Mochyn Bach

It was the Sunday before Christmas, and the day that we were due to go to Howden’s place up in the hills to collect the order of meat. It had been frozen solid for days, and the fields all around the back were quiet under a fat blanket of white. The sky slumped above the bare lattice of the oak wood was the yellow-grey of an old bruise, which meant more snow to come.

The needless scrape and clatter of cookware from downstairs meant that my father was doing the breakfast round of washing-up. He hummed loud as he threw forks into the cutlery drawer, a smashed chord of steel and song.

Upstairs I dressed as fast as I could, pulling on two pairs of trousers and thick wool socks gone shapeless with years of itch. When I was ready I hurried across the hall to my brother’s room. He was three years older than me, and over the last holiday he had metamorphosised into a stranger. His thin face bloomed in a scattering of red spots, which he picked into scabs and sucked off the end of his finger when he thought nobody was looking.

Today he sat at his desk, morose in his dressing gown. He had lately taken to eating breakfast in his room and I perched gingerly on his sofa, avoiding crumpled crisp packets, bits of homework and piles of discarded clothing, watching him spoon enormous lumps of popcorn-yellow cereal into his mouth. Milk rolled down the sides of the spoon, scattering drops on his chin. On the computer screen in front of him was an island in a blue sea, visible in neat squares. He reached out and pressed a key and a row of pixellated Egyptians sprang to life.

‘What’re you playing then?’

‘Dunno. Civilisation.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a game.’ Conversations with my brother had become one-sided of late.

‘How does it work, then?’

He didn’t answer for a moment, slurping the last dribble of sugary milk from the bottom of the thick clay bowl. ‘It’s a game where you’re in charge of the society. You get them to discover things and build them. Take them over. Then you can give them names.’

‘What did you call this place here?’

‘Dunno yet.’

My father is in the hallway.

‘Rhys!’

There is no reply.

‘You up yet? It’s nearly time to go.’

‘I’m not dressed,’ sang my brother.

‘Faint ywr’ gloch yw e?’ my father shouted up the stairs. Rhys frowned and sighed loudly; he had reached the age where everything parents do is mortifying, and my father’s staunch attempts to speak to us in Welsh struck him as embarrassingly redundant. Two years ago it had been a beaming puzzle, bouncing up and down at the breakfast table eager with the answer. In another few years again it would become a secret code, a cosy tradition albeit partaken in with eye-rolling indulgence. I had never grown tired of it, drinking in the rolling, snapping consonants and knife-edged vowels, liking too that it shut out my disapproving, distant mother, who stood at the end of the kitchen with pursed lips stirring her coffee.

Now, though, there was silence. Dad stood at the bottom of the landing waiting for a response. ‘Rhys!’

‘What?’ yelled my brother, not taking his eyes off the computer screen.

‘Well?’

‘Doesn’t matter. I’m not coming.’

‘Please yourself then.’

‘You really not coming?’ I asked him, a bit surprised. He always used to like a trip to the hills.

‘No.’ He turned back to his Egpytians.

I gave up, and wandered out. In the garage, Dad was waiting, pulling on his gloves and jumping up and down on the spot in the chilly air.

The farm where the turkeys were was up from where we were, a few miles down the rickety, bare-hedged lanes at Whitechapel, just below where the fells rose up grey-shouldered and vast in the long, low skies.

All around our place that morning hung the white and thin smell of snow. The earth was frozen into stone ruts that would turn your ankles if you strayed into the thicker drifts at the field’s edge. During the nights the roads froze into thick rink-like sheets that were treacherous as wet glass. Tyres couldn’t bite, and none of the town gritters ever came up this far. I’d fallen twice crossing the yard the day before, even with my thick boots and my mother’s warning yells lodged in my ears. The sluice-brook at the field’s brink was still running but crusted at the edges with rime and dirty slabs of ice, pitted with stones. Icicles formed around the twigs and blades of grass that dipped into the water, dimpling and blurring them like artefacts in a chrysalis. Snow seemed a freak, a miracle, the strangest of weathers. How could it be white, when it was made of tiny flakes of ice?

