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

wire and received a sharp electric shock. Once, when the fix was supposed to be OFF, it wasn’t, and as I grabbed the wire to unhook it and let the cows out of their pasture, I got a jolt of electricity. Occasionally a sheepdog would piss on the electric fence and earth the current, and yelp and run away as if it had been shot. The box was broken for years, and yet it never occurred to anyone then to buy another. The unspoken ethos of the men was always to manage with half-broken things or mend them. We called it ‘making do’.

Burwens was covered in tussocks of long grass, wild flowers – white, pink and yellow – purple-headed burr thistles and ragged thickets of gorse. It was the kind of half-used, half-wild space that existed then in many landscapes. My grandfather paid rent simultaneously to two different landlords for it. The community elders believed it was ‘parish’ land and always had been – it was theirs collectively. But the local aristocratic estate that owned the farm said it was their land; they said they had registered it legally. I had no idea who was right or wrong, but my grandfather, always keen to avoid a fuss, said it was simpler to respect both sides and paid the token rent twice to two different owners. When the cows had grazed down one part of the common, my grandfather would lift out the iron fence posts and move the paddock to another ungrazed patch to let the first area recover. The new area was often as deep as the cows’ knees. The whole common was at different stages of regrowth, a quilt of different greens. The land the cows were currently on was hard-grazed to a lighter shade of green and dotted with cow muck. Only the inedible gorse and the bitter-tasting ragwort, plus a few thistles and nettles stood above the trampled ground.

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That summer my grandfather taught me to hate ragwort. He, like all farmers, despised the stuff. He said it was ‘toxic’ to grazing animals and could kill cattle. Its yellow flowers were symbolic to him of a kind of neglect. Land that was covered in ragwort was being ‘let go’ through bad farming. He enlisted me and my cousin to ‘knock back’ the ragwort (every grand plan for me occurred on a Saturday). He told us he would pay 10p for every plant we pulled clean out from the ground. We must not leave the roots, he said, because they would grow again. The ripped-out plants were to be thrown in a heap to burn.

We marched up the hill and pulled the plants out, until there wasn’t a single standing yellow flower on the common. We were proud of working so hard and felt we had exceeded my grandfather’s expectations of what we were capable of. He had thought we would make our excuses and slope off after an hour or so, but we had kept going until we were done. Our hands stung, were stained green, and stank of the plant for days afterwards. We didn’t get the hundreds of pounds we were sure we must be owed, but five pounds to share between us. Grandad then went and forked the piles of wilting flowers into the trailer to be burned on a bonfire. And I was told to get the cows home.

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The cows strode home down the windy road. Behind them rose a cloud of black flies. The cows swiped their tails and tried to squash them with their noses into their flanks. As the cows walked, they splattered jets of grassy-green shit that formed swirling trails on the tarmac. The muck baked on the road like pancakes, peeling and pulling off, as it dried, the tar-skin from the road. I steered my bike between the cow shit, balancing on the pedals to go slow enough behind the older cows. Swallows dipped in and out of the leafy lane below the breeze. The verges were three feet deep in white flowering cow parsley. My grandfather called it ‘kesh’. Its lush aniseed smell filled the hollows. Halfway down the hill was a little wood where some of my friends were building a den. I was tempted to go and play there, but I couldn’t leave the cows. We were always building dens in messy abandoned bits of the village, including the rubbish dump, where people threw their old tyres, TVs and mattresses. We harvested crab apples from the hedgerows for ‘food’ and stored them. Whenever we dared to bite into one, they were so tart they instantly turned our mouths to fuzz.

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At the bottom of the hill, the cows were meant to walk through the gate to a collecting yard, but they had escaped and headed up to the village green. My father, who was back in the yard, saw them and came to help me. He shouted that they were ‘just taking the piss’ and ran past them shouting and wielding a length of plastic pipe to whack them with. His dog Lassie joined in, nipping an ankle or two and barking at them until they were all in the yard.

In subsequent years the village became more middle-class and tidy, and cows ploughing up sections of the village green with their hooves, and dirtying roads, became a source of tension with other villagers, but when I was young everyone knew that cows mashed up the verges in wet weather and splattered the road with shit – and they always had. There were water troughs in our yard, and until a few years before, anyone with cattle in the village had been free to walk them into our yard for water.

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My father was as tough as old boots, but he loved his cows. Until a year or two before, at the beginning of the 1980s, he had a herd of eighty black and white dairy cows – Friesians, with broad fat backs and sturdy legs. They grazed