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

were good sheep feed, and the turnip field hummed with life. The rows were a refuge and a larder for wild things when the other fields were cold and bare in midwinter. The frosted leaves sparkled silver in the watery winter sunlight. Hares and partridges and countless other small birds seemed to find food and shelter among them.

A cloud-grey sparrow hawk rose over the dyke and scattered the little birds down into the turnip leaves for cover. A big red dog fox skulked out of the far end of the field and away into the woods. As we pulled the turnips, we brought up worms and grubs. Robins and chaffinches snatched them and gulped them down a few feet from our boots. Back at home, in the barn, we threw them out for the ewes to eat. The feast that followed sounded like lots of people eating crunchy apples at the same time.

In spring, these ewes and lambs would go out to help themselves to the remnants of the turnip field. They would rasp at the pinky-orange flesh with their teeth until the turnips were almost carved in two, scraping out every last bit of food, and leaving behind a carpet of mud and treacle-black sheep muck.

~

That night the water pipes froze. My grandfather went to and fro from the house, filling buckets of kettle-hot water, carrying them carefully across the icy yard. We poured it down the metal water pipe that rose from the concrete in the byre. After three buckets, and a lot of cussing, the water rattled through and the lumps of ice within shook. The cattle pressed the triggers of their watering troughs, and slurped.

Grandma had a scarf tied around her head like a figure in one of those black and white photos of the Siege of Leningrad. She tied old clothes and straw around the pipes and shouted for my grandfather to chop some kindling for the fire. Then she went to make our breakfast. As I kicked the boots from my frozen feet at the back door, I could hear the clicking sound that only well-seasoned logs make when split with an axe. I ran a bath to thaw out, but my grandmother was sceptical; she said people washed too much these days.

~

Grandad’s friend George always got the Sunday papers from the newsagents in the next valley, and, after his cows and sheep had been fed, my grandfather would collect them from his house half a mile away. Grandad sat on one of the old armchairs, and George was in the other. I perched on a little wooden chair behind them. The fire glowed orange and the logs crackled and spat. They sat and had a cup of tea and set the world to rights. George was from the same mould as my grandfather. They talked about the wild things they had seen, the price of sheep, who was sleeping with whom in the valley, and who was having money problems. I listened to their talk and could tell that things were changing.

These two old men talked of local people who earned their living from the land on small farms which were now disappearing. Each farmstead in the valley was to them a place where tribes of children were brought up and sent out into the world. Almost everyone we knew could be traced back to a farm – ‘He’s a Weir from Borrowdale’ they’d say, resolving everything worth knowing about the person in question. And even as a boy listening to them, I knew that their world of small farms was being eroded with every passing year. All the people in their stories did traditional work like selling sheep and cattle, building walls, laying hedges, clipping sheep, mending roads, or working in the quarry or the pub. They ignored the incomers to the valley, as if unable to weave these new and different people into their stories. And I would meet many of these (mostly) honest, decent, smart and kind farming folk with my grandfather when we visited their farms to buy sheep, cattle or hens. These people lived insular, often deeply private lives focused on their work. Their voices were rarely heard, because they sought no audience. Their identities were constructed from things that couldn’t be bought in shops. They wore old clothes, and only went shopping occasionally for essentials. They held ‘shop-bought’ things in great contempt. They preferred cash to credit, and would mend anything that broke, piling up old things to use again someday, rather than throwing them away. They had hobbies and interests that cost nothing, turning their necessary tasks like catching rats or foxes into sport. Their friendships were built around their work, and the breeds of cattle and sheep they kept. They rarely took holidays or bought new cars. And it wasn’t all work – a lot of time was spent on farm-related activities that were communal and more relaxed, or in the simple enjoyment of wild things. My grandfather called this way of life ‘living quietly’.

There was no shame in having very little, Grandad said, quite the opposite. It was better to hold on to their freedoms, even if it meant being poor by modern standards. The constant wanting of shop-bought things he held in disdain. He thought these people had understood something about freedom that everyone else had missed, that if you didn’t need things – shop-bought possessions – then you were free from the need to earn the money to pay for them. You couldn’t live from a little fell farm if you wanted foreign holidays and fancy meals out all the time. You had to live within your means.

After a while my grandfather lifted himself from his chair, took the newspaper and we headed out of the door – pausing to look down the valley bottom to our fields, where our sheep grazed and where the becks met in the floodplain.

~

The grass was silver and crunched as we walked. The beck was edged