Red Devon Read online

  Red Devon

  To organic farmers and smallholders everywhere

  Hilary Menos

  Red Devon

  Seren is the book imprint of

  Poetry Wales Press Ltd.

  57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3AE

  www.serenbooks.com

  Facebook: facebook.com/SerenBooks

  Twitter: @SerenBooks

  The right of Hilary Menos to be identified as

  the author of this work has been asserted in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  © Hilary Menos 2013

  ISBN print: 978-1-78172-054-7

  ISBN kindle: 978-1-78172-056-1

  ISBN e-book: 978-1-78172-055-4

  A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

  The publisher acknowledges the financial assistance of the Welsh Books Council.

  Cover photograph: Shastajak

  Printed in Bembo by Berforts Group, Stevenage.

  Author’s Website: http://www.hilarymenos.co.uk/

  Contents

  The Ballad of Grunt Garvey and Jo Tucker

  Being Grunt Garvey

  Knackerman

  Burgoo

  Grunt’s Bane

  Wheelbarrow Farm

  Mates Rates

  The Blue Hour

  Colin

  Rammed

  The Great Hog Oiler Round Up

  The Harrowing

  Badger Season

  Full Load

  Kingdom Come

  Once Upon a Time in the West

  A Load of Old Bull

  New Blood

  Shoot Supper

  Tercio de Muerte

  The Ballad of Grunt Garvey and Jo Tucker

  Shambles

  Agnus Scythicus

  Witches’ Broom

  Shambles

  Pigweed

  Pietà

  Kissing Cousins

  Red Tide

  Dead Zone

  Long Pig

  Operation Blessing

  Pig Out

  UK 364195

  Bob’s Dogs

  Stock Take

  The Organic Farming Calendar

  Woodcock Hay

  Portrait of the Artist as Venus Anadyomene

  Aileen

  Red Rosette

  Handshake

  The Deal

  Viaticum

  Cleave Farm

  UK 364195

  Fat Hen, Few Eggs

  Milk Fever

  Acknowledgements and notes

  The Ballad of Grunt Garvey and Jo Tucker

  The secret of a good ley is a firm bottom

  – Devon farming proverb

  Being Grunt Garvey

  Winsome is sixteen today. She sprawls

  like a crumpled ballerina straddling the drainage gully

  while her sisters mill around and munch hay.

  Grunt brooms slurry off the concrete floor.

  There’s more than one way to skin a cow

  but, this being Grunt Garvey, he will do it the one way

  and sling her from the spike with webbing strops

  like the special delivery under a stork’s beak

  or Darcey Bussell performing a grand jeté.

  It could all go wrong. I see her paddling the air,

  the noose – which it is – too high, too low, or both

  and, this being Grunt Garvey, things don’t go to plan –

  she proves to be quite the Houdini, although

  it’s rather more than two minutes thirty-six seconds

  before she hits the straw with a wet thud.

  Grunt goes for the JCB with the gap-toothed scoop

  to shovel her up like chippings, or so much grain.

  Of course it can’t go wrong, but this being, etc.

  she rolls in like a set of bagpipes with a low moan,

  steam from her paunch soft-focussing her face

  and more than a little damage to her tail bone.

  Midday tomorrow, if she’s not on her feet

  (on pointes if you’re chasing the extended metaphor)

  the local knackerman will bring his gun

  and attempt a short duet

  before Winsome struts her stuff for the last time

  along the tightrope of his winch and chain

  into his tatty van. For those familiar with the charm

  of a cow’s final fouetté,

  this is a good time to look away.

  * grand jeté – a ballet term indicating a long horizontal jump

  * on pointes – dancing on the tips of the toes

  * fouetté – a quick whipping around of the body from one direction to another

  Knackerman

  Rattling down the lane comes John Teague,

  eager to please, eager to do his job,

  partly because he is four days late

  and the ewe dumped by the shed is on the turn.

  Don’t ask him what he knows,

  John Teague, with his aura of flies,

  one eye up the chimney, one eye down the pot,

  leaving nothing but a damp stain on the road.

  He knows the inside of a pig’s mind.

  To put his gun to the back of a ram’s head.

  How a cow falls to her knees as if in prayer

  in this reverse nativity in a half-dark byre.

  Burgoo

  “You got livestock, you got dead stock,” hollers Grunt.

  He slams the tailgate, waves Teague off the farm.

  Stan from Stags has come to talk about forms

  and how everyone’s going to die of BSE.

  In the kitchen Stan’s telling Dad about New Variant CJD.

  Grunt makes mugs of instant on the Rayburn.

  Mum says she knows a man with a sponge for a brain.

  Dad says he knows a mad cow

  but they must be proper mental in Kentucky,

  eating road-kill varmints in a stew.

