Meadowland

by John Lewis-Stempel

  I guess, because of my grandfather’s age and the newness of the Fergie, that the photograph was taken in about 1958. They killed farming a year or so later. And they killed it by putting cabs on tractors. No longer was the farmer alive to the elements, or even close to the earth. All he did now was sit in a little mobile office, complete with heater and radio, pulling levers. I have sat in tractor cabs with air-con systems and plasma screen TVs, where you can literally put your feet up as the computer takes over.

  Since a tractor cannot do a sharp double-back turn, hay-cutting, like ploughing, is done in elliptical ‘lands’, where one takes a wide turn at the end of the field, and eventually the parallel tracks of the tractor across the field meet.

  After about twenty minutes of clickety scything by the bar mower, I have a good half-acre mown, the cut grass lying in long gorgeous Tudor braids, woven through with yellow from buttercups, red from clover, yellow-orange from bird’s-foot trefoil, with a dash here and there of pink from ragged robin, and white from pignut, stitchwort and mouse-ear. The perfume from the cut sweet vernal is strong enough to drown the smell of the blue diesel smoke from the International’s bonnet exhaust. And the sun is shining in a sky so pristinely blue it must be the first day of Genesis.

  The bucolic reverie soon comes to a screeching, flailing end. The mower has hit a stone. (Yes, probably thrown up by my mouldywarps.) One of the cutters is bent, the other broken, the thing in bits.

  Back at the house, I’m on the internet for an hour trying to find a replacement. The best deal I can find is £339 second-hand, but the snag is delivery: three days minimum. So I phone neighbours to see if I can borrow a mower, but the problem there is the mower either won’t fit or it’s in use. True enough. Through the open windows I can hear that the hills and the valley are alive with the sound of mowers straining and whirring.

  I suppose I know what I am going to do, and I’m not even sure that, in some psychic manner, I did not arrange the wrecking stone.

  In the cow byre, along with all the other implements and tack from a bygone age, is a scythe. A proper-job Grim Reaper’s scythe, with a snake-curved hickory snath (shaft) and two grips. I will make hay by hand.

  Funny, the things that take you back. I sharpen the scythe, handle to floor, with sideways-upwards flicks of the whetstone on the cutting edge. (More properly the edge is the ‘beard’; there’s a whole weird world of scythe terminology.) And I can see superimposed upon myself my father making D’Artagnan flicks with a steel to sharpen the Sunday carving knife.

  The English scythe is a monster, with its heavy ash handle and coarse steel blade. Since this is an antique model, found in the byre when we moved in, it was made for an early-twentieth-century Herefordian, meaning someone about five foot six. But there is enough wormholed ash shaft for me to move the grips, which are bound to the shaft by metal clamps, by more than four inches. A good scythe, like a good shotgun, has to fit the individual. In that perfect world that I can never find, it should be bespoke.

  The knack of scything is to keep the blade flat to the ground, so that it hovers a mere millimetre over the surface, and to swing the scythe around one’s body in a circular arc. Knees should be bent, and the weight (presuming one is right-handed) transferred from the right leg to the left leg as one swings through. A man scything should be mistaken for a man performing tai chi. All this I know, because I have scythed before; as a teenager I used a scythe to mow the awkward areas between the trees in our orchard at home. Since then I have used a scythe to cut down weeds.

  But when I mow grass this morning the grass mostly bends before the blade, then pops back up giggling. It does not help that the grass is drying by the minute; grass should be scythed when it is heavy with morning dew.

  And the amount of labour required to keep swinging is fabulous. The blade needs to be sharpened (‘honed’ in the parlance) every ten minutes, and soon I am desperate for the scheduled stops to get the whetstone out from a bucket of water and flick it along the blade. My hands are also beginning to blister. My back aches, my face, in generous speak, ‘has caught the sun’; in less kind words I look like a Brit at Benidorm. I have cut my finger deeply in a blazing piece of stupidity, by running it along the blade to check it was razored up. After two hours under the sun I have mown about a quarter of an acre. With a tractor this would take five minutes. If that.

