The Last Week of June

You count them before you set off and you count them when you stop. It doesn't matter that nothing can have happened to them in the few miles between Skell Bank and here. It doesn't matter that the trailer has a door on it and the door has a pin through it and I put the pin through it myself. You count them anyway, because counting is what you do instead of worrying, and because a woman who stops counting sheep is a woman who has started to believe the world is kind.

Six ewes and a tup. Seven, if you can be bothered to add them up, and one collie in the footwell with her chin on the gearstick, which she knows perfectly well is not allowed and has decided is allowed today on compassionate grounds.

"Get off," I told her, on the last of the tops.

Bess looked at me with an expression of profound sympathy and did not move, so I changed gear round her, which is a skill. We came down the last two miles into Thornwick like that: a woman, a dog, a borrowed Discovery with a hundred and eighty thousand miles on it, and seven animals I have no legal right to put down anywhere on the surface of the earth.

The road drops off Coverside Bank in three long swings, and on the second one the whole dale opens out underneath you the way it has done since I was four. Stone the colour of old bone. Walls running up and over the shoulder of the hill in that way that stops looking like walls after a while and starts looking like something growing. The church tower. The school. The chip van's pitch outside the Billet, empty on a Wednesday. And behind all of it, up past where the road gives up and turns to a track, the top I could not see from here even if I stood on the roof, because it is four miles further back and one ridge over.

Skell Bank. Four hundred and eleven acres of rough grazing, a bit of allotment, and a hill that took me eleven years to teach.

I looked at the road instead.

Everything on both sides of it was ready to cut. That's the other thing about the third week of June: the whole dale stands there holding its breath, grass to your knee and going over, seed heads shivering, every farmer in Wensleydale watching the same forecast on the same phone and doing the same sum. One dry week. That's all anybody's asking for. Cut it and turn it and get it wrapped before the weather remembers what it is. I drove down through four hundred acres of somebody else's held breath, and I thought, quite clearly, the way you think a thing you have no intention of examining: that is not your problem this year. You've nothing to cut.

Mum's house is the fourth in the row on Kirk Gate, and the yard behind it is reached by a back lane that was built for a horse and cart and has never forgiven anything wider. I got the trailer in on the third attempt. Mum came out while I was still swearing at the wing mirror.

Glenys Thwaite is sixty-one and has never in her life run at anything. She came across the yard at exactly the pace she comes across any yard, and she did not say oh love and she did not say well, you're here, both of which I would have had to survive. She said:

"There's a pie."

"Right."

"It'll want twenty minutes." She looked at the trailer. She has lived among sheep her entire life without ever once being interested in them, which I have always found restful. "Will they be all right in there?"

And that was the moment, really. Everything that came after was just me getting to it slowly.

Because the answer was no. The answer was obviously and immediately no. It was half past four on the sixteenth of June, it was going to be light until ten and warm until half nine, and a stock trailer with seven animals in it standing on concrete in the sun is not a place, it's a countdown. They'd been in there since one. They wanted water, they wanted shade, they wanted grass under their feet, and my mother's yard has a coal bunker, a drain, a strip of nettles behind the wall, and eleven square yards of concrete that my grandad laid in 1974.

I stood there and I did the thing I do. I went round it. Tip them out into the yard and run a hose into the old bath — no, six ewes on concrete overnight in June, and the tup would go through the gate at the bottom before I'd got the third one off the ramp. Take them up the green lane and just — no. Not with a movement to record and no holding number of my own and the tup in with them. Ring round. Ring somebody.

There it was. Sat in the middle of the yard like a stone I'd been walking round for six weeks.

Ring somebody.

I want to be honest about this, because I have been dishonest about it with nearly everybody. I can raise this dale. In February two years ago a lambing shed went up at Gill Head at eleven at night and I had nine people and four trailers there before the fire engine got out of Leyburn, and I'd made every one of those calls in my dressing gown without drawing breath. I have asked half of Wensleydale for a bale, a bucket, a hand, a lift, a favour, a Sunday, and never once minded. It is one of the two things I am actually good at.

What I cannot do — and I have tested this, thoroughly, in every possible weather — is ask for anything for myself. It isn't nobility. Nobody has ever accused me of nobility. It's that the asking would require me to say a sentence out loud, and the sentence is I have lost Skell Bank, and I have not said that sentence to a single human being, including my mother, including the man from the estate who typed the letter.

I got my phone out. I looked at it. Twenty-two people in that dale who would have said yes before I'd finished, and my thumb sat on the screen like it had been switched off.

And then I heard myself think: they've been stood in a box for three and a half hours.

Which is a different sentence. That's not asking for me. That's asking for them.

It's a cheat, and I knew it was a cheat, and it worked, which is the worst thing about it. I had the phone up to my ear before I'd finished being disgusted with myself.

The Metcalfes' place is the last yard before the bridge, and it is where things in this village go when they need somewhere to be. Sheila answered on the fourth ring in the tone of a woman who was already partway across a room to something more interesting.

