Meadowland (20 page)

The watchmaker’s synchronized timing between the nests is a clever wheeze. With ants from several different colonies in the air at once, the incidence of inbreeding is lessened. Also, predators cannot cope with the sudden glut of food; pied wagtails are taking their haul of the insects, the spotted flycatcher is
leaping off the fence at the stream of ants passing before her, and the sky is beginning to swirl with swifts, swallows and house martins. But the birds can only eat so many.

Some fertilized queens will survive to found a new colony somewhere. And nothing in nature is wasted. The bodies of the dead meadow ants will go to nourish the soil of the meadow. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Flesh to flesh.

The yarrow heads in the grass are white, discs of intricate clustered jewellery. But it is the extraordinary leaves that are the key to identification, these being long, multi-divided, thus
millefolium
or ‘thousand leaf’ as part of its Latin name. There is probably more folklore attached to yarrow than any other plant. For the ancient Greeks it was the plant Achilles used to bind the wounds of his troops at Troy; for the Chinese the counting of dried yarrow stalks was held to be the means of divining in the I Ching, the Book of Changes. The Celts were convinced that the herb had psychotropic tendencies that allowed the imbiber to see their future spouse. The medieval English were altogether more down-to-earth: the bitterness of yarrow was found to be ideal in the flavouring of ale.

I pick it because it makes a rather refreshing tea.

Mowing grass for hay always brings a headache, especially if mowing an old-fashioned meadow the old-fashioned way. Not until the third week of July are the curlew fledglings grown enough to take wing; I see them leave one morning when I’m in Road Field and happen to look down on the meadow to see four curlews circle around, and then come up over my head, line astern, and out over the mountain, going steadily west. They are unconscious of me; this, however, does not stop me stupidly suffering the pride and sadness of a parent at their departure.

There are other wild things to take account of in the timing of the hay cut. Not until the last week is the yellow rattle seed properly set, and this is one of the plants I wish to encourage. Then there is a skylark still sitting but I peg out a plot around her so she will be left unharmed in an unmown island. The meadow pipit is on her second brood, so she too gets a private island.

At no other time is there a greater disparity between the superficial peace of the countryside and my state of mind than when I’m ‘on the hay’. Make hay while the sun shines, runs the adage. But when will the sun shine here under the mountain in the west of England, where the average rainfall is
40 inches a year? I obsessively listen to weather forecasts on the radio, and nerdishly google weather reports on the internet, especially Scandinavian ones after our friend Annie convinces me they are the most reliable. Like their cars. I’m looking for the Volvo of forecasting.

And I find it. A Swedish forecaster who is right about almost every aspect of weather in south-west Herefordshire grants me ten whole dry days, starting 24 July.

I begin mowing at midday when the dew has dissipated, and the rising temperature is bringing up the pollen. The field smells like honey.

Funny, the things that take you back. A few years ago, I took the doors off the tractor cab, plus the back window, so sitting on the tractor was a cooler, more authentic experience. (And the de-pimping made it easier to bail out from; the electrics in the cab once went up in flames, and I had to jump for it; the dashboard still looks like something drawn by Dalí.) So every time I get in this almost open cab I am reminded of a photograph of my grandfather. He is driving a Ferguson T20, staring intently over his shoulder at the plough behind. The T20 is shiny, and is extra-shiny because of the rain. My grandfather
is wrapped up in a grey raincoat. There is no cab.

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.