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

by my parents’ friends and I have that sense of being not entirely a grown-up. But these are my people, for better or worse. The men all come to talk to me by turns to hear my news and to tell me theirs. Others give me a broad smile from across the room. When I was young, I used to think I was being judged in these conversations and that these men might think me weak and foolish. Maybe they did. But I see now that the stories we tell each other here bind us tightly together like the hawk-nervous chatter of sparrows in a thorn bush.

One of the old men tells me quietly that he is proud of me, and I look to see if he is joking, but he isn’t. I hadn’t expected that. David makes his way over. I have known him since I was a small boy. I’ve always liked him, but I have only properly seen how fine and kind a man he is in the last few years. He sat with me at my father’s wake and shared a drink. He told me that he had been my dad’s friend his whole life, one of his best friends. We shed a tear and shared a smile together, and he told me a funny story about my twenty-year-old dad getting into trouble with a girlfriend’s father because he had brought her home late. Then there had been a commotion in the barn, and he had ended up calving a cow with her father in a byre by the house. He told me that now my father was dead he would try to be as good a friend to me as he had been to him.

It sounded like an earnest promise – and he has kept it. He comes to my farm two or three times a year and quietly offers advice, and he is there whenever I have questions I would once have asked my father. He buys tups (rams) from me, as he did from Dad, and is there at the sales to ensure my sheep make honest prices. I am forty-five years old and I am still being watched out for. David doesn’t need to do this. I hadn’t expected it and am touched by it. He has taken me under his wing, and he thinks nothing of it; this is just the man he is. Today he tells me he wishes my father were there with him to celebrate his birthday. Me too, I say.

They grew up together, clipped sheep together for cash, went to dances, chased girls, drove cars too fast, got out of scrapes and lived alongside each other as they grew into men and started their families. They saw each other struggle, borrow too much money to buy land and somehow pay it back, and eventually achieve the things they set out to do. Some years ago, David was gravely ill. My father visited him in hospital and came back shaken. He thought he had said goodbye for the last time. But David recovered. And now he looks after everyone in the room, fetching drinks and taking time to talk to everyone, including my children. He asks them about their sheep, and their school, and sends his grown-up daughter for farm toys for my son Isaac. A box appears that would once have been his son’s and Isaac plays with the one-legged cows and three-wheeled tractors and paint-chipped metal pig huts.

The old men watch the children play. They pull their chairs closer in a circle and begin to talk. They think farming has gone wrong, badly wrong. I listen. One of them says we need to get back to farming a mixed landscape of different crops, with cattle, sheep and pigs. ‘This just-farming-one-thing is no good,’ he says. ‘You are vulnerable if you farm just one thing, vulnerable to these insane swings in the prices of things. They tell you to get more cows, and want to lend you heaps of money, but when it goes wrong the bank comes for your farm and there is no sentiment. Don’t trust them,’ he says.

Another man, who I recognize but can’t name, says even the good farming families are finished now. The interest rates rise, or the price of pork or milk falls, or the price of feed rises – and the numbers kill them. We have all been to the farm sales and stood in the rain while the auctioneers sell off the farmer’s machinery and their animals. The farmer puts on a brave face, standing by the auctioneer, and his wife checks he is OK by clutching his arm and smiling a message of love. Their friends surround them in their hundreds, buying things they don’t really need just to show their respect and get their names written in the sales ledger.

We all know farmers suffering with mental-health problems. We all know farmers that have killed themselves.

Another of my father’s best friends, Gerald, tells us that he stood on his highest field and looked across the Eden valley and realized recently that it is just a ‘green desert’. He says there aren’t birds like there used to be. And where are the hedgehogs? Where are the butterflies? The other men look uneasy. I am shocked to hear him talk like this. He sounds a bit like the environmentalists we once all hated.

They talk about a field they all know that once grew deep, rich, golden crops of grain that shimmered in the wind and the sun. Now that field is worn out: it has the worst and sickliest crop on it that they have ever known. It has been used for grain for fifteen straight years and now needs to rest and get its soil right again with grass, and some livestock on it to replenish it with their muck. They talk about fields around the district as if they are old friends – and those old friends are