Farming Breeds: Pat – the B&B matriarch
Join us for a funny, irreverent look at some of the characters that make the British countryside what it is. Our tongue-in-cheek guide puts characters such as the retired Major, the “perfect” next-door farmer and the young tearaway under the microscope. Here we meet Pat – the B&B matriarch, who can equally turn her hand to any job on the farm
Pat’s fried breakfasts are legendary.
Sausage, egg, bacon, black pudding, beans, mushroom, fried bread, toast and tomatoes, all fried in lard – three big lumps of it. That’s about 3kg in metric terms. Three handfuls in Pat’s measures.
They’ve been known to render guests immobile. Some, stupefied, have slept like beached whales for hours. One even died of a coronary the day after his stay at the farmhouse. “Just as well he paid before he left,” laughed Pat, red-cheeked, blustering off across the yard to kill a chicken, her dogs and cats swarming around her like flies on meat.
Guests don’t give her any problems. They’re petrified of her, padding around in her wellies by day and slippers by night.
She’s got thick white arms, with skin hanging from them in great folds like the skin on a turkey’s neck. She’ll turn her hand to any of the jobs that need doing on the farm: she’s a dab hand with the axe, she’ll wrestle a ram to the ground and has a face that has been known to stop a salesman in his tracks at 50 paces. She’s built, as the saying goes, for comfort, rather than speed.
“You should see that girl wield a sledgehammer,” her husband, Albert, said the first time he saw her fencing. It was shortly after they met and he, a small weasel-like man who couldn’t afford his own farm, figured this was his passport to some land. Pat’s parents had 120 acres.
So he proposed and she – perhaps sensing that she wasn’t going to be overwhelmed with offers – accepted. They moved into her farm and she’s done B&B ever since. Now, in a bid to boost their income, she’s decided to gear up the enterprise. Gearing up the enterprise meant nailing a cardboard sign to a tree by the road and getting a new set of sheets for the guests’ bed.
When it comes to baking, she measures her prolificacy not by the cake, but by the cupboard-full
It’s the bed in which Pat was conceived and born. The bed in which her parents died. The bed in which she, in turn, gave birth to her and Albert’s six children, now all strong, hearty, barrel-chested giants – and that’s just the girls.
Pat says she takes a “healthy interest” in the guests. “More like a bloody interrogation,” they think. “I’m a friendly Pat,” she says. Others have been known to refer to her as “That Cow Pat”.
When it comes to baking, she measures her prolificacy not by the cake, but by the cupboard-full. And her cupboards are bigger than most: huge, walk-in larders with 12ft high ceilings and hooks hanging from the ceiling.
They’re the hooks on which, years ago, meat used to hang. Now, she scares the guests’ kids by telling them it’s where naughty children are hung from.
“We hang them there till they’ve learned some manners,” is one of her mantras.
She’d like to hang some guests on them, too. Guests who park in the wrong spot. Guests who don’t obey the curfew. Guests who, horrors of horrors, leave some of their fried breakfast.
“Get it down you, it’ll do you good,” she yells. “You look as if you need a bit of feeding up.” Anyone under 15 stone needs feeding up as far as Pat’s concerned.
One guest, so local legend goes, was force fed a sausage. He hadn’t, needless to say, got Pat’s number from the local tourist information office.