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

Then comes the voice of another man – who I don’t know – sitting in an old armchair in the corner. He says everything is being driven by money, the greed of big business and a few farmers who push for more and more and undermine the rest. We are bloody fools, he says, we just end up chasing each other down to the bottom. If we make money with a hundred cows, we want another fifty to make more, and, if we are losing money, we want another fifty to get out of the hole. Either way, it is always more, more. David’s son turns to me and says, ‘it just isn’t fun anymore’.

These men were always fairly conservative with a small ‘c’. I know because I had listened to them when they were younger and I was a child. But something has changed. There was always sense in what they had to say. Now there is radicalism too. And they are right, although I am shocked that they see it the same way I do. I thought I had grown away from them, but the truth is we have all grown away from the same bad ideas. We are all grasping to understand what has happened and how we might climb out of it. Then, because we are all a little suspicious of such serious political talk, we spontaneously get up to go for pudding, and shuffle into the kitchen like penguins in a queue. Sherry trifle with pouring cream. Lemon cheesecake. Finely chopped fruit salad. And then we sit and eat, thinking of other things to talk about, like the football.

~

When we get home from David’s party, I have to go and check on some sheep that were stranded the day before on a hill surrounded by floodwater. They were safe, but I need to see they are all OK. I am glad to be back on our old farm in the fells. The grassy banks by the beck are flattened, showing where the level of water had risen. Glassy puddles in the mown hayfields form mirrors reflecting the sky. Everything is clean and bright. The eggshell-blue sky is broken with white-cloud islands. As I stride downstream, the beck fattens from a trickle to something increasingly like a small river.

Our land is coming back to life again in countless little ways. Wild flowers hang over the fresh flood-bitten banks and rise from the gravel in its bed. Foxgloves tremble in the breeze. Little brown, orange and white moths and butterflies flit to and fro across the clumps of flowers. A heron rises awkwardly from the rushes a hundred yards away, and twists and tumbles down the valley on its sail-like wings, gliding back to the beck two fields away. Our valley always looks shiny and new after a flood. But unlike in those biblical floods that swept away the sinful past, our waters have receded and the all-too-human jumble of the past and the present emerges once more.

~

Our land is like a poem, in a patchwork landscape of other poems, written by hundreds of people, both those here now and the many hundreds that came before us, with each generation adding new layers of meaning and experience. And the poem, if you can read it, tells a complex truth. It has both moments of great beauty and of heartbreak. It tells of human triumph and failings, of what is good in people and what is flawed; and what we need, and how in our greed we can destroy precious things. It tells of what stays the same, and what changes; and of honest hard-working folk, clinging on over countless generations, to avoid being swept away by the giant waves of a storm as the world changes. It is also the story of those who lost their grip and were swept away from the land, but who still care, and are now trying to find their way home.

~

It is now five years since my father died, but we had left his rented farm long before. When we drove away for the last time, I shed quiet tears for the place where I had spent much of my childhood and youth. Those fields had been my playground, classroom and my first place of work. I left that day with a head full of memories of things learned and of countless moments of beauty. That farm was the prism through which I learned to see the world: the place where I was taught about the weather, farming, work, community and the wild things around us. It felt like saying goodbye to a dear friend for the last time. I was abandoning a much-loved place to fall apart. But that farm was not our land and never would be. If we had a chance of holding on and doing anything good, then it would be on our own farm in the hills.

We made our home instead on my grandfather’s farm with its 185 acres of owned land. Fifty years ago, it would have been a decent-sized farm, but by the standards of industrial agriculture today it is tiny. Our bank manager says it is too big for a hobby; too small to make much money. But it is ours.

~

I still travel back to the old rented farm sometimes. It is like visiting someone you once loved but who has now become a stranger. The gorse on the hillside that my father used to burn every few years has gone, scraped away with a large digger or bulldozer. The farmers there have brought that old field, the ‘Quarry field’, into the modern age. The hay meadows have been ploughed out and ‘improved’. There are no fields of barley, oats or turnips. It is all tidier, bright green, reseeded and farmed more efficiently. The linnets that used to flit upwards to the telephone lines, as we played hide and seek; the rabbits that raced across the gaps between hawthorn