Once Upon A Time in the West . . . Country (37 page)

The owner of the yellow tractor then appeared and talked us through each stage of his loving restoration of the machine that glistened before us. Two and a half years he’d worked on it. Brother Tom nodded his head in deference. I had to stop myself from shaking mine in disbelief. The restorer smiled proudly, revealing a set of teeth that suggested he had prioritised tractor restoration over visits for dental work.

I looked up to see that whilst Brother Tom and I had been burying our heads into the arse ends of ageing farm machinery, the field had filled with tractors. And families. Kids pointed excitedly and clambered aboard to sit at the wheel. Mums nattered with mums. The atmosphere was like that of a fairground, but there was only one ride in town, and that was about to begin.

‘We’re all off now Tony,’ said Andrew. ‘You go second to last so that Ken can bring up the rear and keep an eye on you.’

‘OK,’ I said, cheerfully jumping aboard the Massey.

Perched on my tractor, I watched as Brother Tom climbed back into his pen at the rear of Ken’s tractor like an obedient pet. The ‘run’ part of the tractor run was about to begin. Suddenly the neighbouring hills echoed to the sounds of forty-six tractors all starting up. A bit of a din to me, but music to the ears of nearly everyone else in attendance.

‘JUST FOLLOW THE TRACTOR IN FRONT!’ shouted Ken from the cab of his large Massey, ‘OR IF YOU LOSE THEM, FOLLOW THE BLUE ARROWS. I’LL BE RIGHT BEHIND.’

And off we set. In single file, down Dartmoor’s narrow lanes, this impressive cavalcade of vintage tractors making its cacophonous way through the peaceful countryside. Occasionally we would meet a poor driver who had pulled to one side to allow what they believed to be one tractor to pass. By the time I dawdled past them, and they’d watched more than forty tractors go by, their faces bore an expression that seemed to combine despair and resignation. Their wave and weak smile suggested that they knew they would be late and that there was no point in fighting it.

My Massey performed well, but driving it was far from relaxing. Gear changes, especially on hills, were not easy and usually involved a noisy clunking, and the brakes demanded most of my body weight to be effective. We wound our way through narrow lanes gift-wrapped with hedgerows beyond which lay dramatic moorland. At the helm of a smooth-running saloon car this would have been an enjoyable drive, instead it was ninety minutes of quite intense concentration. I was greatly relieved when the tractor ahead of me turned into a large field and there, mirage-like, a row of tents awaited us manned by wives and teenage children. Like tank-driving military personnel, we all happily dismounted and headed off to queue for our rations. I felt a little like a soldier who might have come through a minor skirmish – relieved to be in one piece. I didn’t know where I was, currently having the geographical sense of someone who’d been blindfolded and spun around in circles. Never mind, the forty-five other tractor drivers knew exactly where we were, and that was good enough for me.

As I stood in the food line, the conversation and banter continued all around me. Alas, I had little to offer and no one asked me about the vehicle I was driving. Perhaps they sensed that I was not a serious tractor man. They might have a name for my type – the ones who drop in, piss around on someone else’s tractor, and then bugger off never to drive a tractor again in their lives. Or maybe not. They seemed a friendly enough crowd. It was more likely that I just looked hopelessly out of place, and there seemed no easy route into any banter.

When I reached the head of the queue it was nice to see the warm, comforting face of Lin, who plied me with tea, quiche, a pasty, and pointed out another tent where cakes were there for the taking.

‘How are you getting on, Tony?’ she asked.

‘Just fine. This tractor driving is a breeze.’

These were the words of someone who thought the rest of the day would be plain, albeit noisy, sailing. Well, why not? I’d clearly got the hang of this tractor-driving business and from now on it would just be more of the same.

‘We just head home after this?’ I said to Andrew, when he found me perched on a dry-stone wall consuming my fourth cup of tea and second piece of cake.

‘A couple more hours, I’d say,’ he replied.

