Peaks and Troughs Read online

  ‘You boys,’ as he liked to call us, ‘will be wanting to acquire a tractor soon.’

  Jack and I looked at each other. ‘Will we?’

  ‘Well, of course. You’re here to farm the place, aren’t you?’

  We looked at each other again, nodding convincingly. I think.

  ‘He over at Llwyndu Canol has one for sale,’ he said, ‘one that would suit you two.’

  Apparently Hughie was wanting to sell his Massey Ferguson 127 and replace it with a Fordson Major, a much larger beast that could do the work in half the time, but Gethin said there were tactics involved, which he suspected we had no idea about. ‘What are these tactics?’ I said.

  ‘Tactics so you will come out of the deal right.’

  He spoke as a godfather might, telling us the right way to approach Hughie, not to show too much keenness, open with a low bid and learn to shrug our shoulders. ‘You boys, you’ve never done a deal up here. Turn your face away when he asks for more.’ Also we had to keep our hands in our pockets, look at the ground when he spoke. ‘Show him your back as if you are about to walk away.’

  ‘How much is the tractor worth?’ Jack asked eventually.

  ‘He’ll ask a hundred and fifty,’ said Gethin.

  Jack and I agreed that we would be needing a tractor, so why not this one? At least if anything went wrong Hughie could be called upon; surely having sold the thing to his neighbours he would want to fix it. Gethin seemed pleased with our decision; maybe he was taking a backhander on the deal, and we were being set up. He told us to stroll over to Hughie’s the next day and have a chat, but not to bring up the subject of the tractor, to let him mention it first. All this bluff and double bluff over a simple transaction mystified us.

  ‘Why on earth can’t we just go to Hughie and say how much do you want for that Massey Ferguson?’ I said to Jack.

  ‘And he’ll say a hundred and fifty quid, and we’ll say will you take a hundred and forty. Simple enough.’

  The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that Gethin was involved in the deal. He had an air of aloofness, of someone who liked to control things, coming over as a man with a finger in many pies. But Jack and I didn’t care; if we could get the tractor for £140 we would be happy.

  For at least a week everyone who walked past the Traveller told me I needed to replace the front tyres. Even Harry said they were getting as bald as a parson’s head. So I left Jack reading The Working Dog and drove down to Penygroes to change them and get a spare as well.

  In the Paragon garage I parked behind an old Land Rover, its torn canvas roof partially repaired with strips of tape. Looking out from the back was a grey and white Border collie, pacing restlessly from side to side. I sat in the Traveller for a minute and watched the mechanic slide out the rusting exhaust.

  ‘Been meaning to come and say hello.’ The speaker surprised me; I hadn’t seen him approaching. He seemed to ghost up to my window. ‘Arfon Williams is my name. I’m a neighbour, got the land above you. The field with that bloody great pylon in it.’

  He was a slight figure of a man, skinny, with a thin neck, a bulging Adam’s apple. He didn’t wear his clothes, they seemed to envelop him. Worn, bony knuckles clenched around the crook he leant into, shifting from one leg to another, looking past me, like Gethin, not offering me his hand. His hollow expression gave him a haunted look. A greyness, as if he were overcast in cloud. He had clearly brought himself forward for no other reason than to say hello as quickly as possible and be done with it.

  What a struggle it must have been for him to farm. The physical demands. How did he get through the working day? I knew nothing of him except that he had a flock of Welsh ewes. But he could drive, and no doubt, fired by the fierce independence of the hill farmer, survived by living on his wits. For it was a way of life. What else could one do having been born into it?

  After supper that night, Ros made a list of seeds she said we needed to order from an organic supplier. Nearly forty quid’s worth. I couldn’t believe the cost.

  ‘Why can’t we just buy a few packets from Unwin’s?’ I asked.

  But she wanted to build up her own stock of organic seed, and there was no compromise. She had hired a Rotovator and thought that if Jack and I could start tomorrow we would have the initial work done in two days. If not, she suggested we pay Harry, who had said he could do the job in an afternoon.

  ‘Bloody cheek,’ I said. ‘We’re not that slow.’

  ‘Look how long it took you to fence it.’