  “A few ears short of a bushel,” says Stan,

  “and five of them dead too.”

  What sort of varmints, Grunt wants to know.

  “Used to be squirrel or possum,” says Stan,

  “but these days it’s beef or lamb.”

  New Variant burgoo.

  “Eggs and brains,” says Mum, “the butcher’s treat,

  we had that every week when we were young.”

  “No wonder your brains are scrambled,” says Grunt,

  and throws his slops down the sink.

  That night they sit out, skimming stones on the slurry.

  Teague says, “Remember the road-kill kid,

  spit-roast rats, hedgehogs wrapped in mud,

  what happened to him?”

  “We had a fight in woodwork once,” says Grunt,

  “he tried to cut off my head with a junior hacksaw.

  But he got diabetes and moved to Ugborough.

  What goes around comes around.”

  “After all that squirrel stew,” says Teague,

  “reckon he’s not coming round no more.”

  * burgoo - traditional North American stew made with whatever meat is available

  * BSE - Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a fatal neurodegenerative disease in cattle

  * CJD - Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, a fatal degenerative neurological disorder in humans

  * New Variant CJD - When BSE infects humans, the resulting disease is (new) variant CJD

  Grunt’s Baner />
  One foot in the furrow, one on the grassed ridge,

  he strolls lopsided, sniffs at pineapple mayweed,

  listens as stonechats crack pebbles in the hedge,

  counts on his fingers how thistles annex his land.

  Spear thistles rattle their sabres in open scrub.

  Dwarf thistles lurk in the couch, planning a raid.

  Spotted thistles infest his set aside, their sly lobes

  and pale flowers colonising his waysides.

  Tall bull thistle, creeping thistle, tuberous and woolly,

  nodding in the pastures, inching across his red loam,

  crowding the shaled edge of the old quarry,

  sharper than hoof picks, tougher than baler twine.

  Blessed and bitter, cursed and holy, milk and melancholy,

  lady’s thistle, slender thistle, each and every one Grunt’s bane.

  Wheelbarrow Farm

  When hell freezes over, he swears by three things.

  Lard on the lips. Two pairs of socks. His wheelbarrow,

  good on the steep when even the Ford won’t grip.

  This morning he opens the door to a clean sweep

  right up to the dairy’s cracked slate step, frost

  spangling the tank and, briefly, he’s ten years old

  but now it’s taking the piss. Grunt glares at the snow

  and it glares back. He kicks the water trough,

  heels a hole through the ice. First floods, now this,

  the daily round, in arctic sludge. Milk substitute

  for the calves, a brick of pellets for the fowls.

  He rolls out a silage bale in the cubicle house

  and forks it to the cows, sets a can at the yard tap

  drumming up chilly water for the dogs,

  for the lambs in the barn, the fifty hogs on the hill.

  A neighbour phones on the scrounge for a box

  and a tow out of the ditch where he spent the night.

  Grunt goes off to do what he does best –

  apply excess force with a tool. He’s back at noon

  to fix a burst pipe, by which time two sheep

  haven’t moved for an hour, are past fixing.

  Snow starts to fall as he toils up the slope,

  hauls one sheep into the wheelbarrow,

  picks his way down, then moils up again.

  Mates Rates

  Grunt’s not any sort of man.

  But if he was, he’d be the sort

  – if you were digging a hole –

  not to sit back and watch the show

  but to step up to the mark,

  place his hand gently on your arm,

  take your spade and offer you

  the key to his digger. Mates Rates.

  The Blue Hour

  The fence between Pullheads and Hatchet came down,

  each post rottener than the last, and both flocks together –

  ewes, lambs, wethers – and there on the high ground

  centre stage, the two rams squaring up to each other

  each without armour or lance, just a curled helm

  and the action between them unfolding.

  Grunt’s seen year-olds jockeying in a pen – the short run,

  the butt and buck and high kick, the gradual retreat

  that heralds a new order in the fold – and he’s seen

  the old ram in the orchard earnestly thumping the trees

  until small green apples pelt the barreners beneath,

  and all from a standing start. So he’s drinking his tea

  and starting to think about getting the dogs

  when a noise he associates most with a scaffold bar,

  or a length of four by two, fractures the scene.

  They stagger apart, each ram looking crossly around

  for applause, perhaps, or a swift way out

  or a “Cut!” from the director. But there is none.

  So they back up and do it again, shoulder to shoulder,

  lurching into each other like Friday night drunks,

  or huddled like boxers against the crowd’s urging

  and each one’s nervous twitch sends the other

  further up the field and a little further

  until each backs up almost out of the frame

  and they do it again, only better, and this time both

  fall, a double whammy in long shot slow motion,

  and the lights all dim, and the evening rolls on in.

