English Pastoral by James Rebanks (100 books to read .txt) 📕

or wet weather and would cease to grow. Each field had a human history as well as its natural origins. He spoke of the men who had laid the hedge by the ‘Quarry field’ or dug the drains on the ‘Railway field’, or the various injuries men had endured in different places. He told of the two Buckle brothers who had been fencing on ‘Merricks’ and between each swing of the huge post hammer the brother who was holding the post would give it a shake with his hand on the top. His brother had been distracted by something and the hammer had come down and mashed the other’s hand. I loved these stories. They made the fields the stage for a kind of magical drama.

~

By June the barley was up to my knees, and on windy days silver-green waves raced across the field. The field needed us less for a while, and I was swallowed up again by school. One morning as I was waiting by the church with the other boys and girls for the school bus, milling about, throwing stones and kicking pine cones, my grandfather walked towards us with his sheepdog and stick. He had taken some sheep to a field and was walking back to the farm. I knew he had seen me messing about. I didn’t want him to think me a fool like the others, so I stepped away from the crowd. Perhaps I also stepped away from them because I sensed what was coming, and didn’t want them to laugh at him behind his back afterwards. He stopped and asked what I was learning about at school. I told him we were supposed to be learning about the planets. He said he didn’t know much about planets, he only knew about the sun. Then he told me about how its arc over the village changed with the passing of the year. He stabbed at the skyline with his stick where it rises on the shortest day in December, pointing to the south-east. ‘There – it comes up there,’ he said. Then he used his stick to create small loops over his head to show the path of the sun on the short winter days, explaining its changing arc through the seasons. And, in my eyes, he had turned into some giant insect as he moved through the movements of the sun across our land. One after another, he made the arcs with his stick above his head. He wanted me to know how the sun passes over, and that it was a thing of great wonder. He wanted this day to include at least one useful lesson, before I wasted the rest of it in school. He ended his little orbit on the fells to the north-west where the sun sets. In my eyes my grandfather was heroic, but it was hard not to see that he was becoming an anachronism, even if I didn’t have the word for it then: a man from another age, becoming irrelevant to most people.

The older kids were barely polite as they turned back to their school bags, not sure why this old fool, twenty feet away, was lecturing his grandson, and anyone else that would listen, about the rising of the sun, looking like some mad slow-motion Samurai slicing the sky with a sword. And I was not sure either, but I loved his clock-like explanation of the heavens. He finished, patted his dog Ben, said he hadn’t got time for chatting, grinned and told me not to ‘misbehave and get locked up and miss the summer holidays’, and walked away down the road, humming. The little red bus arrived. We clambered on and flung ourselves into the seats. A minute or two later we were down at the council houses, picking up those kids. I could see long grey lines of trucks on the motorway up the hill. A diesel train chugged down the tracks with black smoke rising from its exhaust, and through the finger-smudged window I watched the sun break through the clouds.

~

The teachers at our primary school were good and kind. They let one farm boy called Brian grow a crop of barley in his square of the school garden. He tended that crop as if his family’s farming reputation depended on it. Every break-time he would be weeding or tending to it. And he stood beside it, proudly, when the teacher walked us past the different plots just before the summer holidays, past the pathetic nibbled-off rows of lettuces, stitches of potatoes with blight that had withered and died, spindly carrots running to seed, and sad unloved plots where nothing much grew except weeds. But Brian’s plot stood waist-high, swaying in the breeze, a perfect weed-free patch of silvering green barley.

~

The six weeks of summer holidays seemed to last forever. Every afternoon (when I wasn’t missing-in-action, playing with my friends) I would be sent to get the cows in for milking. I’d take my bike, peddling and swaying from side to side on the steepest bits, until I reached the top of the hill and could breathe and freewheel. This hill where the cows grazed was called Burwens a rough patch of unenclosed common land, stretching alongside the road to the next village. The cows were behind a temporary electric fence – a thin wire held about three feet from the ground by iron posts, with plastic insulated twirled heads, pushed into the ground every twenty feet or so. The cows stood and waited, tails swatting at flies, with swollen udders, bellowing angrily to be set free. I reached under the rusty electrical box to stop the current running along the wires, my hand trembling nervously near the flick switch. Its cabled guts spilt out beneath it because it was so badly wired. I had been shocked many times before. If I put my finger half an inch to the side of the switch by mistake, I touched a live