The Shepherd Who Played Cello For His Sheep

I booked a room at the local pub for the night. I noticed the landlord’s incongruous London accent as he bemoaned the lack of trade.
It certainly wasn’t the place I remembered. The small, leaded windowpanes were a lot cleaner and admitted more light than seemed comfortable. The tables had been stripped back to bare wood and gleamed golden. There was no trace of the years of nursed pints leaving circular stains, the patina of work-grimed fingers knocking at dominoes. No fug of smoke from pipes and tightly rolled cigarettes, no comfortable aroma of mud, damp wool and honest sweat.
The Saloon Bar had been converted to a Tea Room. There was a coach party of elderly folk who had stopped for a cuppa and a wee on their way to visit a fictional village from a long-running soap. Otherwise, the place was dead.

I sat on a wooden bench in the garden with my Arrowroot biscuit and a bottle of Britvic orange and half-drowsed in the gathering dusk. The brightest stars began to appear in the purple sky. The air was growing chill, though heat still rose from the sun-baked earth.
There was a low rumble from the bar, which was packed with men of indeterminate age in tweed jackets and flat caps, who made more noise than you would expect for such a taciturn race of people with nothing much to say.
One of them was my Dad. Softer spoken than most, you wouldn’t know he was there. Until a certain moment was reached, when enough drink had flowed and there was more ready laughter than grunts. Then, a cry went up for ‘one o’ the old tunes’.
Dad was cajoled into bringing out his fiddle and bow. Under anyone else’s hands, it made a jangle of untuned notes that formed a passable jig or reel. But somehow, he coaxed it into releasing an arpeggio of crystalline clarity, so that I could almost see the music hanging in the air: vibrating the very stars and halting birds in flight.
Old Ned paused at the door on his way in, stub of Woodbine threatening to set his whiskers alight.
“Your Da’,” he confided. “A demon for the bowlegged banjo when ‘e were your age. Pity ‘e never got the chance to tak’ it further at big school.”
I had no idea what he meant, but still glowed with pride.
Then Mum started to sing along with her high, clear voice and I never knew a happier time.

I set off over the hills for a stroll. They appeared nowhere near as high as when I was a boy in short trousers, but I got more out-of-breath than I anticipated.
Looking down at our old cottage, I could see the years had also taken their toll on its stonework, which sagged and leaned into the overgrown garden. There had been some attempt to keep it going as a holiday let, but it had not been up to standard and was too far from the nearest decent-sized town to attract tourists.
I picked up a flat stone from beside the footpath and carried it to the top of the hill. There was an ancient cairn at the summit and I wanted to add my offering to the pile, as was the tradition.
I was disappointed to find it had collapsed, like a giant game of Jenga.

Dad lifted me up so I could place my stone on the cairn.
“What’s it for?” I asked.
“Aye, well.” He set me down again and winked at me. “Some reckon Old Nick is buried here. Best be sure he can’t escape, eh?”
I didn’t know who ‘Old Nick’ was and pictured someone like Old Ned, but even more aged and wrinkled, laying half-crushed under the weight of earth and rock.
We watched awhile as our flock of sheep drifted like a cloud across the green sky of pasture.
In the further distance, a huge black plume of smoke was drifting across the fields. Even I knew it was the wrong time of year to be burning off stubble.
There was something grim about Dad’s expression that stopped me asking about it. I could have worked it out for myself. Child that I was, I still held on to a sneaking suspicion that two and two didn’t always have to make four.
“Come, boy.”
It wasn’t clear if he was calling me or the dog, but we both scampered after him down the hill, towards where Mum was waiting with our lunch.

I entered the churchyard via the lych gate. It was always like stepping into another world, where everything was permanently at peace. The meandering stone path beneath cathedral arches of trees, the smell of newly cut grass, the impressionist daubs of wild flowers against weathered headstones.
The angel was still there: now smaller than me, but no less creepy. Draped across the grave in an extravagant attitude of grief, moss-green tears ingrained into its rain-smoothed features. On more than one night, it had escaped its marble plinth and haunted my dreams.
There was a scrape of stone against metal. I saw Old Ned sitting nearby, sharpening his scythe. By some alchemy, he looked the same age as always. I guessed he had the kind of face that had appeared old when he was in his twenties and into which he had gradually grown.
“’Ey up, lad,” he greeted me with easy familiarity, as if no time had passed. “’Ow are you bearin’ up?”

I only ever saw Dad cry the once. It was that winter when there was a sudden cold snap and a foot of snow fell in a few hours. He went up in the hills to fetch the sheep down to shelter and was gone all day.
He came down again in pitch darkness, carrying one of them in his arms. It struggled fitfully in his grasp. His arms trembled as much with strain as with the cold.
After securing the surviving flock in the barn, he stalked stiff-backed into the cottage and virtually collapsed in front of the fire. Mum stripped off his hat and coat, which were soaked through and steaming in the heat.
I brought him a mug of tea. He cupped it between both fists because he couldn’t unclench his frozen fingers to hold the handle. He didn’t thank me.
Mum pulled off his boots and rolled down his sodden socks, then massaged his feet to restore the circulation. His toes were purple and swollen with chilblains. The room became suffused with the odour of camphor as Mum rubbed embrocation into his joints.
He reached for his fiddle, but couldn’t bend his fingers to form the chords or even hold the bow properly. I didn’t appreciate how much pain he was in, nor that he was seeking to distract himself.
I noticed that his face was wet. I just thought his nose was running and melted snow was trickling down from his hair. Then I realised he was crying. That his chest was heaving with silent sobs.
I felt something heavy in my throat, like a stone I couldn’t swallow.

