Wild Weekend

by Celia Brayfield

  Florian was a wine-maker. His vineyards, stretching to the edge of the village of Great Saxwold itself, reeked of overinvestment. At the entrance to the domaine was a new thatched lych gate and a huge painted hoarding which proclaimed CHATEAU SAXWOLD in squirly eighteenth-century script. Underneath, in smaller squirls, was the mission statement: the finest English wines from grapes grown on biodynamic principles.

  A stack of barrels rose beside it, their brass fitments glinting in the sun, when there was sun. A newly gravelled drive lined with topiary hedges led to the barn where Florian held invitation-only wine tastings for the local gentry, most of whom were his relatives, for the Addleworths also had been in East Anglia for generations and were impressive proof that, for the aristocracy, there is nothing to do in the country except breed.

  Oliver discovered that Colin hired men from a labour contractor to harvest his potatoes and asked no questions about where these men had come from, what language they spoke and whether they had work permits. Jimmy went out himself on his ancient tractor far into the night and ploughed by searchlight. Florian employed his relatives, and in the autumn a small army of the posh poor arrived in battered Range Rovers to pick grapes for him. All Chateau activities were governed by the phases of the moon and the vine terraces echoed with cries of, ‘Do look out, Tristan!’ and ‘Is it time for lunch yet?’

  The vines themselves were trained in immaculate rows and bordered with banks of lavender. A rose bush ended each row, complementary planting, Florian explained, to keep vine fungi at bay. So much, most people had granted him, but when he announced his plans to dig energised cows’horns into the soil to refocus its energy, most of the clientele of The Pigeon & Pipkin experienced a deficit of tolerance.

  Florian’s wine, Oliver was soon assured, tasted like cat’s piss, for all he talked about blending and grape varieties and the weather. The Pigeon stocked the stuff, and a few restaurants owned in the diaspora of Florian’s family around the country, but nowhere else did. Sales were not impressive, so Florian was diversifying into mead. For this, he needed honey, so his first move had been to find a new grant to apply for, set up twenty-three beehives, and paint them all in the vineyard’s colours of navy blue and gold.

  ‘I was wondering,’ Oliver began when Florian appeared in the bar, ‘if I could ask your advice.’

  ‘Delighted. I didn’t know you were interested in biodynamic farming.’

  ‘Er – well, before I get started, I was thinking I should look into grants and things.’

  ‘Too right. I’m sure the Government had its pound of flesh when you were in the City. Time to collect! That’s the brilliant thing about this game. You can actually get something back for all that bloody tax. Come to dinner and I’ll explain how it’s done.’

  Assuming that, since the vines were young, Florian would not be drinking his own wine just yet, Oliver took along a halfway decent bottle of burgundy. Florian’s sister-in-law, very thin, very blonde, very twitchy and another member of the posh poor, took charge of it in a spasm of embarrassment and vanished to the kitchen. She emerged in a few minutes with a small glass of murky purple syrup.

  ‘This is our Pinot,’ Florian explained. ‘A lot of growers can’t get Pinot grapes to ripen at all in England, but we’ve got a south slope that they really seem to like. We’re not selling it yet, but I’m quite pleased with it.’ Oliver swigged with goodwill and a gout of acid liquid exfoliated his tongue, leaving a fair amount of grit behind. The top note was mouldy carpet and the aftertaste was indeed cat’s pee. His own bottle remained unopened and he was to find it, some months later, among the tombola prizes at the village fete.

  On the paperwork, however, Florian was as good as his billing.

  ‘What you want to do,’ he advised, hunting out leaflets from the filing system in his surprisingly well-ordered office, ‘is to make applications under this new Stewardship Scheme. Hedges, landscaping, set-aside – you can get the whole lot financed as long as you say you’re doing it all for tourists and/or conferences. We even do weddings now.’

  ‘But I don’t want to get into tourists,’ Oliver protested. ‘If I did, I’d have gone into leisure and catering. I want to produce food.’

  ‘Just say you’re going to do shearing demonstrations or something.’ Florian gave an airy flick of his wrist. ‘Or harvest mini-breaks or something. We do it. Converted the stables for grape-picking weekends and a few blending seminars. The Government doesn’t actually want you to grow food, that’s the thing. It’s cheaper to buy it all from Israel or Guatemala or somewhere.’