  Penny appears angelically out of the waterfall of perspiration with a mug of tea. ‘How’s it going?’ she asks with a grimace.

  ‘Fantastically!’ I exclaim. Neither am I joking. Nothing in the last ten years of farming, with the exception of delivering calves, has given me such satisfaction.

  I am in a state of near ecstasy. The grass I have actually mown lies in neat lines (‘windrows’) to the left of the blade’s arc, and the sweet vernal, this close up, makes me think they must use it as deodorant in Arcadia. But it is the look and feel of the cut grass that is making me sing. Now that I have re-caught the knack of scything, the grass lies in fallen blades that silkily skitter and slide over each other, as though made from glass, not grass.

  Hay from a mechanical mower is as much crushed as cut. Previously I had regarded this as a good thing, since bruised grass releases moisture more quickly and, after all, hay must dry. But this grass is a revelation. I can see and smell its quality.

  That afternoon, I turn the windrows with a rake once.

  I have searched the labyrinth of memory for a passage I once read about the virtue of hand-made hay, and finally found it in The Worm Forgives the Plough, John Stewart Collis’s autobiographical account of working on the land in the Second World War:

  The agricultural labourer seldom praises anything, or admits that he enjoyed anything in the way of work; and none, save the old, object to the introduction of any mechanical device. But haymaking provided an exception to this – here at any rate. One and all, they not only hated the present job, they glorified the past. We made hay in they days; they said. It was regarded as a kind of holiday time then, their families in the field, great picnics, not to mention lots of beer flowing.

  In the evening I walk down the lanes between the rows of cut grass; there is something incongruous, almost exotic, about part of the familiar field being in braids. I am not the only one to appreciate the sense of holiday liberation, of the meadow becoming a new place. Under the far bank the rabbit young are racing in excited circles of astonishing speed, happy to be freed from the performance-decreasing constraint of tall grass.

  The marshy, uncut corner amounting to an eighth of an acre is the remembrance of how things were only this morning, at dawn, on this side of the field. Here the devil’s bit scabious, which likes the damp conditions, is in full flower. The devil’s bit is a floral indicator of the antiquity of meadowland and, with its round, nodding lilac head, is more intensely beautiful than its name suggests.

  Why the connection with Beelzebub? According to the fifteenth-century herbal Hortus Sanitatis, the plant was the Devil’s very own dark material, the source of his power, and when the Virgin Mary put a stop to his evil, he bit off the root of the plant in annoyance. Another, and contrary, explanation for the abruptly terminating root is that Succisa pratensis was so useful in healing human ailments that Lucifer, vexed, chewed its root to a stub to halve its efficacy. In this version of the plant’s nomenclature, ‘scabious’ refers to its putative ability to cure skin diseases.

  The devil’s bit is certainly the food source for the marsh fritillary butterfly, one of Britain’s rarer butterflies, whose numbers have declined by over 50 per cent in the last century. By July, the devil’s bits in this corner are usually swarming with the black caterpillars of that species. Marsh fritillaries are whimsical insects, and local populations die out for no apparent reason. But ours will not die out, surely?

  Next morning I am up with the skylark and down in the dewy meadow early. Today I am better prepared; I have found a pair of my father’s old tan driving gloves, the sort that say ‘Mine’s a gin an
d tonic’ and that my mother would have accessorized with her horsey headscarf from Country Casuals; and I have made, from a small plastic mineral-water bottle, a holder for my whetstone which can be hung off my belt. Since I do not have a proper hay rake, I have improved our garden rake by separating the wire tines with a pair of pliers.

  After unpacking and spreading out the windrows with the rake, I begin scything. By elevenses, that immemorial time for the agricultural labourer to rest and slake his thirst, I have done three-quarters of an acre.

  Hiss. Hiss. The gentle sound of grass falling to the blade.

