Black Lane Ends

SMALLHOLDING

….. small …………………………. sane, ……………………… men
and women …………………….. abandoning ………
struggle …………………………….. accepting ……….
stern discipline …………………………..
near-forgotten ………………………….

– The Challenge of Smallholding, 1985

To frost and touch that scratching grey above scrawled trees. Banking high, cloud-scoured and flat, shadowless dawn breaks at a sociable hour. Black-grey sludge of last year’s leaves, ground beneath reluctant tyre. I was born in January. We lived on a smallholding, though it is always called The Farm in our collected remembering. We shared that held-small holding, with another family and each winter, we were cut off from the main road by snow and kept two large freezers stocked for winter drifts. We kept goats and turkeys for cash, with a small flock of heritage breed sheep. An act of amateur roleplay. We left before I was three. 

†

LAMBING

………. ….. …….. … in his natural position
…. …… ……… ……. his head ….. ………
………….. giving ………….
little trouble, ……………………………..
withers ….. abnormally ………. ………………… swollen, …………………………………………………. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. must
be pulled; ……………………………………………
Never neglect
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
absolutely ………………. ……………………………..
or it will be dead.

– Lambing Rules, 1915

As they stitched, sutured my mum, post-birth, post-me, they asked:
“Are you doing anything for Burns Night?”
“Tonight? Probably just… this.”

Born in January meant lambs soon followed. My mum was kept away from the heavy and labouring ewes until I was born, for fear of miscarriage. I wasn’t born in a barn, but I spent those early months swaddled in hay, nestled in bales whilst my parents pulled still or wriggling sacks from screaming ewes. They were self-taught. Book-learned. One lamb arrived blue and unmoving. Fluid filled its lungs. Remembering a downturned page, my dad took the lamb by its elastic hind legs and made to swing it around his head. The centrifugal force was meant to eject the fluid from its airways. He completed a quarter of a circle, an arc, before braining the lamb against a low beam he’d forgotten. The lamb was killed instantly. Its oxygen-deprived brain open to the air at last, staining the roof truss. 

This is one of the few stories recited whenever The Farm comes up in recollection. Ziggy, my sister’s pet goat, butchered and parcelled, when my sister was five. The rows of turkeys hung from the low beams of the kitchen, each row a stage toward the Christmas bounty; bled, plucked, trimmed. The enormous, unkillable turkey, bloated on the wrong feed mix, left to live on that high, moorland sketch of stone and grass. 

†

LAMBS

………………. self-evident …………………………….. …….. life
………………………………. overcome by death; …… nature …….
endowed ………………………………………………………………………… life ……
……………………………………………………….
A providing nature ……….. ……………………………………………………………………………………….. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
……………………….. most contrary
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
…………………………..

– Lambing Rules, 1915

If a ewe dies during labour or produces twins and cannot care for both, the lamb can be passed to another who has lost her own. To prevent rejection, the dead lamb may be skinned, the fleece draped, still warm and bloody, over the orphan to keep the scent alive. The mother will raise the lamb as her own if the skin smells familiar enough. I don’t know if my dad ever had the stomach to do this.

The Farm and the memories of it all come to me second-hand. Recollections of recollections, full of errors and amendments. My own history curated, with biases and omissions, intentional and inadvertent. I have no direct memories, I was too young, my brain still soft and smooth beneath the fontanelle. Unformed and stumbling amongst the hay with the slick-blue lambs. It is not that I cannot remember, it is that I could not remember. The bulbs and valves of my brain waiting to be glass-blown. 

†

GOATS

Now …….. live
principally ………………………………………………….. excessive
vitality, …………..
well known ……………………………………………………………………………….
……………………………………………………………………..
………………………………………….. for infants
and invalids

– The Domestic Sheep: Its Culture & General Management, 1900

There is a photograph, part of a series, me as a toddler, not yet walking. I am climbing the farm gate, out of the yard. The images follow my progress. In another I am crawling along the track, beyond the gate. 

Or else I am sat amongst goats in their pen, surrounded by triangular faces and elegant, furred-edge ears, horns and luciferian black-barred eyes. I hold my bottle up to be suckled by my pen-mates, taking my drink in turn. Not pictured are the times I ate their shit. Handfuls of blackgreen kernels, squashed in my rolled pink fist. Or my sister’s memory, second-hand to me, picked up from school by the mother of the other family. “Ziggy’s in the back”. Chopped and bound. Brown paper tied and staining.

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DOGS

………………………………………………………… Rags, … scruffy red ……………………………… ……………..
Rags ……………
apt to lie ………………………… …………………………………………
…….. at Helm, ………………………………… to ground …………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………….
ton after ton ……………………………………………………
……………………………………………… fell ………………………….. abandon ………………
………………………………………. bottomless. …………………………………………………
………………… home heavy …………………. loss ………………….
………………………………………………………….. muffled ………………..

