We'll buy another on Monday
Jean Brown‘Life is like a skipping game. The rope is turning perpetually, as is the earth, and when it is your moment you run in and jump for as long as you can before the rope catches you out. We have been jumping together, Margaret and I, for a good long while, but we are not exhausted yet ...’ Jean Brown
Lesser mortals than Jean and Margaret Brown would indeed be thoroughly exhausted, if not ‘caught out’, by life at Currer Laithe, the farm they run in the Yorkshire Dales. Yet these two wonderful women, well past retirement age, drive to the Monday cattle sales, rescue two-week-old bull calves and rear them with great skill, care and devotion. Day and night, summer and winter, they manage the farm, tending the cattle, moving heavy bales of hay, mending fences rounding up goats, ducks and donkeys, only rarely calling for help. But these exceptionally tough, compassionate sisters have even more on their plate in We’ll buy another on Monday. Every visit to the market, every errand to collect pension, every journey to town is a major event. Onto the roof rack go three wheelchairs; into the aged Land Rover go one disabled brother, one ninety-four-year-old auntie and her friend of the same vintage, two bouncy dogs and another, elderly one without the use of his hind legs. On top of all this, the Browns also offer holiday accommodation in some of the Currer’s sixteenth-century converted barn.
This is a warm, entertaining and moving book which will do much to renew faith in farmers and farming, as well as in human nature generally. Hardships are not glossed over – bereavement, the anguish and slaughter during the Foot and Mouth epidemic for example – but Jean writes just as eloquently of the joys as she does of the sorrows of life in the beautiful spot that they inhabit. No reader can fail to be full of admiration for the resolutely cheerful Browns, or to care deeply about them.
Jean’s story of life in the Yorkshire Dales, begun in We'll see the Cuckoo, and was continued in We'll trace the Rainbow. We'll buy another on Monday is the third in the series, and a fourth book, We'll blow with the Wind, brings the story right up to date.