I tried not to sigh.

‘You’ve got the hang of that tractor, so you can head off with the lead tractors if you like,’ he added.

‘Righto,’ I said, suddenly sensing that ‘righto’ was something that Devonian tractor drivers didn’t say to each other that much.

***

Andrew led the way and I joined the bustle of machines becoming about tenth in the line for the afternoon part of the run, just behind yellow tractor man – meaning that I could admire his impressive restoration work as well as the countryside, which happened to be even more beautiful than what we’d witnessed in the morning. Breathtaking views of the moor enabled me to relax and forget what I was sitting on. Here, on top of the moor, vistas opened up that stretched for miles all around us. No motorways or cities in view, not even an aeroplane criss-crossing the horizon. Total peace, but for the blasting engines of forty-six tractors.

Around four o’clock – the time that should have been teatime – we began to head down the steep winding lane to the valley road that would eventually lead us home. Like the experienced tractor operator that I now was, I ensured that the Massey was in low gear and was crawling along with the engine effectively acting as the main brake. Just as I turned a corner and entered a particularly steep section I could see that yellow-tractor man had made an unscheduled stop. Odd. Why wasn’t he moving? Ahead of him I could see that tractors were also at a standstill. Something was clearly blocking the road ahead and causing a tractor tailback. Routinely, I lifted myself into the standing position that was needed to get the tractor to stop, and I applied my full body weight to the brake.

Nothing.

It made no difference whatsoever.

Panic. Adrenalin pumped. Suddenly my body was in full ‘fight or flight’ mode – which was useless, given that I was stuck on a moving tractor and could do neither. My tractor that wasn’t careering out of control, but was gently crawling in low gear towards . . . well, towards a vintage gem. A lovingly restored yellow tractor.

‘COME ON!’ I shouted as I continued to try and get the brakes to work.

I now lifted my left foot from the clutch and put both feet on the brake. I jumped. Still nothing. With each passing second, the beautiful yellow tractor was becoming closer and closer. The lane was too narrow for me to pass. This was it! There was no choice, I was simply going to ram the tractor in front of me, undoing thirty months of one poor man’s painstaking restoration work. He’d brought it here in good faith to show it off to his mates, one of whom would soon tow it home in another vintage tractor that had been lucky enough not to have been travelling directly in front of me.

‘COME ON! COME ON!’

Just a few more seconds available to plead with the brakes to co-operate. But co-operate they would not. I braced myself for the inevitable collision. For a split second the irony of the situation was not lost on me. Here I was taking part in a tractor run to raise money for the Devon Air Ambulance service and any moment now we would be calling out the Devon Air Ambulance service to come and demonstrate whether or not they were worthy of our charitable donations.

One last jump on the brakes. Nothing. With the yellow tractor now just a few feet away, its driver blissfully unaware of what was happening behind him, I braced myself for the impending collision. Then, in the very last dying moment before impact, something flipped in me. I realised that I couldn’t do it. I simply couldn’t allow my tractor to drive straight into the one before me and I span the wheel round to the left, and directed the tractor into the hedgerow beside the road. Anything could be waiting for me and the Massey. If the hedge wasn’t strong enough to hold us, we could pile right through it and plunge down the hill that might be awaiting the other side. My action was not one of a man who had weighed up the risks or all the options. It was an instinctive decision probably based on some recent evolutionary development in Man that meant he could recognise that hedges were softer than yellow tractors.

THUD.

The Massey crashed into the hedgerow, and – to my immense relief – it stopped. Through the shrubbery, now pushed apart by the recent insertion of a red vintage Massey Ferguson, I could see a gradient ahead of me that would have meant the end of Andrew’s tractor if the hedge hadn’t stopped us. It would have been the end of me too, had I not have been able to throw myself off in time.

