Once Upon A Time in the West . . . Country (32 page)

‘Yes, I’m up for that,’ I replied keenly. ‘I’ve never been on a tractor before.’

Up until this point in my life, tractors had simply been annoying things encountered on country roads that you didn’t want to get stuck behind. They were slow and noisy vehicles that needlessly moved hay around the place, depositing a good proportion of it on the road around them as they dawdled along. The tractor was a vehicle I had come to associate with a sigh. Perhaps this morning would provide an opportunity for me to change this not-altogether rounded view of them.

It was a tight squeeze in the cab. It had not been designed for two people and I had to wedge myself in behind Ken’s seat in an uncomfortable compromise between squatting and standing. Ken fired up the engine and smiled in satisfaction in a way that could only be done by a man who had rebuilt that very same engine. I smiled too. The engine sounded good to me. Well, loud. It sounded loud to me, and I figured that had to be good. You don’t want a tractor with a quiet engine. You’re not going to win anyone’s respect that way.

Reg lived about a mile and a half away, at the bottom of a hill on the other side of the village. The advantage of being up in the tractor’s cab was that as we slowly progressed down the road, I could now see over the hedgerows and, for the first time, I was seeing into the land of properties that I’d never noticed before. Ken gave me the full history of who lived where, and who had been their various colourful predecessors. I was surprised to learn that he had an elder brother who lived alone in a cabin, recluse-like, on a plot of land less than half a mile from Ken’s.

‘Brother Tom keeps himself to himself,’ said Ken. ‘We don’t see him much, but when we do we get on well enough.’

‘Did Brother Tom ever marry?’

‘No.’

A beat.

‘He’s got a son though.’

We arrived at Reg’s before I had time to ask further questions about Brother Tom’s backstory and he looked set to remain the mystery figure who lived at the end of a narrow trail, in a cabin overrun by shrubbery. The type who might fascinate and frighten children in equal measure.

Reg waved us into his farm and indicated to Ken where to park. I struggled out of the tractor cab as Reg admired the Massey. There followed some lengthy conversation between the two enthusiasts about the gearbox and the steering console, in which I chose not to participate. A similar pattern followed as we moved into Reg’s barn-cum-workshop and began to study his four-wheel-drive Zetor. This was not my domain. I felt as ‘at home’ here, surrounded by machinery and farm paraphernalia, as Ken and Reg would have been in a voice-over booth in a Soho recording studio. (Indeed, Reg would have damaged the eardrums of the sound engineer bellowing into the microphone.)

I made a mental note that most of this equipment around me ran on oil. Most of that oil came from the Middle East, certainly not locally. It was transported in tankers that used oil. All of it coughed carbon into the atmosphere. All of us, like it or not, are caught in a carbon trap. Unless we live like a hermit and don’t engage in society we pretty much have to emit it.
2

‘YOU’RE GOING TO DRIVE THIS TRACTOR FROM JOHN O’GROATS TO LANDS END!’ Reg bellowed to me from a few feet away, pointing to his beloved Zetor.

‘We’ll see about that,’ I replied, careful not to commit. ‘What’s that attached to the back of your tractor?’

‘IT’S A WELDER.’

My brief inclusion in the conversation was abruptly halted as the discussion turned to whether the MIG welders were better than this one. Holding no strong views on this, I slipped away and studied the hens – the ones who had provided Fran and me with many a boiled egg and omelette. They strutted confidently around the place, pecking, clucking and generally fidgeting. Only one of them looked up at me.

‘Thanks for all the eggs,’ I said.

The hen looked back at me with an expression as blank as mine had been during the MIG welder dialogue.

I made a quiet note to myself to stop talking to hens.

***

‘See that cottage there?’ Ken announced, as we headed back up the hill, the tractor ‘love-in’ now a thing of the recent past. ‘That’s where we used to live. I lived there until I was eight years old.’

‘Were you born there?’

‘Yes, I was. It was a cold February day. Snow was on the ground when my mother went into labour and my father had to walk to the next village to get the nurse. By the time he and the nurse made it back, my mother had given birth to me.’

‘Wow. No help?’

‘No help at all. Not unless you count my three-year-old brother.’

This was rather encouraging. Perhaps it was something I could throw back at future dissenters when we explained about our plans for a home birth. So often, the explanation of our birth plan had elicited a sharp intake of breath and a slow deliberate shaking of the head, as if to indicate that this choice was equivalent to driving a car without brakes. The prevailing opinion seemed to require thousands of years of history to stand aside and make way for the careering juggernaut of medical intervention. Ken, however, had made it into the world without an obstetrician, a doctor, a midwife, or even a plumber.
3
And he’d come out all right. He’d even gone on to rebuild a tractor engine.

‘That cottage had no electricity or mains water,’ said Ken, almost with pride.

‘How did you manage?’

‘We got our water from a well, and we used a Tilley paraffin gas lamp.’

‘How was it?’

‘It was absolutely fine. It was all we knew, so we just got on with it.’

I considered all the devices we had in our kitchen. A few hours without the power that we took for granted and our world would begin to fall apart.

It was quite possible that in the future we humans might need to live by a new slogan. Tragically, it currently didn’t sound like one that would win any general elections.

Have a little bit less and enjoy it a whole lot more.

*
**

‘The trouble is that George doesn’t want to do the calling anymore,’ Rose explained. ‘He says he’s too old.’