Even Dad was in better shape than me. He was wearing a dark suit – far smarter than his old Sunday best with its shiny seat and cuffs – and an open-necked white shirt. His grey hair was cut fashionably short. His complexion no longer weather-beaten but pale and smooth. A pair of dark glasses concealed his eyes.
His arm was linked with that of a much younger man, who was dressed rather more casually. I was a little annoyed. It seemed disrespectful.
“Hello, Dad,” I greeted him awkwardly.
“Hello, son,” he smiled and nodded. “Is your mother here? I keep inviting her to my concerts, but she never comes.”
“Oh, Dad…” I reached out and clutched his shoulder as my voice broke. I didn’t know what to say.
The young man caught my eye and gave a subtle shake of his head. I took the hint and released my grip, then attempted to mirror my Dad’s smile.
“Well, I’m sure she’ll hear you today.”

When the men from the Ministry came in their bright orange protective suits, Dad tried to stop them coming on our land.
One of them read some gobbledegook I couldn’t understand from a sheet of paper, which he then waved in Dad’s face before attempting to thrust it in his hand. Another drove a wooden stake into the ground outside our gate and attached a bold red printed notice to it.
I had never heard Dad really swear before, but he cursed them all roundly. He spoke in a low, threatening tone, with his chin and chest thrust forward and finger stabbing the air. It was only when the local police arrived and had a quiet word with him that he eventually gave way.
The Ministry men drove their lorry onto our field and started to unload its contents.
Dad baulked at the sight of their guns. He walked up to the man who had served him with the paperwork and wrested the weapon from his grasp.
“If they’re to be killed, then it’ll be by my hand,” I heard him say.
“Why do they want to kill them, Mum?” I asked. “There’s nothing wrong with our sheep.”
Mum ushered me indoors, so I was spared most of what followed. Dad somehow persuaded the men to let him do the slaughtering. They stood back and watched him shoot each one methodically, almost mechanically, with a single silent bolt through the brain.
I peeped through a gap in the curtains and saw him carry each body and place it carefully in the centre of the field. He snarled at anyone who tried to help or hinder him. It took him all day and I could almost feel the strain across his shoulders as he refused to slacken pace or stoop to dragging their dead weight.
Each animal was accorded the full care of its shepherd, until the flock bleated no more.
He couldn’t bring himself to burn them and finally walked away from the pyre as evening fell. Men with day-glo stripes stood like glowing skeletons as the flames and smoke rose at his back.
Mum met him at the door, but he couldn’t meet her eyes. He snatched up his fiddle, but didn’t tuck it under his chin. Instead, he smashed it hard against the cottage wall.
Mum tried to stay his hand, but he swung it again and again – until it was only splinters hanging together by its strings – then thrust it in the hearth to burn as the sheep burned.

The young man set up his cello for him and Dad played ‘Amazing Grace’.
To say ‘there wasn’t a dry eye in the house’ would be a lie. Every eye stayed resolutely dry. But we all gave up trying to sing the words and allowed the pure eloquence of the music to express how we felt.
Old Ned cleared his throat. That was as demonstrative as anybody got.
The final notes circled the nave and alighted into the spire, like doves ascending in sunlight. Then there was silence, as absolute as the electric stillness preceding a summer storm.
Dad nodded at the congregation, acknowledging non-existent applause.
The vicar had asked if I wanted to speak the eulogy. But I couldn’t think of anything adequate to say. Children find it difficult to imagine their parents had a past and that there will be a future without them.

Shortly after the compensation money was paid, a large packing case was delivered to the farm. Dad jemmied it open and carefully unpacked the contents.
It was a cello. Gleaming honey gold and walnut brown, it stood as heavy and impressive as a piece of antique furniture.
Dad put on his Sunday best suit, with a high-necked shirt and thin garrotte of tie, then brought a wooden chair from the parlour and sat out in the open field, cello between his legs.
“What have you done?” demanded Mum.
“What I should’ve done twenty year ago,” he replied as he tuned the strings, plucking them like a double bass in an avant garde jazz rhythm.
He pulled a bow across its face. It made a plaintive sound, which he slowly bent into a melody. The notes flew, slow and dark, lugubrious as crows above the fields: wheeled and echoed back from distant hills.
Each note gave voice to the sheep buried beneath the tumulus at his feet.
At first, the music sounded like Elgar. Pastoral, but dignified and unromantic. As he grew more confident, he put more passion into his playing, until it almost screeched with manic intensity.
He played on while his fingers bled. Played on, even when Mum beseeched him to stop.

Old Ned clapped his hand on my back.
“Don’t think too harshly of your Da’. Happen he’s found a bit o’ happiness in his head, like.”
“It’s that damn cello.” I almost choked on the word. “He could have got the farm going again. Or he could have paid for me to go to Uni, if he wanted to break the chain. Mum wouldn’t have…”
Dad’s young man was approaching, so I bit down on my bitterness.
“I’m going to take your father back, now. I’m sorry. You know he doesn’t understand, don’t you?”
He offered a weak smile and an even weaker handshake. I accepted them both with bad grace.
He tucked Dad in the passenger seat of his car and drove away. I raised my hand in a half-wave. Due to his dark glasses, I couldn’t tell if Dad looked at me. He certainly didn’t wave back.
Old Ned gave me a stone from Mum’s grave. It was time to start building a new cairn. To bury my own devils.