The gift of joy

She arrived at Lush Places with tight curly wool and a sweet tiny face on September 12, 2018, the day before my birthday. She was the smallest lamb born that season.

- Michele Hewitson

I named her Elizabeth Jane after one of my favourite writers, Elizabeth Jane Howard. Howard wrote of cats that they “smell like biscuits”. My Elizabeth Jane smelt of milk and spring mornings. She was all long, gangly, not-yet-co-ordinated legs.

She slept in the kitchen on a cushion, on a crocheted blanket, while I cooked. She had a bottle every four hours, and her little tail, which looked like the tassel on a fez, waggled in ecstasy. When she was a little older, she galloped up and down the hall with her bigger sister Xanthe, Greg's lamb.

We all played in the garden. I would produce a once-posh mohair jumper from another life, now riddled with holes from country life, and wave it about while shouting “toro, toro”. They, like tiny woolly bulls, would rush to butt the cape. Lambs have a sense of humour. But only to a point. I decided once to make Elizabeth Jane and Xanthe jump hurdles on the lawn. You can imagine what a success that was.