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

outside on the pastures for about half the year, from May through to October. The other half of the year, from November to April, they lived in the byres and barns and were fed hay. But Dad had to sell his beloved dairy cows to raise the money to buy the land that had come up for sale right in the middle of our fell farm (the very land my family now lives on, in a barn that was then home to only owls and cobwebs). Land in the midst of your own farm was so rarely put up for sale that he felt he had to buy it somehow, despite having no money.

Even so, having drunk milk only from his own cows his whole life, he refused to have shop-bought milk, which he judged to be a pitiful thing. He said it was ‘watery’ and ‘messed about with’. He called skimmed or semi-skimmed milk ‘pigeon milk’. So he kept this handful of the older cows that weren’t worth much for milk ‘for the house’, and for rearing calves. The milking was done with a little electric machine. The milk came out of the ‘unit’ (basically a milk churn) thick, frothy, warm and creamy. The inside of this unit quickly became coated with a yellowy fat from the milk. You could never scrub it often enough to keep it clean. The flies that followed the cows into the byre from the surrounding fields often ended up in the milk and had to be lifted out, legs wriggling in the yellow froth. If the electric went off, we would milk by hand into a bucket. I loved firing the milk from the teat into the foamy warm milk in the bucket, loved the soft frothy drilling noise it made.

Dad’s favourite was a black Friesian with a friendly face and big, black, glassy eyes that sparkled as she chewed her cud. He called her ‘Old Blackie’ and insisted she was ‘about twenty years old’ – but she was always about ‘twenty years old’ no matter how many years passed after that. She was a gentle cow to milk, ‘letting her milk down’ and never kicking whoever was milking. Out of love for Old Blackie he also kept on her best friend ‘Snowy’. But she was a ‘complete bitch’. Once, she knocked me over in a doorway from the byre, and only by luck did her hooves not crush my ribcage. When I got up, my father’s face was ashen, and he said he’d have to sell her, or ‘maybe I’d have to learn to get out of the way faster’. She was wild-eyed, swishing her tail to thwack me, or lashing out to kick if the flies tormented her flanks. He said I had to ‘boss her’. He would lean into her flank, with his whole weight so she couldn’t kick, until he was almost lifting her half off the ground, and then reach under her confidently and attach the pulsating suckers on to her tits. When she calved each year, Snowy was even more dangerous. She would bellow at anyone who so much as looked at her calf in the first day or two. I was told to stay clear. A few years earlier, in a maternal rage, she had killed a farm cat that had dared to walk past her newborn calf. It lay squashed on the concrete yard, its eyes bulging out of its skull. Why he kept Snowy was hard to fathom, but my dad was always a little bit random.

~

With hindsight, I can see that our farm was full of animals and places that defied my father’s and grandfather’s best efforts to tame them: the stack-yard full of old machinery, chest-deep in nettles; forests of tangled thorns, like those that grew around the castles in fairy tales, in the abandoned quarry by the road, where bullfinches sang from the thickets, their barrel chests a bright plum colour; rotting tree trunks at the top of the yard that had never been ripped out, and were now crumbling and full of red ant nests; the edges of the common land where the cows grazed, scruffy and half-wild; and even the fields of barley and oats were speckled with poppies and weeds, the pastures were full of thistles, and the hay meadows, by late June, were full of wild flowers.

~

My grandfather marched into the ‘Long Meadow’. He gestured for me to follow in his wake of shadow and shaken dew. We were in the lull before the grass was mown for hay. At breakfast my father had said we should mow now, and ‘get on with it’ like our neighbours. Grandad said he didn’t think it was a good idea, but he would go and have a look ‘with the boy’. At the field his tweed jacket was slung across the wall-top. He was stripped down to a sweat-stained string vest, arms leathery brown to the elbow, then a milky white where his stripy cotton shirt had always been (at school, the town kids called this a ‘farmer tan’). He removed his cap, and his hair flopped away from his pale scalp. He walked on into the greenness, and then, like an old heron half-bent at the middle, he picked at something, again and again, from the meadow. I knew I was to be taught something.

After a minute or two, he came back with the grasses splayed like a fan in his hand. It was time I knew grasses by name, he said. So he pointed at each one and listed their names. It was something I was meant to take to heart. Meadow Fescue. Timothy. Common Bent. Cock’s Foot. Yorkshire Fog. Ryegrass. Rough Meadow Grass. Sweet Vernal. Meadow Foxtail. He said that each species of plant told a good farmer something. The good grasses and plants showed that the soil was full of fertility and ‘management’. The worst ones, the ‘weeds’, told him that the field had been losing