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

expensive tractors and a lot of grass was wasted because it went unmown in their shade. Then, with each passing storm, the old trees gradually blew over, making them no good as a boundary, so we cleared them with a chainsaw or digger. We gained larger, more efficient fields that way. Hedges and walls had become a nuisance. The hedges we didn’t grub out, we flailed, using a machine attached to the side of the tractor, like a lawn mower on a telescopic arm. Soon, they were no longer true hedges with a thick, living, plaited heart, but from a distance they still looked OK, with a tidy, flat mown top. But they weren’t the dense hedgerows of my childhood, and as they grew old and were lost the landscapes became barer.

As we threw the last logs in, I looked back at what had once been a shaggy old hedgerow, and remembered playing hide-and-seek there as a child with half a dozen of the village kids. And as a teenager I had seen one of the older boys shoot a rabbit with an air rifle there: it had tumbled over itself as if trying to shake the pellet from its head. Now the hedge and that past were being erased.

More than half the hedgerows in Britain disappeared between the Second World War and the present day. Thousands of miles were lost every year. Some of the hedges were many centuries old, and full of amazing and rare living things. We didn’t think about that then, but it became more obvious and more important as time went on.

~

Whispering doubts about the new farming had grown in me until they were deafening. The costs side of the ledger seemed to expand endlessly as the years passed. It was perhaps fine that we weren’t the winners; I could get my head around that and adapt and survive, but after a while it was hard to see anyone winning. The giant pig farm I had played on as a child was declared bankrupt and was sold up. And in place of an old patchwork landscape full of working people, diverse farm animals and crops, with lots of farmland wildlife, a blander, barer, simpler, denatured and unpeopled landscape had emerged.

~

The more of ‘progress’ we saw, the less we liked it. And we always had something to measure it against, because progress somehow never quite fully happened on my grandfather’s farm in the fells. We held on to that backwards little farm and it became – for my father and for me – a counterpoint to the new farming. Unexpectedly, this odd combination of two different kinds of farming changed my family. We saw, on a daily basis, a ‘before’ and ‘after’ version of a British farm. It invited judgement and enabled comparisons, something not generally possible for other farmers. But the clearest comparison came to us from the roadside between our two farms, where an old man called Henry had lived.

~

Henry looked like the stereotypical old farmer. He was heavy-set, red-faced and a little plump. He wore tweed trousers, with bale string and wisps of hay peeping out of a crumpled jacket pocket. He walked with a steady gait and spoke steadily too. We didn’t spend much time with him, but we knew Henry to be a good man. His rented farm was on the same estate as ours. It was a fine old place with big stone barns and a beautiful house, grander than our place. It would once have been a prosperous farm. Now it seemed outdated, lacking the giant steel-frame buildings of the modern farms.

To us, mention of Henry’s name was a gentle joke about a farmer who had never modernized and had been left behind by his progressive farming neighbours. His was an old-fashioned mixed farm with fields of barley and turnips grown in a rotational cycle. In winter he fertilized his fields by spreading straw-based muck that had come out of the cattle yards and had been rotted in the midden, instead of artificial fertilizers or slurry which we had now all begun using. Flocks of large black-faced Suffolk sheep grazed on the stubble and the turnips. Big broad-backed Hereford bullocks grazed on the pastures. Henry was a good farmer, but a generation or two past the sell-by date. He was stuck, in our eyes, in doing things the way his father had done them. He was uninterested in change, and yet somehow he survived. We speculated he got by because he didn’t have a wife or family and could live ‘quietly’ without much money.

Like the last giant tortoise, Henry seemed stranded in the past as everyone like him disappeared. When I was young, my father would comment on Henry’s old-fashioned ways as we passed his land on the main road. He made meadow hay late in the summer, not silage like all his neighbours. His mowing would be two months or more later than the intensive farmers down the road, and a month later than ours. ‘Good old Henry is just now mowing his meadows …’

Dad liked Henry. He would poke fun affectionately at his ‘backwardness’, but over the years the tone of his voice came to speak more of admiration than contempt. For a long time, I didn’t listen. I would tune out, watching the lapwings rise above Henry’s fields, their paddle-like wings, flashing white, black and emerald in the winter sunshine. I didn’t really understand why, until years later, but I can clearly remember that the sky above his farm swirled with curlews, lapwings and rooks, and flocks of fieldfares in winter.

When Henry died, his neighbours seemed sad that one of the last of the old breed had gone. He might not have been at the cutting edge of farming, but he was well liked. The estate that owned the land carved up Henry’s farm into parcels and added them to the neighbouring bigger and more modern farms. One of my father’s friends farmed next door and