Lambing

The pancake race was at four o’clock on Shrove Tuesday, on the green, from the war memorial to the churchyard gate, which was about two hundred yards, and you ran it with a frying pan with a pancake in it, and you had to toss the pancake three times on the way, once at the start and once at the bridge and once at the finish, and if you dropped it you had to go back and pick it up and put it back in the pan and toss it again, and the first person over the line with a pancake in the pan won.

“Who won last year?” said Frederick.

“Mum,” said Jack.

“And the year before?”

“Mum.”

“How long has she been winning?”

Jack thought about it. “Since 2014,” he said. “Before that it was Nan. Nan won it every year from 1958 to 1989.” He looked across the green at the churchyard wall, where Mrs Haverfield was sitting, as always, with Ernest, watching the competitors assemble with an expression of profound professional scepticism. “She’d still be winning it if she could run.”

“Why did she stop?”

“She was sixty,” said Jack, as though it were obvious.

---

There were twenty-two runners. There were Sue Fennell, in an apron, with a cast-iron pan she had used in every race since 2014 and would not let anybody else touch. There were Gaz and Little Rob, who had entered every year since they were sixteen and had never finished, and had a rivalry about it. There were four of the Americans, Lucía and Devon and Inés and Theo, Theo with a frying pan borrowed from the school kitchens that was the size of a dustbin lid. There was the vicar, the Reverend Alan Prothero, in a cassock tucked into his belt, who said that he had run a pancake race in a desert in 2009 with a mess tin and won it. There was Mr Purvis, ninety, with a walking frame, who had entered every year since 1946 and finished every year, last, at a walk, to the loudest cheer of the afternoon.

And there was Frederick, with a frying pan from the New Inn kitchen, which Sue had lent him, with an expression of a general lending a cannon to an enemy.

“You’ll drop it,” said Sue.

“Probably.”

“At the bridge. Everybody drops it at the bridge. The wind comes down the river and takes it.” She looked at his pan. “If it goes in the river you’re out.”

“Has it ever gone in the river?”

Sue Fennell looked at him for a long moment with her arms folded.

“Once,” she said. “In 1971. Nan’s sister. She went in after it.” She turned away. “We don’t talk about it.”

The pancakes were made by Bridget.

She had flown back to New Westminster after New Year and had come back, for a week, on her own, without being asked, because, she said, she had heard from Sue Fennell on the telephone that there was going to be a pancake race and that the pancakes for it had always been made by the New Inn, and she had seen what the New Inn did to a pancake at Christmas, and she was not having it. She had made twenty-two of them in the New Inn kitchen that morning, one for each runner, thin and gold and exactly the size of the pans, and had brought them out on a plate and put one in each pan herself, with a spatula, without a word, and when she got to Frederick’s she had put it in and looked at it and then at him.

“Don’t drop it,” said Bridget.

---

The vicar started it with a whistle.

Twenty-two people tossed twenty-two pancakes at the war memorial at once, and nineteen of them came down in the pans, and three did not, and Gaz’s went over his shoulder and landed on Little Rob’s head, and Little Rob stood there with a pancake on his head like a beret and said, slowly, Gary, and the whole green roared, and they were off.

He ran.

He ran across the green with the frying pan held out in front of him with both hands, the way you would carry a tray of drinks through a crowded room, with the pancake in it, gold, lying there quite calmly, and he did not look at the pancake, because he thought that if he looked at it he would drop it, and he did not look at the ground, because the ground was not going anywhere, and he looked at the bridge.

At the bridge the wind came down the river.

It came down off the hill and along the water and across the bridge, a hard sudden gust, cold, and he tossed the pancake, because you had to toss it at the bridge, and the wind took it.

It went up out of the pan and over the parapet of the bridge, turning over and over in the air like a coin, gold, above the river, and every single person on the green stopped running to watch it, and on the churchyard wall Mrs Haverfield stood up.

He did not decide to do it. He went up onto the parapet of the bridge on one knee with the frying pan held out at the full length of his arm over the water, and the pancake came down, turning, out over the river, and he leaned, further, and the pancake landed, with a soft wet sound, in the very edge of the pan, half on and half off, and hung there.

He did not move.

The pancake hung over the edge of the pan over the river with the wind tugging at it.

Then, very slowly, he tilted the pan back, an inch, two inches, and the pancake slid down off the edge into the middle of it, and lay there, gold, quite calm, as though nothing had happened at all.

On the churchyard wall, Mrs Haverfield sat down.