The feeling of intense relief was short-lived and was now replaced by acute embarrassment. Yellow-tractor man had remained unaware of the near miss that had taken place just behind him – his engine ticking over and drowning out any sense that another tractor was about to drive into his rear end – but I was only too aware though that the tractor driver behind me, and the one behind him, had just watched me steer my tractor into the hedge, seemingly for no reason other than on a whim. I would need to explain myself.

Sheepishly
2
, I lowered myself from the stalled Massey that was now at a forty-five-degree angle to the lane.

***

Slowly I walked back towards the strong-jawed, stoic-looking driver in the tractor behind me.

‘Sorry about that,’ I called up to him, raising my voice to be heard above the engine that he had optimistically left running. ‘The brakes wouldn’t stop the tractor. I had no choice but to drive into the hedge.’

A pause. Then the driver smiled and nodded. That was it? A smile and a nod? Had he any idea what I had just gone through? I didn’t know what it was worthy of, except that it was worthy of more than a smile and a nod.

‘What shall I do?’ I now asked.

A shrug.

Just a shrug. That was it? What was it with this bloke? Was he related to Dr Spock? What did one have to do to elicit any emotion from him? I looked back at the unimpressive configuration of hedge and tractor that was a few yards below us and tried to figure it out for myself. There was no shortage of tractors that could tow me out of the hedge, but the lane was so narrow that there probably wasn’t room for the required manoeuvres. It looked just possible that I might be able to reverse the tractor back onto the lane. That would be much simpler. I suggested this to the man who, perhaps in more ways than one, was now looking down on me.

He nodded.

I could have guessed as much.

‘If I manage to reverse it out, you don’t mind waiting for the other tractors to get a safe distance away from me – perhaps even to the bottom of the hill?’

He shrugged and shook his head.

Sometimes out of adversity positive things can come. OK, this hedge collision may have represented a disappointing and complicated development in my brief flirtation with tractors, but here was the foundation for a new and great friendship. This experience, and our ability to share it in the way we had, would surely lead to a great bond between us; afternoon walks, evening drinks, late-night suppers together, during which he could smile, nod and shrug, and then smile, nod and shrug again until there was no more smiling, nodding and shrugging to be done.

When the tractors ahead of me began moving again, I remounted my tractor, scrunched the Massey into reverse gear and released the clutch. I was more than a little nervous. Would I be able to reverse us out of the hedge – or would I block the thirty-six tractors behind me? Would I ruin the tractor run, and mess up the afternoon for the half-dozen other vehicles that were possibly going to use this road in the next few hours? To my intense relief, I felt the tractor edging backwards and back onto the lane. A huge embarrassment had been averted.

The road ahead of me was clear and that made it safe for me to continue, but I was fully aware that the tractors ahead might have to stop again for some reason. If this happened whilst I was facing down a hill then I’d be faced once again with the unpalatable choice of driving into a yellow tractor or the hedgerow. The hedgerow might not be so kind to me next time. That’s why when the road levelled out and a small clearing appeared just around a bend, I decided to pull over and stop. I would wait for all the tractors behind me to pass, and discuss the options with Ken. He’d know how best to get this vehicle home.

Emotional man smiled and nodded as he drove by, as did the driver on the tractor behind him. However, the next tractor stopped and the driver called across to me.

‘Need a tow?’ he asked.

I declined the kind offer and went on to explain what had happened and how I was waiting for Ken.

Off he went. The next tractor that came along stopped. The driver called across.

‘Do you need any help?’

Once again I explained the situation.

When the next tractor stopped, the terrible truth dawned on me. Being positioned as I was in a small clearing that was just around a bend, none of the tractors that were passing could see the short conversations I was having with the drivers ahead of them. I now realised that every remaining driver on the run would stop and offer to help me, and that there was nothing I could do about it. About thirty consecutive explanations as to why I didn’t need their help would be needed. This was going to be exhausting.

Ten tractors and explanations later, I considered the option of hanging a sign around my neck saying: