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

~

He stopped every few minutes to catch his breath. As we worked, swallows and swifts tacked backwards and forwards after the insects we disturbed. They passed on either side of me like star fighters and snapped their wings so close I could almost feel them on my cheek.

My grandfather spat on the blue-grey whetstone, then pushed it through the arc of the scythe’s blade. Its gritty surface rasped at the cutting edge, leaving it shiny, metal-raw and sharp. He pulled his finger gently along the blade, making me wince. He smirked at my nervousness. When he was satisfied it was carving-knife sharp, he stuffed the sharpening stone back in his pocket and put his scythe back to work. Soon the handle curled and twisted around his body in the classic style. He swung it effortlessly, curving around him, again and again, so that each slash took about a six-inch swathe of thistles. Occasionally, he cursed as the arced blade hit a hidden branch and the scythe was wrenched out of rhythm. His shirt was specked with the thorns of thistles, and the scythe blade itself was wet-green with thistle sap. Twenty feet away a goldfinch swayed gently on the purple flower of a burr thistle, and rocked back and forth, its little gold wing-bars flashing in the sunshine as it plucked at the thistledown. I swung my sickle, or ‘slasher’, back and forth. Slash. Slash. Slash. Thistles were flung past my shoulders on both sides. My neck was wet with sweat, and itchy with thistledown. My arms and neck were sunburnt brown. My half-length hair was bleached blond like the kids hanging out on the beach in the movie Jaws. The wooden shaft of the sickle had blistered my thumb. If I caught too many thistles with a swing, it snagged, stalled and twisted my wrist painfully. Across the field, my father was driving the tractor with the ‘pasture topper’ on the back. The two swirling blades vibrated and hummed underneath it, as they slashed everything off at about three inches from the ground. Occasionally the machine hit a rock and there was a crunching metal sound, and cursing from the tractor window.

My grandfather told tales of how poor this land was when he had started farming it in the 1940s – just thistles, broken fences and unpicked stones. Decades of his work meant it was now ‘in good heart’. But, in truth, it wasn’t a battle won. A month later, many of the mown thistles had regrown and seeded again.

~

In August, the barley began to change colour, slowly ripening to gold. The heads, whiskered and silver, turned back to the earth as they dried. My grandfather would rub the ears of barley between his palms, until just the grain remained. Then he would pinch one to his mouth and bite it. He told me to copy him. Until they were ripe they were full of squidgy milky-white fluid, but as the days passed and the sun did its work, they became hard, until his teeth split the kernels like a chisel. Then he gently spat the two halves on to his hand to reveal the densely packed flour within the grain. That told him the crop was ready for harvesting. And for the first time in my life I felt a kind of pride about a crop, because I had helped to grow it and knew how much work and faith had been invested to get this far. A few days later, as our school bus passed down the little road, I knew what the wild black specks above the barley field were too – and my heart sank.

~

My father was striding towards the field, down along the hedges, past trees with leaves covered in a silver-grey coating of dust. Soon the field ahead was echoing with cawing, and the sky above it was a swirling plague of crows. The crows had been ignoring the scarecrow, dressed in Dad’s wedding suit and stuffed with straw and tied at the wrists with bale string. They had also been ignoring the mechanical crow-scaring device he had put in the field for several days. They were too clever to fall for such tricks. They were ravenous, smashing great holes in the crop with their wings to steal the ripening corn. Dad meant to shoot a couple and hang them from makeshift gibbets in the field, to frighten away the others and save the crop from destruction.

He had his 12-bore shotgun slung over his shoulder, cocked in half. Cartridges stuffed in his pocket. He gestured for me to be quiet and walk quietly in his wake through the waist-high barley. He cursed a handful of crows that saw us. They headed off, cawing a warning. He made his way quietly down the field, hidden from the crows by the hedge and the shoulder of the hill. A babbling, raucous, clatter of harsh calls told him they were feasting not far ahead. Then, as we got within sight of them, they took to the sky, turning it black. Hundreds of rooks, carrion crows and jackdaws crowded the skies in an orgy of blackness. They flew every which way in a panic. Every which way, that is, but within a hundred yards of us. I was crouching behind him in the barley which hid us. The barrel of his gun was poking up against the sky. He said this was a total waste of time, that the crows would circle the parish, land in some of the ash trees at the other end of the field and mock us until we had gone. Then they would resume their wicked feast. But some of the rooks were so brazen that they were returning, testing the skies for threat. They didn’t really know where we were. Dad remained rigidly still. The air was tense. Silence, except for the sound of their