English Pastoral by James Rebanks (cat reading book .txt) 📗

backs under the branches, or stood in their shade, to shelter from the sun. Late spring meant lots of work, but good work, Grandad said, because it achieved something, unlike the dull repetitive daily slog of winter that I’d known and disliked a few short months ago. The ewes and lambs were tagged, marked, tailed and vaccinated. My father and grandfather had time to breathe a little, and do odd jobs, making good the damage of winter.

It was one of those May days when the cotton-wool clouds race to the distant fells and the emptying sky was blue. My father had gone to a distant auction mart to see ‘what sort of trade sheep are’. My grandfather told me he had some ‘gaps to put up’ so I went with him. Following him around the edges of our farm, I felt we were like an ancient tribe walking the boundaries of our territory.

We walked across three fields and then down to the bottom of our ‘Long Narrow Fields’. A wall had come down where the winter weather or the sheep had moved a stone or two and weakened it. Some of the stones had tumbled down the bank on the far side. I was sent to carry them back up the bank one at a time. If we left them in the hay meadows, he said they would do great damage to the machinery. The mower would jump and shake with shuddering bangs, as if it had swallowed a landmine. And it had to be done before the grass got too long. My grandfather worked out how best the stones would fit back in the hole like a jigsaw puzzle. He carefully sorted the walling stones, placing the top stones to one side, and divided the good walling stones carefully between the two sides of the wall. Then he began placing them, taking trouble to present their moss- and lichen-covered faces to the outside edge and leaving a flat surface on top of them that could be built upon.

Among the stones at his feet were a little broken clay pipe and an old green bottle, revealing that other men long before us had done this work. He told me stories about his grandfather, and how he became a successful farmer, and about his Model T Ford, and the gold watch he gave his daughter as a reward because she lambed his sheep and was better than any of the hired men. And his landlord’s son who, he laughed, once got a ‘real job’ driving a concrete mixer, but had stopped at a pub and got in with a bad crowd, and when he came out, legless, hours later, the concrete had set solid in the back.

His stories were full of instruction about the kind of people we were and the kind we were not. He impressed upon me that our side of the wall was where we had to work to prosper. He said a farmer was as good or bad as their farm, and what was in it. If our fields swelled with great crops of barley, turnips or hay, or were grazed with fine cattle or sheep in deep lush green grass, then we would be judged ‘good farmers’. If they were badly drained and rank with weeds, with tumbling down walls, badly thriven sheep or wormy cattle, then we were more or less ‘losers’.

As he laid the top stones on the wall, an hour or two later, I sensed him distracted by something. Instead of lifting his stone, he turned his gaze down the scraggy overgrown headland. As I worked, he touched my hand to still me, and then touched his own ear as a signal to let me know he had heard something. ‘What?’ I whispered. He held his finger to his mouth. A hedgehog snuffled out from the long dead grass by the field edge. Oblivious to us, it trotted along like a Victorian woman raising her petticoat above her skinny legs, until it reached him, sniffed nonchalantly, then climbed over the toe of his boot, and on down the field edge until it was lost again in the grass. I was grinning from ear to ear. Grandad was beaming like a little boy, and said in a hushed pantomime voice, ‘That was Mrs Tiggy-Winkle taking her washing home.’

~

My grandfather’s world, and thoughts, largely stopped at those walls, the edges of our kingdom. Beyond was someone else’s concern. We had ties and obligations to those neighbours, and shared rules of decency. We had moments of collaboration, but what they did on their land beyond these boundaries was their business. Our walls, hedges and fences were critical to our farming system. They let us manage parcels of land in many different ways. We had thirty or forty fields on the farm and lots of them were small. But each field to my grandfather had a character, almost a personality, and a back-story, which was part of a series of stories that made up a kind of epic poem. Those field poems came alive in the telling, and in the ongoing work. Knowing the fields and their whims and needs was vital: it determined what could or could not be grown in them. The yields some fields produced became part of their stories – some were of crops that were more bountiful than anything we had ever known – and we wondered if they were just myths.

Grandad said the sandier soil on the field he called ‘Castlebanks’ was ‘hungrier’ than other ground, and needed lots of well-rotted ‘hull muck’ (the best kind of muck from the barns where the bullocks were fed and bedded with straw which had been rotting in a midden for months before being used) to enrich it. The ‘Bottom Banks’ grew wonderful turnips, as big as footballs, which basked in the warmth of the sun. The ‘Eight-acre field’ grew bountiful crops in dry years, but it was clay and could ‘sulk’ in cold