Mother was waiting outside the gate. She would not look at me. We went on down the lane in silence, though not before I pulled the gate closed so hard that I heard something crack.
Yes, I was a difficult child, I see that now. Not that I meant to be difficult, but I had a sense of my own will. Did I not have the right to feel what I felt, be who I was?
Like all the households about us, ours was one of comfort but thrift. Grandfather believed in using God’s great lantern, which cost nothing. Eating God’s bounty: eggs from our own hens, cabbage from our own garden, a shave or two of the pig killed at Christmas.
Grandfather was a man perfectly weaned from the things of this world, conducted his life in the radiance of God’s glory. There was a lot of church-going, a lot of talk of Providence, endless heartfelt thanks for what we were about to eat. Church twice on Sundays, the Bible read every evening, prayers around the table before bed.
Young though I was, I knew not to ask the question to which I knew there could be no answer: If God is good, why is Father dead? It was the first falsehood, to bow my head with everyone else, to say the Amen loud as if I meant it. I watched Mother from under my lashes to see whether she was being false too, but I never caught her out.
But Grandfather was a kindly soul and loved me. Let me wander over the fields and make shelters with branches and leaves and creep into them. Did not stop me when I went out in the rain and spent hours diverting and damming the runnel of water down the slope behind the house.
– A clean child is not a happy child, he said, when Mother scolded.
Grandfather had a reasonable spread of acres and grew a little of everything: barley, turnips, hay. But what he loved was the sheep. He walked among them, his boots authoritative, and they scattered, running all earnest and stiff-legged and then, when they had got a safe distance away, staring back at him over their shoulders.
– God has constituted them to flock and follow, Grandfather told me. They are creatures of fellowship. While we poor sinners believe we can do it all alone.
Mother thought sheep were silly creatures, but they were not, only behaved in ways unlike us. I came to love them, understood their ways, cared for them. They were amenable creatures when you worked with their natures and not against them, and never quite stupid. Grandfather showed me how you stayed behind them, taking your time. How, when they turned to stare at you, you stared them out. How you waited till they were facing the way you wanted them to go, then you held out the crook to make yourself bigger than you were.
How could you not warm to a creature that, when you came near her lamb, ran forward and stood stamping her feet? Poor thing, she had no other power to defend her young. I laughed in admiration at her courage.
– God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, Grandfather said, watching the lamb stumble, fall, get up again. Remember that, Lisbet, when life hurls its blasts at you.
Grandfather taught me all I would have needed to become the wife of a farmer. How to churn butter, how to fix a sick chook. How to count sheep, not as straightforward as you might think.
– You can never trust yourself, counting a flock, he said in his calm instructional way. There’s something about sheep makes the counting miss. When it comes to counting a flock, always make a knot. Or a notch. Keep it in twenties. That’s what you call keeping a score, see.
He had a bit of twine that he got out of his pocket to show me, undoing the knots from the last count, and handed it to me.
– Now you’ll be right, he said, and I heard the smile in his voice, the tenderness.
Grandfather was what was called an improving farmer, which as a child I took to mean his reproving ways with a wilful child, and his rock-like sense of what was right and what was wrong, and how all that was right lay in the hands of Our Lord. Now I know that, in spite of his age, he was one of the new type of farmer, and that the word meant an attention to the breeding of stock. There was high excitement—even guarded Grandfather was excited—when he bought a ram from a Mr Bakewell. Until I saw it I thought it might be a sheep made of cake, or perhaps a sheep pie, something good to eat in any case, and was disappointed that it turned out to be wool and horn like any other sheep. It arrived on a cart with a man called Hale, who took it by the halter and led it like a prince through our gate while I petted the dog he had brought with him.
– Take care there, lass, Mr Hale called out. If you stand still he’ll want to piss on your leg.
I thought this a fine bit of humour, but Grandfather was stern, I could see he had judged Mr Hale as a common fellow.
Grandfather was holding the ram’s head up by the horns and Mr Hale, all hat from my point of view, was bending over the creature, parting its fleece with big rough hands to show, under the grey matted surface, the creamy wool.
– How’d you like a dozen like this fellow, he said, to get his end in among your pretty ladies?
– Mind, Grandfather said. Mind your language, Mr Hale, if you please, do you not see the young lady here?
Which was a surprise on two counts: that whatever it was Mr Hale had meant by those words, they must carry a weight of sin, and that a girl of nine was a young lady who had to be shielded from whatever those words meant.
Mr Hale looked over at me, perhaps as surprised as I was that the ragamuffin in her mud-rimmed skirt was a young lady. Then he and Grandfather were murmuring on about crimp and grease while I swung on the gate, back and forth, back and forth, scraping the mud off my boots on the bottom beam till there was a neat row of lumps, though there was no point to it, as my boots would be heavy with mud again as soon as I got down. The watery spring sun, the bleating of lambs from the field, and Grandfather murmuring on and on with Mr Hale, the ram with its unblinking eye waiting to be let go: that memory is as clear after seventy years as if it were yesterday.
With Mr Hale gone, Grandfather and I stood among the flock, the sheep all rustling and bleating around us while he explained why he had got the ram, spent fifteen guineas on it, which to my ear sounded like a vast sum, and the ram looked to my eye much like any other sheep. But this ram had a wonderful heft on him, Grandfather said, and a grand fleece, and was a fine lusty creature. When he put this ram over the ewes, the lambs they would drop would carry that heftiness, that grand fleece and that lustiness in their own blood. Then it was a matter of doing something called in-and-in, which meant choosing the best lambs every spring and joining them back to the same lusty ram and to each other, making sure to get a new ram now and then to stop the blood getting too thin.
Once I understood, I was entranced. It was like trying to look into the future, to see what would happen ten years later if you went one way, or whether it would turn out to have been better to have gone the other.
Which, as I write this now, seems to me not so different from the life of humans, as well as fine lusty sheep.
NOT TO BE TOO CLEVER
Bridie, daughter of the Reverend Kingdon, had been my friend from our earliest years. Lodgeworthy was at the bottom of the hill beside the river and the vicarage was at the top of that same hill, beside the church. She and I spent most days together and, after Mother and I went to Grandfather’s, I stayed with her many nights too, because from the vicarage it was a fair step back to Grandfather’s house. It was simpler for me to stay with the Kingdons for a few nights on the trot, rather than go back and forth. Bridie and I shared the high bed in her room, Mrs Kingdon came to tuck us in and blow out the lamp, and it was as good as having a sister.