Why, I asked Dad.

He said he didn’t know.

Now as we turned the corner up the hill we could see, a couple of fields back, the edge of the forest, black pines forming a massed wall against the rutted white. Once this forest went on and on over the fells and into the neighbouring county. Once, my father said, there were wild boar and wolves amongst the trees.

The farm was at the end of a short track. A painted board in the holly bush by the turning read

EGGS

PORK

CHRISTMAS TURKEY’S

RARE BREEDS

The farmer and his family lived in two rickety caravans parked in a muddy patch in front of the outbuildings. He and his wife shared the larger of them, and their two sons the other, a dilapidated towing caravan resting on an unfinished patch of cement. My father told me they’d been trying for three years to get the planning permission to build a house. ‘They have to be there,’ he said, ‘for the business, see. But it’s no kind of life.’ There were two barns, the cattle pens and the smaller shed where hens shivered in their straw. A collie strained, alert, at the end of a tatty nylon rope. His ears were rigid black triangles. I watched him, eyeing the rope, assessing its strength. I was always afraid of dogs.

The vans squatted under the side of the big steel barn. As my father switched off the engine, the door of the larger swung open and the farmer came out, frowning at the unfamiliar jeep. My dad jumped out into the snow and his face relaxed.

‘Now then, Tomos,’ he greeted my father.‘What can I do for you?’

‘I’ve come about the beef,’ said Dad. ‘Spoke to you on the telephone yesterday.’

‘Oh yes,’ the farmer said. ‘I’ll just –‘ he turned back towards the caravan and shouted for his wife. She was an enormous roly-poly woman and she came heavy and smiling down the steel steps towards us. She was wearing open-toed sandals and her feet were forced pinched and red through the gap. The whistle of a kettle on the stove sounded clear inside as the door clicked shut behind her.

Hello, she said. Happy Christmas.

Hello.

I stood awkwardly, my hands in my pockets while the grown-ups talked. I admired the even print of the sole of my boot in the blank unmarked ground. I scraped some of the fresh snow off the top of the car’s wing-mirror and put it gently in my mouth. It began to dissolve at the edges of my lips, soft and cloudy, the cold sending shocks of pain through my teeth. I couldn’t chew it but sucked at it, surprised how little water it yielded. All that massy filigree spun out of nothing. The adults were moving around towards the big door of the barn. I hesitated. As it drew open I caught sight of a pen of straw and the yellow of heat lamps blurred in the grey air. I followed, ten paces back, struggling to draw the bolt shut.

‘It’ll be right, that,’ said the farmer. He had a thin wool jumper with a pattern of snowflakes on it, frayed at the cuffs.

Inside the barn was warm with the heavy smells of animal life. The collie barked sharply when he saw us and was quelled by an angry word from the woman. The black and roan Dexter calves lay placid as  Bethlehem on the hay, rattling their noses in the empty proven bucket. Outside, the wind boomed faintly against the outbuilding walls. Within, there was just the breathing and moving of the animals, rustling and scuffing at the straw.

Beyond were the pigs. There were five suckling sows, each in their own pen, enormous things heavy with pale blood and grunt. Their piglets lay satiated in a wriggling, twitching pile under the heat lamps at the rear of the pen. My father and I stood alongside the farmer, climbing up the gate for a closer look.

‘Those’ll almost ready to wean,’ he said, ‘next week. Eight weeks old they are now.’

‘Gloucester Old Spot, is it?’ asked my father.

‘Oh yes,’ he replied. ‘Aye.’

The smallest pig trotted up to the feed-bowl, keen and nosing. My hand was resting on the top bar of the gate, and I leaned forward, trying to touch. The mother pushed towards me, vaguely threatening, rattling the steel bolt of the gate with her long nose. Her snout was a perfect prehensile triangle, closing in on my hand where I had gripped the cold rung. The little pig stood behind her, dogged but uncertain. It was neat, two greyish-blue spots on its hind flank. Its tail hung limp and uncurled. It was both bald and naked, like a blind baby mouse, and all over delicate fine silken hairs. It quizzed me, sniffing, like its mother.

