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

When we came around the field ten minutes later, the mother curlew was nestled in the dusty seedbed like nothing had happened, and my grandfather grinned. That night I told Dad proudly about Grandad and the curlew eggs. He said Grandad was a ‘soppy old bugger’ and no wonder we had taken so long to get the work done.

~

Two weeks passed and the barley was poking up through the earth, the little spears of green racing for the sky. There was a notable sense of relief as my grandfather walked across the field, through hundreds of regulation rows of green seedlings. While I was at school, my father spread some artificial fertilizer on the field; I could see it like tiny little white polystyrene balls on the ground. And with every passing day the curlews, oystercatchers and peewits on their nests slowly became submerged in a rising sea of nitrogen green barley.

~

My grandfather rarely went to church, and thought the vicar was an idiot, but he would say things like ‘you’d better pray’ when I asked him whether the barley we had sown would grow. Planting a crop was an act of faith. There was a very real sense that it might all end in failure. The seed drill might not have worked. The birds might steal the seed. The weather might be too wet or too cold, or drought might ruin the crop as it grew. And even if the seed germinated, it could be blighted by disease or eaten by vermin, making all that work futile. Everyday disasters of this kind would leave our farm short of crop for our animals in winter.

The year before, our barley had been damp when we harvested, because there wasn’t the weather to get it dry. It had warmed in the loft, like a compost heap, until it steamed. In midwinter, when the cows needed it for feed, it had become stuck together and mouldy. My father said they would have to eat it or go without. The cows looked at it with disgust. I was beginning to understand why everyone we knew moaned continually about the weather. We were slaves to it.

A field with a healthy, weed-free and bountiful crop was always what we hoped for, but it was not a natural thing, and if it happened at all, it was created by the will and toil of the farmer. The gods could either reward us with a bountiful crop or crush us in countless ways. And such a hard way of living made for hard people.

~

We walked across the headlands of the barley field to the sandy banks that were pockmarked with rabbit warrens. It was three or four weeks since the barley had been sown, and now the damage done by the rabbits was showing. The first hundred yards from the dyke, nearest the warrens, was grazed bare – nibbled off at ground level. Five inches beneath where it should have been. My grandfather had told John to ‘do something’ about the rabbits or, he said, there would be no barley to harvest later in the summer. And I followed him because he was patient and kind, and he taught me things. He lived with his wife Sheila in one of the council houses below the barley field. My dad said John was ‘wasted’ on rough farm work. He was careful and steady, a craftsman at heart, with pride in his work however simple the task. He could make or mend things and took great care in laying bricks or blocks straight and true. He could fashion beautiful gate-catches out of bits of chain, wire and old nails.

Behind their house, by the coal bins, were two cages with ferrets in them for ‘rabbiting’. The ferrets ate from old Fray Bentos pie tins. Stiff brown rabbits were hung up by the back door, ready to be skinned. John told me not to put my fingers through the wire mesh front, or the ferrets would bite and not let go. He reached in, grabbed them confidently by their middles and stuffed them into his wooden box and closed the lid. He threw the leather strap over his shoulder and made off through a hole in their fence. I tried to step into the impressions his boots made in the soil, but couldn’t quite match them and had to leap a little between strides. A few hundred feet ahead of us a slow creeping tide of rabbits moved, in stuttering waves, back to the stinging nettles around their holes.

At the warren, John did a recce of holes as if trying to work out a puzzle. He kicked at the nettles to clear them from the holes, then methodically covered their many exits, gently splaying nets made of soft white string across the shadowy holes, like a spider’s web. Each net was surrounded by a drawstring attached to a hand-carved wooden peg pushed firmly into the ground. He lifted a ferret from its box, and slipped it under the net, feeding it hand over hand into the hole. Then we waited. I knew John was anxious, because the ferret could kill down the hole if it trapped a rabbit in a dead-end, and might not come back. He had a spade to dig it out. The ferret’s job was really to spread panic among the rabbits, scaring them up into the nets. John watched the nets like a hawk. After maybe twenty seconds, a fleeing rabbit trapped itself in the pursed net. It was caught fast and lay silent, wide-eyed. He swept it up into his hands, pealing it quickly from the net, and pulled its neck and its back legs apart until there was a gristly crunch. It shuddered and went limp; then he tossed it onto the grass by my feet where it was soon still. He quickly and carefully reset the net. Two other rabbits bolted out of