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

heavy-legged, but are having fun working together. The lads tease each other about their girlfriends, or failed attempts at getting one, and about the biggest of them who is soaked and demanding they go for a KFC in the local town at the end of the day. He loves that shit, his mate tells me. Then rain falls, silver and heavy, catching in the brilliant sunlight like millions of droplets of mercury. We shelter under a willow tree. The rain thwacks on the olive-green leaves. We wait.

Blue and emerald dragonflies dart about under the outstretched limbs of the ash trees. Little ripples swell outwards from the fat raindrops as they splash down on to the bog. A newt hangs listlessly a few inches beneath the surface of the water, ignoring the rain, with arms and fingers outstretched, watching us. The shower passes. The lads wade away for more posts. Look, says one of them to me, and points. Isaac comes running across the wet field, his legs brushing the flowers as he runs. He passes through the sheep lying in the grass, chewing their cuds. I shout for him to wait for me on the dry bank, and head out to meet him. Floss gets there first and gets a cuddle. We four head after the stray sheep along the lane that rises and falls, and twists and turns, from our land to the distant fells. Strays are a pain in the backside, but if they haven’t gone far it is better to retrieve them now before they cause more trouble in the gardens of the village.

~

Once we crest the first hillock we can see the escaped ewes and lambs threading their way along the lane. I send Tan to pass them. He’s off like a bullet down the ruts, until he is on them, and past their flanks. They turn back and run to us. Isaac opens the gate for them into our field called the ‘Top Rigg’ and Floss turns them in. The sheep gallop off down the field. They flush a brown hare from its form, and it bolts. Hares love this open grassland. In spring they chase each other in mad day-long races across these fields, and then stand on their back feet to box. They give birth in the fields and tuck their leverets into the rushes and tussocks of grass. They sit motionless, with big hazel-coloured eyes, watching us pass.

Up here the land is more open – almost moorland – with only an occasional hawthorn dyke to break the skyline. These fields are pastures that have been managed the same way for countless decades. They are unsuitable for growing crops. Our ewes with two lambs graze these fields in summer, while those with one strong lamb go back to the fells where they can be reared on the tough mountain vegetation. Some cattle have gathered behind us, reaching their heads over the gate from my neighbour’s land. They belong to my friend Alan. He is one of the elders of our community, a man of good sense, from the same forge as my father. We often swap notes over the fence about the price of sheep, the weather, or the wild things we have seen. He seems sad at how things have changed and points out that we receive now (in real terms) a quarter of what he was paid as a young man for his sheep. The value has been stripped out of good farming, by cheapening food too much.

And yet our animals are still what keep us here, creating the work and the income that helps pay our bills. We generate two or three times as much income from sheep and cattle as we do from environmental payments (despite being in the highest possible levels of the available schemes). Our lamb and beef do not earn the premium that would compensate us properly for producing them in ways that are less efficient but good for wild plants, insects, birds and other animals. I see no prospect of this in an age when everything revolves around producing cheap food. Meat has been reduced to a pitifully low-priced commodity in supermarkets, when it ought to be a thing that is respected and valued – even if that means eating less of it. Many British people have lost the taste (and cooking skills) for things that can be produced sustainably in their own landscapes. The mutton from the older sheep that have reached the end of their breeding lives on the fells would not have a market at all if it weren’t for the British Asian community who, thankfully, still have the taste for cooking and eating it. The old farmers in our valleys know exactly when the festival of Eid starts and ends because they time their sheep-selling to coincide with the feasting.

~

When I was young and first began to realize how fucked up and complicated the world was, I thought we could turn our backs on it all and hide away on our farm as if it was a kind of cocoon. And when I reluctantly left to go to university, and to earn my living in that wider world in my twenties and thirties – mostly sat in front of a computer doing what other people told me to – I loved having a place I could retreat to, to ground myself in work that to me felt real. The farm kept me sane.

When people dream of getting ‘back to the land’, they often have this kind of escapism in mind. If you have been parked in a cubicle in an office for years of your life, with lengthy commutes on trains or in traffic jams, then perhaps a farming life looks like freedom. But I’ve come to see that the reality of being a farmer is anything but an escape from the world; it is often like being a slave to it. Everything that happens on a farm is affected by