Black Lane Ends
Published in Issue V of Sextet (October 2026)
SMALLHOLDING
..... small ............................... sane, ........................... men
and women .......................... abandoning .........
struggle ................................... accepting ..........
stern discipline ................................
near-forgotten ...............................– The Challenge of Smallholding, 1985
To frost and touch that scratching grey above scrawled trees. Banking high, cloud-scoured and flat, shadowless dawn breaks at a sociable hour. Black-grey sludge of last year’s leaves, ground beneath reluctant tyre. I was born in January. We lived on a smallholding, though it is always called The Farm in our collected remembering. We shared that held-small holding, with another family and each winter, we were cut off from the main road by snow and kept two large freezers stocked for winter drifts. We kept goats and turkeys for cash, with a small flock of heritage breed sheep. An act of amateur roleplay. We left before I was three.
†
LAMBING
.......... ..... ........ ... in his natural position
.... ...... ......... ....... his head ..... .........
.............. giving .............
little trouble, ...................................
withers ..... abnormally .......... ..................... swollen, .......................................................... .................................................................................................................................................. must be pulled; ...................................................
Never neglect .......................................................................................................................................................... absolutely ................... ...................................
or it will be dead.– Lambing Rules, 1915
As they stitched, sutured my mum, post-birth, post-me, they asked:
“Are you doing anything for Burns Night?”
“Tonight? Probably just… this.”Born in January meant lambs soon followed. My mum was kept away from the heavy and labouring ewes until I was born, for fear of miscarriage. I wasn’t born in a barn, but I spent those early months swaddled in hay, nestled in bales whilst my parents pulled still or wriggling sacks from screaming ewes. They were self-taught. Book-learned. One lamb arrived blue and unmoving. Fluid filled its lungs. Remembering a downturned page, my dad took the lamb by its elastic hind legs and made to swing it around his head. The centrifugal force was meant to eject the fluid from its airways. He completed a quarter of a circle, an arc, before braining the lamb against a low beam he’d forgotten. The lamb was killed instantly. Its oxygen-deprived brain open to the air at last, staining the roof truss.
This is one of the few stories recited whenever The Farm comes up in recollection. Ziggy, my sister’s pet goat, butchered and parcelled, when my sister was five. The rows of turkeys hung from the low beams of the kitchen, each row a stage toward the Christmas bounty; bled, plucked, trimmed. The enormous, unkillable turkey, bloated on the wrong feed mix, left to live on that high, moorland sketch of stone and grass.