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

‘What’s happening?’

‘Shush … Keep quiet,’ he said. ‘She’s foaling.’

The stable was dimly lit by one half-hearted light bulb hanging from a twisted grey electric wire decorated with cobwebs from the beams. The once white-washed walls were brown with years of cattle shit from their legs and bellies rubbing against them. The cobbled floor was six inches deep with white sun-bleached straw. Beneath the dim bulb the bay mare twisted and turned as if in pain. She was staring at her side, which was swollen, some foal limb or other pushing up jagged beneath the taut skin as if she had swallowed a stepladder. Then she lay down in the straw. After a minute or so, a contraction shook her whole shivering body like an earthquake. She extended her head out like a corpse and groaned. Grandad trod carefully towards her rear end, motioning to me to stay where I was. I waited through each contraction, not knowing what was happening. Then she moved a little and Grandad could see a foal’s legs jutting out, strangely long, angular and sharp. He felt past the legs and smiled. The mare shook again and pushed, and the legs seemed to lurch out four or five inches. He waited for the next tremor and then pulled at the legs. This time they came even further, and a nose was visible, a flash of white seen through the blood and translucent yellowish birth sac. And then the mare stood up, see-sawing to her feet and the foal clattered down to the straw with a thud that made me wince. My grandfather cleaned its mouth of fluids and leaped to the door before the mare tried to kick him.

An hour later, after they had given her some quiet time, the mare was shaking gently, nervously, as the foal prodded her side with its head, looking for a teat. A week later the foal was running around the field, learning to use its too-big legs and snorting defiantly as Grandad watched it from the field gate. Grandad was still a horseman, forty years after he had bought his first tractor.

~

The previous Christmas holidays I had been sulky and defiant when asked to go out and work. But I was a different boy now. My grandfather didn’t ask me to get up when he did at six o’clock: I listened for him dressing and was ready to go when he was. His smile was one of pure pride on seeing me up and ready. Ten minutes later we were mucking out the byre with a shovel. The muck had piled up overnight in a shallow trench behind the cows, landing with dull firm thuds, coiled and dry, and almost smelling of hay. Grandad bent at the middle, pushing his shovel into the steaming piles of muck, then flopped a shovelful up and over into the wheelbarrow. If a cow started to piss, he stood back a few steps to give it a moment. The steaming yellow river flowed to the grate of the drain by the byre door, the whole thing working on gravity. The piss generated clouds of steamy ammonia that made my nose curl.

It was bitterly cold outside, and he said this was the warmest job on the farm. My grandfather worked in the byre in a jumper and waistcoat. The byre was heated until it was snug by the cows and the piles of muck behind them. In the old northern ‘longhouses’, the people lived in the same structure as the cattle, he said; this cow-warmth was a precious thing to be made use of. Later, clad in layers of jackets like some down-at-heel Arctic explorer, he went across the frozen fields to feed the sheep, and I bawled and waved my hands to try to keep the hungry sheep from swarming around his legs and knocking him over.

The midwinter work was tough, but my grandfather took pride in it all. He piled up a giant mountainous midden of straw and muck across the yard. He brushed around it each day so that it was neat and tidy. Its steep sides and its brushed-back edges showed that he cared about his work. It gently steamed and was the only place that wasn’t being buried in snow, as it generated so much heat that it simply melted. He thought that pride in your work, no matter how modest the task, was the mark of a good man, so he mucked the cows out as if he was being judged on it every day. And when the byre was clean, the cattle lying down and full of hay, and the sheep in the field fed, he told me we must use the frozen ground while it lasted to spread some muck on the meadows, without damaging the fields with wheel marks. So, we led some muck out down to the field, with his little tractor and muck-spreader and it was thrown out by the swirling chains where it steamed and dozens of rooks scratched amongst it for grubs.

~

Grandad said we must get a load of turnips for the pregnant ewes. So we took the old Massey Ferguson tractor with the storage box on the back. At the field, we slowly pulled up several hundred turnips by hand and threw them into the box. Pulling them from the frozen ground was hard for Grandad, and almost impossible for me. He puffed and wheezed. But when I said this was ‘the worst job ever’, he shot a sharp look at me and said that pulling them from sodden muddy ground on a cold and rainy day was much worse. I had seen my father in waterproof leggings and jacket working on such days, swollen, frozen red hands running with cold brown mud. After a few hours of this work, it was best to keep out of his way. Cruel work. And yet, for all this trouble my grandfather and father both loved growing turnips. They