Phil Vickery - Raging Bull - My Autobiography

My first experiences of life off the farm were at a local nursery school, where I went a couple of mornings a week, then it was on to Kilkhampton Primary School for slightly more serious schooling and, more importantly, the chance to get involved in lots of different sports like cricket, football and rounders for the first time. I’m not from a sporty family, and my parents aren’t sporty at all (the only sports event I ever saw my dad compete in was a young farmers’ tug-of-war one year), but when I got to school I became very interested in all sports, and I wanted to get involved with everything that the school had to offer. Mark was the same as me and we would play all sorts of sports together.

We even enjoyed darts - that was fun. We would practise at home with a makeshift set-up. We’d fix up a dart-board on the chair leaning against the kitchen table, and throw arrows at it, practising our technique as we competed against one another to get the better score. Again, this was a case of our skills not being quite as good as we envisaged, and we’d miss the dartboard frequently, and leave loads of little holes all over Mum’s best chairs and table. Once again, we’d run away from the scene and hope she’d not notice. She always did.

As we got older our love for darts continued to blossom, but we moved ourselves from hurling arrows at Mum’s best furniture to throwing them at the dartboard in the pub where we could do a lot less damage, get into a hell of a lot less trouble and drink pints. We even went on to play in the local leagues against other pubs in the area; we all took it very seriously.

Back on the farm, we spent a lot of time razzing around the place on tractors and when I look back now I can see that I was a bit of a liability. I just seemed to crash the bloody thing all the time (I think you’ll notice there’s a theme developing here… I did have a habit of breaking a lot of things). There were these small walls all around the farm, and I have to tell you that small walls and big tractors don’t make a very happy combination. You’d drive along in the tractor and just not see them. The trouble is, even though they were only small and didn’t look like they’d do any damage at all, if you hit them with the tractor, you would end up ripping the tyres off, which cost hundreds of pounds to repair. Dad would go mad.

As we got older, so the trouble we got into became bigger. One particular story I remember was of my brother racing around the farm on a quad bike. He and I were out doing the fencing (repairing holes in the hedges to stop the sheep breaking out). We had just finished the job and were heading for home when we realised we’d left something right at the bottom of the field. It was a really foggy day, so Mark went off on his quad bike to get it, and I waited on the tractor for him to come back. He disappeared into the foggy mist, out of sight, while I waited patiently. The next thing I knew, there was the most almighty crash - he’d driven straight into an electric pole and smashed the front of the quad bike. Luckily he went flying off to one side and was uninjured. To be honest, though, his injuries were the least of my concern. I saw the front of the quad bike and the way it was all smashed in, and all I could think was, ‘What the hell are we going to tell Dad?’

Again, Dad was really unhappy. But not quite as cross as he was when it came to tractor mirrors and windows. Christ, he’d get pissed off with us. Not that I can blame him because we did smash a lot of them. The windows at the back of the tractor were a particular problem because they opened outwards, so I’d shove them open on a pleasant day, and immediately forget that I’d done it. I would reverse the tractor up to something, forgetting that the windows added another foot onto the length of the tractor behind me, and hear a loud crash and the smash of glass. Shit! This happened so many times that Dad eventually refused to replace the back windows. On freezing cold winter days we would always regret our recklessness, as we sat there wrapped up in coats, hats and gloves, freezing bloody cold.

Although Mark and I played around a lot, we also helped out on the farm from quite a young age. Certainly by the time I was four I was doing chores regularly. The rule in farming tends to be that as soon as you’re strong enough to do something, you’re old enough. I remember having some funny little jobs, like filling gaps in the hedge to stop the cattle running through. I guess it’s like an apprenticeship. You master all the tasks that your father does by watching, helping him, then doing them yourself. That’s why farms are passed down through the generations, because of all the small things you learn growing up. As soon as I was able to lift bales of hay, I would be lifting them, and as soon as I could milk the cows, I did that. It was a gradual thing, until I could do everything on the farm for myself.

I loved farming but it’s a hard, hard job because it never stops. One thing that people tend to forget about farming is that there’s no such thing as a weekend. The cows need milking every day, and that includes Christmas Day, birthdays, and every weekend, morning and night. In fact, in order to minimise the workload on Christmas Day we used to double up on everything so that we wouldn’t have to work like mad on 25 December itself. It meant that the period leading up to Christmas would be very hard work, ensuring there’d be enough hay, straw and feed to allow us to get through. Christmas parties were a thing that other people did.

Without doubt, the most difficult thing to happen when I was young was Mum and Dad splitting up. I was around eight years old at the time, and though I was very young I remember it all clearly. There had been lots of rows in the house and lots of tension in the air leading up to their decision, so looking back I can see it was the best thing, but at the time I didn’t understand at all. I’d hear Dad shouting and Mum crying but you still never imagine that your parents will split. It’s a terrible shock when it actually happens.

When they separated, Mum and Dad decided that Mum should move out, leaving Dad, my grandparents, me, Mark and Helen on the farm. Once Mum had settled somewhere new, we went to live with her. Mum and Dad tried a couple of times to get back together, but it didn’t work out, so we moved back and forth between Mum’s new house and the farm.

I found the whole divorce thing hard. I was old enough to know that things were changing and life was about to become more confusing than ever. I can remember overhearing my parents saying, ‘He’s too young to understand,’ when talking about the divorce. That’s something that still frustrates me to this day. Of course I wasn’t too young. I was aware that all these things were happening around me, but no one would explain them to me.

I’m not blaming anyone. I think Mum and Dad didn’t want to burden me with all the details because they thought I was too young, and that I would adjust better if I wasn’t weighed down with too much information. In reality, though, I think it would have been better if I had been talked to properly and told what was happening. I think you have to know all the details in order to be able to deal with the things that happen to you, even when you’re very young.

It was difficult when the split first happened, but we soon settled into a routine. There is no doubt that my parents splitting up had an effect on me. If you come from a broken home I think it makes you tougher and less trusting of people. It makes you harder, and I know I’ve carried that with me. It’s not a bad thing, necessarily; it’s just a fact of life.

When I wasn’t at the farm, I was at school. One of the clearest memories I have of my junior school is that it was much bigger than infants school; in fact I remember it being huge. I was daunted by the enormous size of it, and thought I’d never be able to find my way around. I recently went back there for the school’s centenary and it made me laugh how tiny everything was. The classrooms were so small and the chairs so little, but when I was young it seemed like a really big place. I was never very confident when it came to school work, and though I tried my hardest when I was younger (the same can’t be said of me when I was older) I did find it tough going. I guess I never really saw the point of school. I never imagined myself doing anything but farming at the end of it all, so what was the point? It always seemed to me that being on the farm was the best place in the world to be.