  Eight-foot-wide swathes of levelled grass lie in windrows in my wake. Ye olde yokel could probably mow this five-acre field in a day; inexperience means I will be doing well to cut an acre a day. Well, naivety and lack of fitness; modern men, even manual workers, cannot compete with a Victorian peasant, let alone a medieval one. But the Scandinavian weather god has granted me ten days, so I have time to spare.

  The arc-action of swinging the blade and the repetitive swish as it razes the towering grass is entirely hypnotic and I fall into musing. The hay-cutter was always a field philosopher:

  From a different line of work, my colleagues,

  I bring you an idea. You smirk.

  It’s in the line of duty. Wipe off that smile, and

  as our grandfathers used to say:

  Ask the fellows who cut the hay.

  From The Decade of Sheng Min, translated by

  Ezra Pound

  When people needed an oracle or an answer they always asked the hay man.

  Robert Frost in ‘Mowing’ declared scything to be ‘the sweetest dream that labor knows’. My long scythe too whispers to the earth and leaves the hay in rows.

  I fell in love when I was fourteen with a flower meadow, perfectly set off by a wooden field gate beside the Wye. Almost all the things I love are to do with grass. Geese, sheep, cows, horses. Even dogs eat grass.

  John Clare found his poems in a field. Sometimes I find words. There is nothing like working land for growing and reaping lines of prose.

  I have never been so close to the animals of the meadow. To the leaf bug that grips grimly to the toppling blade of fescue, to the frog that decides to hop it, to the meadow brown butterfly that sups the nectar of the white clover even as the blade slithers towards it, to the rabbit lying in a form that does a white-tailed bolt.

  I now know why the hay-cutters of yore tied up the bottom of their trousers before haying. A confused brown vole runs towards me and scurries up my leg, its tiny razor clees gripping into my flesh. As I am wearing voluminous shorts there is a nanosecond of some nervousness. My high-pitched shriek and passable attempt at reel dancing persuade the vole to jump off.

  By one o’clock I have done about an acre. I spend the afternoon turning and drying the hay.

  Despite all the seen and unseen motion of summer, there is a stillness in the landscape, as though it were trapped in a glass jar.

  If anything, I am scything the next morning even earlier because by elevenses the heat is killing. I have now slipped into a rhythm of haymaking a Tudor peasant would understand. Cut in the morning; turn the hay in the afternoon. A steeping haze today takes away some of the fierceness of the incandescent sun, which is as welcome to the cut grass as it is for me. Trickily, the sun can be too bright for hay, bleaching it so it is as lifeless as shredded office paper.

  The afternoon is also the time for the hay to be carted. Which, really, is where the fun begins. I have tied stock fencing around the sides of the 4-ton Weeks trailer so they have more height, and towed this down to the meadow behind the International. I have a pitchfork. So what could be easier than pitching the hay up into the trailer?

  The answer comes the next afternoon. The amount of loose hay is wondrous. Forking up a ton of it on to the trailer massacres my back. I drive the tractor up to the yard, the trailer a Spanish galleon sailing behind me. I pitch the hay into the spare stables.

  That evening I can barely move, and stoop around like a geriatric gnome with gastroenteritis.

  After four days, I have mown about three acres, and have slowed to snail’s pace. But I have had a brainwave. I have taken down to the meadow two 4.9 × 7.9m tarpaulins. When these are spread on the ground, the hay that has been raked into a ‘haycock’ mound can simply be rolled on to them. The tarpaulins can then be dragged behind the jeep back up to the farm, pulled to the right place, and the hay rolled off. Roll-on. Roll-off. No back-breaking pitchforking needed.

  The only snag is that when I am towing the tarpaulins through the cow field the Red Poll attack them, butting at them with their heads. By standing on the second of the tarpaulins, they detach it, and start to eat the contents before I can shoo them away.

  Their feasting is, I feel, a sort of compliment to my hay.

  For the remainder of the day, they refuse to budge from the shade, where they repel insects with an African swish of their tails.