– Fell Terrier, 1983

There was another photograph, lost before I ever saw it, my sister and me in the woodshed, offcuts and sawn rounds stacked behind. My sister is five or six, thick dark auburn hair, the fringe ruler-straight, I was maybe six months, not a year. My sister showing me her wooden toolset, over-sized and colourful hammer, a piece of scrap wood in my lap. It was a cosy, idyllic image. Perhaps what our parents had in mind when raising children here. Between us and the woodpile, the farm dog, a terrier of indeterminate breed, its body white with warm brown, almost orange, blotches stamped haphazardly. One black paw. In its jaws it carried a rat, dead and almost half its own size. 

The photograph may never have existed, the story too good to need evidence. I do not know the dog’s name, and I doubt my sister could recall it either. It must have been soon after the photograph was taken that the dog went missing. Lodged in a rabbit hole, overcome by instinct and unable to back out, there it died. The colour of its paw and circumstances of its death recalled with ease but not its name. 

†

MACHINERY

……………………………………………………………….
neighbours ………………………………………………………………………………………….. learn ……..
your land …….
by leaning …………………………..
……………………………………. …………………………………… needed ………………………………
friendships
wear thin ……………………
borrowing.

– The Challenge of Smallholding, 1985

We had a nineteen-sixties Land Rover, with manual windscreen wipers and a rusted hole in the floor. My mum wore wellies under her scrubs to fit her feet on the pedals. A district nurse with ewe’s blood beneath her nails. A hare caught in the wheels on the way to work, bagged and thrown in the hospital freezers. The food hygiene inspector, pulling out the forgotten body, blood-filled bag around its head and all, six months later. 

The family with which we shared The Farm are a blank all to themselves. Aside from the butchered pet goat and a minor car crash; icy roads and a crumpled bonnet, their two boys, one of them lifted into the air by the horns of a too-close cow at an agricultural show, not much else survives. 

We never discussed what happened to make the families split. Why we left the wide-open moor for a close-packed terrace in the mill-haunted and sooted valley below. How we sold the animals off, cheaper than the market agreed. 

The crash one of the few stories that brings me into their orbit. My parents weren’t there, just the other mother and the other children. The only detail I have, other than the ice, is that she kissed me on the head. It is the only detail my sister would recount when, many years after leaving The Farm but still children, the story came up. That the mother kissed me and this was something that my sister thought funny, “poor you”. 

I never asked what it was about this woman that crashed the car on an icy morning, high on the moor, that made the idea of having been mothered by her in however small a way, so funny to my sister. I doubt she would remember now. If she did, the edges would be softened, as if observed from a distance. The aberration of a long lens distorting any meaningful detail. Some stories too threadbare to be handed down. 

†

VERMIN

………………………………………………………………. seedlings uprooted …………………………………..
……………………………………………………………………………………………..
good grassland half …………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

..…. choked.
It may not kill ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………. I

suffer ………………
they suffer ………….
neither ……………………. the other …………….
…………….. harm.

– Lore of The Land, 1982

Black velvet bunting, strung along the fence. Barbs piercing the soft fur of moles as their skins hung lightly, soil still clustered among the fine hair of their pelts. The hung dead, the molecatcher’s invoice. My mum found my sister in the kitchen, bathing a soft-black corpse in the sink. Another time walking one in a jaunty sing-song along a window ledge. 

†

WINTER

………… many years …….. close
observation
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

… the moon ………………
……… cannot say …. ……………………………………………………………………….
…………………………………………………………………………………………….. When
…………………………………………………………. these storms
……………………………………………………………………………………………………. moving from south to
north …………………………………………… seldom ……………………………………………….. .. ……
….. return ………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………..
………………………………………………………………
A storm-glass …………………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………. may save you …………….

– Lambing Rules, 1915

Lamb’s ears are almost translucent. Tentative and vital whorls of blood, brief and branching patterns beneath thin-soft fur. A newborn lamb is only delicate for a few minutes, as the ewe licks it clean and pushes blood around the panting body. Within hours, they are robust and standing and butting at the ewe’s teats, hungering and frantic. Likewise, the mother, exhausted from labour, is most vulnerable in the hours after birth. They share a window of susceptibility, in which gales and sleet, snow or disease may take aim at either or both. The lamb reliant on the warmth of its mother and the mother reliant on the warmth of last summer’s sun. If passed, they will never be so vulnerable again. 

The winter of 1990–1991 was severe. The Burns Night Storm killed almost twenty. It was my second birthday. Ewes, dead and dying, those in lamb making up the majority of dead, excavated from snowdrifts covering the drystone walls that stitched The Farm to the hillside. The track leading from The Farm to the road obliterated, the road itself impassable. That was our last winter at Black Lane Ends. 

I do not think it was the harshness of the winter that led to the sale of The Farm. Nor was it the lack of profit that could be scratched from the thin and sodden ground. Both parents, both sets of parents, worked a day job, The Farm was little more than a hobby. A staked claim of romanticism or perhaps wild optimism. A last stab at collectivism, an alternative way to order a family. Families. Labour. Across and between blood and marriage. An attempt at something else. 

When those threads unravelled it was these man-made bonds that broke first. Their knots proved insufficient to whatever strain they were subject to. The kind of summer-born dreaming that does not survive the first waking frosts. Ideas and idealists unable to last when opened to the cold bright air. A construct untested by winter gales.