The occasion was our third village hall committee meeting. We’d already sorted out some pressing bureaucratic matters regarding the shift in power from the old committee to this one, and the new committee’s feet were very much under the trestle table. We were discussing item four on the agenda, the idea of reintroducing an event that had previously been a success – Meat Bingo. At first, I’d heard ‘Meet Bingo’ and I’d begun to wonder if this was a kind of dating night where people could be paired off according to what numbers coincided on their cards. But no, it turned out that it was simply bingo in which you could win a joint of meat instead of other prizes. My thought was, if we’re going to have bingo evenings where the prize is specific, then why stop at Meat Bingo? We could have Petrol Bingo. Salt Bingo. Insulating Tape Bingo. But all in good time. These would have to be suggestions that I’d propose when my stranglehold on power was more complete.

‘Oh. That’s a shame to lose George,’ said Mary. ‘He was a good caller. We’ll need to find someone else.’

There followed a hideous silence where I felt the weight of expectation around the table. I held off for as long as I could. Finally, it all proved too much for me.

‘Well, I suppose I could do it,’ I said, begrudgingly.

I am not a big fan of bingo. I’d played it once before in France, and even with a different language and the challenges which that brought, I’d still found it to be an incredibly tedious evening. Perhaps, I mused as the discussions turned to finalising the arrangements, that actually
calling
the bingo would make it a more enjoyable evening all round. A chance for the performer in me to shine.

‘OK. Item five,’ I announced in my best Mr Chairman voice. ‘Trying to get more people up to the village hall who never normally come to events.’

‘Could we distribute leaflets letting them all know what’s on?’ suggested Brenda.

‘Good idea.’

It was decided that we would share the task and each committee member would leaflet different areas of the village. I figured that this would be a good way to get to know new people, because as well as passing on the information about the village hall, it could be a kind of cold calling for friendship. Facebook on foot.

In reality, I didn’t do most of it on foot. I decided to do the more remote houses by car, after I’d delivered to my immediate neighbours. Two doors along, I met Alf. Actually I didn’t meet him, we’d met briefly once before, as he reminded me, when he’d delivered the local parish magazine to our door. His recollection of this, and my failure to do so, might have been easier to bear if Alf had not been ninety-three years old. Like a lot of very old people do, he dropped the revelation of his age quite early on in our conversation.

‘Wow, you look fantastic on it,’ I said.

This was not a routine, sycophantic remark. I really meant it. Alf was the finest example of a 93-year-old man that I had ever laid eyes on. In conversation, too, he proved that his faculties were all there, and we’d already established that his memory was working better than mine. He attributed his good health to country air, nice views, and not getting too worked up about anything.

‘Regarding the bingo,’ he said, ‘Vera and I don’t get out as much as we used to, but I applaud what you’re doing at the village hall and we’ll try and get up there.’

Impressive stuff. Now I had something to which I could aspire. Given that I was about to enter fatherhood at a more senior age than most, it would be my duty to try and emulate Alf. So, encouraged by the uplifting chat with my Peter Pan neighbour, I jumped in the car in order to reach the houses that were located at the end of a long, bumpy lane. Everything started well enough. Nobody was in at the first two houses, so I stuffed the leaflets in the front doors. At the next two stops, people were at home and I was able to introduce myself as a neighbour, explain my new role, and engage in a positive conversation about the village hall and its potential to bring people together. I felt rather buoyed by the positive responses. The bumpy road then became ridden with potholes, and the required driving was suddenly a far cry from the city action for which my car was designed.

I pulled into the drive of a farm, parked up, and saw Sam – the guy who’d had a cup of tea with us after the ‘sheep in the garden’ incident. He immediately came over and invited me in for a reciprocal cup. I said yes, partly because I didn’t want to say no, and partly because I was due a break, having been on this arduous task now for a full ten minutes.

When I got out of the car, I noticed that the front right tyre was flat. Oh dear, how foolish of me to think that the Smart car, the city runaround, could cope with these stony, unkept-up country lanes. Yes, I was in a Smart car. You know – those piddly little things that look as if the back has been cut off? Silly looking, but good for the environment. That had been our thinking anyway and we’d bought a second-hand one a month previously. However, bringing the Smart car up this particular lane had not been so smart.

Sam jumped immediately into crisis-assistance mode and he and I began looking for the spare tyre. The Smart car is anything but conventional, and my embarrassing ignorance about it was soon exposed. Was the boot at the front? I didn’t know. How did you open the bonnet? I didn’t know. Did it even have a bonnet? I didn’t know. Was that where the spare tyre was? I didn’t know.

‘Do you have the manual?’ asked Sam.

‘I don’t know,’ I replied.

Encyclopedic ignorance. If there was something that anyone needed
not to know
about this vehicle, then I was there with all the lack of knowledge at my fingertips.

A search in the car (struggling first to find compartments, and then open them) revealed no manual.

‘Come in, have a cup of tea, and we can search the internet,’ suggested Sam.

If you ever get bored, you can do exactly what I did next. Simply type the following into Google.

Where is the spare tyre on a Smart car?

It takes you to a forum. The first answer is: ‘There is no spare tyre, so remove the steering wheel and get out and push the thing like the shopping trolley that it is.’

Yeah, yeah, very funny. Internet wise guy.

The trouble was that all the other answers confirmed that the Smart car has no spare tyre. How could that be? Surely it was illegal? No, some further research revealed the awful truth is that they do it to save weight. It seemed that my environmentally friendly miles per gallon were coming at the expense of leaving me stranded if I ever got a puncture.

I followed the course of action that was fast becoming a default position when anything went wrong. I called Ken.

Quite irresponsibly – and worse still, without informing me – Ken had gone out. His position as best neighbour in the world was suddenly questionable. I’m not sure that he could be allowed to have a life. How dare he not remain on 24-hour call?

It was decided that I should leave the car and walk home. I would have to order the new tyre from the local garage, nip down with Ken to collect it, before whizzing back up the lane to fit it. All very inconvenient and time consuming. Never mind, I’d delivered a tremendous six of the eighty-five leaflets I’d been given, so I could go on a tour of Sam’s farm without any guilt.