by Tim Pears
June
The boy’s father strode up the track to Little Rats Hill. The boy fell behind, trotted a few steps to catch up. Walked beside his father. Grey sky. Lagged again. Trotted forward. They ascended the track in this manner.
On the hill the boy’s father took a plug of tobacco from his pouch, filled and lit his clay pipe. They waited.
Amos Tucker rode his cob across Haw Park towards them. They watched him kick the horse periodically though it made no difference to the beast’s laggardly pace. The farmer’s legs looked puny beneath the barrel of his body.
‘Albert,’ Amos said.
‘Gaffer,’ said the boy’s father. The boy took the reins of the cob as Tucker leaned forward on to the horse’s neck grasping its mane, and rolled his weight over the saddle and down to the ground.
‘What’s our reckonin, Albert? Be we ready?’
The two men stood in close proximity to each other. Each studied the earth around him and as far as he could see, turning at intervals to cast his eye in a fresh direction. The sky was overcast, streaked with grey, a little hazy. The boy held the reins and watched the two men. The cob wanted to munch the lush grass but the boy gripped the bridle beside the bit and kept her head up.
‘I reckon tis makin its way,’ said his father quietly.
Tucker looked around about, as if with these words seeing the scene afresh. He nodded, and spoke in little more than a whisper. ‘I reckon so too. It’s risin, innit?’
The boy’s father frowned. ‘Seems so to me, gaffer.’
Tucker took a step closer. The boy strained to hear him. ‘Let us make a beginnin,’ he said.
They spoke in whispers, as if some malevolent spirit in the upper sphere might overhear and punish their presumption. Or as if words uttered carelessly might dart like arrows upward and puncture the wispy clouds, provoking rain.
‘Go forth, Albert,’ Tucker said. ‘Make ready.’ He clambered aboard his mare, took the reins from the boy and steered back towards the farmhouse in the bed of the valley, kicking the cob’s flanks on occasion, to no discernible effect.
Albert Sercombe set off down the track. The boy could see the village in the distance and the families returning from church to the farms on the estate. Pilgrims walking home. He heard a sound, turned and scanned the air searching for its origin. The song of a skylark. He could not see the bird but its chirping liquid song teased him. He stared. His cousin, son of Enoch, elder brother of Herbert, was a soldier. He had been home on leave one month before, shunned by his elders, dandy in red tunic and round cap. the lads and boys gathered round him. While he hid they closed their eyes then tried to find him but they never could. He also stripped naked then wagered he could reclothe himself entire, fit for parade, in the time it took a lad to hold a lit match. Thus he took their pennies.
The boy looked about him patiently, the skylark’s running stream of song impossible to pinpoint, until he saw the bird dropping, plummeting towards the ground, and then before it seemed to reach the grass it vanished. The boy turned and trotted after his father.
The men rose and moved like shades in the dark cottage. His father Albert, his brother Fred. The boy followed them. They stumbled along the lane from the cottage to the farm, dew materialising on their caps and shoulders.
Fred hived off to the stables. At the gate to the pasture the boy’s father called the horses. They came up out of the darkness.
Fred had climbed into the loft, poured corn and chaff into the manger. He threw the last of the clover from the year before into their racks as the horses came into the stable, five of them, one after another in the order they observed amongst themselves. Red, the big ten-year-old Shire, then eight-year-old Noble with her foal and the filly, then the old mare Pleasant, then the two black three-year-olds, first Captain, then Coal. They entered their customary stalls one by one.
While Albert prepared the harness and tackle, the boy followed Noble into her stall. He spoke to her to tell her of his approach, that she be not startled as she fed. He speculated as to whether she missed her foal in the daytime while she worked. He told her he thought she would be in harness with her brother, Red, today, driven by the lad Herbert, his cousin, but that when the cereal harvest came she’d be put abreast with the young ones, and he wondered whether when she pulled beside Captain she would know that he was her son. He thought not.
He heard the clatter of hobnailed boots. Then his father’s voice addressing the new arrivals. ‘Good a you to join us fore the evenin.’
‘I see no fuckin light ayet in that sky,’ the boy’s uncle, Enoch, replied. ‘I’m here. Your lad’s here.’
