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

farmer told me to head down the dirt track for thirty miles. Then turn right for six blocks, then turn left for two more blocks until I reached the field. It is like navigating on a chessboard. I race past fields of cattle, eyes glowing in my lights. Around them, strange wild eyes are shining out from the bushes. I pass a tree by the side of the road. Creatures half-recognizable are lying around it, large and red. Kangaroos. Startled, they flee through the scrub along the sides of the track. I am so amazed I don’t ease off the throttle. They flank the tractor, flying. I could reach out and touch them. It is like a dream of kangaroos leaping around me. Then, before I can process what I am seeing, they are gone and I am suddenly alone in the night, with the vibration of the engine, the stars and the red dust. And I wonder if anyone at home will believe me about the kangaroos. After an hour of feeling half lost, I reach the mown field and work through the night, baling by the tractor’s halogen lights.

~

The Australian landscape was flat, unlike anything I had ever seen before. It stretched on forever, and then some. A landscape of vast, perfect fields. I was confused by how perfect it was: neat squares carved out of the bush by surveyors with a ruler on a map a century or so ago.

Land here was cheap, the scale vast. There was no history to slow anything down. Or none that was spoken of. It was a blank slate on which these modern farmers were writing the future. No old walls. No old farmsteads. No people. No bones of older things poking out through the new. Just flat fields, perfect for huge machines. Tens of thousands of sheep ranched in fields bigger than our entire farm. Herds of 600 or 700 cows. All the people I met were full of enthusiasm and hope. We can out-compete everyone else in the world, one farmer told me over a beer. He was right. We were beat.

~

A few months later I headed home. I was hopelessly homesick, and had become crippled by it. I dreamed each night of the fells and the greenness, and our crooked, imperfect fields. And I missed the red-haired girl I’d met in the pub the night before I left.

~

I came back more in love with my home than ever. Our farm had never been so luminous. The hedgerows glowed green as we drove past, the meadows and pastures looked so ragged and pretty, and Dad thought I was talking gibberish. But I saw, perhaps for the first time, the full beauty of our landscape – its walls, its hedges, its stone-built farmhouses and its old barns – and I knew that this place was as much a part of me as I was part of it.

And yet, for all this love, I returned somewhat defeated. I had a growing fear in my heart that we would struggle to survive. We couldn’t produce food to compete with the farms I had just seen. I sensed that perhaps we were the past, that our age was coming to an end.

~

In the months that followed, I began to see what was happening to us much more clearly. I understood why my old man was struggling to make a living. What good was a farm like ours, battered by the wind and rain for six months of the year? What good were crooked fields and higgledy-piggledy old buildings? What hope was there for farming on this tiny scale? I had seen a new breed of bigger, faster and more intensive farmers, and now men like them were also emerging from the wreckage of our landscape. I felt embarrassed that my own family hadn’t managed to keep up. We were too small, too old-fashioned, too conservative, too poor, and now, probably, too late to find a place in this brave new world.

~

At home, everywhere I looked things seemed outdated. Tractors had replaced horses as the main source of power on the farm a generation earlier. But the tractor implements my grandfather and father used were only slightly bigger versions of what had come before. In our stack yard, the rusting corrugated tin ‘implement shed’ was full of items of old horse-drawn machinery. The beams in our farmhouse kitchen were still covered in horse brasses. The past had departed, but she had left behind many of her tools, and they were gathering dust in our barns. Ancient tack hung from the beams of our loft, leather crumbling, brittle, covered in white cobwebs: harnesses, yokes, bridles, girths and horseshoes. There was even a hand-held walking seed drill tucked in the beam of our barley loft, with a spreading mechanism that was played by hand like a fiddle. And a pair of horse spurs from the Boer War on the hearth where Grandad had sat to read the newspaper, as if someone had taken them off five minutes earlier. I held those spurs one day and realized that I was part of a traditional working life that was being pulled out of shape. No one on the modern farms hand-pulled turnips or milked old cows for the house twice a day.

~

My father became weighed down with the responsibility of keeping our farm going with all its growing debt. He became rougher and harder to deal with: he seemed to have just one plan – to outwork our problems. Slog it. Get up earlier. Work later. He was irritated by any show of softness in me, as if we couldn’t afford to be anything other than tough as hell. He wasn’t one for explaining anything in words, but his actions said we had no choice but to copy what everyone else was doing. We needed new machines and new breeds of sheep and cattle; we had to cut costs and corners. We had fallen way behind and now