Though anyone could see the Big Meadow was ripe for the taking, Pete got up before the sun rose to drive out to make sure of it. Himself and the collie dog, his only housemate these days, the pair of them bleary eyed and thoughtful. The machines were booked for eight o’clock. They’d have it knocked by midday and if the weather held up like the forecast promised, the meadow would be saved and cleared in the next couple of days.
Pete parked the old pick-up truck right inside the gate and rounded up the dog to go walking through the long grass with him. He made a deliberate racket as he went following foxes trails and badgers’ scents, all the while coaxing the dog to chase the crows whose indignant caw-cawing lit the sky up with noise.
If you stopped to ask Pete what all the rabble rousing was about, he would have been hard pressed to answer, but if he thought about it at all, the answer was simple enough. It was something his father had always done and his father before him. It gave the crabbit field mice and the long-legged rabbits a chance to scatter before the machines came and took the legs out from under them. Even the dullest of the pheasants couldn’t miss the alarm and had no excuse not to scarper.
Pete thought more and more about the men from his past with every step that he took. His first memory of this place was of his grandfather down here in the meadow sometime in the late 1950s. Lord, Granda must have been pushing 70 by then, but there he was in the thick of it, all decked out in shirt, braces and breeches, topped off with a greasy hat. He was some man to work.
Pete’s father followed in his footsteps. On the best of days, he did the work of three men, pure dynamite altogether. He was built for the haymaking they said – thin and taut, fast and fluid, sharp and steady – always the first to step into the meadow in the morning and the last to leave at night. Pete wasn’t much of a worker himself. He took after his mother’s side they said and what’s more she had him spoiled. But he proved himself later, shouldering all the responsibility when push came to shove and he was the only one of them left round the place.
Still, it wasn’t the same these days. Anyone would tell you that – all machinery and materialism and money-making now. Not the same back break in it anymore. Not the same heartbreak either. The fear of losing a field of cocks to a squally summer storm or the danger of a festival crowd coming in, setting up camp and making a mockery of your work.
Pete shook his head at all the changes he had witnessed since he first set foot in this meadow over fifty years ago. ‘You wouldn’t feel the time passing, would you Lassie?’ he addressed the dog, his early morning eyes looking into the distance, out over the horizon, and whatever lay beyond….
The sea is a giddy girl today practising her dance steps, a girl with sky blue eyes dressed in a light blue sailor dress, trimmed with white ribbon. She is a girl with very little concentration on the humdrum drills of dancing, a girl who looks skyward any chance she gets, dreaming up a world beyond regimental dance classes, a world beyond this solid place where her two feet (two left feet her teacher says) sit firmly on the ground.
daisyheg 