‘He’ll find Fred’s filled the manger.’
Herbert ran in. He geared up Red with chain harness, groping in the gloom, then came into Noble’s stall. ‘Will you lead her out for me?’ he asked.
They led the heavy horses to the stone drinking trough. The boy’s father stood in the rickyard by the two-horse mower, cleaned, oiled, knife-sharp. In the half-light the mower gave the first colour of the day, red and canary yellow.
‘Hup! Back!’ Herbert spoke loudly to each horse in turn until they stood either side of the mowing machine’s pole. He lifted this and Albert strapped it to the underside of the horses’ collars, the weight of the machine on their necks. He fastened the traces to the swinging whippletrees, and put a wooden coupling stick between the horses’ bridles, fastening it with spring clips.
Albert tied the rope reins with a slip knot to the left ring of Noble’s bridle and the right ring of Red’s. Herbert fetched an armful of old clover and placed it on the iron seat.
‘Think I’m gettin old and soft, lad?’ Albert asked him.
‘I’ve no wish for a sore arse, uncle,’ Herbert said. ‘See no need for thee to have one neither.’
‘We’ll start over Watercress Meadow. Bring a rake, another knife and the file.’ Albert mounted the machine, made a clicking sound by blowing air through his teeth sharply against his cheek, and flicked the reins. The horses moved slowly forward and he drove them out of the yard, past the farmhouse still in darkness, into the lane by Long Close, the boy Leo following.
At the gate to Watercress Meadow, Albert Sercombe waited. He did not look behind. The boy trotted past and unlatched the gate, and swung it open. Albert dropped the bedding of the mower. He pushed the lever at his side forward to pitch the fingers and knocked the gear knob to the on position. He ordered the horses to walk on. The meadow was heavy with dew. Light seeped into the morning, the sky was clear, the boy watched the mowing machine clatter around the outside of the meadow tight to the hedge in a clockwise direction, the long knife cutting the grass on the right-hand side of the machine. Rabbits scuttered to their burrows.
The boy walked back to the yard. He passed Herbert on the way, weighed down with implements. He saw his uncle Enoch riding the second mower, he guessed to the Berry Fields. The boy’s brother Fred followed in a cart.
From the tool shed Leo took a sickle and sharpening stone and returned to the field. He watched the rattling mower. Grass, cornflower, clover, meadowsweet, fell before the agitating knife. Herbert raked the outermost swathe in away from the hedge. The boy walked through the field. He found a wasps’ nest and cut around it with the sickle. His father had not asked him to do this but he took it upon himself.
Albert Sercombe drove the horses, the horses pulled the mower, the mower cut the grass. At times he stopped and climbed down and freed the knife that was clogged with wet grass or with soil from molehills. Herbert Sercombe raked the swathe away from the hedge. Starlings gathered and scoured the newly mown grass for worms and insects. Leo Sercombe investigated the long grass. His father brought the horses to a stop and called out to Herbert to bring the new knife. He disengaged the gear and raised the bedding.
Herbert came with the long knife. Albert felt the blade. ‘You’ve not sharpened it,’ he said.
‘You didn’t say.’
‘Did you not think, you lazy sod?’
‘You said to rake the hedge swathe.’
The boy thought his father might strike the lad, but he did not. ‘Where’s the file?’
Herbert said nothing.
Albert nodded in the direction of the oak tree at the base of which Herbert had stowed the implements. ‘You left the file over there?’
‘You said to fetch the knife.’ Herbert turned and walked towards the oak, muttering to himself. Albert watched him, shaking his head, as if someone were speaking in his ear pointing out the lad’s merits yet he disagreed.
The boy noticed that the first bluebottles and horse-flies of the morning had appeared, worrying the horses. He went to the hedge, reached up and pulled off lanterns of elderflower. He walked back and laced them into the horses’ bridles. His father filed the blade of the new knife. Herbert removed the used knife from the machine, and replaced it with the freshly sharpened one. He squirted oil from the long-spouted can along the blade and between the metal fingers, then he oiled the driving bar, and lastly he filled the reservoir for the cogs that drove the mower from the wheels of the vehicle.
‘You know well what to do,’ Albert told him. ‘So do it.’
