I learned many things I thought I might never need to know from Jack Duncan. Perhaps that isn't surprising, considering he was (by my maths) in his 40's and I was just started school. He was the farmer my dad worked for, as a dairyman. From as early as aged 4 until I was about 7 or 8 I remember him as a kindly, slow talking and slow walking man.
He first sat me on a tractor seat when my feet couldn't reach the pedals - I learned amazing words like throttle, clutch, gear-stick. I was his golf ball retriever when he took a couple of golf clubs into a field and practised. He said it was OK to eat the peas that were growing with the barley in the field next to our cottage. He encouraged me to take some of the rich molehill soil just over the dyke at our cottage, for my dad to make potting compost (mixed with river gravel and leaf mould.
He and his wife Nancy took us to Ayr a couple of times each summer, to the beach, for ice cream, and the amazing experience of travelling in an early Austin Cambridge A55. We inherited every couple of weeks the comics that came into the house for their two children, my first discovery of that particular literary genre.
They were generous, kindly people who made life a bit easier for us. These reminiscences are sparked by a photo I took of a Cheviot sheep, one of a few hundred grazed for a few weeks locally. Jack Duncan taught me the names of several sheep; Blackface, Leicester, Scottish Dunface, and Cheviot - the one in the picture.
Jack Duncan was a good shepherd. His dog was unimaginatively called Shep. and sometimes competed at the sheep dog trials down Ayrshire way. I remember in the evening he took me down to the meadow, and across the main rail line to Dumfries, to look over the sheep.
He was looking for any sheep that was limping, and Shep easily separated it and cornered it. Jack the good shepherd had a sharp pen knife, a wee box of powder and a stick of keel (now called marking fluid). Once treated, he would mark it, and go looking for the same sheep some days later, and if still limping it would be taken to the farm for the vet to treat.
So when I read the Johannine Jesus saying, "I am the good shepherd...the good shepherd looks after the sheep," I already have a stock image in my head of a slow talking, slow walking, kindly man with a bunnet on backwards, a couple of golf clubs, a clever sheepdog, and the wherewithal to deal with foot rot.
I know. It isn't a bible land Ladybird book picture - but it works for me.
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