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

twisting and turning like spaghetti thrown on the floor. Little willow and alder self-seeded on the banks, and behind them little gravel beds began to form, tiny at first, but soon fattening until they were changing the course of the beck. As the water slowed behind the saplings, it dropped finer gravel on which fish spawned.

~

The riverbanks are now bustling little highways for wildlife. They are rich in purple and yellow and pink flowers, moths, butterflies and stoats, and crossed with the sunken paths of hares, badgers and foxes. An otter now claims part of this promising territory with her two kits. All around me is birdsong – chaffinches, blackbirds, thrushes, warblers, blue tits and coal tits. Wood pigeons coo. As I near the house for my breakfast, the roe deer with her fawn dashes away and up beyond our farmhouse: this is her route from the meadows to the woodland beyond.

~

My grandfather told me to ‘plant trees’ when I was ten years old. It was a slightly baffling instruction because to the best of my knowledge he had never planted one. I think it was one of those things he knew he should have done. He spoke with great affection about the Scots pines that once grew above his stack yard when he took the rented farm on in the 1940s. But I only knew their rotting stumps – where I had played with plastic toy soldiers until I was bitten by the red ants that spewed out of the decaying wood when I broke off a piece by mistake. But over the years those words echoed in my head and did their work.

~

Last March, on a mild grey Saturday before lambing time, we gathered up the children and went out to a fenced-off wilder area on our land. The little oak saplings peeked out of the hessian sacks and were starting to bud. We had to get them in the ground. Our spades slipped into the turf and levered open crevices for the roots. Gently, we posted the 18-inch-high saplings into the open earth, then pressed the turf and soil firm around them with the heels and toes of our boots. My eldest daughter Molly carried the tree guards and stakes. She secured each sapling with a guard to stop them being munched by deer. She dawdled as she passed the beck, watching some little fish dart for the shadows. Isaac stumbled across the tussocks of long grass with a handful of saplings. He told me he would come back here when he was a grandfather to see if these trees ‘have actually grown, or not’. He sounded doubtful about the whole enterprise.

My mother was away across the beck, untying the bundles of hazel and hawthorn saplings. Her hair was greying now, and she wasn’t as strong, but she loved to help us on the farm with lighter work when she could. She said she felt closer to my father when she was here, that he was somehow still working among us. His ashes were scattered high on the field called the Horse Pasture, so that he could ‘keep an eye on us’. When she was grieving and broken, being on the farm doing the work he once did seemed to help. She became the memory of this farm and reminded me that my father always left a straight-trunked little oak or ash tree every thirty or forty feet in any hedge he was laying, so it could grow up beyond the rest of the hedge. And in the past year when we laid some of these hedges again the traditional way, after thirty years of neglect, the half-grown trees left standing were those my father let grow the last time. They stand proudly above the hedge, their crowns billowing out to touch leaves with their neighbour’s along the dyke.

~

At the top of the little woodland corridor, I pass by the ‘cloven stone’, a giant boulder deposited here thousands of years ago by a glacier, and through the wooden gate to our house. The valley is now carved in half by the sun. Behind the farmstead the south-facing fellside shimmers in the new day. A hare leaps through the meadow beyond the beck. It rises and falls, like a carousel horse seen above the crowd at a fair, its top half appearing and disappearing with each grass-bound leap. And then it stops to watch me pass, ears flicked backwards like a capital K poking out from the grass.

~

Back at the farmhouse a small boy is peering out of the window, a sturdy little man with a mop of blond hair and a wicked, hopeful smile. Our youngest, Tom, is not yet two years old. He seems to be as stubborn as the grandfather he was named after, and as obsessed with the farm. He presses his face up to the glass, fascinated by what lies outside. As a baby of a few months old, he would sit watching the hens in the garden, or the red squirrels stealing the bird’s nuts, or shout ‘Baa’ loudly at the sheep on the hillside opposite. He is furious if I don’t take him each day to feed the sheep and cattle. Left behind, he stands at the door, tears flowing down his cheeks, or shakes the garden gate in his fury, howling at the injustice of it all. Something beyond the house and garden calls to him. Often he does come with me, and his mother sometimes comes along as well to keep him safe while I work. He seems oblivious to bad weather in his jumpsuit and mittens, and some days sits on the quad bike, overalls soaking wet, his little cheeks cold and red, but set with a steely determination to be there come what may.

When I shout the flock up for hay, he shouts too. When I shout commands to the dogs, he copies at the top of his voice – ‘LIE DOWN TAN’. The dogs lick his