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

we head home. The tractor headlights shine a halogen-yellow tunnel through the branches that arch over the road. Rabbits scurry across in front of the tractor into the verges. I sit, yawning. Fat white stars flicker in the blue-black sky. As the tractor travels back through the little village, the houses are glowing with electric light, TVs and people walking about in their kitchens or slumped in their living rooms.

~

Every journey must start somewhere, and this is where mine began. I sat in the back of that tractor, with the old man in front of me, and for the first time in my life thought about who we were and what the field was, and the relationship between the gulls and the plough. I was a boy living through the last days of an ancient farming world. I didn’t know what was coming, or why, and some of it would take years to reach our fields, but I sensed that day might be worth remembering.

This book tells a story of that old world and what it became. It is the story of a global revolution as it played out in the fields of my family’s two small farms: my father’s rented farm in the Eden valley, which we left nearly two decades ago now, and my grandfather’s little Lake District fell farm, seventeen miles to the west, where I live and work today. It is the story, warts and all, of what farming was like here in my childhood, and what it became. It is about farmers like us, in our tens of thousands, across the country and around the world, and why we did the things we did – and what some of us are now trying to do to make it right. The last forty years on the land were revolutionary and disrupted all that had gone before for thousands of years – a radical and ill thought-through experiment that was conducted in our fields.

I lived through those years. I was a witness.

NOSTALGIA

But before our iron carves an unknown plain, let our study be to learn its winds and fickle sky, the local tricks, the temper of the land, what each zone yields, what each refuses.

Virgil, The Georgics

The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.

J. A. Baker, The Peregrine (1967)

A healthy farm culture can be based only upon familiarity and can grow only among a people soundly established upon the land; it nourishes and safeguards a human intelligence of the earth that no amount of technology can satisfactorily replace.

Wendell Berry, ‘The Agricultural Crisis as a Crisis of Culture’, in The Unsettling of America (1977)

We sit silently in the waiting room, perched awkwardly, like nervous crows, on the stiff-backed chairs. Formal portraits of the founding fathers of this law firm look down sternly from the walls. Seated beside us there are a slightly greying mother and her daughter. The daughter whispers to the mother and she whispers back. Then they are ushered up the stairs by a man in a pinstripe suit. These stuffy Dickensian offices are beside the sandstone church in our local town. The steps up to the door have been worn away by the best shoes of generations of country folk scurrying in and out to sort out various legal issues.

The first mention of my family on paper concerns a legal dispute about land ownership with a local aristocrat in 1420, in the neighbouring parish. We are here at the solicitors that has handled our farm’s legal affairs for at least three generations, to learn the details of my father’s will.

My grandfather’s solicitor was simply spoken of as ‘Charles’, as in ‘We’d better ask Charles about that’, when anything remotely legal came up. Little market towns like ours have long had a smattering of middle-class professionals that serve the needs of farmers and others that live from the land.

A young woman who seems to be a trainee secretary offers me a cup of coffee. An older woman has prompted her, with a nudge and a whisper, to ask me, but it soon becomes clear the young woman doesn’t really know how to work the coffee machine. It seems she is trying to do her best in a new job, but has yet to find her feet. Her hands tremble with the cups. ‘I’m not a posh coffee person,’ she says to us under her breath, embarrassed. The older woman moves her gently but firmly to one side and makes the coffee. The young woman, now back behind the desk, looks as if she’d like to run away. I know that look. Until I was in my twenties, I was terrified even of having to chat with ‘posh’ people (anyone vaguely middle-class or university-educated). I felt small around them, or else I simply turned surly and quiet. They had all the words. They knew all the things I didn’t.

No sooner has the coffee arrived than we are politely escorted by the older woman across the corridor and into a room with leather-upholstered chairs around a varnished table. Through the window, beyond the table, two grey pigeons strut after each other on top of a slate roof. A woman enters the room behind us and passes my mother with an armful of old and bulging folders tied with string and ribbons. She makes her way round the table and introduces herself, and tells us that these are the ‘deeds’ for our land. The ribbons are untied and the bundles slouch and spread like a fat man’s belly released from a belt. I long to open out these papers, this thick wedge of untold stories, and hold them in my hands, but clearly not many people ever do that here because she tells us the legal necessities we have come to hear and the deeds remain spread loosely, but