by Angela Huth
Then, the silent shot between those hopeful eyes. Then, the slump and fall of the body, some heavy with an unborn lamb. There was a dignity about each tumble to the ground: shocking as a landslide, awesome as a waterfall. When the first ewe was slain Saul removed his cap and bowed his head.
‘Can’t fucking take any more of this,’ whispered Ben to George. ‘Cows next.’ He turned and left.
George left soon after him. He saw no point in watching the killing of every sheep, and knew he might be needed when it came to the lambs.
He went up to the house, sat at his desk in the swivel chair that had been in his father’s office. He was immensely glad the old man had not lived to see this. Although there was nothing to say, he wanted to speak to Prodge. He picked up the telephone. With his free hand he fingered a pile of unopened envelopes collected from the gate – communications from MAFF that he had not the heart to deal with. They didn’t matter. Tomorrow he would have all the time in the world.
‘Prodge? They’re here. They’re at it. Dead efficient at their job, I’ll say that.’
‘Bloody hell.’ Prodge paused. His voice cracked. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘It’s rough.’
‘It’s the end.’
‘No. It isn’t. Not for you. Not for us. But we’ll talk about that when the slaughter’s over.’
‘Have you asked when they’re going to be taken away? You don’t want dead animals lying around for days.’
‘I’ll do that. A pyre’s being built up on High Ridge.’
‘We’re just waiting to hear when the killers are coming to us. If they are.’
‘Let me know. And love to Nell.’
George sat for a while, swivelling the chair. His eyes were on the photograph of Lily on their wedding day: another life, that. Then he stood, stretching, still feeling that he was in charge of the impending fatigue. He reckoned he could put it off till tonight. He felt a slight giddiness from lack of food, made himself a piece of toast and honey and wondered what to do. A walk, he decided. Solvitur ambulando was something he had always believed in. The healing power of nature was his chosen medicine. For him it worked.
He made his way down to the valley, walked beside the river for a while. It moved as fast as the clouds reflected in its waters, lapping at the quietness. Then he went into the oak wood, where many of the trees had been planted by his grandfather. George himself had done a certain amount of planting on his land, but now, with the animals gone, that was something on which he would be able to concentrate. To leave a heritage of woods, fine trees, would make up a little for no children. In the country at large, thousands of acres of woodland had been razed over the last fifty years, taking with it incalculable wildlife. The thought of planting, replenishing, deflected a little from the ghastly business of the day at the farm. But only for a short while. George hurried back to the shed.
There he found Saul in exactly the same position as he had left him, hands crossed over his cap, head bowed. The vets had almost completed their job. George watched as the last few sheep were despatched and fell on to the vast lumpen wool carpet made of their companions. Then there was no more bleating.
The vet in charge came over. He expressed brief satisfaction that the job had been accomplished with such haste.
‘I think we can take care of the lambs,’ was how he put the next part of his plan, ‘before we break for lunch. Cows this afternoon.’ As if to release George and the rigid Saul from their misery, he went on to explain how foolproof was the slaughter of cattle. ‘We shoot them with a captive-bolt pistol, then they’re pithed with a special rod through their brain to make quite sure they’re dead. We do a good job.’
‘I suppose you could say that’s good,’ muttered Saul, struggling up from the weed of his own thoughts. ‘I suppose we should be glad of that.’
The lambs, the cows. George wandered about his farmyard, no clear aim in mind, thoughts unstill, face unsmiling. The place had been taken over – the official vehicles, the block of latrines, the vets whose pristine white of the early morning was now blood-spattered and stained. They had rendered the ewe shed silent. Now they would cut off the squeal of the lambs. Then they were to finish their job with the greater slaughter of the Friesians.
