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

feet out every few seconds, treading back to the surface. Feet weren’t meant to do this. He was sweating. In front of him the grains of barley were being sucked away as if by some invisible force, a whirlpool sucking him and everything else down, down, beneath the surface. Tons of grain, strands of straw and ladybirds were swallowed and churned up the tube and spat out up in the loft. It looked as if he was standing in a giant egg-timer as the sands ran away beneath his feet. It was evil, strength-sapping work. The machine went on and on, and vast sweeping shovelfuls simply bought him a few seconds: it was hungry and it demanded more. I was told to stay away from it. Stay where I was in the back of the tractor. Never go near the auger, he said, it was dangerous. It had a cruel power that didn’t respect flesh and blood. A farmer we knew had been sucked into a machine like this and lost both of his feet – flesh torn away to stumps. But he got out of hospital quickly and, with newly fitted synthetic feet, resumed working like an able-bodied man on his farm.

When the last load was led home, the stubble shone in the afternoon sunshine. A few days later and the straw was baled and put into the loft in the barn, directly above the byre where the cattle lived in winter.

To my boyish eyes the work of our barley field was done, the cycle complete. But my grandfather thought no such thing. Growing and harvesting were merely a prelude to the dark months when his days were full of feeding and bedding livestock with barley and straw. The straw would be thrown down through a hole in the loft floor for the cows’ winter bedding.

At some point that autumn I became aware that no one was telling me to go out and work now: I was choosing to.

~

Harvest festival. We trooped to the church from school and sang hymns like ‘We plough the fields and scatter’. It was one of the highlights of our year. There was an embroidered banner in the church of a young Jesus, who looked very blond and Anglo-Saxon, and around his feet were little birds eating the grain he had thrown down for them. That night there was an auction in the village hall. Families walked from their farms and houses, in the dark, with torches. Everyone crowded in the little back room. The women poured tea and handed out custard creams and pink wafer biscuits. The farmers talked about the weather and whether they had enough crop for the winter, or how the sheep sales were going. They gossiped about the crop wasted by the farmer down the road, as he had missed the dry weather, but he wasn’t there to hear it. The farmer they were talking about was a newcomer who had been to agricultural college, and they were delighted by his incompetence.

The kids raced around the large room next door, playing tag. There was a tapestry on the wall that the children at the village school had made ten years earlier, with all the farms on it and the names of the fields. At the back, the vicar’s wife was organizing all the items for sale. The trestle table groaned with food the women had baked, or given, ranging from beautiful golden loaves of bread in the shape of a sheaf of barley, to bags of homemade fudge that we bid eagerly for, and jars of freshly made jam and marmalade, to tins from the back of cupboards of pineapple chunks and canned soup that no one really wanted. We flapped our hands around in the auction and bought what we could. My dad was the auctioneer for the night. When it was done, the vicar said he wanted us all to go to his new Sunday school – but none of us were listening because we were stuffing our faces with my grandma’s gingerbread.

~

Grandma’s kitchen in the farmhouse became a jam factory every autumn. She didn’t reckon much of ‘men’ in her kitchen, but I was still a ‘boy’. And, on this particular day, I was not gainfully employed so was recruited to help and learn. Grandad drove us to a lane a couple of miles along the valley. It was edged with scraggy bramble hedgerows, and was Grandma’s favourite gathering place. She wore wellington boots that met her brown skirt at her knees, with a thick quilted jacket and headscarf tied under her chin. She had thick bottle-top glasses for her short-sightedness. I was to help fill her Tupperware tubs with fruit. Grandad left us and said he would come back later; he had to go and see his cousin ‘about some sheep wintering’. We walked up a ‘lonnin’ (lane) for about half a mile. It was an old way for sheep and cattle to get to and from the fells from the farmsteads in the valley. As we climbed, the ash trees with their thinning leaves were left behind. The fell above us was cold, bracken-brown, autumnal and bare, but before us the fields were a deep dark green, and we could see the valley stretch for miles. The air smelt of sheep ‘purl dip’, from ewe lambs that had been made ready for the sales.

The sides of the lane were rife with thorns and brambles and soon we reached the place she had come for, and she set down her containers. The tangled mass of thorny vines was black with ripe brambles, and we picked them, arms scratched chalky with the barbs. I stuffed every third or fourth bramble in my mouth, while Grandma told stories about when she had picked fruit with her ‘momma’. When we walked back down that lane, we were laden with fruit. My grandfather was waiting, asleep in his car, the windows steamed up because of the heaters on inside.

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