"It's Bryony Thwaite," I said. "Sheila — I've seven sheep on a trailer at me mother's and nowhere to tip them out tonight. Have you still got the roadside intake down by the bridge?"

There was a pause. Not a long one. It was about the length of a woman putting down a tea towel.

"We have," she said. "There's nothing in it but nettles and the bottom half's rushes."

"They'd not care."

"No," Sheila said. "They'd not." Another pause, exactly as long as the first one. "How long is it for, love?"

I heard myself say, "One night." I heard how it sounded. I said it again anyway, brighter. "Just the one night, till I've sorted meself out."

"Right you are," said Sheila Metcalfe. "I'll send the lads down to shift the trough."

I said thank you about four times more than was necessary and got off the phone. Then I stood in my mother's yard with my hand over my mouth. I had just told a lie in a village where lies have a half-life of roughly forty minutes. And the trough being shifted meant Ryan and Dean would know, which meant their uncle would know, which meant Sheila's bus in the morning would know. And none of that was the reason I had my hand over my mouth. The reason was that I had got grass out of a woman for seven sheep in under ninety seconds, and I could not have got a cup of tea out of her for myself.

The intake is two and a bit acres of nothing much, hard against the beck, with a wall on the road side and a rotten-looking gate that turns out to be entirely sound. Ryan and Dean had the trough round and full before I'd backed the trailer to the gap. Twenty and eighteen now, both of them a foot taller than the last time I looked properly, both of them capable of moving a cast-iron trough forty yards without discussing it. Dean asked if I wanted a hand with the ramp. I said I was right, thanks. He said nothing else, which I appreciated more than I can say, and the two of them went off up the lane with their hands in their pockets.

Then it was just me, and the pin, and the door.

I dropped the ramp and the noise went off the wall opposite like a gunshot and Bess flowed out of the footwell and round the back of the trailer without being asked, and dropped, and waited, low and burning, in the exact place she was needed. That dog is nine and has never in her life required an instruction she agreed with.

They came off in the order they always come off. Ada's line first — the old ewe with the split ear, who is not called anything, because you do not name a hill ewe unless you want to spend the rest of your life at it. Then three behind her. Then the young one who has to be stood on the ramp and thought about, then the last, then the tup, who came off backwards out of pure principle.

Seven sets of feet on the ramp. Seven on the road. Seven through the gap.

And then they walked the wall.

That's the thing I hadn't let myself get to, all the way down Coverside Bank. They went in, and they didn't put their heads down. Two and a bit acres of June grass, thick enough to lose a lamb in, and not one of them ate. They went up the inside of the wall in a line, nose to tail, all the way to the top corner, and stood there, and looked out at a beck they had never seen in their lives.

A hefted flock knows its ground. That's all a heft is: the ewes know where the grass comes early and where the ground lies safe in snow and where you don't stand in a wind off the west. They teach it to their lambs, and their lambs teach it to theirs. It takes forty years and it lives in their feet. My family had been on Skell Bank since 1948, when my great-grandmother took the tenancy, and the hill had been teaching Thwaite ewes ever since. My grandmother Ada bred the last twenty gimmer lambs of her life in 2016 and I put every one of them on that hill and I spent eleven years adding to what they already knew.

You cannot move it. That's the whole of it, in five words. It isn't mine and it never was; the law says a heft belongs to the farm and not the farmer, and for once in its life the law is describing something true. So when the Stainmoor estate sold Skell Bank in April, and my farm business tenancy simply ran out — no succession, no renewal, nothing owed and nothing wrong — the flock was sold with the ground, in one morning, to the men who came for it. And I got a cheque, itemised, in a windowed envelope. Fencing materials. Muck in the yard. A hundred and ninety-one pounds for a water trough.

Nothing for eleven years of teaching sheep a hill.

I stood at that gate a long time. The swifts were going over, high up and screaming, and the beck was doing what it does, and somewhere up the dale a mower was still running at nearly seven o'clock because a man could see the same forecast I could. My seven stood in the top corner of a borrowed field and did not eat, because they did not know where they were, and they will not know where they are tomorrow either, and I am the reason.

I got back at half past seven. The pie had been out and put back twice.

"Mabel Heywood rang," Mum said, not looking up. "She wanted to know if I'd any use for a bit of hay off Gordon Calvert, seeing as."

"Seeing as what?"

"She didn't say." My mother put the pie down in front of me. "It were seeing as, though."

By six. It had been round by six. I hadn't even shut the gate before Thornwick had decided what I was — a Thwaite, back, asking after grass — and started, kindly and unbearably, to arrange things.

I slept in the back bedroom, in the bed I had at fourteen, with Bess flat out on the rug because I am not strong enough to send her downstairs. Ada's crook stood in the corner where I'd propped it. And on the wall above the chest of drawers, still, after nineteen years, my mother has left up four framed school certificates with my name on them in a hand I no longer recognise as mine.

I lay there and I listened for sheep, the way you do, and of course there was nothing to hear, because they were a quarter of a mile away in somebody else's field, standing in the corner.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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