He got off the parapet. He ran. He had lost about eight seconds. He did not know where anybody else was. He ran across the last of the green toward the churchyard gate with the pancake in the pan, and somewhere behind him he could hear somebody’s feet, fast, on the grass, and Sue Fennell’s voice saying something that the vicar, as an ordained minister, would later decline to repeat, and he got to the churchyard gate and tossed the pancake for the third time, straight up, as high as it would go, and it came down in the pan.

He crossed the line.

---

He had cut his thumb. He did not know when. Probably on the parapet. There was a small cut on the side of his left thumb, perhaps a quarter of an inch, and it had bled a little, and he had not noticed until he stood at the churchyard gate with the pan in his hand and the whole of Coln Saint Aldwyns cheering and Mrs Haverfield on the wall looking at him with an expression he had never seen on her face before, and looked down, and saw it.

Theo was there.

Theo had not finished the race. Theo had dropped his pancake at the start, in the dustbin-lid pan, and then dropped it again at the bridge, and then abandoned the race entirely and come across the green at a run with the green St John Ambulance bag that he had brought, Frederick later found out, just in case, and now he was in front of Frederick at the churchyard gate, on his knees, with his blue gloves on.

“Hold still,” said Theo.

“It’s a scratch.”

“It’s a cut. Hold still.” Theo cleaned it with a wipe. It stung. “You were on the parapet.”

“The pancake was going in the river.”

“You were on the parapet, Freddie, over the river, on one knee, with your arm out, in the wind.” Theo dried the cut, very carefully, with a square of gauze. “If you’d gone in, I’d have had to go in after you. And Castellanos would have gone in after me. And Kimura would have gone in after him. And it would have been in the paper.” He put a plaster on it, a small one, perfectly straight. “Don’t do it again.”

“It’s a plaster on a scratch, Theo.”

“It’s a plaster on the King,” said Theo, and stood up, and took off his gloves, and looked at the plaster on Frederick’s thumb with great satisfaction, as at a job well done. “Somebody’s got to.”

Behind him, at a distance, Sue Fennell had crossed the line second, with her cast-iron pan, and was standing with her hands on her knees, breathing hard, looking at Frederick.

She straightened up.

She walked over. The green went quiet.

She looked at him for a long time with her apron on and her pan in her hand.

“Sixteen years,” said Sue Fennell.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.” She looked at the pan in his hand, the New Inn’s pan, which she had lent him. “You won it with my pan.” She shook her head slowly. “You went up on the parapet like Nan’s sister in 1971 and you didn’t go in.” She held out her hand.

He shook it.

“Next year,” said Sue Fennell, “you’ll not be here, and I’ll win it.” She let go. “And the year after. And the year after that.” She turned away toward the pub. And then, over her shoulder, in a different voice: “That was the best pancake race I’ve ever lost.”

---

Harold Quayle’s column on Thursday said:

WHERE IS THE KING? On Tuesday the King was on a bridge in Gloucestershire, on one knee, on the parapet, over a river, holding a frying pan, catching a pancake.

Your correspondent did not make this up. Your correspondent has a photograph. It was taken by a man called Gary on a telephone from about forty feet away while a second pancake was falling on the head of a man called Rob. The photograph is blurred. It is nonetheless clearly the King. It is nonetheless clearly a pancake.

He won.

Your correspondent has been told by the Household, in terms of the most perfect courtesy, that the King’s participation in a village pancake race in Gloucestershire on Shrove Tuesday is a private matter. Your correspondent agrees. Your correspondent would merely observe that in thirty-four years of covering the Crown he has never once seen a King win anything except an election he was not standing in, and he would like the Realm to know that this one has won a race. With a frying pan. On a bridge.

Where is the King? On a parapet, in the wind, not falling in. Your correspondent finds that he is, for the first time in his career, very slightly proud.

---

The Ellises cleaned for a week.

Will reported it at supper every evening like a war correspondent.

“Monday,” said Will, “Dad did the kitchen. The whole kitchen. He moved the dresser. Nobody’s moved the dresser since 1987. There was a shoe behind it.” He ate a potato. “Tuesday he did the yard. He hosed the yard. You can’t hose a farmyard, it’s a farmyard, it just gets wet. Wednesday he painted the gate.”

“He painted the gate?”

“Green. It was green already. He painted it greener.” Will put down his fork. “Thursday he cleaned the dog.”

“Nell?”

