by Patrick Gale
‘Well that’s the trouble with silage, isn’t it Prue? All done by machine. Wrapped in plastic. No art to it at all, really.’
‘Lazy, I call it,’ Prue said.
‘And it stinks,’ said Effie. ‘It’s nice enough now but when you cut it open in the autumn it’s like sick with mould on.’
‘In our day,’ Maudie told them, ‘everyone round here still made hay and that doesn’t stink. Good hay smells sweet.’
‘What’s hay?’ Effie asked.
‘Dried grass, stupid,’ James said, watching the film.
‘It’s more than that,’ Maudie told him. ‘Hay’s a craft. It’s a mystery. You have to cut it just at the right time. The ears can be forming but leave it too late and there’s no goodness left. And it has to be dry. You need four clear, dry days at least. You can’t cut it wet ‘cause it won’t dry right lying down. It has to be cut dry then tedded – that’s turned to you – twice daily. It has to dry fast so the goodness doesn’t leach out. If you’re slow drying it, respiration carries on and the sugars turn to gas and water.’
‘And heat,’ Prue put in. ‘Hay gets hot. Put it in a rick too soon and the whole thing could go up. Every few years someone would have an almighty fire. When we were younger, the whole family lent a hand, cousins and all. If you were old enough to walk, you were old enough to turn hay. And there were competitions.’
‘There still are, for silage,’ James put in. ‘Dad says there’s no point.’
‘Nothing wrong with competitions if you’ve a chance of winning,’ Maudie said to shut him up. ‘Your grandfather, in his time, was the most competitive haymaker on this peninsula. He wasn’t like the others, though, watching weather vanes and looking how high the birds were feeding; he went out and got the science. Knew all about balancing his herbage dry matter and how he had to get the moisture content down by a third.’
‘A quarter,’ Prue put in sharply. ‘They reckon you should aim for a hundred and fifty grams per kilo nowadays.’
‘If you say so,’ said Maudie, who maintained a stout disapproval of metrication. ‘He knew about amino-acid leaching and stomata closure and the rest. He was obsessed with raising his yields. He was sure if you prepared the grass in the right way back in the early spring, you could produce a hay that took up the same amount of space in the barn but fed the animals twice as well.’
‘Didn’t he have a muck spreader?’
‘Of course he did but that wasn’t enough.’
‘What about fertilizer?’
‘We couldn’t afford chemicals. We had to make do with what nature gave us.’
‘What, then?’
Maudie edged forward in her chair slightly, aware that she was competing for their attention with Gary Cooper. ‘Blood,’ she pronounced.
‘Dried blood?’ asked James.
‘No.’ She was scornful. ‘That’s no use. When Mother Eddy went peculiar and danced off a cliff and they cleared out her cottage, he found an old book which spelled it out for him. You needed fresh blood. There was plenty of blood when we killed a pig but we used all that for puddings. But he got chickens.’
‘Not much blood in a chicken,’ Prue sighed.
‘It was quality that mattered. Quality and freshness. And then there were the kittens.’
‘No!’ Effie was deeply shocked.
‘Of course. Barn cats have kittens all the time. It’s a fact of life. And the mothers’d die of hunger and exhaustion if you let them raise them all. My dad always used to drown them. Put them in a sack, nice and quick, and into that old cattle trough at the top of the yard. Don’t be silly, Effie. It was a natural kindness. He had to do it. But then your grandfather there started taking the kittens himself. He thought I didn’t know but I’d see him keeping an eye on the litter instead of drowning it straight away.’
‘Wanted them plump and juicy,’ Prue said with just the right hint of relish.
‘That’s right. One day he’d be out there in the barn, weighing them in his hands and the next night he’d take longer than usual shutting the yard gate and walking the dog. And I’d know what he’d been up to because he’d spend an age washing his hands. I even heard the little click as he slipped the fruit knife back into that rack by the bread crock.’
There was a pause filled only by a startled cough from Miss Tregenza as Gary Cooper’s astonishing profile caught the light. Effie breathed through her mouth. The child needed her adenoids out. Maudie briefly summoned up the gratifyingly intense image, glimpsed through a slyly lifted floorboard, of her sister, Bridie, gassed and splayed on the kitchen table, having hers removed by Dr Wadsworth.
