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

wings. Two or three black dots approached high above. The first one was much too high, impossible to kill. But Dad leaned back until he was straining, almost crushing my legs. A black speck, wings outstretched, moving slowly, but so high it seemed tiny. He pulled the trigger gently. The gun recoil sent a shudder through him to me. The shot had gone, but he was still peering up the little sight on top of the gun. The air smelt of cordite. Then, high above him, the bird crumpled into something smaller and fell from the sky. It landed about five feet from where we were crouching on the bone-hard ground with a feathery thud. All hell had broken loose. The crows knew that we were there now and had a shotgun. They fled like a kind of storm wind that sucked the air from the field.

Dad stood up and looked at the terrible damage they had inflicted on the barley. He took in a sad breath. Two acres or more of it had been flattened. It lay with broken stalks, as if a herd of elephants had rolled on it. Everywhere was flecked with white crow shit. Black feathers lay amidst the barley. I felt proud that my dad was such a good shot. We left the dead rook hanging from the lowest branch of an ash tree, bobbing by a leg from a length of red bale string.

~

The ‘combine man’ arrived later that August and irritated my father by going on and on about the destruction the crows had made. Lice-riddled, they cawed at us from the distant ash trees. Like most small farms, we couldn’t afford a combine of our own, so a local machinery contractor sent a man to do the harvest. The giant red machine rumbled down the lanes, chugging out clouds of black exhaust fumes and pushing back the branches. Behind it followed its own reel, a cylinder rake on spindly trailer wheels that clattered like a shopping trolley with every bump in the road. The frustrated, slightly grumpy and bewhiskered driver was the younger son of one of the old established local farming families. My father called me from the stubble to ride up on the combine and watch it work. I squeezed in next to the driver, the handbrake jutting awkwardly into my backside. As we drove down the field the grain was raked by a giant revolving reel on to dozens of little serrated triangular knives that severed it from its roots, about four or five inches from the ground, then it was rolled by the windmill-like cylinder into the heart of the machine. The stubble left behind the machine had a neat fresh-shorn look. Waist-high rows of straw dropped from the back end of the combine and divided the field into rows. Behind the driver’s seat was a giant tank to hold the grain, and through a glass panel I could see it, cut from its stems and shaken from its ears, pouring out.

The combine circled the ever-diminishing patch of barley, trailing a cloud of dust. At forty-five-minute intervals, my father returned to the field on the tractor, pulling the grain trailer alongside the combine. The combine extended out its giant red arm to empty its belly through the arm into the trailer. The ground was hard, and we jolted around on the rougher headlands. The combine man scratched his beard from time to time and loosened his neck scarf to shake off the dust. He had bags under his eyes and a packet of fags stuffed in his top pocket. Ladybirds crawled along his arms. Every surface on the combine was covered three inches deep in dust and chaff. As we cleared the field, diminishing the standing crop strip by strip, rabbits leapt away to the dykes, and the driver’s dog, running down below, hunted them across the stubble.

The combine driver cursed at the poppies and thistles, and told me that my dad should have sprayed them with pesticides as the crop wasn’t as ‘clean’ as on the more modern farms he had worked at. He said my grandfather was a bit behind the times. Weeds could be eradicated now. There was no excuse for them anymore, he said. He told me his friend drove a much bigger combine, but it would be no good in our small fields. We needed to widen the gateways, and clear some of the shaggy old thorn hedgerows to make bigger fields. Small fields like this, of odd shapes and elevations, were hopeless. Trees drove him mad with their branches that scratched the paint from his machine. Everything was wrong with our farm. I was silently angry, but I held my tongue. When I told my grandfather later on, he said all this ‘modern talk’ was bullshit. If the combine man was so smart, why was he just driving a combine? He said we needed to produce as much as we could of what we needed on our own land, and we needed the barley and the straw for our animals. The stubble left behind was somewhere to spread the muck in the depths of winter, returning the goodness from the animals to the land.

I rode home with my father down the lane, three or four tons of barley in the trailer behind us. The brakes on the old tractor weren’t good, so he pumped them nervously as we went down the steepest bit of the hill to stop it ‘running away with us’. Back at the barn, the barley flowed out of a sluice gate in the back of the trailer and down to the concrete yard.

My father tipped the trailer at the bottom of an electronic auger (a motor-driven Archimedes’ screw inside an aluminium pipe that takes the grain up and into the barn). Then he stood up to his knees shovelling grain to the auger. He sank into it as if it was quicksand, so he had to lift his