†

TURKEYS

Free range ……
requisite ……….. vigour …………………………………….
…………………. belong ………………………………. no place ………………..
close confinement ………………..
poor …………………………………………………………………….
restless desire ………………..

– Poultry Manual, 1908

My dad killed each turkey by laying the black and red furious neck between the tines of a garden rake. With one foot holding the bird in place, he would lever the handle away until the scrotal flesh stretched tight and smooth, a quiet popping was followed by a stilling of the scrabbling feet in the dirt of the barn. Slaughter began in late November, in time for the birds to be plucked, decapitated, gutted and hung along the beams of The Farm’s large kitchen. Each beam a stage in the process. Buckets of blood and entrails, gizzards and hearts; hard and vivid, saved for those that still cooked them. I never asked what happened to the feathers. What good are a turkey’s feathers except to the turkey? 

Finisher feed is for the last weeks of a bird’s life, to achieve slaughter-weight. Those two words its final worth. Too much or for too long and the birds outgrow themselves, their legs crooked and curled beneath black and shining bulk. My parents did not know this or else forgot. The turkeys grew huge. Riotous thugs, skinheads, patrolling the farmyard and chasing goats. The meat, when it came, was flabby and tasteless. Empty flesh, good only as filler. 

One turkey grew more than the others. Its legs resisted the buckling weight that collapsed smaller birds, that led to sores and ammonia burns where their exposed legs festered in their own soil. This giant continued to grow, even once the feed mix was altered. This king-turkey, this Tudor bully, complete with ruff and leggings, dominated the yard. Terrorising dogs and chickens, people and goats. This enormous black beast of Black Lane Ends was penned away at the farthest end of the yard, between drystone-grit walls, before tussocky moor began in earnest. Its gobble-gobble was a threat. Day and night it sent out barbed jibes. Whether to its jailers or approaching foxes that rattled its bars. No predator dared reach it. There were no wolves big enough left in those hills. Its enormous shadow filled the yard when a full moon rose behind its shuddering tail. 

I don’t know any of this. Only what I was told. Of the turkey with the rake-resistant gullet that grew massive on the wrong feed. The gobble-gobble, the fanned and quivering tail more mine than its. 

†

MARKET

……………………………………. outstanding ………………………………………………………………………….
………………………………… exceptional ……………………………
good living …………………………………………………………………………………………… …. extremely
hard. …………………….. ……….. exceptions. ………………………………………………………………………. a
viable alternative ………………………………………………………..
future ………………………………………. doubt ……….
……………………………………………………………………..
who can tell when ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….
to return to the soil?

– The Challenge of Smallholding, 1985

We left The Farm when I was two years old and I don’t know why. We moved to cobbled streets in the valley below. Most animals were sold off by the herd or flock. No dogs were left. Only the turkey remained. No stockman willing to take it, no auction house able to collect or contain it. 

The wind whistled when it passed between the stones of the walls. Each boundary harmonising with the next. The chains were loosed, and the yard became a kingdom for that bird. The turkey strutted and gargled amongst those singing fields. Gates still held shut by pink-white bailing twine thrummed in winter’s gales. Slates, quarried and cleaved from the surrounding land over a century before, shucked from roofs by the same gales and smashed to dust where chickens once scratched. 

From the terraced rows in the valley below, the hills and pastures of The Farm were still visible. In midwinter, the sun did not reach the frozen yards or narrow ginnels that divided terraces but the low winter sun, before dipping below black moor, lit the splayed and glinting fan of that turkey’s tail. Bigger than any farm. Throat stretched high and taut and living. Defiant, the gaggle and gurgle flowing out and down amongst the fields and over the walls. Washing the valley sides and pooling in the valley bottoms and streaming between hard-scoured slopes to wash amongst the potholes and outhouses of the close-by streets. 

†

LAND

……….. acceptance ……..
discipline ……………….. the greatest
step towards freedom ……………………..
and nowhere …………….
true ……………………………………………. a slave-
………….. tyrant.

– The Challenge of Smallholding, 1985

I drove that moor one spring, passed those walls, thirty years after we left. The farm was gone. The stone truth of the buildings remained but converted and divided. Yards enclosed and grassed. The surrounding land parcelled and sold as meat. No animals grazed, no chickens scratched. No barbed wire from which to hang the skins of moles. No black-oiled feathers beside a bloody bucket. No rake or hooks. The last turkey gone, its outrageous bones scattered and covered with green and impossible turf. 

The Farm I carry bore no resemblance to the remains of the one I saw. The land sat on a watershed, between the Irish Sea and the North. There was a fundamental divergence, dependent on which side of a tumble-down wall the rain fell or snow melted. The rough-grit wall was gone, and I could not think how the water would know which way to fall. 

†

……………………. dogged ………………………………………………………………. dead ……………………
urge …………………………………………………………………………………………………… fate,
……………………………………………………………….. lurches ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
……… abandoning ……. struggle
……………………….. accepting ……… ………………………….. ……………………….. …………………….. ….
…… …………………………………………

– The Challenge of Smallholding, 1985