‘Did it work?’ James asked suddenly and his voice pulled her back from reverie.
She looked at him hard; the image of his father. In that, at least, he did not disappoint. ‘Do you know, it did,’ she said. ‘At least, he took the Grassland Association’s cup two years in a row. But winning wasn’t enough. He’d set himself a challenge to beat.
‘The third year it was a horse. I even remember his name. Destry. As in Destry Rides Again. He was the last of the horses. We had the first tractor west of Penzance but that wasn’t until 1938. Anyway, poor Destry hadn’t been put out to pasture for two months when his heart gave out. The vet said he’d had a murmur but I think it was sorrow. He missed the labour. Anyway, horses were usually shot by the knacker when their time came. He’d come out and finish them off kindly then buy what was left for dog meat. Don’t look like that, James. During the war, people ate horse, too.’
‘Tasty,’ Prue said nostalgically. ‘Red wine. Bit of juniper to take off the muskiness.’
‘Horse meat, Prudence. Not dog.’ Maudie shook her head to the children, as though to explain that Prue wasn’t all there.
‘But your grandfather said no. After all Destry had done for the farm and seeing he was the last of the line, he should do the deed himself and call the knacker out afterwards. Well, I thought. We’re moving on from kittens now. And sure enough he didn’t finish him off until after dark. Told Mum it was because he couldn’t bear Destry to see the shotgun but I knew it was the blood. He needed to shed the blood at night so it would have plenty of time to soak into the soil before the sun rose and dried it up. And he must have known a shot to the head wouldn’t reach a big enough artery so he wanted to use a knife afterwards and be able to rinse his boots and hands off under cover of darkness.’ She sighed. ‘Funny, though. I’d forgotten all about it when they called us all out to get the hay in that summer. But then I breathed it in.’
‘Was it…’ James was all attention. ‘Was it disgusting like silage?’
She paused for effect. ‘It was the sweetest hay I had ever smelled. Like fresh baked bread in a ripe orchard. I took one sniff and I caught your grandfather’s eye – he was a very handsome man in those days – and he smiled, ever so slightly. So I knew I was right. And it didn’t just win him the cup again, it was like miracle food. The cattle were so sleek and muscly on it and the meat, when it came, was so well marbled with fat, someone started a rumour we’d been doctoring them with some chemical. Which we hadn’t, of course. Nothing but grass, our own milled barley and our own sweet hay.’
‘Cream and roses,’ sighed Miss Tregenza so suddenly even Maudie was startled.
‘What’s that?’ Prue asked her.
‘How you can tell a good bit of meat.’ Miss Tregenza’s eyes were momentarily freed to roam as Gary Cooper had left the scene to less principled and therefore less handsome characters. The tip of her tongue crept out to moisten thin lips. ‘Puts you in mind of cream and roses.’
The sad falling off in meat quality with the rise in low-fat cookery was a pet topic of Maudie’s but she had a professional eye on the clock and her fifteen minutes were nearly up. ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘I thought to myself that’ll be it now. He can’t get another horse. He can’t make sweeter hay than this. He can rest on his laurels. Sure enough he went back to letting my dad drown the barn kittens and our hay was good b
ut no better than anyone else’s who knew to watch the weather and judge the season.
‘But then the War came and all the evacuees. Hundreds of grubby, rowdy little town children on the trains from Paddington and Bristol. Some of them had never seen the sea before, never mind a cow. We had six – four boys and two girls – and those saucy Land Girls. But one of the six children went missing. A little tyke, he was. Red hair, crusty knees, hated washing. About your size and age,’ she said, carefully assessing James. ‘Jacky. Jacky Porter. No one was surprised when he vanished. He was forever wandering, always skiving off when they were walking to school. So we just supposed he’d run off back to London. We did all we could. The sad thing was that he went just too early to find out he’d nowhere to run to. Mother and aunt dead in a flattened house. Terrible really. And he had no father who’d claim him.’
