The Shepherd's Life (9 page)

Hay times were like chapter markers in my life, each one showing me a little stronger and more useful and my grandfather a little older and weaker. I literally grew into his shoes. In the good summers, or perhaps just in my memory, there was an air of joy about it, and my grandmother would come to the field at regular intervals with meals or afternoon tea—cakes she'd baked and a large tin jug of tea. We'd sit around on makeshift chairs made of bales, and the old men would tell stories and joke about summers past. I loved those stories about working horses, heroic labours of men in the past, and German and Italian POWs who had come to work on the farm during World War II.

Granddad didn't reckon much of the Italian officers, their claims of aristocratic pedigrees, or their somewhat different work ethic. “They were all Count bloody this … and Count bloody that.” And they wolf whistled at girls passing on the trains … Some of those POWs were still living on the farms they'd chosen to stay with after the war, staying put rather than returning to a home that didn't exist anymore. They lived in little bedrooms in farmhouses all over our area, like strange living ghosts of the war that had ended before my father was even born.

The wind would catch wisps of hay in little tornados and whiz it off across the field. Swallows would hawk around the field, catching insects, and high up in the blue buzzards would circle on lazy wings on the thermals. High atop bale-laden trailers I rode home, dodging branches and telephone wires. Once the trailer caught a gate stoop as we turned into the yard. I tumbled down in an avalanche of bales, landing at my grandmother's feet. She clucked and fussed. The men denied any knowledge, perhaps truthfully, of my being up there. I just shrugged.

The hay meadows are crisscrossed with shadowy little streams, flanked with foxgloves, havens from the heat of the day for sheepdogs and children. These meadows are not mown until late summer, so the flowers and plants could drop their seeds.… Traditional upland hay meadows are a thing of beauty. Rich multicoloured waves of grasses dance in the light summer winds. Mosaics of brown, green, and purple grasses and flowers are home to a multitude of insects, birds, and occasional roe deer calves. Lush, green, thistle-scattered pastures flank the hayfields with the twin-rearing ewes watching the commotion with interest. Grasshoppers call to one another from the ribbons of green that are the field boundaries, and magpies chatter from the crab apple trees.

In an ideal world hay timing would be easy. Three or four days of perfect drying weather after the grass is mown, two or three sessions of turning it to ensure it is uniformly dried by the wind and sun. The hay, dry and sweet smelling, would be baled, and then carried into the barn, never so much as touched by a drop of rain. But it is not like that very often in English summers. Timing the mowing to hit the gaps between rains is a calculated gamble at best, and a bad summer could ruin a winter's fodder—and often did in the Lake District. So hay time is often a battle between farmer and the weather.

Cutting the meadows leaves the mower covered with a thick carpet of grass seeds, pollen, and insects. It also opens up a hidden world where voles had lived in peace but now scurry off to the dykes. In one of our meadows the sun-bleached skeletons of two elm trees stood, from which a kestrel watched us work, occasionally hovering above the field and swooping down on a vole and carrying it off in a fistful of talons.

Following the mower, perhaps a day later, comes the haybob, which fans the grass out of the rows in which it lies and helps it to wilt evenly in the sun and wind. For the next few days sand martins sweep past us as we turn the hay each day, scattering insects to the breeze.

When the greenness and sap have wilted out of the grass after a few days, it is rowed up, ready for the baler. And at last the baler starts thumping out its dusty, clunking rhythm. The men worked under the keen eyes of greedy lice-tormented rooks, which wander the fields searching for worms and grubs under the cleared rows. From time to time a shear bolt would snap on the baler and you would hear frenzied hammering and a few “fucking hells.” Today, hay time is increasingly mechanized (in the 1980s new machinery came in which means that crop can be wrapped in plastic, shrink wrapped by a giant swirling spider-like machine, behind a second tractor, that follows the baler, so even in damp summers some nutritional value is saved by pickling it as silage), but throughout my childhood and youth it was a full-on physical effort with everyone expected to pitch in.

Once the bales were made they had to be taken to the barns and eventually manhandled into the “mews.” When we were boys, one of the jobs we dreamt of being strong enough to do was stacking the bales. Each slow year of growing up was filled with the hope that next year, maybe, we would stack bales with the men. Our family had a shortage of young men, just me, so we looked enviously across the fence to our neighbours who could muster a full gang of sons and nephews and cousins. As each bale was lifted several times before it was in the barn—and we made many thousands—strength mattered.

Each year I found myself a little stronger, and able to lift the bales higher, while my grandfather grew weaker. His sense of decline was only eased by the pride he had in me, his grandson, growing up to take his place. As a child I had rolled bales to his knees, thinking I was helping, and carried his bottle of cold tea from heap to heap, wishing I were as strong as him. Each year the balance between us altered in my favour. Then we reached a curious halfway point where we worked as equals when I was about thirteen years old, but I quickly agreed each time he suggested that “us two old men” ought to stop “for our pipe” (neither of us smoked). The next year I was much stronger than him and pretended I needed to stop every now and then, so he could rest. A couple of years after that he was following me around the field, rolling bales to my knees for me to lift, and lifting an odd one when he could.

 

31

Making hay in daydreams tends to be idyllic and sunny, but in real life it can be a bitch of a thing. I can remember 1986, the worst summer, when we burned all our hay. A disaster. You need nearly a week of dry and sunny weather to make hay. And you need to be able to travel on the meadows with a tractor and mower to mow the grass at the start of that week. What could possibly go wrong in one of the wettest places in England?

