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

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As we walked the farm, a bewildering – to me – number of different things were happening in the fields around us. There were four or five meadows growing hay, with a few for silage, and two or three of barley (including the one I had just helped him plough). Down the headlands, there was a field of freshly sown oats, grown for the horses; then a field of turnips for the sheep, and a dozen or so raised mounds of soil, ‘stitches’, planted with potatoes for the house. Further away, a field of ‘whole crop’ of peas and beans, yet another source of winter cattle feed. As if this wasn’t enough, he also – reluctantly, but to keep my grandmother happy – had a garden with rows of cabbages, lettuces, carrots and onions. He would curse and grumble as he broke the earth into clods with his fork each spring. He had, until recently, had even more kinds of livestock in the fields and barns: a herd of dairy cattle, another for beef, three breeds of sheep, and pigs, horses and hens for eggs, and ducks and turkeys reared and fattened for sale at Christmas. To my eyes, my grandfather knew how to grow and care for a lot of different things – he was a farming jack-of-all-trades.

He told me one day not to be confused by it all, that the pattern was simple. ‘The farm dances around the plough,’ he said. Other tools followed and were used, but the plough was king. To grow a crop, he had to plough or ‘till’ the ground to create a seedbed, turning the shorn old crop into the earth to stop it growing. The plough was the key tool for ‘improving’ his rented farm – and had been since he’d been a young man in the 1930s and 1940s, ploughing with a horse and trudging up and down the furrows in his hobnailed boots.

There was something about working the land on foot behind a horse that seemed to make him see the world differently from the way later generations would see it from a powerful tractor. My grandfather knew our fields as if they were extensions of his body. He had felt the plough tremor as it scratched across the bedrock, felt it in his hands and through his boots. On foot, behind a horse, grass, soil and worms were up close – seen, heard, smelt and touched. There was nothing between him and the nature he worked with. The labour was often hard, long and perhaps sometimes boring, but I never heard him say a word to suggest he regretted a minute of it.

I walked and rode with him through the seasons – watching and listening. In the midst of Thatcher’s Britain, I was a boy on a tractor listening to my grandfather’s tales from the 1930s (or others from the 1890s that his grandfather had told him). These tales were full of horses. There was a kind of magic in those stories, because the horses and men in them were already gone. The sun was beginning to set on his world. He was in his final field days.

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We followed the old drystone wall that led from the farmstead to the meadows. The wall rose and fell with the contours of the rigg, the raised hogback mounds of earth that rose above the floodplain. Meadow pipits rose up from the field, and flitted up and away ahead of us, perching on the posts that held the wire to the top of the walls to stop the sheep escaping. The ewes and lambs called to each other across the valley. My grandfather stopped and held his hand to his ear, pantomime-style, to listen to the cuckoo calling in the woods on the fell. I nodded. He quietly opened the wooden gate by the stone barn, or ‘hoggust’, as he called it. An old black Aberdeen Angus cow was due to calve. He had walked her into the barn the previous night, so that he could help her if things went wrong.

We peered through the broken window. A jet-black calf was lying in a patch of light flooding in over the barn door. My grandfather crept in quietly and I followed, pausing at the door. The cow’s teats were shining and soft, so he knew the calf had suckled. It shone, in wet cow-licked curls of saliva and spittle. The old man talked to its mother to reassure her, and she lowed back at him, but then relaxed and let him scratch her rump. He pulled gently at the afterbirth, and it peeled away and fell in a sloppy bundle on the barn floor. He lifted it away with an old pitchfork and threw it into a clump of nettles by the blue slate and lime mortar wall of the barn. He reached under the calf and said it was a bull calf; then he lifted it to its feet. The mother watched him carefully with big watery black eyes, chewing her cud. He waved to me, and I knew he meant that I should open the door. The cow wandered through, calf stuttering after her, and away across the meadow to the rest of the herd. She paused every few strides to let her wobbly-legged son catch up. We watched them, the cow heading to the beck for a drink, grabbing wisps of grass as she went. Some of the other cows came to inspect the calf and touch noses with the mother. The rest were grazing across the field, tails swishing as they munched along, others were lying with their calves by their sides and flicking their tails and ears at the flies that encrusted their flanks and eyes with shimmering specks of emerald and black. An older calf was gently pummelling his mother’s udder as he sucked, face covered in a milky froth, while another stole milk by reaching in