9780432067413 - on a Pig's Back: Autobiography by Holgate, John (1 results)
- Hardcover
- First Edition
Seller: Past Pages, Oshawa, ON, CanadaPast Pages
Contact seller5-star sellerCondition: Used - Fair
£ 15.55
£ 54.93 shippingShips from Canada to U.S.A.Quantity: 1 available
Hard Cover. Condition: Fair. Dust Jacket Condition: Good. First Edition 1st Printing. BOOK: Previous Owner Markings/Ex-Library; Front Free Endpaper Missing; Front, Rear Fixed Endpapers Pulled From Removal of Jacket Cover; Corners, Spine Bumped; Light Shelf Rub to Boards; Spine Moderately Cocked; Edges Moderately Soiled. DUST JAC…KET: Previous Owner Markings (Price Clipped); Lightly Creased; Lightly Chipped; Laminate Lift on Spine From Removal of Sticker; Slight Discolouring Due to Age; In Archival Quality Jacket Cover. SUB-TITLE: Life on a Small Farm. CONTENTS: 1 The Great Cow Chase 2 An early morning affair 3 Goodbye to Alice Capone 4 Wild geese and goslings 5 Feeding the growing grass 6 Paulina and a potent after-shave 7 Early grass and a late arrival 8 Cabbage plants and sowing 9 A bit of muck for luck 10 Jumping about with pigs 11 Enter Percy Pig 12 May Day and may blossom 13 The cattle trade collapses 14 Haymaking in the rain 15 The season's task--shearing 16 A woolly lawn-mower 17 Birds' eggs and porky picnickers 18 The bovine mammary gland 19 A left-handed cow and a bumblefoot 20 A prickly problem 21 A crisis with our milk 22 Warbles and Rufus goes blind 23 Everything goes to the Fund 24 Cashing lambs and a hobbling ewe 25 Bringing home the barley 26 The epic of Chanticleer 27 The rams run out 28 Annie Pig's tale 29 A threadbare countryside 30 A ewe is killed by dogs 31 The Eve of Christmas and a calf. SYNOPSIS: In this new book about his farming adventures John Holgate traces a hilarious course of events with joyous wit and splendid observation. It is a natural successor to Make a Cow Laugh, in which he described his family's nail-biting transition to rural life, giving up the comforts of suburbia to buy and renovate a run-down farm, and it shows them carrying on with a confidence not always justified by results. Despite the raw facts of farming life--muck-spreading, cow chasing, exercising the pigs and being the butt of much wry amusement among the locals at The Forge--the family's increasing agrarian accomplishment was its own reward and went some way towards compensating for the ailing bank-balance. The going was still hard, the family was still impecunious, but there was a little more time to look around and the seasonal tasks did not present quite the same problems. On a Pig's Back is the story of the animals the Holgates shared the farm with and some of the people whose lives were woven into the same rural tapestry. To his encounters with the farming community John Holgate brings a powerful love of the country, and his enchanting descriptions of hay-making, harvest time and the countryside in winter will never be forgotten by those to whom such things still matter. Brought up in a small provincial town, John Holgate at eighteen left school during the war and joined the RAF. He served in the Middle East and Italy, was demobbed as a Flight Lieutenant and became a reporter with a local newspaper. On the strength of the job, he and Shirley, who is a Mancunian, got married. After a time in Swindon, Wiltshire, they moved to London. He worked as a reporter on The Times and on the Daily Mail, did two spells in Africa--pre-Amin Uganda and Zambia--and then became a Civil Servant. The farming yen which gripped the whole family he finds difficult to explain. "It grew slowly," he says, "like in-growing toenails." Size: 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. Ex-Library.
