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

featureless and bland. I was a daydreamer. Then my father bawled at me to get my boots on and go out and help, shouting that he wasn’t running a holiday camp. When I appeared at the backdoor, he told me what jobs to do outside and turned in disgust back to the yard, leaving a shitty brown stain dripping down the cupboard, where he was standing. And all I could think was, who would want to be out there, with frozen hands, working for that maniac in the rain?

~

One day I heard my grandfather shouting at my father that he had made me ‘sick’ of the farm already, that he had been too hard with me. Grandad was still the patriarch of every one of our acres, rarely away from the fields, and I soon learned that it was more fun working with him or, even better, being on his farm up in the fells, than working for my dad at home.

Grandad didn’t look much. He wore the same old brown suit every day. Beneath his flat cap his scalp was pale, and his hair swept across it pathetically. He had a cup of toothpicks by his chair and would use them to fiddle for bits in his gob. He had never seemed young, looking more or less the same, but skinnier, in the oldest picture we had of him, in which he held a prize beef Shorthorn bull in front of the castle in the local town. But I didn’t care what he looked like. I seized any chance to hang out with this old man who told amazing stories and seemed to do whatever he liked. That year he set out to teach me all about the fields, starting with the ploughing of the barley field and how our farm worked through the seasons. He knew that given a little time with me he could make me fall in love with it all. And he was right, because in the course of that year I did. Nearly forty years later, that year mattered in another way, because it gave me a head full of memories of a farming world that would soon vanish. That time became a lifeline for me, a light in the darkness.

My farm education that year was fragmented, handed to me like pieces of a jigsaw that didn’t always form a whole. These fragments would only slowly build up to give me a clear understanding of that world and its values. I was learning the old ways, and just in time because they were starting to die out all around us, even in our own family. I had uncles and cousins with good lowland farms fifteen miles away, and it was clear from their new tractors, machinery and big buildings, and their barely concealed contempt for our old-fashioned farming, that things had already changed for them.

~

He sat in his Land-Rover in the farmyard, by our back door, revving the engine and peeping his horn. My mum said I’d better get a move on or Grandad will go without me. I tumbled over my own feet, trying to put my wellington boots on and get through the door. I was to be Grandad’s ‘gate-opener’. We rattled off down the lane, with him grumbling about being late. A minute later, he stopped at the Long Meadow gate, and I jumped out and opened it quick-sharp (only the heaviest gates, or those tied with barbed wire, got him out of the vehicle). He drove through and I closed the gate behind him.

Some of the pastures were full of ewes and young lambs. He took care to see that they were all being mothered correctly and were thriving. He knew which lambs belonged to each ewe by sight and could tell when one was missing or following the wrong mother. We drove around his ‘stirks’ (young beef cattle) that had just come out of their winter barns to graze. These young cattle were flighty, raising their heads and galloping off, snorting like startled wildebeest. Grandad said they were fine, and we needn’t bother them. Further down the road three escaped lambs galloped down the road, baaing for their mothers, and tried to push themselves back through the hedge. Grandad travelled with a bucket of staples, a hammer and a roll of wire in the back, for moments like this. He sent his sheepdog Ben to get the lambs back while he patched up the fences. We let the flock through a gate to a new field. He said they were ‘a bit stale’ and that my father should have moved them already. Sheep should not hear the church bells twice in the same field, he said – it meant they had been in one field too long.

He parked the Land-Rover, and we walked across a sandy bank covered in gorse to inspect more of our fields. I tried to keep up with his strides, just as I tried to pee for as long as he did when he emptied his bladder (but I couldn’t because he pissed like an old horse and it went on forever). As he walked, the grass rasped at his boots, making a scythe-like sound with each stride. He wore old brown leather boots that turned up at the end like clogs, with yellow laces, and my grandmother polished them with dubbin. Halfway to the cows, he paused to take in the wider panorama of the valley, reading the varied greens and browns, the patchwork of different grazing, and the other farms. He knew exactly what everyone else was up to in the valley. As we walked, I was told that every one of the crops and animals had its own annual cycle of birth or planting, growth, protecting and feeding, harvesting or killing and selling. It would be another ten or fifteen years before anyone told me the technical term: an old-fashioned ‘mixed’ and ‘rotational’ farm. It didn’t warrant a name to my grandfather,