  So in the morning, rather than go to Hughie and look at the Massey, we got on with ploughing up the vegetable garden. The Rotovator was a crude bone-shaking machine, noisy and slow, cutting out every time we hit a stone. You gripped hold of it, both arms vibrating so violently that after half an hour all your muscles went into spasm and continued to twitch long after you’d turned the machine off. We carried on vibrating through the whole of lunch, as did our knives and forks as we tried to eat. It was hopeless trying to hold a cup of tea. I couldn’t close my fingers round the handle. At least Sam and Lysta thought we were very funny. We should have hardened up to all these physical demands by now, but no, here we were again walking around like Bill and Ben, determined Harry would not be called upon to finish what we had so rashly started.

  We worked on through the afternoon, clearing the field of stones that could be used to fill gaps in walls, and by the time the sun went down the job was done. Heavy-legged, with our wellingtons clogged with mud, we sat either end of an upturned water trough smoking roll-ups, picking out in the fading light the orange beaks of blackbirds hopping around us looking for worms. We welcomed the evening breeze wafting over our faces, which were glowing with the heat from our physical exertions. The satisfaction of seeing what had been achieved always brought with it a reflective mood. It was how we enjoyed the end of the day, when the slog was over, sitting quietly, full of our own thoughts. It was an interlude before we went into the house to join Ros and the children.

  Coming from the bathroom clean and refreshed, the day scrubbed out from under my fingernails, I realised Sam and Lysta were becoming two little people. Gradually I was connecting with them more, although getting them to eat their food always seemed to be a serious challenge.

  When in their high chairs they seemed to think it hilarious to throw their food across the room. Ros did not approve of my finding this sort of behaviour humorous, and told me in a raised voice that it had to stop.

  ‘You’re not with them all day. Don’t encourage them.’

  On Saturday morning we made our way over to Llwyndu Canol to have a look at Hughie’s Massey Ferguson. Despite Gethin’s insistence on the tactics needed to come out right on the deal, Jack and I hadn’t rehearsed a single line. It was early April, and although spring might have appeared in the south of England there were no signs of it here. Admittedly, there were lambs running around in the fields, but nothing in the hedgerows had popped up green yet. Gwyn told me we were usually two or three weeks behind the rest of the country. The chill in the wind from the Irish Sea made my eyes weep. I had my collar up and my thermal underwear on, the most unattractive articles of clothing I possessed. When I got dressed in the morning, Ros would roll over in bed and ask me where my arse had gone. ‘Old man’s clothes,’ she would say, a huge turn-off to anyone desiring a successful love life. But they were effective so I stuck with them, despite Ros’s ridicule.

  Jack and I walked down the narrow track towards Llwyndu Canol. I could see the surly figure of Bryn, no longer armed with a catapult, throwing a sheath knife into a railway sleeper. As we approached he took a long deep drag on a roll-up, then threw the butt down in front of us, exhaling a blue cloud of smoke that cleared into the cold daylight. He kept his belligerent face turned away from us as he retrieved the knife. From his trouser pocket he took out a handkerchief and cleaned the blade, touching the tip with his finger.

  ‘Pa’s down below bringing sheep back,’ was all he said.
/>   We could see Hughie in the distance, far below us. He was working his dog, Jobber, shepherding ewes and lambs towards an enclosure. Already Jack could see the dog was too close to the sheep. ‘He should be further back. There’s trouble coming,’ he said.

  Myfanwy stood as if frozen to the spot, holding open the wooden pen gate, Hughie shouting orders as the dog moved frantically from left to right. Ewes bleated anxiously as they became separated from their lambs, turning in all directions to search for them. We could see the disintegration, the loss of shape in the flock, as increasing panic dispersed them. Myfanwy’s high-pitched screams stung the air with mounting hysteria as Hughie stood over Jobber beating him with his crook. The dog would have none of it and leapt over the wall, disappearing towards Penygroes, terrified by his master’s violence. I looked at Jack. ‘Not the dog’s fault,’ was all he said.

  Myfanwy was so angry she was throwing a series of punches into Hughie’s chest. One did not need to translate from the Welsh to guess what she was saying.

