Life and times

The farmer and writer John Lewis-stempel

FARMING, EH? As my grandfather used to say, ‘It’s nothing but crisis management.’ Actually he tended to mutter ‘It’s one f—ing thing after another,’ before excusing himself with ‘pardon my French’. Poppop did 60 years down on the farm.

Today began well, so I should have known it could only get worse. Around 3pm I go to check the sheep in the bottom meadow. A mist spews out of the dingle, where all the mists of the world are made.

There is a certain comedy in counting white sheep in mist. But there is nothing funny about realising that the ram is missing. I find him hanging upside down on the stock fence. He’d climbed over it, then on the dismount trapped his rear legs in the wire strands. The grass in the other field was no greener. He was panting, and foam-mouthed.

I sprint back to the house – well, as fast you can in wellingtons – grab the fencing pliers and, from the gun safe, the 12-bore.

I cut the ram down, trying to hold his body against me so he does not fall. Slabbed on his side, I stroke his muzzle. There is no hope; his back is broken. I say soothing things, false things, and place the merciful shotgun behind his head.

After the blast, only a marble string of skin remains connecting head to body. On the meat shelf of the supermarket, blood is dull and ochre in its plastic wrapping. Fresh blood is strangely fluorescent. As it spreads over the thin grass, it is the only bright thing in the afternoon.

INTO THE WINTER WOOD. Over the stile, on to the path. Past the giant sycamore, pegging down this remote, flappy edge of Herefordshire where it runs into Wales.

The sun, low and nuclear-white, strobes through the passing trees. No birds sing. How bleak the crow’s old nest looks in the bare oak.

Dump the sow nuts into the metal trough, and bang it with the iron bar; the breakfast gong. The pigs come running down through the stone-column trees, ears Dumbo-aflap. Any more flap and these pigs really would fly.

A sparrowhawk cuts in overhead; an avian blade twisting through the branches. My attention taken by the bird, I forget to dodge Lavender, 300kg of Peppa-pink Welsh pig. The only way out is to accept her demand: a scratch behind the ears. I give her a minute or two, then try to move. She darts in front of me, surprisingly quick and light on her hooves. So, another five minutes of pork-scratching (pig owner’s joke).

Later, a customer interrogates me on the phone, ‘Is your meat happy meat?’

‘My dear sir’, I say, thinking of Lavender, ‘it’s positively blissed out.’

MY WIFE AND I are just back from a couple of weeks in France, where I was studying organic agriculture. (Poshly, I called the sojourn my ‘sabbatical’.) Despite my mother teaching French, my own ability with the language of Proust became arrested at the schoolboy hopeful of ‘femme, vin, Gitanes’. Still, in our rented moulin I joined my wife – another family linguist – on the sofa watching box sets of Engrenages ,a Paris-set ‘policier’.

My vocabulary of French swear words became fabulous. Thus, when I dropped the milk in the Argenton branch of Carrefour, absolute hardcore French rudeness, combining two taboo bodily functions, flew out of my mouth. The customers looked shocked.

Pardon my French, as Poppop would have said.

John Lewis-stempel’s latest book, The Wood: the Life and Times of Cockshutt Wood (£14.99, Doubleday), is published in March

There is a certain comedy in counting white sheep in the mist