The Farm by Richard Benson

Author:Richard Benson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2005-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Stick and the Clipboard

In the morning, we rise at seven to bed the pigs with fresh straw so they will look clean. The crowds will arrive at eleven.

At breakfast I suggest to Guy that we should have bought bacon, bread and coffee, and sold sandwiches, but he smiles grimly and says, ‘Auctioneers bring their own catering van.’

Sure enough, when we reach the field there is a burger and hot dog caravan already parked in the spinney, powered by a generator that makes a banging noise audible everywhere. Two young men in unclean white overalls are slicing bread-cakes and frying sausage.

At ten when we return to the kitchen, my mum is making cups of coffee and the first cars are gathering outside. Helen has come to take Mum to Scarborough for a few hours, as arranged with my dad last week, after she said she did not want to be here when the strangers were in the yard. Dad’s friend Dickie has come with Auntie Eileen. He sits in a corner near the old veneer bureau where my mum keeps the bills and letters, while Auntie Eileen clears and washes pots, and everyone talks about people from the old days – who’s dead, and how old their children are, and which empty fields have been built on. Guy tells a story about a farmer who has recently gone bankrupt. He says the farmer’s wife has cystic fibrosis, and the man who worked for him is being evicted from his tied cottage. The evicted man has two daughters, eleven and nine. ‘We can’t complain, really, can we?’ he says.

And then it is time. Mum and Helen drive off while Dad and Guy ride up to the field in Dickie’s pick-up. John from the village offers me a lift in his Nissan Micra, but as I am getting into the car I remember I have left my jacket in the kitchen, and run back in to get it. The house is quiet and still. As I pass the living room, I see Auntie Eileen standing, her mouth pinched shut, just staring out of the window and down into the yard.

There are cars, Land-Rovers, Fourtraks, pick-ups and vans, most splashed with muck and crusted below the waistline with dry, pale-brown mud, parked along the roadsides near the yard. The lane verges are crammed with them, and there are more in the field – Isuzus, Mitsubishis, Range Rovers, Ford Mavericks – where the burger van bangs and the auctioneers point at the rows.

John parks in a corner of the field, and although the field has not belonged to anyone in my family for almost ten years, as I get out I feel as if I have pulled back the curtains of my flat to find the audience for a country show crowded into the garden. In front of me, slowly walking past, a pair of men, one well over six feet tall with grey hair like ghostly undergrowth, the other no more than five two, with a flat-capped head pulled right down into a worn-out Barbour coat.

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