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

with ice and sounded as if it was flowing under thin broken glass. The branches on the oak trees were frosted like the velvet on a stag’s horns. The sun laboured to raise itself above the fell. We were going to meet Dad and John, who had come to lay a hedge. Suddenly, there was a splash in the beck ahead of us. Grandad sped up his walk to a stiff trot. We saw a quick fish-like shimmer in the shallows ahead of us and then it was gone into the dark pools. He told me that the salmon that leave their becks for the Atlantic can taste the rivers they were born in from way out at sea. They follow that taste like an invisible ribbon up the estuaries after years at sea, up the thick slow rivers of the lowlands, on and on, ever upwards, over weirs and obstacles, past tree roots and fishermen, on and on, until the taste is so strong they become like torpedoes fuelled by adrenalin. Eventually they navigate up the rivers to these valleys surrounded by fells, with their familiar peaty water, and there they wait in the deeper pools for the spate of flood water that will take them further up the stony shallow becks to where they were born years earlier. And there they will lay their eggs in the gravel, and many of them will die. He told me this as if it was a miracle. He pointed to the fish in the pools, with sea lice on their gills and fins, and white scratches and tears on their bodies, and his face glowed. And as I stood looking, Grandad began mumbling about the ‘Water Board’. He said they were coming to straighten the beck, to drain the valley bottom more effectively, with a series of trenches. They wanted to board the sides with wood to keep it neat. They must be spending someone else’s money, because he wouldn’t spend his that way. The river would undo their work within a few years, he said.

~

We trekked steadily up from the beck, and through the gate to the meadow, towards my father and John. Dad’s Land-Rover was already by the hedge and his axe could be heard striking. John was pulling branches away from the hedge and throwing them into piles to burn. Thorns are dormant in winter and can be cut and bent, before coming back to life in the spring. A good thorn dyke, Grandad explained, is a solid and useful thing, a simple piece of craftsmanship, requiring no shop-bought things to create or maintain, made entirely from its own materials. He said you could tell whether a farm was thriving simply by seeing if traditional crafts like hedge-laying were still being carried out.

Each thorn trunk was first almost severed with the billhook, then, when pliable and ready to fall, John pulled the branch down to lie on its neighbour. My father protected the delicate sappy hinge, which was thin as a book’s cover. His hands were scratched and had dried blood on them the colour of the hawthorn berries. He said this thin remnant of trunk would thicken like a wound scabbed over and carry enough sap to the branches to let it go on growing. And as new upright shoots grew from each laid branch, in subsequent years, they would tie the laid branches together until the hedge architecture became tangled and shaggy and thick. The men talked, but I lost interest and went to sit in the car twenty feet away, to warm my feet with the heaters, while listening to Blondie on the radio.

Two or three years later, the branch architecture at its heart was hidden from view, and it was a scraggy green hedge again. Every fifteen or so years hedges like this needed laying, and with each reworking they became an ever more impenetrable, impassable tangle of gnarly, almost horizontal branches. As it aged, it became ever richer in plants, birds and insects, both in the hedge itself but also on the raised mound, or ‘kest’, on which it stood – a haven for wild flowers.

These hedges were perfect places to hide for us kids, or to climb through in summer. Once through them we were in other kingdoms and could ignore the far-away sound of our mothers calling for us. We would wander off down the hedgerows, on adventures to the railway, or to the old ruined mill where the older kids played – or later, to look at porno mags and to smoke fags. At times it felt like life had always been this way and would continue like this forever.

~

As a child I had had an illustrated book about the Greek myths. I loved Odysseus and Theseus and their heroic journeys. But I suspected we were more like Sisyphus, pushing a giant stone up that hill, only for it to roll back down again and again. At the start of that year of learning I had thought that working on the farm was something to escape from. But I began to realize that, despite some whingeing and moments of despair, my father and grandfather thought this continuous work was the inevitable price to be paid for a good life on the land. Things must be done, because they always had been done. The secret was to settle in your harness and not fight it. Just get on with it. My grandfather seemed to have found a way to endure it through enjoying the wild things around him, and in taking pride at doing things right. He seemed to be saying to me: learn to see the beauty in mowing thistles, learn to enjoy the skill of the scythe, learn to tell stories or make people laugh so that even the toughest working days won’t break you. If he was like Sisyphus, then it was Sisyphus with a smile on his face. He thought, harshly, that modern people were like children,