  ‘But surely …’

  ‘It’s democracy, Ollie. We’ve got to do what the majority of the population wants us to do.’

  ‘You mean that because most people insist on buying tasteless food produced at a fatal environmental price by virtual slave labour in the Third World, because they don’t think and can’t think and want to spend all their money getting wasted in Ibiza so they’ll never be able to think again, we have to give up growing anything at all?’

  ‘A bit harsh, but yeah, that’s about the size of it.’ Florian said this in a calm, sad voice that pulled at Oliver’s heartstrings. He saw that, behind the exquisite courtesy and Hugh Grant mannerisms, Florian was just as angry as he was.

  ‘You’re a terrorist, aren’t you?’ he said suddenly. ‘You sit in your office here scamming the system because you’re forced to by the regime.’

  ‘Look, just get the forms,’ said Florian, ‘and I’ll help you fill them out.’

  As a banker, Oliver had been brilliantly slick at analysing political initiatives. As a farmer, however, he was pathetically inept at making those initiatives work for him. He never quite understood that the whole intention of official policy was to stop farmers growing food. When a man is about to realise his life’s ambition, he doesn’t want to know that it has been officially declared wrong. When a man has proudly volunteered to adopt the human race’s primary profession, the very activity that separated humans from animals all those millions of years ago, he isn’t about to admit that it is now a terrible mistake. However patiently Florian talked him through it, the concept was too ugly to get into his brain.

  About ten thousand other farmers were in the queue ahead of him when the Agricultural Conversion Grant Part IV became available, so he missed the boat. His form applying for a Heritage Stewardship Award was a few checked boxes short of the bureaucrats’ideal. He soon lost heart; the application pack for the European Hedgerow Regeneration Subsidy was so huge that he left it unopened in the log basket, next to the pile of unread bank statements.

  Occasionally, when The Fieldcare Agency managed to attract the media’s attention, Oliver, Colin, Florian and Jimmy watched their doom as it was sealed, speech by speech and scandal by scandal, on the TV in The Pigeon & Pipkin. The four of them spontaneously congregated there because they were the only unmarried farmers in the area and sitting at home alone to watch their profession die was just too hard.

  Come August, when the skylarks sang from dawn to dusk in the cloudless skies and Colin Burton lost his profit on three fields of cauliflowers because they were not white enough to please the man from Marks & Spencer, when the ripening corn was turning bronze and Oliver’s reserves had dwindled to a four-figure sum, he judged that his fields had become meadows and were ready to rock. His grass was a triumph. As dense as velvet, as fine as baby’s hair, frothing with silver husks, springy to walk over, every new blade glistening with dew every morning. He planted a couple of fields of potatoes, and the sight of the young plants, waving their leaves like little green flags, gave him confidence. It was time for the sheep. He bought two hundred and they thundered down the ramp of the lorry that brought them like the firstcomers at a football match running for their seats.

  Over the next few months about half of his ewes died lingering and distressing deaths. Lucy Vinny, the vet, a woman he would come to know much better in the months that followed, diagnosed poisoning from the toxins still pres
ent in the ground, a cocktail of pesticides and growth-promoters used when the farm had grown peas for a multinational frozen food company. ‘It takes about three years to wash out of the soil to the extent you can actually raise livestock,’ she said with an irritated sigh.

  ‘I should have talked to you first,’ said Oliver.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed crisply, ‘and I’m afraid you’ll be seeing me again soon.’

  ‘I hope so, I was planning on lambs,’ he told her.

  ‘I wouldn’t advise it,’ she said, patting his arm sympathetically. ‘Not for a while.’

  He went to the pub.

  ‘Bloody useless sheep,’ Colin said, through mouthfuls of Chicken and Broccoli Bake, ‘always getting the bloody vet down for ’em. Get into ducks, that’s where the money is.’ He waved his fork expressively.

  ‘What do you think, Jimmy?’ Oliver asked him.

  ‘About ducks? We’ve been fine with ducks this year. Price is holding up.’

  ‘I meant about sheep,’ said Oliver.

  ‘Oh, sheep. Best do what vet says,’ Jimmy said. ‘We always done that.’

