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

condition, that they had been robbing it of nutrients, taking more than they had put back. The Fescue flopped over his rough old hands, its head drunk-heavy with tiny oat-like seeds. Look at this, his face said, pay attention, learn this, a farmer needs to know these things. But I was daydreaming about the clouds above, not paying attention, and forgot all the grass names for many years.

As we walked back to the house, he mumbled that the hay was nowhere near ready; he would not mow it now, just because my father had no patience. We would mow it later, as we always did. Back at home, Dad said that Grandad was living in the past, that we hadn’t got the manpower for doing things the way they used to, and that silage was better feed for the cows. He said we were farming like it was still the ‘fucking 1950s’.

~

I was scrunched up in the back of the Land-Rover with the sheepdogs dripping candles of saliva on to my legs. It was a Saturday and we were travelling to work on my grandfather’s farm, to worm the lambs. Dad and John were in the front talking about football, but also passing brief comments on all the farms and farming families we pass.

‘That’s a tidy farm.’

‘They are tremendous stock people.’

‘He was caught in bed with another fella.’

‘He never stops (bidding) when he wants a tup.’

‘She’s lovely.’

‘They own half the village.’

‘Best cows in North of England them.’

‘He has no work in him.’

‘That’s a total shithole.’

‘Smartarse. He knows the fucking lot.’

I was wedged between hessian bags of sheep feed, fence posts, rolls of fencing wire, buckets of hammers and nails, bits of railing and tubs of sheep-marking. It took half an hour to travel between our two farms. Until that summer, the journey had been a blur of green flashing past, and none of it meant anything, but as my farming education progressed, I began to see what those fields were. I didn’t know it then, but my life was a mirror of that journey: a movement into the fells, a journey the wrong way, backwards away from modernity, into one of the last traditional farming landscapes.

The first half of the drive took us through the lower ground by our local town, where the land improved and the farms grew bigger, the farming methods changed to fast-growing herds of modern dairy cattle or giant fields of barley or grain. I could tell from the men’s talk that these farms were more prosperous and the farmers wealthier than us – we half-admired, and half-resented them. I knew already that this was good land, with flat, deeper soil. I could see the big tractors and shiny machinery in the barns and the fields. I could see the giant barns and cattle sheds being erected. I sensed from the talk in the front of the pick-up that these valley-bottom farms were changing to something else. I didn’t understand all that they said, but whatever was happening to these farms was coming for us too. My dad seemed nervous about it all, as if we were falling further and further behind these farmers who were leading the race. We were never going to have the money for all this.

Then we turned left at the roundabout on the edge of town, with its grey industrial estates, giant feed mills, chicken-guts processing plant and motorway junction, and headed for the Lakeland fells to the west. As the road wound uphill, we passed out of the best land, and eventually found ourselves on the little road into the valley where my grandfather farmed, nestled between the two rounded fells that mark the start of the Lake District. We wove between small meadows, bounded by shaggy hedges and silver walls, and rough grazed fields that rose from the boggy valley bottoms to woodland and wilder fellside. These fields were like a time capsule, farmed in the traditional way.

~

As I spent more and more time with my grandfather, I became aware that his fell farm was barely ‘improved’ at all. It was staggeringly beautiful, even the most hardened and unsentimental working men we knew would comment on it. That outdated farm seemed to cast a spell on everyone. The problem for my father was that it was full of work that had previously been carried out by a small army of skilled men and women, and they were disappearing, leaving him rushed off his feet trying to hold the two farms together as my grandfather grew old. Across the two farms, he would be shearing sheep until it got dark, then milking early the next morning, then racing off to dose some bullocks on some distant rented land, then wolfing down his dinner, then spraying a field of barley, then trying to get back to milk the cows, then mending a fence from which some sheep had escaped. It was exhausting and I’m not sure my dad understood clearly what had changed, or how impossible his fight to keep up was. John was also getting older and needed lighter work. Within a few months he went to work for a local builder doing odd jobs – and my mother and I were enlisted to help plug the gaps.

~

Thirty years earlier, half a dozen men would have gone with scythes, and with their shirtsleeves rolled up would slay the thistles each June or July. Now there was just Grandad with his scythe, Dad on a tractor, and me with a sickle. Sheep and cattle don’t eat thistles, so grazing beneath them is almost impossible if they grow strong and dense. Thistles were one of nature’s ways of taking our land back, making farming hopeless. They ruined the pastures.

The fields that were too stony and hilly to be cropped, and with large banks or edges too steep for tractors, were used as permanent pasture and it was here that the sea of thistles was chest-deep. So my grandfather and I had the