*   *   *

In 1986 it just never stopped raining. Black clouds. Miry fields. Endless rain. Sometimes summer never quite happens. It must have offered brief moments of respite because somehow we got the hay baled, but then the heavens opened and it rained for days and days. If you understand the importance of good hay, there is something irretrievably sad, pitiful, and pathetic about ruined hay. What should be a lovely sun-bleached green slowly becomes grey, rotten, and dead. What should have been our harvest for the winter rotted into something worse than useless: a time-consuming liability. We tried stacking the bales against each other, on days when the wind blew and rain eased. But the bales now sagged deadweight beneath the baler twine in our stinging hands. More rain. Fat splashing drops. The heaviest I've ever seen. The hay was ruined. It had started to sprout green on the tops of the bales. It would never dry. Everyone knew. Even if we got it into the barns, it would heat. It might even combust and burn the barn down as sometimes happened on farms. Or it might simply rot. There was no point in bringing it in. Rooks skulked in the ash trees, waiting for worms under the heaps.

*   *   *

The fields were now green with fog (the sweet regrowth after cropping that we use for the lambs that are weaned [our word is “spained”] off their mothers in August and September). The bales sulking and leaving rotten dead marks where the grass should now have been cleared. However bad it was, the hay needed to go somewhere. Clearing the fields of this sodden junk was like moving corpses. Cruel work. Sickening for men. Pointless. Rotten smelling. We took thousands of bales to the ruins of an old stone barn. Created a fire beneath one corner of the pile. Stood back and watched. But the cursed stuff couldn't even burn properly. It smouldered sulkily for weeks. I can still smell the hay burning in a stupid, pointless, charred heap. We brought bales to the heap for days until the fields were cleared. Sweating, with rain dribbling down our necks. When we were finished, we had nothing to show for weeks of work or a year's growth on the meadows. No hay in the barns. Fields now boot deep in grass except for coffin-shaped, yellow, dead stains where the bales had lain. My father turned away and said, “Never mention this to me ever again, I don't want to remember it.” Grey smudgy clouds anchored to the fells and it rained for weeks.

 

32

My grandfather is asleep in an old brown armchair that is for his use, and his use only. He has read the local newspaper and fallen asleep in it after his midday meal. He is old and tired because he starts early and works too hard for an old man.

But I wish he would wake up.

Sometimes when he is not working he tells me stories.

He loves to tell stories. True stories. This is how he passes on his values. How he tells me who we are. They have morals, these stories.

We don't give up, even when things are bad.

We pay our debts.

We work hard.

We act decently.

We help our neighbours if they need it.

We do what we say we will do.

We don't want much attention.

We look after our own.

We are proud of what we do.

We try to be quietly smart.

We take chances sometimes to get on.

We will fail sometimes.

We will be affected by the wider world …

But we hold on to who we are.

It was clear from his stories that we were part of a tradition, that long pre-dated us, and would long exist after us. The stories left you feeling proud to be part of that tradition, but very aware that as individuals we were bound by duty to carry it on, bound to try and live by those values. His main lesson was above all to get along with people; don't burn your bridges or they will stay down for a long time. Having the same families live and work alongside each other for many centuries created a unique kind of society with special values.

In my grandfather's world, a person's life was not a thing of his own invention, a new thing on a blank slate. We are bound by our landscape. Shaped by it. Defined by it. Like all good grandparents my grandfather could only see the best in me, and that always made me stand a little taller.

Fathers' names are still interchangeable with those of the sons, and surnames with the names of the farms. The story about your family was something to be aware of, because a bad story could shame you for years.

We are, I guess, all of us, built out of stories.

I know his stories almost off by heart …

He told stories of his grandfather on his mother's side of the family, T. G. Holiday. From what I could gather, my granddad had worshipped and copied his grandfather much as I did mine. So even though I never met this man and he died long before I was born, there is a connection and continuity between us. My grandfather built himself out of stories about T. G. Holiday and I built myself out of stories of him.

T. G. Holiday sits proudly on my bookshelf in a sepia photograph I have inherited. It must date from the 1890s or 1900s. The picture shows him standing in a field surrounded by bullocks, a hazel stick in hand and a large droving dog sitting loyally by his feet. Bowler hat. Muttonchop whiskers. He looks deep in thought and not that interested in having his photo taken. The cattle are each eating from their own wooden buckets or stone troughs. In my grandfather's stories T. G. was a kind of mythical heroic character.

T. G. was a tenant farmer on the Inglewood Estate. He bought Irish cattle and met them in the little harbour at Silloth with his men. He'd have wagons loaded with troughs for feeding them on the journey back to the farm. He also bought flocks of geese off those boats, and tarred and gritted their feet so they could be walked back to the farm. They walked these animals home, taking a couple of days or more, sleeping at night by the roadsides. He fattened the cattle and geese on his pastures and sold them in local markets when they were in peak condition and worth the most. Without anyone much noticing, he made money from his dealing, because during World War I he quietly accumulated lots of war bonds as an investment. Some time later he sold them for profit and filled two suitcases with money, which he kept at home for two years.

Then one day he loaded his suitcases into his cart and went to an auction of three good farms. To the disbelief of everyone present, he bought all three farms and paid in cash. As he travelled home that day he passed a crowd on the roadside in Penrith, and realized they were selling a row of cottages with sitting tenants. Perhaps to finish off whatever point he was making that day, he bought the row of cottages with the cash left in the suitcases. He sold them to the individual tenants for a profit in the next few months.