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

of coat, but it started a feud in our family. One of Dad’s sisters said she felt ashamed he wasn’t dressed properly. She said he looked scruffy and cheap. He wore a thinner coat, because he didn’t have a woollen funeral coat. He had broken the rules of respectability and given people a glimpse of our reality that they shouldn’t have had.

My parents and grandmother came back to the farmhouse. Dad sat silently in his chair by the fire, looking wounded and angry. I gripped my cup of tea. I wanted Mum to stop crying, but didn’t know how to help. My grandmother was fussing about something in the cupboard that didn’t matter at all, desperate not to step between her daughter’s words and her daughter-in-law’s tears. Mum was slumped at the kitchen table. She found this farming life full of strange rules and confusing customs. She wasn’t used to these huge communal funerals and what it all meant, and the symbolism of it. She didn’t show emotion very often, but this was all too much. She said they ‘cannot win’. It was just a fucking coat. And I was aware suddenly that this was all about money. Dad didn’t have a proper coat because my mother was trying to save money. The money my parents borrowed to buy the land on my grandfather’s old farm years earlier was spiralling into a huge debt because interest rates had gone insane. Mum said they were damned if they spent money, and damned if they didn’t. She knew she had failed, that they were meant to present a front to mask it all. It would be some years before my father forgave his sister. For years afterwards he would glare at whatever clothes we wore to funerals to make sure we were dressed properly.

~

We had regular visits from the bank manager. Mugs of milky tea were presented, with three plates of cakes and biscuits. Box files of bank statements and bills would appear on the table. I was sent out to work – out of the way – while they talked. But the silent glances exchanged between my parents at the next mealtime were enough to tell me that things were really bad. Grandad had been wilfully blind to the world we lived in, and defiantly held on that way until he died. Dad couldn’t afford to be like that. He said we had to do something before we went bankrupt.

~

I found books by economists who seemed to understand the rules of this tough new world. I was hungry for what they knew. I admired their realism, even if I also knew it meant a cruel end for the world I had loved. Joseph Schumpeter had seen it all coming, way back in 1942. The death of small farms was not only inevitable, I read, but a good thing for society. He described this as an inescapable capitalist process, what he called ‘the perennial gale of creative destruction’. No one likes being on the wrong side of history, said the economists, but get over it. Small farmers were like the coal miners, yesterday’s people. Go back to school, retrain, move on. President Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, had famously told audiences of farmers, again and again, to ‘Get big or get out’, and to plant commodity crops such as corn from ‘fencerow to fencerow’. He said the old ways were hopeless and needed to be eradicated: ‘Before we go back to an organic agriculture in this country, somebody must decide which 50 million Americans we are going to let starve or go hungry.’

While we worked, I would regale my father with all this economic thinking, and he would sigh heavily and say nothing. I knew we needed to be more ‘productive’ and more ‘efficient’. We needed to be more selfish and stop wasting so much time on things that didn’t make any money – Dad would volunteer to tidy the village green, paint the village hall, or help a neighbour with their sheep shearing or with their haymaking. He loved breaking in young horses and could spend hours doing it. He loved going to the auction mart to follow the trade and buy and sell a few sheep or cattle.

~

The new technologies and ways of using them unravelled our farm like someone pulling at a loose thread on an old jumper. First the horses disappeared. The pigs vanished next. Then the small flocks of turkeys and hens went. As pieces of the farm were taken away there were all kinds of knock-on effects. When the horses were sold, our need for fields of oats went too. When the dairy cattle went, the milk stands grew nettles and the butter churns, paddles and moulds were stashed on a dusty shelf in the pantry. We no longer grew fields of turnips or barley. Instead, we bought cheap sheep feed from a local mill made from imported American lupins, maize or palm kernels. All the fields on Dad’s rented farm were soon a single shade of green.

Across the country a great simplification had already taken place, and it was speeding up, as we all tried to keep up with the new intensive farming by copying it. I was witnessing the climactic stages of a great stripping away. Farms shed layers of rotation, specialized in certain crops and animals, applied artificial fertilizers and pesticides, bought new machines, and used whatever other ideas and inputs were available to increase yields and keep up. It was a kind of arms race, with the large modern farms trying to swallow up the little old-fashioned ones like ours.

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The economics of farming made it virtually impossible to opt out. There wasn’t an option where farmers got to press ‘PAUSE’ and stick at some moment in time just because they wanted to. They’d simply go bankrupt or fall into a spiral of debt as we were doing. Prices for farm products were now global and were being driven down by the