Needing a rest

Life, strange as it was, carried on.

Sooner or later, we all 'cracked'.  I was the first in the team to 'wobble'.

We'd been sent to an infected premises near South Molton.  The premises themselves had been slaughtered a week previously, and the dead animals lay everywhere.

We had to kill some contiguous sheep.  I can't remember how many, but it was lots.

There was a police car sat on the gate, with two RMP officers sat alongside doing nothing as usual.  The sheep to be killed were all in fields joining the farm, and were quickly brought onto the holding.

There was some free space in the sheds, so we started to kill the sheep in small batches as usual.  Fairly early on, one of our guns went wrong.  We always carried three guns, one each for Tony and I, and a spare.  

Our weapon of choice was the 'Cash Special' captive bolt pistol.  It was a well made tool, which usually worked very well.  The problem was that the guns themselves were not designed for the kind of continual punishment we gave them.

In an abattoir, the captive bolt is used maybe a few hundred times a day.  An animal is stunned, then shackled, then 'stuck'.  All this takes a few minutes, and the gun has time for a rest between shots.

With us, especially when killing sheep, it was continuously being fired.  They soon got hot, and after a long day your forearms ached from holding such a heavy tool.

Our 'spare' gun that day was a variation on the Cash Special.  It was a shorter, lighter version, and felt totally different to the usual weapon we used.

We soon filled every available space in the shed, and looked around to see how we could fit in the rest of the sheep.  There were no hurdles, and no empty buildings.  The decision was taken to run live sheep onto the dead bodies already in the shed, and 'layer' the animals.  

I wasn't happy with this, but like the others, couldn't see any other way of doing the job.

We carried on, with Tony and I stood on top of sheep that had been dead for a week and killed the next 'layer'.

It was foul.

The space soon ran out again, and we started on layer three of sheep.  By now, the smell, and general unpleasantness of it all was really grinding me down.  Tony had passed the 'short' Cash over to me, as he didn't like it.  I didn't like it either, and our killing rate was falling fast; partly because I was taking much longer to place each shot, and partly because we were standing on top of the sheep we had killed a couple of hours earlier.

Suddenly, my gun started to miss-fire.  It did it a couple of times, and I cracked.

I just couldn't cope with it all anymore.

Tony asked what was wrong,

"This f*cking pile of crap gun has packed up now!" I said as I threw the gun across the shed.  It bounced off the wall, and I stood and stared at it.

After a minute or two of blank staring at the faulty gun lying on the ground I walked over and picked it up.  Without another word to anyone, I walked out of the shed and into the bright sunshine of outside.  I took a few breaths of fresh air, and stood and cried.

I knew at that point that I really needed to get away from this farm.  I walked to the gate, and opened the van.  The gun was thrown into the back, and I started to wash myself down with disinfectant.  Once disinfected, I stood leaning on a nearby gate and smoked a cigarette.

Before I'd finished my smoke, Nigel walked up to me.  He put a hand on my shoulder and said, 

"You need a break.  Go home, and take a rest day."

After weeks of working anything up to 130 hours, the Ministry had realised that you can't push people that hard without something going wrong.  We had been allowed a rest day, taken as 'special leave' after each eight days work.  No-one in the team up to that point had ever used a rest day.

"What about this lot?" I asked

"Don't worry about it.  I'll look after things, and we'll all still be here when you get back" he said.

I was exhausted.  Officially, I was supposed to drive back to Truro, pick up my own vehicle, and then drive home.  That was a round trip of 180 miles, and I just couldn't face it.  The other complication was the hotel.  I had all my stuff in my hotel room 30 miles away.

I phoned the hotel and explained that I wasn't going to be there that night.  

"That's OK," the receptionist said, "If we need your room we'll pack your stuff up and keep it safe for you.

Home was 8 miles away, so I got in the van and drove there.

Home life, such as it was, was very strange after all that time away.  I couldn't go out and do the normal things, and it seemed very odd watching the news from the relative comfort of my own armchair.

I had my rest day, and slept and eat far more than I had been doing.  But I wanted to be back with the team, doing the job, fighting the war.

Why, after all the suffering did I want to go back and do it?  Looking back now, I really don't know, but at the time, I felt that I'd let people down, and worried about what was happening in my absence.

I only had the one rest day.  Two nights at home, and first thing in the morning I was at Exeter for the morning briefing.  The team welcomed me back like I'd been off for a year, and I was glad to feel wanted.