Hay, good looking

Sweating under the heat of the June sun, John LewisStempel helps his former neighbour Ian–with the aid of a Massey 135–to gather in hay bales before the rain falls

- John Lewis-Stempel

I CAME down a back lane from Leominster. On the downhill, where the car picked up speed, the lane, lined with white cow parsley, unfurled, as if blossoming itself. I dangled a hand out of the car window, intending to tattoo on the door Supergrass’s Alright, which was loud on the radio; and then caught the smell of incoming rain on the evening air. And that tension in the air that comes before rain, as the natural world, the flowers and the animals, gird themselves. Looking across to the west, I saw that the long wall of the Black Mountains had assumed the ominous dark hue that prefigures downpour. The instinct to hurry to my destination was strong, but coming lumbering up the hill there was a travelling castle of hay bales, so I pulled over into a passing place and waited.

Eventually, the Massey Ferguson 135 and its trailer, loaded to the sky, reached me. (Making hay always gives the farm vintage tractor its moment to star; the Massey must have been 50 years, not out.) The driver gave me the country greeting, a peasant’s economy of scale, a single index finger raised from the wheel. Then he peered closer through the ghostly murk on the glass of the cab door. I recognised him in the same moment. A former neighbour, we had both moved. He flung open the cab door, bent down and pleasantries followed, the ‘how ares’, the ‘whats’, and the ‘wid you knows’. Then a small vulpine smile slid across his face: ‘Don’t fancy helping me load that lot, before that lot comes in?’ Ian asked, jabbing his thumb across his chest to the field, to the stack of waiting bales and the rain gathering behind the mountains. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’ll get this load in the shed and be back in a jiffy.’