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

this enough to legislate for it and pay for it. To do this we have to opt out of the cheap food dogma that has driven farming and food policy for the past few decades. We might have to stop gullibly accepting every new technology and new ideology, and care instead about some fairly simple old technologies and ideas – like valuing good rotational mixed farming and enlightened land stewardship. One of the best ways to create a better rural landscape is to mobilize the farmers, and other country people, working with what is left of their old culture of stewardship, and tapping into their love and pride in their land. We can build a new English Pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all.

~

In his final weeks, my father liked to travel around the farm with me and talk openly about what would happen after his last day had come. In this scenario, to my great discomfort, I had been promoted and he was no longer of any significance. He had become the past tense. I tried to stop him talking like that. The farm was still ‘his’ in my mind, and I wanted to believe that he might not die. But he was clear that he had done his bit, carried the baton forwards, and handed it on. The handing on, rather than being sad, or an ending, or defeat, seemed to give him great comfort, as he felt he had done what he had set out to do.

In the preceding months, when he found out he wasn’t going to recover, and maybe was just a few weeks from death, he had to choose how to spend his remaining days. My mother asked him what he wanted to do, and the answer was simple (and entirely unsurprising). He wanted to go home to the farm to carry on his life for as long as he could. He made an unwritten, and unspoken, list of all the jobs that needed to be done on the farm. Then he worked, slowly, with failing strength at times, through his list.

One Saturday he took my eldest son, Isaac, and my youngest daughter, Bea, with him to hang a gate, because, he said, I would ‘never get it done’. The gate was on the pastures opposite our farmhouse, between a field where our sheep were grazing and a meadow full of wild flowers and vetches that we mowed each summer for hay. It is flanked on both sides by an old wall covered in moss and lichen that shines, depending on the light and the hour, green, yellow, purple and silver. Over the centuries the old wall has sunk a little under its own weight back into the earth, six inches down in some places. And it has sagged left and right, so it rises and falls, and meanders ever so slightly, like a loose shoelace. On the wind-wake side of the wall there lay a drift of last autumn’s copper-bronze beech leaves, wind-brittle and crunchy like plastic crisp packets under foot.

My seven-year-old son Isaac now calls it ‘Grandad’s Gate’. He tells me often that he, his sister and his grandfather mended it. His grandfather spliced together two broken gates, recycling them, to make a new one. My wife had smashed one of those broken gates on the school run, reversing her car out of the farmyard without seeing it; it had blown half-shut as the children distracted her with their bickering in the back seats. The resulting mended gate looks a little peculiar, but it works perfectly. I pass through it almost every day. It swings good and true. It rained the day they mended it – but they didn’t seem to mind. They all came back soaked but with smiles on their faces, proud that they had done it together. Dad knew there would be a million things he would not now get to teach my children, that so much that might-have-been would now never happen, but this day he had shown a little farm boy and girl that you could make something new from something broken.

~

It took me two or three years after my father’s death to understand the simplest of truths: that I had just taken his place. We each have but a fleeting moment between those who came before and those who come afterwards. I am now the one who makes the decisions that shape our farm, but my choices are almost as constrained as they were for the first farmers who settled here. The hilly nature of our land, and its northern latitude, height above sea-level, soil, temperate climate (affected by the Gulf Stream) and our growing season dictate many of the ways we must farm. A Lakeland fell farm like ours is always going to be primarily a livestock grazing farm; it is part of the three-quarters or so of the British landscape that is unsuitable for growing crops. Yet we still have bills to pay, debts and obligations to family and community. We need to produce something from our land to sell.

Our farm is still about the hard work of breeding and selling stock recited on our fields of grass. We must sustain our land and ourselves, until it is time to pass it on. I have no idea if any of my children will want to take on this farm, or indeed whether any of them will be able to afford to do so. Life is complicated, and it’s hard to guess what it will hold for them. I merely hope that they will all learn as much as they can about farming during their childhood, including a respect and love for the natural world. This valley is a gift of a place to grow up. Children can roam half-wild across the fields and play in the woods and becks.

We will continue farming as if, someday, one or more of our children will take it on, and will worry about whether they