  It could not be said that Oliver Hardcastle was a chauvinist. It was just that women didn’t talk quite loudly enough for him to hear them, in the larger sense. Or maybe Lucy Vinny made a mistake by patting his arm, or by speaking so crisply and looking so certain, with her striped shirts and navy sweaters and neat little pearl earrings. Or by obviously preferring four-legged animals.

  Lucy’s life was her horses; nobody in the pub knew much about horses, but hers were certainly elegant animals and every now and then someone in a great flash car would come from miles away to buy one, and make admiring remarks about her eye for good bloodlines. On Sunday mornings, Lucy took one of them out for a hack then sometimes came trotting down to The Pigeon & Pipkin for lunch and hitched the horse in the car park like a cowboy. It was the sort of rural eccentricity Oliver would have fancied indulging himself, but he was afraid of looking like a prat.

  In this little morass of wistful denial and fantasy rejection that surrounded Lucy in his imagination, her message, telling him to forget about lambs, sank gently, and disappeared. And Jimmy’s advice – well, Lucy and Jimmy had some funny understanding. Odd, since she was definitely on the posh tottie side and he was an old-style son of the soil, but they always did agree and she rented a couple of his fields to graze her horses. So Jimmy’s opinion, Oliver considered, couldn’t be relied on if Lucy was involved.

  The ram glared at him from its web page, its creamy fleece almost touching the ground, its magnificent horns curling confidently down to its dusky cheeks. Oliver reached for his mouse and made the booking.

  For a short time, all went well. The ewes seemed to like the ram as much as he did, and when, with the proper etiquette, they were introduced, most of them succeeded in getting pregnant. Then about half of them miscarried. Of the remainder, most managed to give birth, but every one of the lambs was dead within a fortnight. To bury the sad pile of fleecy carcasses, he hired a small JCB. When the bill for the burial took him into overdraft, he barely noticed. At first.

  The bounced cheques finally gave him the clue, and Oliver sat down for a day of reckoning, at the end of which he concluded that he had no money. He found himself in the traditional position of an English farmer, in debt and up the creek. Full of righteous anger, he drove to London and marched into the offices of The Fieldcare Agency itself and demanded restitution.

  A visit from an expert was promised, and some weeks later a woman with a cast-iron assumption of superiority and a briefcase full of leaflets arrived at Saxwold New Farm.

  ‘I’m sure we can help you,’ she began in the tinkling-cymbal voice of a person who’s simply brilliant with theory and thinks practice is something that is only relevant to professional golfers. ‘Our Protected Landscape Management Scheme is designed specifically for people like you.’

  ‘Great,’ Oliver responded, wondering why he felt so uneasy.

  ‘Tourism is a definite possibility.’

  ‘You mean, you want me to go on holiday until my soil isn’t poisoned any more?’

  ‘Ah, no.’ She had been trained to expect some degree of intellectual challenge with a farmer interview. ‘I mean diversifying into farm holidays. A small hotel, that’s something you could do.’

  ‘No it isn’t,’ said Oliver.

  ‘Of course it is,’ she said, in the sort of voice people use when encouraging a three-year-old to get started with the finger-paint. She rifled through her briefcase for leaflets, saying, ‘Farmyard experience weekends are definitely going to be the next big thing.’

  ‘When I was a banker,’ Oliver said, ‘and people told me something was definitely going to be the next big thing, I knew I was looking at a no-hoper.’

  ‘People with your skills are exactly who The Fieldcare Agency hopes to attract into the countryside,’ she assured him. ‘I’ve got a very positive feeling about this.’

  ‘That was the other thing that was the kiss of death, people saying they had a very positive feeling.’

  ‘I can’t see how we can move forward here without a positive attitude, at least.’ She blinked.

  ‘It’s difficult to be positive after you’ve found out that your land is so sick that anything that eats anything that grows on it lies down and dies.’

  ‘That’s only a short-term issue.’

  ‘So is my overdraft. I need to make some money.’

  ‘Tourism can be extremely profitable.’

  ‘I don’t want to be part of the tourist industry. I want to be a farmer. Have you come here to tell me I’ve been wasting my life?’

