An old milk churn stood near the doorway under an ancient stone lintel, and log fires burned in both bars. In the summer they often preferred to sit outside at one of the picnic tables in the garden, admiring the hills or watching the gliders pass overhead. But Matt wasn’t in a mood to notice the scenery, even if it had been daylight.
‘Some of the people who live in these villages now are on a different planet from what we are. If you meet people down at the postbox or in the pub, they don’t relate to what you’re doing at all. Their work and life experiences are so different from ours. They think we’re either mad or quaint.’
That night, the pub was filled with people in various stages of saturation and evaporation. It was like a Turkish bath where everyone had forgotten to take their clothes off. You couldn’t get near the fire for piles of drenched cagoules and plastic over-trousers.
‘It’s sheer ignorance. They think we’re all either grain barons or peasants.’
The smell of cooked food mingled with the steam from drying clothes, like the aroma from the kitchens of some exotic restaurant. If he closed his eyes, Cooper could imagine a genuine curry being prepared in the background, hot with cayenne and spiced with interesting herbs.
‘You know Geoff Weeks at One Ash? He has Right to Roam over part of his farm. Some ramblers complained about finding a dead sheep on his land the other day. They rang the police, even — can you believe it?’
Ben wanted to say that, yes, he could believe it. You only had to spend half an hour in the Call Reception Centre to get an idea of the complaints from the public that call handlers had to deal with. Three thousand of them a day. Litter on the pavement, birds stuck up trees. A dead sheep was nothing. Sometimes the actual nature of the incident wasn’t clear until response officers arrived at the scene.
But he said nothing, preferring not to interrupt Matt when he was getting things off his chest.
‘If you’ve got five hundred ewes,’ said Matt, ‘and you run them until they’re seven or eight crop, the way Geoff does, then a certain percentage of them are going to die. It’s a fact of life, isn’t it?’
Ben nodded. Yes, death was certainly a fact of life in the countryside. It was one of the things that urban dwellers didn’t appreciate. These days, they ran special coach trips from the cities to give townies a chance to smell the difference between a cow and sheep. But you didn’t know about the omnipresence of death until you lived here.
Usually, a mention of the word ‘diversification’ was enough to spark a rant on its own. Tonight, Matt was abnormally subdued.
‘I don’t know if you remember Jack Firth, over near Chapel. It turns out he’d been running a nice little sideline, killing and burying unwanted greyhounds on his land. The rules say unwanted dogs should be euthanized by a vet, but breeders and trainers find that too expensive. It was much cheaper to use Jack’s services.’
‘What’s your point, Matt?’
‘He was meeting a demand, you see. It’s what the government wants us to do, find new ways of exploiting our assets, and providing services the public actually wants. Jack told me there are twenty-five thousand unwanted dogs produced every year by the greyhound racing business — dogs at the end of their racing lives, or that have never been particularly good in the first place. The rescue centres could never cope with that number, so Jack had found a niche market. His business would have been safe for years to come.’
‘Was he found out?’
‘Yes. But there was no evidence of cruel or inhumane treatment of the animals. Even when he was arrested, he could only be charged with failing to obtain the proper licences. He didn’t fill in the forms for the bureaucrats. So now he’s a criminal.’
It wasn’t quite what Ben had expected. But he could see that Matt had found an example of diversification that he’d be using for years to come, as a warning to others. Best to change the subject a bit.
‘Can you see a future for the girls?’ he asked. ‘They’ll want to go off and do their own thing when they grow up, won’t they?’
‘Well, I’d like at least one of them to be involved in farming. Our family have been farmers since the year dot.’
‘I know, Matt.’
‘I should think it’s ever since farming has existed. All right, the younger brothers and sisters have always had other jobs, like you. But if they haven’t had a farm themselves they’ve always been involved in some way. There’s got to be a couple of cows or a few sheep — it’s just a way of life. But young people need to believe they can make a living from farming, and they want to get some respect. Farmers feel like they’re regarded as the dregs. We can’t do anything right.’ He paused to take a long swig of beer. ‘And there are the marts.’
‘You mean Ashbourne?’
Ben knew the closure of Ashbourne cattle mart had been a blow for local farmers, though there was still Bakewell, and even Uttoxeter over the border in Staffordshire.
‘That’s just the latest,’ said Matt. ‘Those farmers in isolated locations look forward to market as a chance for a trip out, to meet people with similar problems. The only other person we talk to much is the bank manager. When the rest of the local marts go, that’ll be it, Ben. That’ll be it for livestock farming in this county.’
‘Oh, come on, Matt.’
‘No, I’m telling you the truth. In ten years’ time, I’ll either still be farming, or drawing the social, and that’s a fact. There was an article in the
‘There are still a few left, though.’
‘Aye, a few.’
Cooper was silent for a moment, savouring his Towns, letting its flavour wash away the strange chemical taste that seemed to have settled at the back of his throat since he’d first visited Pity Wood Farm.
‘Do you really think it will happen, Matt?’ he asked.
‘I’m damn certain it will. I think it’s all planned out somewhere. In London or in Brussels, I don’t know. But I reckon there’s a dossier sitting in some bureaucrat’s desk drawer right now, showing the target date for the closure of the last small hill farm. They’ve got our fate worked out, and there’ll be nothing we can do about it.’
‘Nothing? You could start planning for it now, couldn’t you?’
‘Oh, yes? You try coming in exhausted after a long day and sitting down to do the government’s bloody paperwork. Then see how much time you have to start planning your future. Not to mention trying to spend a bit of time with your family. You see, that’s the trouble with us farmers. We’ve got this suicidal urge to farm. If we were sane, we’d have said “sod it” by now.’
Cooper felt a familiar niggle of worry about his brother surface at the back of his mind. He’d suffered severe spells of despondency himself, and he knew what it was like when things looked really black and the future held no hope. There was such a temptation to consider the easy way out, the one that would take all those burdens off your shoulders in an instant.
He could only hope and pray that the tendency wasn’t present in his brother, at least not to any greater degree. Matt had seen this happen to people he knew — too many of them, over the years. The highest rates of suicide in the UK were among farmers. They became very attached to their patch of land and could find it hard to cope, particularly when a problem such as foot-and-mouth occurred.
It was one of the saving factors about farming that you were always looking to the future — anticipating the next harvest, or the next lambing season. The work you did today would bear fruit in five months’ time. It was quite different from living on a day-today basis, when every week was the same and nothing was likely to change.
But if that optimism about the future was taken away, then farmers like Matt would have nothing to keep them going.
‘Are we going to have another drink?’
Matt thumped his empty glass down. ‘Why not?’
Ben drained his Towns and got up to go to the bar. After a day like this, he did start to wonder who the sane ones were. Maybe, in the end, it was the likes of Diane Fry who could see the future most clearly, and had it all worked out. Fry’s attitude was the real sanity. Well, perhaps.
With mounting, irrational rage, Fry stared at the contents of the box she’d lifted from beneath the loose floorboard. Diamorphine hydrochloride. Pharmaceutically prepared heroin, freeze dried in glass ampoules for injection into the wrist.