‘Shame,’ Prue sighed and shook her head at the fecklessness of men. The children only stared. Maudie pretended an interest in the progress of the baby jacket.
‘That summer,’ she said, ‘when your grandfather had cut the hay and the girls and I were out tedding it, I came across a Fair Isle cardigan. Well I knew it had belonged to the Porter boy but I thought nothing of it. He was a tearaway who left clothes all over the place and, as often as not, had a sock missing or couldn’t find his tie before church. But I gave it to your granddad to hand in to the police, just in case. And there was something in his face as I passed it to him. A sadness. A kind of…dignified regret.
‘I’ve often wondered what he did with the body. Down one of the old mineshafts? Or perhaps he ploughed it into a barley field.’
‘What about the hay?’ Effie asked impatiently.
‘Hang on a second, dear. Knit two, purl two, cast one onto t’other, knit two, purl two…The hay? The hay had no smell at all. Looked fine enough. Dried quick enough. But it was a dead thing. Characterless. And I swear to God the cattle didn’t like it and we actually had to buy in bales from Zack Hosking. And if the story ended there, I’d have said it was divine punishment, plain and simple and that he saw the error of his ways.’
‘Why?’ James asked. ‘Did the grass die?’
‘Lord, no. It takes more than a bit of blood to kill off a whole field of grass. It was stranger than that. We let the cattle in the field for a few weeks that autumn before the rains started in earnest and I went up there one morning to check they had enough water. And they were nosing at something. You know how inquisitive steers get? They were nosing and dragging their hooves. So I walked through them to take a look and there was a sort of mound. Like a big molehill. Well we don’t get any moles, as you know. Only rabbits. So I thought it was a bit queer and I scraped a bit at the earth with my toe, the way the cattle had started to. And they were all nosing around me and snorting and sneezing.’ Maudie mustered a shudder. ‘I remember it so clearly. I crouched to feel and my fingers found a sort of…well skin, really. Greyish, where the earth had been on it, but pink inside and quite warm. Well, I dug more aside and realized it was a sort of…a sort of bag. Full of liquid and…and something else. I was just going to run and fetch your grandfather or one of the Land Girls – they were only a few fields away – when it kicked. Or something inside it kicked.
‘Prudence, it’s no good. You’re going to have to finish this matinée jacket for me – I can’t make head or tail of this blinking pattern.
‘You know how sometimes you go into a house or into a room and, although you can’t say exactly what’s wrong, you get a bad feeling?’
Both children nodded although it was certain neither had the slightest psychic ability. Even Prue had fallen quiet. The only sound was Nurse using the rotary iron in the hall, the murmur of sports commentary from the smoking room and subdued, manly conversation from Gary Cooper and a colleague.
‘Well that’s how I felt and I sensed that whatever it was, I had to destroy it. I ran to the hedge and fetched the biggest bit of granite I could carry and heaved it back. I thought I’d just shut my eyes and drop it on the thing, the way you would on a rabbit with myxomatosis. I wasn’t thinking beyond that, of the mess or having to explain it or anything. I was just about to let go when I heard a strange sucking, whiny sound, a bit like a very new kitten now I think of it. And I opened my eyes, looked down and almost dropped the rock.
‘The skin of the bag, or whatever it was, had sort of split apart and there, all wet and shiny like a little seal was a baby. A perfect, black-haired boy baby. The skin had shrunk up like a burst balloon but the last of it was sticking to his head and, as I bent to scrape it off him, he opened his soft blue eyes, emptied the stuff out of his mouth and claimed me with his cry as surely as if he had called me Mother.’
Maudie glimpsed her daughter-in-law’s returning Jeep. ‘And that,’ she said, ‘was the baby that grew into your father.’
There was a stunned silence.
‘I don’t believe it,’ James said at last.
‘I don’t care,’ Maudie told him. ‘He’d deny it, of course, because it’s only human to want to be like everyone else. I just thought you ought to know. That’s why his middle name is Fielding.’
‘The mark,’ Effie said softly, remembering something. ‘There’s a red mark on his head where his hair’s falling out. Is that…?’
‘Yes, dear. Where the bag was stuck to him. His birthmark, if you like. Now here’s your dear mum to take you home.’
