The Girl Who Never Came Back by Suzanne Goldring

Author:Suzanne Goldring [Goldring , Suzanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781837907076
Published: 2023-08-22T16:00:00+00:00

SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE MANUAL

KNOW YOUR ENEMY

3. REGULATIONS

B. Residence

viii) Do not stay in one place too long.

THIRTY-ONE

MAKING HAY

Once I started spending a lot more time in Sylvia’s cottage, one of the things that really surprised me was how much there was to learn about the countryside. You can’t help it, you see, because it’s all around you.

You think it’s peaceful out there, but there’s so many sounds as well. Not that I can hear all of them with my ears. I’ve never heard the nightingale that everyone says sings high above the fields in the summer and I certainly never heard the bell-ringers in the church across the fields, though Sylv swore it was clear as anything.

And it’s not just green fields out here with cows and sheep, oh no. One moment there’s a tractor digging up potatoes, spurting them out of a funnel into a truck that follows behind. Then before you know it, another tractor turns up to start ploughing and the field is sown with what the local farmer calls winter wheat. And then when that’s all cut down and taken away, sometimes the field fills up with hundreds of sheep for a week or so. It never stops, really it doesn’t. You don’t see that sort of thing on the streets of London. The nearest you get to the changing seasons is leaves littering your doorstep and kids throwing eggs at your front door for Halloween, little tykes.

And I couldn’t help noticing how, now and then, the different farming jobs out here seemed to affect Sylvia’s mood. She was very odd about the sheep. Kept muttering that she couldn’t see the shayfer. Goodness knows what that was all about. And take harvest time, for example, and by that I mostly mean haymaking and cutting the corn. I never knew before I came out here what was hay and what was straw, but I certainly do now. Hay’s for eating and straw’s for bedding, so now you know. The field opposite the cottage is always grown for hay and the one round the back chops and changes; sometimes it’s potatoes, then it’s bright yellow rapeseed, and then the next year it’s back to wheat again. Once the wheat has been harvested, that’s when they come back again to cut all the stalks and bundle them up and that’s the straw.

Anyway, the hay always set Sylvia off again. I don’t mean sneezing and that, although all the cutting and cropping creates almighty clouds of dust and we have to shut all the windows when they’re harvesting in the field. No, I mean it made her have one of her funny turns. She always started muttering about haystacks, needles and magnets.

And I remember saying to her, ‘That’s in the olden days, Sylv. Farmers don’t do haystacks no more.’ It’s clever stuff these days, you see, and we’d sit out on her front lawn in our garden chairs and watch the farm machinery circling the field. One tractor is in charge of cutting the grass, then another comes and turns it.

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