‘How long till they go for slaughter?’ my father asked. The eyes of the piglet were wet, grey things, beck stones, fringed around with thick white lashes.

‘Twenty-six weeks, it is, all told.’

‘How many do you get out of the Old Spots, about?’

‘Nine or ten or so each time,’ replied the farmer, warming to his theme. ‘Though we had one, when was it, October, had sixteen. Wasn’t it?’ His wife, beaming, nodded. ‘Aye. Sixteen,’ he said, with something like pride, ‘and she raised them all. All of them.’

‘Good grief,’ said my dad.

There was a pause.

‘When I used to work the farm, we had a sow with a litter of fifteen,’ he added. ‘But they all died. Rolled on them, she did.’

I spoke. ‘On purpose?’

‘No, no.’ He shook his large head, heavily. ‘She just rolled on them by accident.’

‘Sheep do it on purpose, sometimes,’ I said.

The younger son of the farm stood at the rear of the barn, boots deep in a pile of white feathers. In front of him hung a half-plucked turkey silhouetted in the gaslight. Beside him, a radio blared out a football match. His face was expressionless as his hands went about their task, fast and expert. I watched him, sidelong, under my lashes. He looked like an exact amalgamation of both his parents, his father’s almost comically red cheeks and his mother’s wide-set eyes under the oilskin cap. He looked up for a second and saw me watching him. I turned away quickly.

My father was in a small breeze-block room off to the side, counting out the meat we’d ordered.

‘Like I say,’ the woman was speaking, ‘we don’t normally go in for selling frozen but with sirloin it dun’t matter so much. And we couldn’t get the butcher to come out again before Christmas. Next time we’ll slaughter now…next March, it’ll be. We only get one or two of the Dexters done at a time, and there’s a woman over Clitheroe who orders every bit of brisket we get in. Every bit. It’s funny what folk like, isn’t it?’

She handed three packets of shrink-wrapped steak over to my father. Our name had been pencilled in rough capitals on the label. She shuffled to the side to close the chest freezer, her huge bottom bumping against me. ‘Sorry, love.’ Above us, the turkeys were hanging with bound feet from hooks nailed into the low beams. The one closest to me wasn’t long dead. The raw bloody wound in its neck gaped like a wet ruby.

‘You’ll be after one of these as well, then?’ said the farmer’s wife, groping for her calculator and nodding towards the hanging turkeys. My father looked at me, eyebrows raised. I flushed. ‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘We could get one, I suppose,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t thought of it. Make sandwiches for Boxing Day.’

‘Good turkeys, they are,’ said the woman. ‘Reared outdoors. Though we’ve stuck ‘em in the back, now. Bit too rough for them out.’

I shifted uncomfortably. I didn’t want to be rude. I spoke quickly, as quietly as I could, desperate. ‘I…Dad…dw y ddy’mn hoffi…turkey,’ I finished, lamely.

‘What’s that?’ said the farmer, only half-listening.

‘Twrci’, said Dad. ‘You mean you don’t like twrci.’ Of course it was the same word.

‘Oh,’ said the woman. ‘Best not, then.’ But she didn’t seem to mind. She totted up the meat on the calculator, looking puzzled. ‘That isn’t…Sorry about that.’ She laughed. ‘I were out last night.’

‘Twenty-two pounds thirty, it should be,’ said the farmer. ‘Call it twenty-two.’ Dad unfolded the note from his wallet.

He patted his chest. ‘I don’t have any change on me.’

My father looked at me. ‘Do you have any money?’

‘I don’t,’ I said.

The boy who had been plucking the turkey had come over and stood in the doorway, waiting.

My father went out to the car to get some coins from the glove compartment. I stayed, looking at the pigs rootling purposefully. A small gap in the drystone had been plugged with a torn feedsack. The sow lay on her side, cotton flag ears flopping as her litter barged and clambered up her side. The smallest one was invisible under a torrent of heads bobbing with excitement and trotters struggling for purchase.

