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

wife. Smoke was rising from the oven, and a strange noise emerged from my mother like a stifled scream. She opened the oven door, pulled out the tray and stared at the carbonized lumps. She looked as if she was going to cry. She mumbled to herself and said she didn’t have time for this shit. She had her outside jobs to do, and the clock was ticking.

~

Dad splashed on diesel and then flicked a match at it. WHOOSH. The giant heap of thorns burst into flames like a disaster at a chemical plant. Soon, vast clouds of black smoke rose from the orange glow of the fire to the darkness above. Dad and John had built the bonfire on the common land from farm rubbish, plastic bags, tree roots, thorn branches from the laid dykes, old furniture, stinking road-bald rubber tyres, bags of bale string and plastic jerry cans of waste oil. Anyone else with stuff to dispose of would also have dumped it on there over the past few days. Occasionally an aerosol exploded in the heart of the fire. Everyone ran backwards as if a small bomb had gone off. The men casually lit fireworks with fags and shoved them into empty lemonade bottles for launch pads seconds before they zoomed into the sky. Mothers shouted at the children to stand further back – from the flames and the rocketry. Grandmothers plied us children with baked potatoes, sausage rolls and treacle toffee like black shards of glass that threatened to break our jaws and rip our teeth out. Then, an hour later, we all strode home in the dark, stumbling over branches or clumps of grass. Some kid was wailing, yanked away home by a frustrated parent because they had burnt their hand on a sparkler. Flashlights shone into the trees and up above to an empire of stars. Frost nipped at our faces. We passed a fox on the way home, and my father called it a ‘thieving bastard’ because, he said, one of its brethren killed some of our hens a year earlier.

~

I escaped to my grandfather’s farm in the Christmas holidays. The old man was getting weaker and needed my help to feed his suckler cows now that they were ‘laid in’. Plumes of steam rose from the byre door. A fog of familiar warm smells drifted across his cobbled yard: cows, hay, shit and piss. The cow byre had stone and lime mortar walls, a sloping green-slate roof and a wooden door in two halves like a stable, with an old iron latch. Cobwebs hung from the rafters like tangled pairs of women’s tights. Nineteen cows lived up one side of the byre in winter, tied up by their necks in their stalls. In front of each one was a stone trough for hay and a cast-iron drinker that they operated by pressing down with their mouth or tongue. Sunlight shone down through holes in the slates. And in these celestial beams the hay dust danced.

I helped my grandfather carry hay bales from the shadowy barn at the far end. An owl ducked out through a broken window into the daylight, a blur of movement that never quite seemed to be a whole owl. Grandad didn’t like to disturb it, so he got his hay quietly, whispering, almost with veneration, as if the owl owned the barn and we were trespassing. Big fat brown moths fluttered about when we moved the bales, and often ragged-winged butterflies as well, like tattered jewels. Back in the byre, a robin followed my grandfather on his rounds, waiting for the little handfuls of hayseeds that fell from his jacket pocket whenever he fumbled for his penknife.

The cows bellowed at him to be fed, and he talked to them, telling them to be patient. He threw each cow a slice of hay. They flung the slices around in front of themselves with their mouths, ripping off giant mouthfuls with their curled tongues. The whole byre echoed with the chomping. Their neck chains jangled and clanked with the throwing up of their heads. I was not as brave at walking between the cows with slices of hay as my grandfather. Some of them lifted a leg threateningly, poised as if about to kick. I backed off, scared, but Grandad knew them better. He passed by the cow’s flanks twice a day. He walked through clouds of their breath, was licked or nudged by their mouths, and occasionally dodged a kick.

He watched their tails for discharges of menstrual fluids, which revealed whether they were in calf, as intended, or coming ‘a bulling’ (coming into season). The cow could then be walked to the bull in another barn to get mated. When a cow was due to give birth, he would go out through the night with his torch, me with him, to check on her. His breath was caught in the torch’s glow, for a brief moment, before it rose to the rafters. He peered into the loose boxes, or ‘hulls’, deep in golden straw, where he put the cows to give birth. If the birthing calf’s legs were large, he helped to pull it out, or gave its legs a pull with a ratchet on his ‘calving aid’. An hour or two later, he helped the calf to get hold of the mother’s teats, if it hadn’t worked it out for itself, or milked the cow of its golden colostrum and piped it on to the calf’s stomach. It was not clear to me whether the cows worked for my grandfather, or the other way around.

~

One morning he lifted the wooden, hand-carved latch, or sneck, on the stable door. The handle was worn smooth from decades of use by rough farm hands and rose softly above the sneck. The rusty door hinges groaned slightly as he pushed the door open about four inches. He peered through the gap. I pushed beneath his chest to see and feel him tremble