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

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Time seemed to slow down around my grandad. He believed in watching carefully and taking time with his animals. He would simply gaze at his cows or sheep for what felt like ages, leaning over a gate. As a result he knew them all as individuals. He could spot when they behaved differently because something was wrong, when they were coming into season or were about to give birth. He thought only fools rushed around. He believed that a good farmer was patient and used his, or her, eyes and ears, and nose and touch. Doing things well was his goal, not doing things quickly or with the least effort. He called me his ‘squire’ which I never understood until much later – I was his project, his apprentice. A week after we ploughed the barley field we went back to ‘pick stones’. My grandfather didn’t spell it out, but I see now that that field was to be my classroom, the place where I was to learn all the stages of growing a crop.

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The furrows had dried and crumbled in the wind and sun. I was told to steer down the eight-acre field in the lowest gear. I bumped along on the tractor, crawling slowly down the furrows, getting bouncier at the front as the weight in the back grew, stone by stone. My grandfather and John, a bandy-legged farm worker with Brylcreemed black hair and blue cotton trousers, walked behind, throwing stones into the ‘transport box’, a metal crate suspended on the back of the tractor on the hydraulic arms. Each fist-sized rock the men threw arced through the sky and clanged into the box, or cracked as it settled on the other stones. As I began to worry about crashing into the wall at the field’s end, Grandad climbed back on, nudged me out of the way and took the wheel. He drove the box of stones away to tip into holes in the field, or in gateways or lanes to make them firm. Any good walling stone was taken to where it could be reused. Nothing was wasted. Stone was a useful thing. And boys were meant to be useful too. The truth is I was a lonely kid, awkward and easily embarrassed. Other people made me feel nervous and as a result I’d do or say stupid or clumsy things. But my grandfather was different. He made me feel respected and important. I would do anything to make him proud of me, so, when he began my field education, I paid attention, even though I wasn’t really sure I wanted to be a farmer.

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After the stone-picking, the next day we had to break up the furrows into a seedbed. The harrows were big upside-down iron rakes, the size of a couple of double beds, held together by chains and pulled by the tractor over the furrows. With each clattering pass, they slowly broke the ground into a crumbly flat surface. After a while, Grandad said the seedbed was ready because you could see the harrow lines left in the finely raked soil, like fingers pulled through dry sand. My father appeared at the top of the field with the seed drill, an ancient-looking contraption that sowed the grain in the ground at periodic intervals, somehow dropping a single grain every three or four inches or so (or so we hoped, because it was a waste of time if it didn’t). He drove past and mimed ‘You OK?’ I nodded back.

Three generations of us. The field a blur of tractors and dust. And with each pass the work got done.

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A week later, the soil glowed warm in the first days of sunshine. Then we were rolling the field, flattening the loose soil, tucking the seed beneath a pressed-down surface, away from the rooks that sought to steal it. Or, rather, my grandfather was rolling the field; I was being anywhere but at home with my dad, who was in a foul mood because a calf had died of scour. Behind us the giant iron roller rumbled along, the huge cylinder full of water clanked, rattled and banged every time it hit a bump in the field. I bounced around, daydreaming about the John Wayne movie I had watched that morning, the one in which he hires a bunch of schoolboys to do a cattle trail (because the men have all disappeared to the ‘Gold Rush’). He is then killed by some thieves, but it is OK because the boys get tough and avenge his death by hunting down and murdering the bandits.

My grandfather was saying something or other about the peewits (also known as lapwings) that flap around us with their paddle-like wings, twisting and turning, rising and falling, flashing their wings. Suddenly, he stopped the tractor, climbed off slowly, cursing his stiff old legs as they planted themselves in the freshly tilled soil. He strode across the ground, eyes fixed on the spot. I wondered what he had seen. He bent down and picked something up from a scratch in the ground and put it in his flat cap. Then he climbed back in and set the cap on my knee. I looked down at the eggs and held one in my hand. It was warm, and the mottled colour of the boiled imitation pebble sweets you could buy at the seaside. They are curlew eggs, he told me. They nest in these fields. We bounced on. When we had come full circle, he took the cap full of eggs, climbed out and placed them back on the ground where they were, recreating something like a nest with the back of his knuckles. I asked him if the parent birds would come back to them, and he said, ‘Sometimes they