English Pastoral by James Rebanks (cat reading book .txt) 📗
- Author: James Rebanks
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We trekked steadily up from the beck, and through the gate to the meadow, towards my father and John. Dad’s Land-Rover was already by the hedge and his axe could be heard striking. John was pulling branches away from the hedge and throwing them into piles to burn. Thorns are dormant in winter and can be cut and bent, before coming back to life in the spring. A good thorn dyke, Grandad explained, is a solid and useful thing, a simple piece of craftsmanship, requiring no shop-bought things to create or maintain, made entirely from its own materials. He said you could tell whether a farm was thriving simply by seeing if traditional crafts like hedge-laying were still being carried out.
Each thorn trunk was first almost severed with the billhook, then, when pliable and ready to fall, John pulled the branch down to lie on its neighbour. My father protected the delicate sappy hinge, which was thin as a book’s cover. His hands were scratched and had dried blood on them the colour of the hawthorn berries. He said this thin remnant of trunk would thicken like a wound scabbed over and carry enough sap to the branches to let it go on growing. And as new upright shoots grew from each laid branch, in subsequent years, they would tie the laid branches together until the hedge architecture became tangled and shaggy and thick. The men talked, but I lost interest and went to sit in the car twenty feet away, to warm my feet with the heaters, while listening to Blondie on the radio.
Two or three years later, the branch architecture at its heart was hidden from view, and it was a scraggy green hedge again. Every fifteen or so years hedges like this needed laying, and with each reworking they became an ever more impenetrable, impassable tangle of gnarly, almost horizontal branches. As it aged, it became ever richer in plants, birds and insects, both in the hedge itself but also on the raised mound, or ‘kest’, on which it stood – a haven for wild flowers.
These hedges were perfect places to hide for us kids, or to climb through in summer. Once through them we were in other kingdoms and could ignore the far-away sound of our mothers calling for us. We would wander off down the hedgerows, on adventures to the railway, or to the old ruined mill where the older kids played – or later, to look at porno mags and to smoke fags. At times it felt like life had always been this way and would continue like this forever.
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As a child I had had an illustrated book about the Greek myths. I loved Odysseus and Theseus and their heroic journeys. But I suspected we were more like Sisyphus, pushing a giant stone up that hill, only for it to roll back down again and again. At the start of that year of learning I had thought that working on the farm was something to escape from. But I began to realize that, despite some whingeing and moments of despair, my father and grandfather thought this continuous work was the inevitable price to be paid for a good life on the land. Things must be done, because they always had been done. The secret was to settle in your harness and not fight it. Just get on with it. My grandfather seemed to have found a way to endure it through enjoying the wild things around him, and in taking pride at doing things right. He seemed to be saying to me: learn to see the beauty in mowing thistles, learn to enjoy the skill of the scythe, learn to tell stories or make people laugh so that even the toughest working days won’t break you. If he was like Sisyphus, then it was Sisyphus with a smile on his face. He thought, harshly, that modern people were like children,
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