  The woman from The Fieldcare Agency seemed used to this line of argument. ‘Nobody is saying that, Mr Hardcastle,’ she replied, quick on cue. ‘You can farm and have crops and animals and everything – er – traditional. Tourism just means sharing it with people.’

  ‘But I can’t have crops and animals, can I? My land is toxic, whatever grows on it comes up poisonous. That’s why you’re here. Hello?’

  At last, a shadow of doubt appeared on her face. ‘The Fieldcare Agency does recognise that people want the countryside to be cared-for, even if only for aesthetic reasons. There are some husbandry options which we can recommend as alternatives.’ She rummaged in her briefcase. ‘Leeches. For medicinal purposes. There is a demand for them from alternative practitioners.’

  Oliver winced. She winced in turn. ‘Well, if you don’t like that, we could look at other ways of achieving profitability. People in your position can escape the commodity trap by selling something for which customers will pay a premium price. Turf. Have you considered turf at all? Grass for people’s gardens, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve seen a garden.’

  She ignored his sarcasm. ‘Or energy crops. I’ve just put a farm in Somerset over to a new strain of wheat that gives us a cereal starch from which compostable plastic bottles can be produced.’

  ‘A new strain of wheat? How’s that, exactly?’

  ‘Oh well, if you have ideas about GM.’

  Oliver suddenly felt very tired. He rubbed his eyes hard. ‘Of course I have ideas about GM. I’m an organic farmer. We’re not the first people you’d see planting genetically modified crops, are we?’

  ‘Our job is to help people to reinvent themselves,’ the woman said, sorting her leaflets into a neat pile and putting it firmly in his hands. ‘I’ll leave you to read through these and maybe follow up with you in a few weeks.’ When, she implied, you’ve come to your senses and given-up all this stupid nonsense about growing food.

  Oliver threw the leaflets on his compost heap No. 2 and went down to The Pigeon & Pipkin.

  ‘Bloody women,’ said Colin Burton, through mouthfuls of Thai Tuna Surprise. ‘Think they can bloody tell you what to do.’

  ‘Tough job but somebody’s got to do it,’ said Lucy Vinny, raising a mild laugh.

  ‘She kept saying they wanted to attract more people like me into farmi
ng.’ Oliver shook his head.

  ‘I suppose she meant people with money to lose,’ Lucy suggested.

  ‘It was never going to happen. The moon was in Capricorn,’ announced Florian.

  ‘We know how it’s going to bloody go, don’t we?’ Colin continued as if no one else had spoken. ‘We’ve seen it with the electric, then the telephones, then the trains and then the bloody post office. Some government department gets itself a new logo and a fancy letterhead, gives itself some poncey name, the fat cats get fatter, price of everything goes through the bloody roof, nothing bloody works any more and a couple of years later the whole thing goes down the bloody tubes.’

  The regulars around them bleated their agreement. Oliver felt comforted and bought another round.

  ‘What you want to do,’ said Florian, ‘is get hold of some cow horns and bury them at each corner of each field on the first day of the waxing moon. They’ll act like energy sponges, soaking up the earth’s vibrations and cleansing the ground. I’ve got a few horns I’d be happy to pass on.’

  ‘Thanks, Florian, ’ preciate that,’ Oliver mumbled. He never knew what to say when Florian started on with the New Age stuff.

  The landlord of The Pigeon & Pipkin, skilled at making a profit from farmers’problems, decided to observe the ancient country custom of a lock-in, and it was 2am before Oliver got back to Saxwold New Farm. Halfway up his glowing oak staircase on the way to bed, the journey suddenly didn’t seem worth making any more, and he fell asleep on the half landing, sitting with his back propped comfortably against the wall.

  At 4am, he woke up. He was cold. His head ached, his throat was lined with sandpaper and his eyeballs had gone rusty in their sockets. He got stiffly to his feet and looked out of a window. Outside, in the icy March night, his poisoned meadows lay quietly under a blanket of white mist.

  Not as quietly as they should have done. Here and there, the mist was churning. Now and again, the sound of a grunt reached him. In the surreal half-light he could see the field where his potato plants, which had been declared too deadly to be harvested, had been bolting away while he wondered what to do about them; now their tops were waving, they were agitated.