“Nell,” said Will darkly. “She’s not spoken to him since.”

“He doesn’t need to clean anything. I’m coming to help with the lambing. It’s a shed.”

“I know it’s a shed. I told him it’s a shed. I said, Dad, he’s going to be in the lambing shed at two in the morning with his arm up a ewe, he is not going to look at the dresser.” Will picked up his fork again. “And Dad said, he might.”

---

He went up on the Friday night, the seventh of March, at ten o’clock, in the dark, with Will, in the Land Rover, up the steep lane from the valley to the top of the hill where the farm was, with Castellanos following in the dark car, and Kimura in the passenger seat of the dark car with a flask.

The farmhouse was lit in every window. Mr Ellis met them in the yard, which was wet, because it had been hosed, under the light over the back door, in a jumper and a pair of overalls and wellingtons, and Mrs Ellis was behind him in the doorway, a small quick dark woman whom Frederick had met once at a match and who had looked at him then with the same expression with which Sue Fennell checked a delivery against an invoice.

“You’ll want tea,” said Mrs Ellis.

“Thank you.”

“Then you’ll want the shed.”

“Yes, please.”

“The kitchen’s clean,” said Mr Ellis, anxiously, behind her. “We cleaned it.”

Mrs Ellis looked at her husband.

“Robert,” she said, “go and see to the ewes.”

---

The lambing shed was a long low barn at the end of the yard with a corrugated roof and walls of stone at the bottom and timber at the top, and inside it was divided into pens with hurdles, dozens of them, small square pens down both sides with a ewe in each one, and a deep layer of straw on the floor of every pen, and a light hanging from the beam over each row, and a smell of straw and wool and sheep and something else, sweet and heavy and warm, that Will said was birth, and that Frederick would never afterwards be able to describe to anybody.

It was warm. That was the surprising thing. Outside it was March and cold and dark, with the wind coming over the top of the hill from the west. Inside, with two hundred ewes in it breathing, it was warm as a kitchen.

Some of the pens had lambs in them already. Small, white, wet, impossibly thin-legged, standing under their mothers with their tails going like propellers, or lying in the straw in heaps, asleep. Some of the ewes were lying on their sides, breathing hard. Some were standing in the corners of their pens, pawing at the straw, and looking at nothing, with an expression that Frederick recognised, from somewhere, and could not place, until Will said, that one’s close, and he realised it was the expression of somebody waiting for a telephone to ring.

They sat on a bale at the end of the row, he and Will, and watched.

“What do we do?” said Frederick.

“Nothing,” said Will. “Mostly. They know how to do it. They’ve been doing it for ten thousand years. You just watch.” He leaned back against the hurdle. “You only do something if something goes wrong.”

“How often does something go wrong?”

“About one in ten,” said Will. “Dad says one in twelve. Mum says one in eight.” He looked down the row. “That’s why we sit up.”

---

Something went wrong at ten past one.

It was a ewe in a pen halfway down the left-hand row, a big grey one with a black face, and she had been lying on her side for an hour and pushing and nothing had happened, and Will had been watching her for twenty minutes without saying anything, and at ten past one he got up off the bale.

“Right,” he said. “She’s stuck.”

Mr Ellis was at the far end of the shed with another ewe, one that had had twins and was refusing to look at the second one. Mrs Ellis was in the house. Will looked down the shed at his father, and then at the ewe, and then at Frederick.

“I’ll need you,” said Will.

“What do I do?”

“You hold her head,” said Will. “Kneel down. By her head. Put your hand on her neck. Keep her still. Talk to her.” He was taking his jumper off, and rolling his sleeve up past the elbow, and reaching for a bottle of something on the shelf by the pen. “She’ll kick. Don’t let go.”

Frederick knelt down in the straw by the ewe’s head and put his hand on her neck.

It was very warm. Her wool was coarse and thick and slightly greasy and his hand went into it to the knuckle. Under the wool he could feel her pulse, very fast, and her breath going in and out in long shuddering pushes. She rolled her eye at him, yellow, with a strange flat oblong pupil, like a letterbox, and he looked back at her.

“Talk to her,” said Will, from the other end.

“What do I say?”

“Anything. She doesn’t speak English. She just wants to hear somebody.”

He talked to her.

He did not know what he said. He said it in Swedish, at first, without deciding to, because it was the language his mother had talked to him in when he was frightened and very small, and then in English, and then, for some reason, in Morag’s voice, and then in Mr Pryce’s, and somewhere in the middle of it he realised he was telling her about the Speech from the Throne, the whole of it, the economy and the railway to the north and the Concord station, in a low voice, steadily, with his hand on her neck in the straw, and that she had stopped rolling her eye, and was looking at him, and breathing.

