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

the windows with tape and newspapers. After mealtimes my father would look at me still standing there chewing ‘perfectly good meat’ with a look of confusion and disgust. He’d stride off up the yard, and my mother would come out and say, ‘Quick, get a cheese sandwich and eat it before he comes back and kicks your backside.’

One frosty autumn day my father came back to the house after dinner, crestfallen, because Old Blackie had ‘gone off her feet’. We looked where he pointed at the top of the Cow Pasture, and saw her slumped on the ground. She was worn out and had reached the end of her days. Snowy was grazing, sympathetically, nearby. Dad knew that she must now be shot, dragged down to the yard and sent away with the ‘knacker man’. He took his shotgun and trudged sadly up the field. From the kitchen we saw his head sunk in sadness as he had a word or two with the old cow. He put the gun a few inches from her head. And then suddenly Old Blackie rocked forwards to her feet, pushed past him and his gun, and wandered off to graze with Snowy. As he passed us in the kitchen, on his way to put his gun back in its cabinet, we were all grinning. He told us to ‘shut up’, but he was smiling. She lived quite healthily for another eighteen months.

~

When the ground became sodden, the cattle were brought down from the fields for the winter to live in the barns and byres, and it was my job to go out and help feed them when I got home from school. The dusky sky echoed with rooks and starlings swirling around the village on their way to roost as I tramped across the yard to the ‘meal house’ where the cattle feed was stored. It was deafeningly loud there because the barley crusher was on, its two giant flywheels flattening the thin flow of barley. We filled hessian sacks with it for the cattle and poured it across their hay and silage like a scattering of pale yellow corn flakes. I had to brush up the sweepings of waste barley from the meal-house floor for the hens.

I was less reluctant to do these chores than I had been the previous winter, but I still hated the hen house. It was a small wooden shed, with an outside wire-mesh run full of nettles. The hens scratched and pecked in the dirt each day in the sunshine and caught the occasional juicy worm or a spider, and retreated to the shed at dusk. There was no electric light in the hut, so as I stepped in the door swung shut, trapping out the last of the daylight. It was dark now except for the small rectangular light of the pop-hole through which the hens went to and fro from the outside run. The floor of the shed was raised about a foot or eighteen inches with years of dried hen muck. Deep in the shed, the laying hens sat silently in the nest boxes, except for an occasional cluck or wing flap in the darkness. They were motionless until my groping hand found them. Then there was a minor explosion of clucking, feathers flying, wings flapping and dust swirling. One or two came squawking through the pop-hole as if a fox had entered their coop. But the ‘broody’ ones held tight to their nest. I reached under their feathers into their warm downy underbelly to take the eggs from beneath them. The older hens stabbed at my hands with their sharp beaks, drawing blood.

But then something else moved in the dark. Rats. Big rats, fat from eating the hen feed. I could sense shapes moving on the floor, the darkness electric-charged with fear. Suddenly I heard squawking and saw a huge rat trying to pull a half-bald hen down a hole in the floorboards. I shouted and the rat let go and vanished. I retreated from the hut, shaken, and told my father, who said, ‘Them rats want fucking poisoning. This is past a joke.’ And he must have done it, because for the next week, whenever I collected the eggs, I found dying or dead rats in the pen, being pecked at by the hens.

The reward for this ordeal was a handful of fresh eggs each day. Back in the warm light of the farmhouse they were a range of browns – some speckled and odd ones smudged with hen shit. They warmed my hands and I liked that. The eggs had a deep orange yoke when they were boiled for breakfast. And to keep them clean, I carefully filled each nest box with golden barley straw from the barn.

~

That winter I began to see, for the first time, the cruel pressure that was weighing on my father. Long after I was tucked up in bed, he would be working out in the night, hammering away in the workshop or welding some broken hayrack. Or I’d hear his voice loud and angry through the floorboards. I heard the other kids at school talking about where they were going on their winter holidays, but my family never had a holiday. And my mum was caught somewhere between the kitchen sink and doing the work once done by a man on the farm.

~

Mum was shaping the dough on the table in our little kitchen. It stuck to the tabletop, despite the flour she had sprinkled on it. She had a polo neck on. The sleeves were pulled back to her elbows, exposing her long pale arms that were pushing and pulling. She flicked her hair behind her ear. She was slim and pretty. She had tried to follow the recipe in the Be-Ro recipe book. My grandmother had told her it was easy to make scones, but my mother found such things almost impossible. Maybe Mum wasn’t cut out for being this kind of farmer’s