  ‘I don’t think this is a good day to be doing a deal with Hughie,’ I said to Jack, still watching the scene unfold. Calmness did return and lambs found their mothers again, but without a dog what could Hughie do now? On our way back to Dyffryn I remarked to Jack that the wonderful relationship between a man and his dog is as vulnerable to breakdown as marriage or friendship. But Jack wasn’t listening. The scene we had witnessed had affected him much more than me. ‘It was all too frantic, too fierce, too hurried,’ he said.

  Two days later we did finally talk to Hughie. He told us he had been waiting for over a week because, as he put it, Gethin had mentioned in passing that we might be interested. I became uneasy about being set up, fearing that Jack and I might be played for fools in someone else’s game. But once Hughie had fired up the tractor with a starter handle and revved it up by pushing his hand down on the accelerator, causing plumes of smoke to billow out from its vertical exhaust, I thought it would suit us. Jack took it on a test drive up the steep track on to the Carmel road. When he eventually reappeared I drove it back to Hughie to shake hands on the deal.

  ‘A hundred and fifty cash,’ he said.

  Gethin’s tactics kicked in, and although Jack and I hadn’t discussed doing the deal we turned our heads away in unison. It happened just like that. Hughie remained silent as we stuck our hands into our trouser pockets, casting dubious looks to the ground.

  ‘Duw, boys, come on, what’s with this?’ he said.

  ‘We were thinking a hundred and twenty,’ I said.

  He looked disgusted at this derisory offer and, turning, began to walk away. Over his shoulder he shouted back at us, ‘You insult me.’

  I couldn’t remember what came next in this charade. Then Jack called after him to ask if he would throw the rear-end loader into the deal. Smart move, I thought. What made him come up with that? ‘You won’t be needing that on the back of a Fordson Major,’ he added.

  ‘No, that’s true,’ said Hughie, coming back to join us.

  So I jumped in, offered £130 cash with the rear-end loader.

  Hughie threw his arms in the air and removed his cap, his baldness glowing in the sunlight, his mouth open as if mortally wounded. A silence floated up between us and I thought us all actors in a play. Who should speak the next line?

  ‘Put five more pounds on it and we’re home,’ he said.

  ‘The rear-end loader and the Fergie for a hundred and thirty-five,’ I said.

  ‘It’s yours,’ he said, putting out his hand. So we shook on it, me and Hughie and then Jack. The ordeal, because that’s what it felt like, was over, at last.

  Back at Dyffryn, Ros thought the two of us had smug looks on our faces. I did feel we had come out of the deal on the right side. I asked Jack what made him suddenly throw in the rear-end loader. ‘I just saw it lying there, thought we would need one some time.’

  ‘I think it will always be like that,’ I said.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Having to do deals.’

  ‘Yes, you’re probably right,’ he agreed.

  ‘Why don’t you put one together? Let’s listen to some music.’

  I dug out a Beatles track, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. I said to Jack, ‘Living might well be easy with eyes closed, but we’re not going to survive here misunderstanding all we see.’

  3

  The Dummy Run

  Summer at Dyffryn, a sweet warm breeze blowing through the hay fields. Swallows skimming the grass, Jack’s store lambs grazing the land in front of the house. Harry had sold them to us after doing a deal with some distant cousin who was bedridden and could no longer farm.

  ‘To be fair to the man, his body should have given up years ago.’

  Jack walked amongst them every day. If we ever needed to gather them, Harry brought up his old dog Axel, a cunning collie whose working days were behind him. He had a black patch around one of his eyes. When Harry sent him out to bring back the sheep, he ambled out towards them rather than put too much effort into it.

  We never seemed to be in the house. Everything happened outside. Already we were eating new potatoes, lettuces, radishes and shallots from Ros’s flourishing vegetable garden. Sometimes she made a picnic supper, which we ate sprawled out on a tartan rug, watching a fat sun dimming over an expanse of empty sea. We soaked up these occasions, because there was another reality to living on a farm that brought an anxiety far removed from the peace of the long summer evenings.