Ben was not there to see the slaughter of the cows he loved. Had he asked, George would have reported that they died more importantly, somehow, than the sheep. Briefly they lurched before they fell, with curved neck and head uneasily turned, alert for a last second to the bellows of their companions, still alive. Fallen, there was still a magnificence about them, each one with its singular markings of black and white, its piebald nostrils shining. Only the udders, slumped to one side, were uniform in their veined swelling, their last balloon of milk denied its last draining. George had never been as fond of his cows as of his sheep, but he felt a sort of pride in the way they had met their death. They had co-operated with their slaughterers, making it easy for the men trained in this loathsome job.
By the end of the afternoon ninety-two cows, some three hundred sheep and forty-two lambs had been slaughtered. The chief vet removed his protective glove to shake George’s hand again. He said he had no idea when the stock would be collected. As soon as possible, he said. But it wasn’t up to him.
The vehicles drove away, the temporary lavatories were removed, Saul and Ben went to their cottage. It would be the first time for God knows how many years that they would have the chance to sit down together indoors at this time of day. George imagined them barely speaking in their grief, sipping at untimely cups of tea.
An immeasurable silence had fallen over the farm. George longed for a breeze, the ruffle of branches, but the air was still. The quiet gushed everywhere, unbreakable. George walked about for a while, avoiding the shed, the barn of the dead lambs, the cattle yard. He looked across the empty fields – four hundred acres of well-tended land with no animals to graze it, now. Only the barley fields left to work. He thought how fortunate he had been for so long, and knew he was not going to be one of those who would be beaten. He, with Prodge and Nell and Saul, would start again.
It was nearly seven, dusk thickening, by the time he crossed the empty yard to go back into the kitchen. Too tired to eat, the sickness in his stomach making the whole idea obnoxious, he went straight up to bed. Now he could allow himself to give in to exhaustion. Within moments he was asleep.
The next morning George woke at his usual early hour. He felt the drugged heaviness that comes from one good night after many bad ones. He lay, not wanting to get up, but unable to go back to sleep. After a while – he could not judge how long – he remembered there was no need to get up. No cows to milk, no sheep to feed. Apart from the piles of stuff to be dealt with on his desk, he had nothing to do. Here he was, a farmer like many others by now, with nothing to do.
George leapt out of bed, dressed quickly and went downstairs. A smell of frying came from the kitchen. Dusty was at the stove shaking sausages and bacon in a pan.
‘Thought you could do with a good breakfast this morning,’ she said. ‘Suppose I shouldn’t have come, what with the regulations. But now there are no ... I practically bathed in disinfectant at the gate. Don’t think I’m a liability’ She was very pale.
‘Thanks, Dusty. I’m ravenous.’
‘I hear Ben and Saul have taken it deep. Ben was crying into the night, Saul said.’ She put a plate of fried things in front of George. She had cut triangles of toast, made from her homemade bread, and stood them in a rack. Such unusual niceties conveyed the depth of her sympathy. George had not had such a breakfast in a long time, and despite the carnage outside he was hungry. He ate gratefully. During lambing Dusty did not come in early, never knowing when George would be there. This rare breakfast was the best comfort she could have provided.
‘I shouldn’t go out there if I were you, Mr George,’ she went on. ‘The yard, the shed and that. I caught a glimpse, though I didn’t mean to, on my way in. Talk about a battlefield. I
hope they’re coming to take them away today. They’ll begin to smell quick enough.’
‘I’ll ring MAFF again in a moment. You have to hang on for hours. It’s almost impossible to get through. Thanks for all this, Dusty. Wonderful.’
When eventually he did get through to the local office George was given the answer he had expected: they could give no definite time as to when the carcasses would be removed. They were short-staffed. There was a backlog to get through. They’d do their best. Already there were hundreds of carcasses waiting to be burnt, George must understand. It wasn’t easy, organising a crisis. Often there were conflicting instructions from Whitehall, no one knew quite where they were. The harassed man George spoke to tried to sound sympathetic and apologised for being unable to give some kind of assurance. The local MAFF representatives, men who lived in the country and knew first-hand what the farmers were going through, were always a great deal easier to deal with than the men in London.
