The world turned upside down

THE day after my grandfather’s funeral, my grandmother sold the herd of cows.

- Carla Carlisle

The pedigree Jerseys were all born on the farm and had never lived anywhere else. We knew from the taste alone which cow the milk came from. I howled as the innocent cows were loaded onto trucks that took them to a farm where nobody knew their names. My sister says this is ‘false memory’, that we were at school when they went. I’m sure I howled when I saw they were no longer there.

The dairy, the milking parlour and the hay barn joined the abandoned chicken houses to create an agricultural ghost town that looked like a photograph by Dorothea Lange. The only things that now grew were broken chairs, old bedsteads and galvanised milk churns, but we still called it a farm. Long after the deeds belonged to people we didn’t know, we called it the ‘home place’.

The farm on my father’s side went before I was born. It was in the Mississippi Delta, but it was never called a plantation, a word now gone with the wind. There were no mint juleps and hoop skirts, only miles of gravel roads, fields of cotton and soybeans, bony mules, incestuous bird dogs, swamps and lazy rivers. My grandfather spent half of his life managing thousands of acres that he had once owned. I never asked him what it felt like to lose your land, but I don’t think it is a ‘false memory’ if I say he was sad.

I didn’t activate my melancholy rural memories until I married a Suffolk farmer. Before then, I reckoned the most significant achievement of my life was getting off the farm and mastering the art of living in cities. For better or for worse, however, the past is imprinted on us in mysterious ways. Before I could tell wheat from barley, I was determined to Save the Farm.