  * barreners – barren ewes

  * wethers – castrated male sheep

  Colin

  Up at four to milk and the Dartmouth lights

  glow yellow down the valley. Hay for the calves,

  barley for the pigs and the yard to scrape.

  Clouds of mist form with each breath.

  He picks out lambs for market. Backs up the box

  and shoves them in by hand. For once they’re quiet.

  Then out with the old plough bobbing behind.

  Five shining blades. The tractor rears and strains.

  There’s winter wheat to walk, lime to spread,

  the barn to clear before the auction date.

  The quad bike’s got no brakes. The lad’s off sick

  so that’s another weekend spoken for.

  Headlights blazing, mind a blank, he ploughs

  long after dark. Post on the doormat, untouched.

  Rammed

  Grunt barrows each ram to its own pen in the shed

  near Peg, the in-lamb ewe with the broken leg,

  though he needn’t have bothered: one lies in the straw

  shaking, not even as good as dead meat,

  the other scrabbles the air with its front feet,

  eyes bled black, unable to stand or walk.

  By midnight the shaking stops. What little breath

  comes short and slow. Grunt’s seen enough

  to know where this one’s heading, and when it’s due.

  The other watches with a mixture of fear and scorn,

  pressed against the hurdles, its curved horns

  heavy on its neck, its slack back end askew.

  Grunt fetches a bottle of Life Aid from the meds box,

  drops by the all-night vet for some steroid shots,

  brings water and an armful of horse hay,

  then hauls the live one up till it half stands, half leans,

  drags itself after him, bluffing and harrying his knees

  even as its back legs slide under and away.

  Two days later Peg lambs. Grunt cuts her cast

  and eases open the wadding and crumbled plaster.

  Watching her test the bone as her two lambs feed,

  their tails a-shimmy, each one nuzzling a teat,

  Grunt reckons the ram’s had time. He speed dials Teague

  as he’s shepherding Peg and her lambs back into the field

  and gets home from ploughing that night to find

  three empty pens, an hour off his daily round,

  and only a field full of healthy sheep to mind.

  The Great Hog Oiler Round Up

  Colin bought it at a farm sale in Iowa.

  A nineteen-fifteen Lisle Swine-Ezer Hog Oiler.

  “The Pig Farmer’s Best Defense Against Mange and Lice,”

  said Colin. A divorce present for his ex-wife.

  Now it squats in Grunt’s garden like a fire hydrant

  or stocky pillar box, glistening with tractor paint.

  Grunt leafs through the vintage catalogue, keen to buy

  their blunt promise – Hog Joy, Health Hog, Rub Hog Or Die,

  coveting one shaped like an outsize billiard ball

  snug in its sump, nineteen-twelve, patent applied for.

  So many scrapped, or rusting in ditches and barns,

  the weight – and the history – of their cast iron forms

  worth less than a powder puff dusting of lindane

  (moderately hazardous). “Lik
e the wife,” says Colin.

  The Harrowing

  Armed with bolt cutters, gauntlets and hand-held winch,

  he starts third time lucky, cursing the dodgy earth,

  backs up to join the harrow to the three point linkage.

  It looks like a folding bedstead, the weave of the chain

  like Qs with tails worn bright. Its counterweight

  sends his front wheels bouncing all over the lane.

  He starts at the top of the hill, raking the bents

  for thistles and stroil grass and thatch. He likes this part.

  He circles the field once more, then starts his descent.

  At the bottom, one thick wheel broadsides the sedge

  and the back of the harrow swings out and snags

  on something anchored deep in the blackthorn hedge.

  It feels as if hands are sucking him into the redshank,

  an ancestor ploughed up and out of his cold barrow,

  or offended by the grubbing up of an ancient bank.

  Grunt slams the diff lock on with a curse and a prayer

  and the tractor lurches and tips. Mud spatters his face

  as the wheels churn, and churn, until he pulls away

  dragging a tangle of wire and posts strung together

  – the buried results of years of winter fencing –

  a barbed necklace fit for some monstrous mother.

  He parks in the yard back down at the farm in the valley

  where bees nose orchids and white campion

  and the cadences of the church bells barely carry,

  opens the kitchen door, still sweating from his trial,

  a dark hulk against the light, a mud-reamed troglodyte,

  and sits down with a ‘Value’ pizza in front of Countryfile.

  Badger Season

  Grunt has Dad’s old Webley & Scott twelve bore

  with the dinged end and the open scroll chasing on the stock,

  the right barrel choked by three quarters,

  the left choked by a half, for close work.

  Teague has his usual .22 for the fox

  and his .243 because you never know when...

  (he mutters something inaudible about Brock)

  and – for fun with rabbits – he’s brought his four ten.

  Both fancy trying their luck down at Rolster Bridge

  but Colin’s trying to impress some bird he met online