George put on his jacket. ‘No good news there,’ he said to Dusty.
‘Really you don’t want to go out.’
‘I can’t stay cooped up in the house all day, can I? There are things to be seen to. I must go and talk to Ben and Saul. In a way, it’s worse than yesterday. I feel I must face it.’
‘I suppose so.’
George went out of the kitchen door into the yard. Today it was cold. There was a flawless, almost blue sky. It was a familiar morning of early spring but, because of the uncanny silence, it was unlike any other. The usual background sounds of animal cries, tractor engine, slurry scraping, men’s footsteps, were not there. Not a bird sang. Ben’s expert whistling after he’d finished the morning milk was no longer a shaft of music lurking behind a wall or building. Indeed, there was no sign of either Saul or Ben. George considered shouting, but decided against it. In their own time they would appear to oversee the next part of the grim business.
George walked slowly down to the milking parlour. It was immaculately clean as always, gutters sluiced down, troughs cleaned. At some point yesterday, George realised, while waiting for the cows to be slaughtered, Ben must have made himself do all this – mechanically, perhaps – the job he had done every day of the week for a good many years of his youth. Just because there were no more cows, it would not have occurred to him not to clean the milking parlour. He was a rare lad: he’d have made a wonderful farmer. We’ll miss him: we’ll miss him so much, thought George.
He stood holding on to one of the rails that divided the stalls, trying to accustom himself to the silence of the parlour. No humming suck of milking machines, clank of chain, splurge of shit, deep lowing. Only the old, ripe smell of milk was still slung about the place. How soon would that fade? George took a deep breath. He wanted to remember it.
His good fortune, in the quick slaughter of his animals after they were declared infected, did not continue. It was now his turn to join the many others suffering from the total chaos caused by official strategy.
He had no idea how many hours he spent trying to telephone those in charge in the next five days, how many dozens of vague estimates he received as to when the animals would be collected. ‘It’s not in our power to say’ he was told, over and over again. Hour after hour he sat in his study, windows closed, for the stench of rotting flesh began to make vile the air. Most exasperating of all was the apparent inability of those he spoke to to understand that there was any urgency to arrange for the removal of several hundred putrifying animals. But then urban civil servants in offices of clean air perhaps couldn’t be expected to imagine the horror hundreds of miles away. Most of them wouldn’t know a ewe from a ram. It was incomprehensible to George and his neighbours that there were dozens of local experts – hunts’ kennel men and vets – offering their services, but their offers were ignored. At this time, too, the armed forces, with their impressive skills at organising large operations, were not called upon. The government insisted in continuing in its own way. Frequently the men they employed to do the killing made a grotesque hash of it, causing further suffering. There were stories of inexperienced marksmen chasing calves round fields, finishing them off with blows on the head. It was no wonder farmers, locked into the same desperate state as George, felt that ministers were uncaring as well as incompetent. Did they not realise that further disease was being spread by unburied corpses?
‘It’s inhuman, it’s obscene,’ roared George one evening on the telephone to Prodge. ‘I’ve been shut in for five days, no answers, kept in the dark. What the hell’s going on? All these announcements about everything being under control. God Almighty. It’s chaos. And lonely and exhausting,’ he added. ‘Ben came up one afternoon with a scarf over his nose to ask what’s happening. The stench is making Saul ill.’
Prodge himself was in a state of fearful anticipation, wondering when he would hear if his animals were to be victims of contiguous culling. Though the two friends spoke every day, they were unable to offer any comfort to each other.
On the afternoon of the sixth day the telephone rang. The animals would be collected on Thursday morning.