  It was the bull calves. We had bought twenty Friesians from a dealer in Devon and lost six in the first two weeks from scouring. We were feeding them powdered milk and all had healthy appetites, but we noticed that in the mornings some of them looked unsteady on their legs. They suffered from rapid weight loss and dropped so quickly. We thought they had no resistance to the bacteria in their new surroundings; added to the stress of the long journey so soon after weaning, this was a fatal combination for some of them. We realised it was a mistake to have bought them from an advert in a farming magazine. It was a hard lesson learned, and we vowed from then on only ever to buy locally. We had rung the dealer, but he was unsympathetic and didn’t want to listen to our tale of woe. ‘They were fine when they left here,’ was all he said. The remainder grew in strength, and following a two-week period of no further losses we were through it. Soon they would be eating calf pellets, and it wouldn’t be long before we could turn them out, watch them graze with the sun on their backs.

  But first we had to cut our hay and Harry, who was spending most of his time at Dyffryn these days, had assumed the position of chief decision maker, a role he played naturally and with flair. In some ways he had become a blood brother, after we swore him to secrecy concerning our greenhouse project, hidden away in a clearing amongst the larch trees. Jack and I came up short on self-assembly skills. It is something you’re born with: you either have it or you don’t. We certainly didn’t. But because it had to be top secret, we agreed to give the greenhouse a go, and had promised not to curse and swear at each other or storm off saying, ‘You bloody well finish it then!’We began the undertaking quietly enough, speaking politely to each other, studying the neat instruction diagrams carefully, but our equanimity began to fade when after an hour nothing seemed to quite line up.

  We weren’t out by far, just a sixteenth of an inch or so, but it was far enough to make us begin to lose our patience. And who was the clever dick who came up with the idea of the Allen key? Someone called Allen, no doubt, Jack said. To have the arrogance to get a worldwide patent on a minuscule gadget you couldn’t open a tin of sardines with! When we stood back and looked at the thing, it leaned so far to the left that the gentlest of breezes would have blown it over.

  ‘A complete waste of time,’ said Jack.

  So we got the right man on the job. Harry, of course.

  When we told him what we wished to grow in the greenhouse, we should have known what his reaction was going to be. ‘Oh, I do love a bit of dope. To be fai
r to the two of you, it’s a brilliant idea, what with street prices on the up. You know, I have to go all the way to Bangor to score a nice bit of hash.’

  Harry put the greenhouse together in a morning. We were going to pay him twenty quid, but decided to settle up when we harvested the crop. We already had seedlings growing in pots hidden away in a bed of compost down in the lower fields, surrounded by a rectangular border of red bricks, over the top of which we had laid an old car windscreen. Not pretty to look at, but effective, tucked away out of sight behind large gorse bushes.

  Although Ros knew what we were up to, she wasn’t keen on the idea. She did smoke the odd joint at parties, or relaxing sometimes with friends, but Jack and I wanted a regular supply. We carried twelve seedlings up to the greenhouse, where we watered them twice a day. Now we just had to wait for them to reach maturity.

  Meanwhile we had been making friends with Rose Tobias, a well-to-do American who owned the cottage above Dyffryn at the highest point on the Carmel road. She enjoyed panoramic views sweeping in every direction, taking in the mountain of Cwm Silyn and stretching as far as the Menai Strait in the north. If one ignored the pylons you would not have known you were living in the twentieth century.

  Only in Wales from May until September, she would put an easel in her garden and paint the cloud formations, the ever changing shades of light, as the day passed between dawn and dusk. She was more than happy to talk about her work, which consisted of a vast collection of sunsets and distant horizons. There wasn’t a single person in any of the canvases she showed us.

  ‘Where are all the people?’ I asked.

  ‘Gee, I can’t paint people. Far too complicated, and anyway what do they add to a glorious sunset?’

  Like many Americans, she was confident, direct, and didn’t take herself too seriously; traits that always gave our conversations an easy-going friendliness. She had a sparkling eye for Jack, at least twenty years her junior, and teased him with suggestive innuendo. She was attractive, washed by the Californian sun, her flirtatious nature belying her maturing years. Heavily lipsticked, she smoked Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes, which she held between fingertips varnished the same colour as her lips.