  The horsefly is a silent and murderous biter. It comes not in ones or twos but whole battalions, drawn from afar by the smell of sweat. I become twitchy, like the horses do, expecting their attack, and begin slapping paranoically at any sensation on my skin. When the horseflies infiltrate past my defences and inject their probosces I smack them dead. Haematopota pluvialis means ‘blood-drinker of the rain’. Half an inch long, slate grey, horseflies also have the nickname ‘gadfly’, a reference to either the fly’s roving habits or the Middle English gad for pointed tool or iron (the same root as goad).

  After crushing the biting flies, I wipe the blood off on my shirt. I look like the lead in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

  For good measure I am also bitten by Tabanus bovinus (the horsefly with the hairy thorax) despite its supposed preference for cows.

  In the evening I look upon my work. Eternity would not be enough to contain all the summer eves one could enjoy if they were like this, despite the horseflies. I chew on a stem of foxtail that escaped the hook.

  Another blissful, rosy summer’s eve, in Herefordshire, the unknown county.

  The buzzard young are on the wing, making the meadow their nursery hunting ground. A wood pigeon coos drowsily in the oaks. Grasshoppers are chirping . . . For a second I think I hear a nightjar.

  There was a nightjar here once, on a similarly warm and windless night. In the near dark, its churring seemed to emerge from the very landscape, as if the earth was vibrating. Then, for a second, the bird flew up against the sinking sun and performed a silhouetted cartwheel along the mountain top. Or so it appeared in a glorious moment of trompe l’oeil. Then it flew away. For the nightjar, the field was just a stopover on the way to Ewyas Harold Common or on to the mountain. It was not home.

  I have seen them on the common in daylight, reposing like lizards in the trees. The nightjar is not an attractive bird, what with its drab plumage and gaping mouth; it was said to steal the milk from goats, hence the local name of goatsucker. But the nightjar is entirely an insect eater, catching its prey on the wing like the martins, only at night, using the bristle to the sides of its mouth to funnel insects into the chasm of no return.

  I have decided to sleep under the stars.

  They say that if you can remember the sixties you weren’t really there. By the same token, if your night under the stars was free of insect bites and rustling you didn’t really do it. But better to lie out in a sleeping bag in the open than in a tent, which is only another form of house. Tonight heaven is my roof, the hedges my walls. A procession of late night birds and early night bats fly over me, and a hedgehog snuffles along to give me a fright with a human-sounding snort.

  The jackdaws do not seem to sleep, but jackdaw young have no sense of danger, so need great and loud teaching. Lots of it, apparently.

  Then the field folds me in soft wings.

  One man went to mow, went to mow a meadow.

  Haying, of course, used to be a communal activity, although the raciness of traditional English folk songs about mowin
g suggests that the day’s activity extended to rolls in the stuff:

  ’Twas in the merry month of May in the Springtime of the year,

  All down in yonder meadows there runs a river clear,

  And to see those little fishes how they do sport and play,

  Caused many a lad and many a lass to go there a-making hay.

  In comes three jolly scythesmen to cut those meadows down,

  With a good leathern bottle and the ale that is so brown;

  For there’s many a smart young labouring man comes here his skill to try,

  He whets, he mows, and he stoutly blows for the grass cuts devilish dry.

  Then in come both Will and Tom with pitchfork and with rake,

  And likewise black-eyed Susan the hay all for to make;

  For the sun did shine most glorious and the small birds they did sing,

  From the morning till the evening as we goes haymaking.

  Then just as bright Phoebus the sun was a-going down,

  Along comes two merry piping men approaching from the town.

  They pulled out the tabor and pipes, which made the hay-making girls to sing,

  They all threw down their forks and rakes and left off haymaking.

  They called for a dance and they jigged it along,

  They all lay on the haycocks till the rising of the sun.

  With ‘jug! jug! jug! and sweet jug!’ how the nightingale did sing!

  From the evening till the morning as we goes haymaking.

  Another song, ‘As I Was a-Walking’, recalled:

  A brisk young sailor walked the field