The farmer was beside me. ‘Good pigs,’ he said quietly.

‘They’re nice,’ I said.

‘Want one, do you?’ My father reappeared in the doorway. ‘Keep it in the garden!’ He laughed.

‘Some folk put a couple of them out in the orchards,’ said the woman, reappearing from around the corner, a bundle of twine in the crook of her great arm. ‘Put them out there to turn over the soil. Gets the air into it, specially this heavy clay we’ve got.’

‘The National Trust puts them out on the fells to root up the bracken,’ I said.

We went out of the barn and back out into the snow. The sky was dark pewter. My father shook hands with the farmer, and he and his wife went back to the caravan, knocking the snow and muck off their boots as they climbed the rickety steps. The son still stood in the doorway. As we were climbing into the car he called after us.

‘Don’t take the road by Forden’s,’ he said. ‘I got stuck there two hours ago when I was bringing the sheep up. It’s frozen half-way up the bank and skidding underfoot. Stick to Syke Lane and you should be right, it’s had the sun on it.’

As we turned out of the farm track and back to the road, the thunderheads of the next raft of storms coming from the west glowed in the last rays of the cold sun as it fell behind. My father whistled over the din of the engine as the car rumbled its slow and attentive way over the iced curves and hidden dips of the thin road. Outside in the quietness, there was the long, slow light over the winter grass, and the rustle and jump of small birds in the hedgerows.

‘I hope the pigs do well,’ I said. My father said nothing.

We reached home under a sky of ink and gold. To the east the first faint stars appeared, cold dots between the smurred edges of the clouds.

The light was on in the kitchen and steam had fogged up half the glass. Someone was boiling vegetables for tea; the smell of soggy carrot nosed into us, warm and wet, as we shook the snow and muck off our boots.

‘Shut the door!’ yelled my mother from the sitting room.

My brother is in the kitchen.

‘Well, then,’ says Dad affably, slapping his hands down onto the thick wooden table. He has already stored the slabs of beef carefully in the garage freezer, out of the way for the next week. ‘What have you been doing with yourself?’

Rhys shrugs. ‘Nothing.’ He is sat at the kitchen table, eating a slice of bread and cheese. He is not using a plate. There are crumbs all over the table top. My father tuts as he wipes them up with a dishcloth.

‘It’s only half an hour until your tea, you know.’

‘It’s fine,’ says my brother, annoyed. He goes back to munching on his sandwich.

 

I think of the piglet, its eyes winking like sequins in the half-dark of the barn.

 

‘You won’t eat your dinner,’ says my father. He turns around and starts investigating the contents of the sideboard.

 

My brother mutters something unintelligible and turns over the page of the newspaper he has been reading. His finger leaves a greasy, buttery mark on the side. My father half turns.

‘Eh? I can’t hear you if you mumble like that.’

‘I wasn’t,’ spat my brother with derision, ‘mumbling.’

 

‘You were that,’ said my father, cheerfully. ‘You’re turning into a mumbler, you are. You were doing it all last week too.’ Rhys looked up from the sports page, glowering from between his curtain of hair. I can feel the corners of my mouth twitching, curling upwards.

My father doesn’t notice a thing, banging about in the cupboard for a saucepan. ‘You mumbled that whole thing.’ He turned to me, unwisely, for conformation. ‘He did, didn’t he? What did you say?’ I looked away. Rhys was still staring at him, irritation screwed all over his features. ‘I didn’t bloody mumble, all right?’

‘Well, I didn’t hear you. I didn’t catch a word.’ My father is oblivious, teasing. ‘Mumbler.’ 

My brother jumped down. His face was bright red with vexation. ‘I SAID, DW Y’N WEDI BLINO. DW Y’N MYND YR GWELY,’ he yelled. And he knocked the newspaper off the table and onto the floor, and stamped off up the stairs

My father roared.

‘That’s my boy!’ he said.