They hung their jackets on the hedge and resumed their labours. The boy watched his father circle the field in diminishing irregular loops. Periodically the carter slapped the skin of his neck or arm. From a distance he appeared to be castigating himself.
The boy’s sister Kizzie stood beneath the oak tree. She held up a basket. No one knew how long she had been standing there.
‘You should a called us,’ Herbert yelled.
Kizzie did not answer. She had recently taken a vow of silence. The school monitors had been nominated to go to the Coronation fête, given to a horde of the nation’s children at the Crystal Palace. Kizzie could not be spared at this, the busiest time of year. Miss Pugsley and Mabel Prowse had gone without her.
Herbert unhooked the pair of horses from the mower. Leo carried handfuls of freshly cut grass into the shade and the horses munched it, their tails swinging.
They ate the cottage loaf and cheese and onion the girl had brought, drank water, and tea, still luke-warm from the pot.
‘Feels like it should be lunchtime,’ said Herbert. ‘And tis only the mornin break.’
‘These are the long days,’ Albert agreed. They ate in silence.
Farmer Tucker came walking into the field. ‘Mornin, Albert,’ he said. ‘You’ve made a good start. Here, I brought you a drop a cider.’
‘Welcome, gaffer.’ Albert took the flagon and drank deeply, then passed it to Herbert who did likewise.
‘Heard the clatter of the mower as I ate my breakfast,’ Amos Tucker said. ‘What a racket. And it makes no difference how low you set it, you’ll never shave as fine as a good man with a scythe.’
Albert Sercombe nodded slowly. ‘Aye, gaffer, and it took as I recall eight men to cut this meadow.’
The boy and his sister and the lad their cousin Herbert said nothing.
‘Aye, Albert,’ Tucker said. ‘And if I listen now …’ He ceased speaking and raised his head aslant, ears cocked, alert in the manner of a plump cock pheasant. ‘…I can hear the music of those scythes being sharpened.’
Kizzie passed around jam tarts.
‘Remember, Albert, when the master brought the first mowing machine on to the estate? He’d only just took over, after the old Lord Prideaux died on us.’
‘Was it here on Manor Farm, gaffer?’ Herbert said.
‘No. Home Farm. Albert’s father, Jonas, told me, “The men won’t endure it.” Right enough, they stuck iron harrow tines upright in the grass. Ruined the machine.’ Amos Tucker shook his head. ‘Who was the master to punish? The men or the farmer?’
Albert swallowed a draught of cider.
‘What did the master do, gaffer?’ Herbert asked.
Farmer Tucker cast about him. As if there were a greater, invisible audience for his recollections beyond this small band. ‘One old boy was a bachelor. He was put under arrest, and taken to court in Taunton. Sent down a while in Exeter gaol. Never heard from again, was he, Albert?’
The boy’s father shook his head.
‘Died in the workhouse, like as not,’ said Amos. ‘And the farmer, one Gresley by name, the master moved on after harvest.’
‘Some of they others was lucky, I’d say,’ Herbert opined.
‘Our master is a wise man,’ Albert assured his lad. He rose unsteady to his feet. They stepped out of the shade of the oak branches.
‘Hot for the horses, ain’t it, carter?’ Herbert said.
Albert looked up at the sun, squinting.
Herbert nodded towards Noble and Red. ‘The bloodsuckers is botherin em bad.’
‘We’ll finish this meadow.’
The girl took the basket away. Tucker carried off his empty flagon. Herbert filed the blade. When the time came to replace it he did so. The mower rattled around the field. The boy watched his father ride the mower. A wispy cloud of steam rose from his sweating body. He was like one of those Canaanites who lived in the valley land and had chariots of iron; they were not driven out by the Israelites but lived in the midst of them, and they became forced labourers. They lived thus, still, here in the West Country.
Periodically rabbits ran across the stubble, birds rose from the grass. When the residual clump in the middle of the meadow was cut Albert Sercombe drove his pair out around the outside of the field in an anti-clockwise direction: the grass over which the horses had ridden initially had recovered a little and now itself was mown.
