Last Saturday morning, I was pouring the Avonmore milk into the cornflakes when Mrs P came into the kitchen.

“Do you know,” she said, “that you can buy wholesome bottled raw milk in Athboy now?”

I didn’t know but raw milk certainly wouldn’t be my thing.

In fact I think milk – and eggs – are only barely edible. If you think about them too much you wouldn’t touch them. The more homogenised and pasteurised and pulverised milk is the better, as far as I’m concerned. But the mention of drinking raw milk brought me back nearly 50 years to my childhood.

The mere suggestion of buying milk on a farm 50 years ago was enough to have you certified. Almost every farm would still have kept a cow for the house. Even the most ardent tillage farmers like the Sammy Houlihans in Rathangan or the Greens in Athy or the Colemans in Millstreet would, I’d say, have kept a cow. But you can be sure Sammy didn’t milk their cow. They, like everyone else, had someone to do it for them.

We had the herd (what we called our herdsman), Nicholas Carr, to milk ours. Fellow workman Johnny Malone would milk on Carr’s half day. But if Carr had gone to the coursing or the cocks, then I’d have to step in.

We actually had not one, but two, cows for the house but that was because they were Jerseys and there’d be more milk in a goat. I’ll now tell you why, I think, we had Jerseys.

My late father did a clearance sale for the Bewley family – they of the café of the same name – when they were moving from Moyvalley and dispersing their world-renowned Jersey herd. The trade was sticky at the auction for so many Jersey cows at a time when the Friesian was very much the coming thing.

My father, as auctioneer, was helping the trade along, so to speak, but he got stuck with a few expensive cows by the end of the sale.

So about a dozen cows were despatched by Murray’s Commer lorry back to our yard that evening. Now, we were a big hungry family but even still, a dozen cows was way too many and Carr was horrified at the thought of hand milking all these.

Carr had to knuckle down and milk them in the cow house that evening but, within a week, 10 of the cows were sold – at a loss – leaving two for the house.

Asthma

My father was delighted with the two Jersey cows, my mother less so. Rich creamy Jersey milk was good for asthma (me), he proclaimed, and would make the best butter (Mum).

The wooden churn with a lid, which was prone to flying off, was brought back into service in the small dairy and the butter pats were found. Soon after, we were eating pounds of fresh creamy Jersey butter and it was better than the vegetable oil-based Blue Band spread.

Now we did have a fridge but, for some reason, the pans of whole milk weren’t kept in it. The milk was always kept in blue-rimmed white enamel dishes in the scullery. In summertime, I think my mother would put muslin cloths over the dishes to keep the flies out. Maybe.

The first up in the morning would get to skim the cream off the very raw milk for the cornflakes, in contrast with the Avonmore of today. But I prefer today’s Avonmore milk – I don’t miss the Jersey hairs and the suspect green stuff floating in the milk.

I’m sorry there’s been no tillage talk this week but you can blame Mrs P for sending me down memory lane. Anyhow, there’s nothing happening in the floating fields.