four hours. As we went to bed, we left the lamb flat out, fighting for his life in his cardboard box intensive care unit.
Next morning I got up early to feed and nurse my little triplet, but when I looked in the cardboard box there was no sign of the patient. I asked all my family if they had seen him. They assumed he was in the box.
“Have a look all around the room, search under the furniture,” Mother suggested.
I crawled around the room on my hands and knees and, lo and behold, there he was, standing upright underneath the sideboard.
I wondered who had lifted him out of his box. My father said he must have recovered sufficiently to jump out by himself. It was a miraculous recovery. “It must have been that drop of whisky,” Father decided.
Mother wondered what we were going to call him
“Prince,” my brother Ron quickly suggested.
“Call him Prince after the horse, Prince Regent. He is a good jumper and is favourite to win the Grand National steeplechase at Aintree.”
So Prince it was.
He couldn’t stay in the house any longer however, because it is difficult to house-train a young sheep. So we made a special pen for him in the warm shippon.
From that moment on, he never looked back. He soon got to know his name and grew up into a fine, strong, healthy ram.
Whenever we called his name around the farm he responded by bleating, and came running, always expecting a tit bit to nibble.
When one is young, pet lambs are fun to have on the farm, but as they grow into adult sheep they can become naughty and mischievous and a total nuisance.
They don’t mix freely with the main flock. They remain too human friendly, get too pally with the sheepdogs and cannot be herded.
They stroll non-chalantly into areas they shouldn’t go and lead the main flock to follow them. They find their way into the garden and eat the flowers and vegetables.
Prince was no exception, and one day, after he had overstretched my father’s patience, he was loaded into the farm trailer with lambs from the main flock and driven to market.
A sad day for a young farmer’s boy. A day that remains in my memory 60 years on.