They were curiously reluctant to leave but more reluctant still to do as their mother bid them and hurry next door to give Grandpa a fond goodbye kiss. Herbert Boskenna clicked his teeth at Effie while she was waiting her turn and the child truly turned pale with fear.
‘She ought to eat more,’ Maudie told her daughter-in-law, ‘and he needs to watch less television – it’s giving him nightmares. Bye all. Come back soon.’
‘The trick,’ she confided in Prue as Nurse wheeled in the tea things and wheeled out Miss Tregenza, ‘is to spike the narrative with just a seasoning of solid, agricultural fact.’
BRAHMS AND MOONSHINE
The clouds had drifted away during the concert and people exclaimed, as they emerged from the church, at the unexpected brightness of the moon and stars. A comet was making a centennial appearance in the western sky that Easter. Gretel wanted to linger with the others to admire the clarity of its tail but Corey was keen to be off. The Requiem had barely begun when he realized each of them had supposed the other had shut the chickens in their coop before leaving. He had been fretting about foxes ever since.
‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ she said, meaning the comet. Her heart was still brimming with Brahms and she wanted to make the rare sensation last.
‘Yes, come on,’ he said. ‘If we get a move on we can get out of there before we get stuck in a queue with this lot.’
She followed him obediently, feeling in her wallet for the key to the van. There was a retiring collection after the concert to assist the fine old church’s restoration. Still blissed-out on music, Gretel had reached for her money as they left their pew, generosity welling up within her, only to find he had raided her funds to buy oil for the chainsaw. She could offer nothing to the pretty girl with the begging bowl but twenty pence and a worthless, craven smile.
The concert-goers’ cars were crammed into a field across from the church. It had been drizzling all week. She felt cold mud on her toes as she hurried after him and cursed the foolish impulse which had prompted her to wear pretty shoes and her least ancient dress. No one else had dressed up; forewarned, they thought only of warm practicality. The exceptions were the musicians, glimpsed here and there, incongruous in backless dresses or dinner jackets amid the mud and four-wheel-drives.
The van was not a four-wheel-drive but an old, much-patched Commer converted to a mobile home, built for unhurried journeys and long, recuperative rests. When they arrived, she had taken one despairing glance at the mud and pleaded with the young musician waving them in to let her park on the thin island of firmer ground near the entrance
. But he was bound by regulations and insisted, smiling, that she park with the other large vehicles, most of them shamingly new and all of them surely better equipped for such conditions.
‘Well go on, then.’
‘We’re skidding.’ She felt the sickening lack of grip.
‘Slowly,’ Corey said, ‘or you’ll make it worse. Ease her out. Steady!’
She drove because he had lost his licence before he met her. Some terrible tale involving a child, a bicycle and worn brake shoes. Told her in the flush of new love, the story had demanded and won her sympathy but increasingly its lack of details came to rankle and her mind framed the questions she could never ask. What was the child’s name? How old? Just how badly disabled had the accident left it? And why did Corey only voice indignation, not remorse?
‘Here. Let me. There’s a tarp back there. Stick it under the wheels with that old blanket and I’ll try.’
While he shifted across to the driving seat, she slipped out, stuffed blanket and tarpaulin between mud and wheel then stood back.
‘Okay,’ she called.
‘Push!’ he shouted back.
She braced a foot against the stone gatepost behind her and placed both hands squarely on the van’s rear. She felt rust beneath her fingers and imagined her fists bursting straight through bodywork that was little more than filler and cheerful paint.
‘Okay,’ she called again.
He revved. The wheels churned uselessly, burying the blanket and chewing up the tarpaulin.
‘Stop,’ she called. ‘Stop! I can feel her sinking.’
All about them glossy four-wheel-drives were pulling away. She thought of asking for help but she knew what the swinging headlamps revealed; an ageing New Age couple and an even older van. She imagined women taking in the mud caked round her inappropriate shoes and sprayed up her faded Indian cotton, heard their hastily mouthed commands to their husbands to pay no heed and hurry on by. She knew she and Corey presented the very image of fecklessness, of thankless time-wasting.