That’s another three days,’ George shouted. ‘Don’t you realise we’re surrounded by stinking, rotting animals?’ He slammed down the receiver, shaking. All morning George sat at his desk, yet another mug of cold tea not drunk beside him, trying to picture not only his own future but the future of British farming in general. Thousands of farmers had been driven to bankruptcy by the overzealous adoption of EU red tape, collapsing world prices, the huge fall in the price they could get for milk and meat. They’d been assailed by BSE, swine fever, bovine TB. This final tragedy of foot and mouth was probably the last straw. The view looked so grim that George feared that if he did not force himself to move he would weep, crumble, crack up in some undignified way. He knew what he had to do: he must assess the state of devastation of his farm.
He wound a thick wool scarf round the bottom of his face and over his nose. He went out. Walked in dread towards the yard of dead cows.
His herd of slain Friesians was now nothing more than an undulating black and white landscape on the ground. Already some of their bellies were swollen, their legs stiff and at odd angles. They lay awkwardly, some with tipped-back heads and mildew-coloured eyes. Others were open-mouthed, purple swollen tongues bursting from black caverns. George forced his eyes over every animal. He recognised each one – some singular detail, a scrap of its character still there, in death, he thought. Or maybe that was being fanciful. But Daisy, for instance, prettiest of the herd with her near-white hide and one black ear – she had a look about her he remembered on so many occasions coming in from the pasture. Skittish, she was, Daisy. She would give a small buck to show she wasn’t merely one of the crowd. Now stiff and swollen, death seemed not to have deprived her of her flirtatious look. – I’m going mad, thought George, suddenly pulling himself up. I’m suffering hallucinations. His eyes rested on Bustle, whose birth he remembered – a huge calf who stood up almost at once, and later became the best milker of the herd.
George left the yard. He walked back up to the house avoiding the barn where the mound of dead lambs was piled. A small silver car was parked in the farmyard. Some official, he presumed. He was almost used to officials coming and going as if the place was theirs. He had no inclination to discuss compensation, removal of carcasses, anything. He did not in truth know what he wanted to do, or where he wanted to go, but he knew he could not face a conversation with anyone. He made his way to the shed, moved very slowly through the great doors to look upon the next plain of slaughter, his sheep.
There was, as always, a husky light in the shed. This made it easier to look upon the wool rug that stretched before him. The individual shapes of death were less precise than in the cows’ yard. He saw the odd horn, an open eye gleaming like a slug, a raised hoof. But his dead sheep were no more than an animal porridge, his favourites among them indiscernible. Thank God, he thought.
George lifted his eyes from the mush of she
epskin to the far side of the shed, where bales of straw and hay were stacked to the roof. A figure in a blue coat was leaning on the wooden barrier of one of the pens. Oh no, he thought: this is the cruellest hallucination of them all.
The figure, a woman, who was looking at him – who had perhaps been looking at him since he came in – began to move towards him. But after a yard or so, she stopped. George put a hand to his thumping heart, transfixed. They stood regarding each other like strangers. But in their unknowingness of each other they were also conscious of what already existed between them. Lily recognised this at the same moment as George. She gave a little spurt of speed, her feet silenced by the straw on the ground. Then she was close to him, hands clenched by her sides.
‘I’ve come too late,’ she said.
‘No.’
‘When did they do it?’
‘Days ago.’
‘Oh, George.’
‘Not good.’
‘Prodge and Nell?’
‘Waiting their turn.’
‘George, George, George.’
She bent her head forward so that it touched George’s heart. He looked down on it. Even in this light her hair still sparkled. Perhaps it really was her. George put his hand on her shoulder.
‘I’d like us to go away from here, straight away, just for a few hours,’ he said, quietly. ‘But I’m afraid that’s not possible.’
‘No.’
‘Let’s go in. You’ve seen enough.’
Leaving the shed, his hand still on her shoulder, George leant a little on his wife. He walked like a man rescued from the sea, aware of firm land beneath his feet again. Dazed, stunned, his legs shaking, the familiar bones of Lily’s shoulder beneath his hand and the flower scent of her, unfaded, gave some assurance that all this was really happening.