James Rebanks recalls an afternoon with his grandfather on their Lake District farm 

We followed the old drystone wall that led from the farmstead to the meadows. The wall rose and fell with the contours of the rigg, the raised hogback mounds of earth that rose above the floodplain. Meadow pipits rose up from the field, and flitted up and away ahead of us, perching on the posts that held the wire to the top of the walls to stop the sheep escaping. The ewes and lambs called to each other across the valley.

My grandfather stopped and held his hand to his ear, pantomime-style, to listen to the cuckoo calling in the woods on the fell. I nodded. He quietly opened the wooden gate by the stone barn, or ‘hog-gust’, as he called it. An old black Aberdeen Angus cow was due to calve. He had walked her into the barn the previous night, so that he could help her if things went wrong.

We peered through the broken window. A jet-black calf was lying in a patch of light flooding in over the barn door. My grandfather crept in quietly and I followed, pausing at the door. The cow’s teats were shining and soft, so he knew the calf had suckled. It shone, in wet cow-licked curls of saliva and spittle. The old man talked to its mother to reassure her, and she lowed back at him, but then relaxed and let him scratch her rump. He pulled gently at the afterbirth, and it peeled away and fell in a sloppy bundle on the barn floor. He lifted it away with an old pitchfork and threw it into a clump of nettles by the blue slate and lime mortar wall of the barn. He reached under the calf and said it was a bull calf; then he lifted it to its feet. The mother watched him carefully with big watery black eyes, chewing her cud.

He waved to me, and I knew he meant that I should open the door. The cow wandered through, calf stuttering after her, and away across the meadow to the rest of the herd. She paused every few strides to let her wobbly-legged son catch up. We watched them, the cow heading to the beck for a drink, grabbing wisps of grass as she went.

Some of the other cows came to inspect the calf and touch noses with the mother. The rest were grazing across the field, tails swishing as they munched along, others were lying with their calves by their sides and flicking their tails and ears at the flies that encrusted their flanks and eyes with shimmering specks of emerald and black.

An older calf was gently pummelling his mother’s udder as he sucked, face covered in a milky froth, while another stole milk by reaching in from behind while she daydreamed. Grandad turned to me and said, ‘That’s a cheeky bugger, isn’t it, it thieves milk off all these old girls when they’re not looking, no wonder it is fat as butter.’

Extract from English Pastoral: An Inheritance by James Rebanks (Penguin Books). Buy a copy here. 

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