The Shepherd's Life by James Rebanks

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