When he reached the gate Albert brought the horses to a halt, raised the knife and fingers of the mower, put them out of gear. The boy saw bloodstains on the blade. His father drove the horses back into the lane. Herbert gathered the implements. The boy turned back into the field and followed the hedge where the machine had most recently mowed. He found the dismembered carcase of a partridge, and a little further on its nest, built by chance in a slight depression of the earth. He counted nine olive-brown eggs, smooth and glossy. Only three were broken. He removed his jacket and tied the ends of the two sleeves together. He looped the sleeves as a collar round his neck, and lifted the nest carefully, entire, and carried it in his jacket like a sling slowly home.
The boy’s mother was responsible for their poultry. She had two hen huts, each housing thirty hens and one cockerel. Annually in March the cockerels were replaced by others of different breeds. Thus she did invigorate her flock of birds. The yard and the orchard were populated by many different strains, Albion, Brahmin, Dorking, Leghorn, Spanish and Wyandottes clucking and squawking in a confusion of tongues like the doomed builders of Babel.
Ruth fed young chicks with rice. Each spring she sold the two-year-old hens and replaced them with pullets hatched the previous year. The boy searched among them now for the black Minorca hen. She had never been sold; his mother deemed her as co-operative a sitter as she had ever known. The bird believed every egg placed beneath her was her own. He found her in the orchard and bribed her with grain to her nesting place behind the wood shed. He laid the partridge eggs down, still in their nest, and the hen took a turn or two around them then stood and looked about her as if to an imaginary audience of her own kind, to show them this impressive production. Then she sat upon the eggs.
On the day following, Herbert took one of the three-year-olds, Captain, leading the swathe turner to Watercress Meadow. The hot sun had bleached the outermost of the green herbage and was turning it to hay already. The clover in red bloom was now a fawn colour, the yellow trefoil had wilted, and Herbert followed the same route as his carter had the day before, turning the grass, which smelled so sweet a man could imagine becoming a ruminant munching upon it, contented.
Leo had agreed to go to school but he tracked back. At the farm he collected the same implements Herbert had used the day before and carried them past the Meadow to Ferny Piece from where he could hear his father mowing. The boy raked the swathe out a
way from the hedge. When Albert stopped for his morning break he did not speak of his son’s presence, neither to thank nor to berate him, but he broke his bread and cut the cheese and the onion and shared them with Leo, and he shared the water.
The hay in the field gave off heat as it dried. The boy watched birds as they flew through the air above and were unexpectedly disturbed, how their flight was upset and how they responded. Some struggled ill-naturedly then resumed their intended direction. One yellow wagtail, however, returned to this unexpected thermal and let itself fall and glide. The boy watched it playing with the air.
When they ate again, Leo produced his packed school lunch. The boy pulled his boiled bacon sandwich apart and offered his father the larger part. His father passed him his knife and the boy cut his jam pie in half. His father reached across and ruffled the boy’s head and hair; his hand was huge, flattened by labour, the skin callused and tough like hide.
On the morning of the third day Albert paced out a rectangle in the rick yard, thirty feet long by fifteen feet wide, and marked it with old straw.
They began to gather the hay. Albert hitched Noble in the shafts of one waggon and drove it to the Meadow. Herbert hitched Red to the second and towed it likewise.
The boy and his mother and his sister raked the swathes of hay into cocks. The heads of the rakes were as wide as those who wielded them were tall. Their wooden teeth were each eight inches long. Albert stood in the bed of the first waggon. His son Fred on one side and Herbert on the other pitched hay up to him with their long forks. Dunstone led Noble between the cocks of hay. His mother saw the boy watching the horses.
‘I know you’d rather have yon job, Leo,’ she said. ‘Poor Dunstone would take it to heart.’
Dunstone was a vagabond upon the estate. He had no place to sleep but each night chose a new spot. At a glance he could pass for a boy but then one saw his face. Or one might see him stiff and limping in the morning and take him for an old man, and be likewise duped. He was neither young nor old, and he was both. They said of him there was not much up in the attic. His ragged clothes were the cast-offs of other men. Given him by women ashamed for their husbands to wear them any longer. They were ill-fitting upon poor Dunstone. The sleeves of his jacket reached almost to his fingers. The hems of the trousers had been cut off and were frayed above his ankles. He lifted wisps of hay and fed them to the horse.