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

were hopelessly trying to catch up. I was arrogant enough to begin to pity my father for not having all the answers, for not changing things even faster, for not knowing how to win this fight. He carried our growing overdraft on his shoulders like a sack full of rocks. And I became full of a rough kind of pessimism, cynical and angry. We only had one choice: to embrace change and modernize. I had come to feel ashamed at how ‘backwards’ our farm was. I sensed that history didn’t care. It was like a train: it leaves the station, and you can shout ‘come back’ or ‘you’ve gone the wrong way’ all you like, but it is gone down the tracks and you are left behind.

~

The game playing out on our farm was taking place across the entire British countryside. In many ways, what was happening was ‘progress’. It is easy to forget that farming is literally a matter of life and death; easy to forget how amazing it is to live without ever having to worry where your next meal is coming from – for dinner to always just be there, and better than that, to have a choice of what you eat. And yet hunger was only a generation away for many families in Britain and around the world.

My grandparents had lived through the food shortages and periodic high prices that were common in Britain in the early decades of the twentieth century. This scarcity could be seen in the small stature of the oldest people I knew, who often stood a foot or so shorter than their sons and grandsons. Rationing in wartime was a stark reminder that food could not be taken for granted, when feeding the country required importing 20 million tons of food a year and overseas supplies were vulnerable. These were long years of queuing outside shops for scarcely available goods, cheating and black-market trading for foods as basic as eggs and butter. And so, by 1950, British farmers had been tasked with improving food security and feeding a nation of 50 million people, and were encouraged by government subsidies and guaranteed prices. In the decades that followed they rose to that challenge: producing much more food, much more cheaply. The modern supermarket was the culmination of what people wanted – an eye-popping miracle in historical terms, food in qualities and varieties beyond the wildest dreams of anyone prior to the twentieth century.

In my childhood, my mother’s friend Anne, from up the village, was always popping round and telling us how cheaply she had bought a lump of gammon, a bag of frozen chips or some washing powder. The first big supermarket that opened, fifteen miles away, on the edge of Kendal, was an aircraft hangar-sized industrial shed, with a huge tarmac car park, and stuffed full of things that were so low-priced it was all people could talk about. Anne would draw at her fag and regale us with tales of the things she had bought, or what they had had in the café and how little it had cost. She had stopped baking homemade cakes and teased my mother for being so old-fashioned. She said having a vegetable garden was a waste of time because she could buy everything from the store much more cheaply than you could grow it.

Our vegetable plot was in our farmhouse garden, and it was Dad’s job to dig it over and get the potatoes into the ground. He hated gardening. After one of Anne’s visits, Dad stabbed the fork into the thin stony soil, and it sang as it hit rocks beneath his feet. The soil in our garden seemed to be the poorest on the farm, as if it were made of handfuls of baked clay rocks. Each spring Dad led in endless barrow-loads of well-rotted straw muck from the calf pens to help it. His spade had a broken shaft and lay by the wall where he had thrown it in disgust when he dug up the last of the potatoes in winter, so he disappeared for twenty minutes to fit a new one. Then, when he returned, he dug a long straight trench about a foot deep and threw in lots of the muck. I stuck the potatoes on top of the muck and covered them lightly with soil. The potatoes were seeding, because we were a bit late getting them in, and were sprouting with blind white shoots. Something simmered up inside him. He asked Mum how much a bag of potatoes cost in the supermarket. Then he started mumbling calculations about how many hours he spent on growing ours. He declared that growing them was a waste of time. He said Anne was bloody right. Mum countered with a hymn of praise to the fresh garden spud, but he was not having it. Half the buggers were rotten last year with potato blight, he said. That autumn the vegetable garden was sown with grass, and we bought potatoes from town.

~

Over the years, supermarkets began to drive down the prices we received for the things we sold. By the time I got back from Australia, things were becoming desperate. One day we travelled to the local livestock market to sell a load of fattened sheep, with Dad whingeing about how little they were worth and that we would be ripped off by the sheep dealers who bought for the supermarkets.

On the way back, we drove past some big lowland farms. Dad was staring miserably at the land beside the road. ‘Christ, they’ve given that field some bag.’ He was stunned by the bulk and colour of the crops growing in their fields. The grass was growing insanely fast and was an ungodly dark green – they had been doused in synthetic fertilizer. His comment seemed half in admiration, half in horror – as if he wasn’t sure whether this farmer was pushing it all a bit too far.

~

No one in