At the other end Will had his arm in the ewe to the elbow.

“Leg’s back,” said Will, through his teeth, to nobody. “One leg’s back. It’s trying to come out with one leg back and it can’t.” He shifted. “I’ve got to push it back in and find the other leg and bring it forward and my arm’s too big, my hand’s too big, I can’t get.” He stopped. He looked up the length of the ewe at Frederick, kneeling by her head in the straw. “Your hands are smaller.”

“What?”

“Your hands. They’re smaller than mine. Longer. Thinner.” Will was breathing hard. “Dad’s are bigger than mine. I can’t get it. You can. Swap.”

“I don’t know how.”

“I’ll tell you how,” said Will. “Swap. Now. Now, Fred.”

---

He did it.

He did not think about it, afterwards, as a thing he had done. He thought about it as a thing that had happened while he was there, the way the kiss behind the bonfire had happened, the way the pancake had landed. He swapped with Will. He took off his jumper. Will poured the stuff from the bottle over his hand and his arm to the elbow, cold and slippery. He knelt in the straw behind the ewe. And Will knelt by her head, with his hand on her neck, talking to her in a low voice about the price of feed, and said, in.

He put his hand in.

It was hot. That was the thing he remembered. Hot and tight and wet and enormous and alive, and the whole of it pushing against his hand in long slow waves, and he could not see anything, and Will said feel for the head, and he felt, and there was something, smooth and hard and the size of an orange, and Will said that’s the head, go past it, down, you’ll feel a leg, and he went past it, down, and there was a leg, thin as a pencil, with a tiny hard hoof at the end of it, folded, and Will said that’s the one that’s out, the other one’s back, go along the shoulder, the other side, and he went along the shoulder, the other side, past the head, in the hot dark, and his arm was in to the elbow now, and there.

A leg. Folded back. Tucked under. The hoof pointing the wrong way.

“Got it,” he said.

“Cup the hoof,” said Will. “In your hand. So it doesn’t tear her. And bring it forward. Slowly. Wait for her to stop pushing, then bring it.”

He waited. The ewe pushed. He felt the whole of her close round his arm like a fist. Then she stopped.

He cupped the tiny hoof in his palm and brought it forward.

It came. It came round, and forward, and straightened, and was beside the other one, two legs together, and Will said yes, that’s it, that’s it, now hold them, both, and when she pushes, pull, down, toward her hocks, not straight, down, and the ewe pushed, and he pulled, down, toward her hocks, gently, with both legs held together in his hand, and the ewe made a noise he had never heard any living thing make, and something gave, and all at once, in a rush, on a wave of heat and wet, the lamb came out into the straw.

It lay there.

It did not move. It lay in the straw in a wet yellow heap, legs everywhere, with a film over its face, and did not breathe, and Frederick knelt behind the ewe with his arm wet to the shoulder and looked at it.

“Clear its nose,” said Will, very fast. “Its nose. Get the stuff off its nose. With your fingers.”

He cleared its nose. He wiped the film off its face with his fingers, off its nose and its mouth, and it lay there, and did not move.

“Pick it up,” said Will. “By the back legs. Swing it. Not hard. Like a.”

He picked it up by the back legs. He swung it, once, gently, the way Will showed him with his hands, and laid it down in the straw, and it lay there.

Then it sneezed.

It sneezed. A tiny wet absurd sound, like somebody saying tsch. And then it shook its head, and its ears flapped, and it opened its mouth and said something, high and thin and outraged, a sound like a gate that needs oiling, and lifted its head out of the straw on a neck as thin as a wrist, and looked at him.

At the other end of the ewe, Will let out his breath all at once and sat back on his heels in the straw and put both hands over his face.

The ewe turned her head round, the whole length of her neck, past Will, and looked at her lamb in the straw, and made a low deep noise in her throat, a sound Frederick had never heard and knew at once, and began to lick it.

He knelt in the straw with his arm wet to the shoulder.

He could not say anything at all. He did not try.

From the far end of the shed, Mr Ellis said, quite quietly, “That’s a tup lamb.” He had come down the row at some point without anybody hearing and was standing at the end of the pen in his overalls looking down at the lamb and the ewe and his son and the King of Great Britain kneeling in the straw, and his face was not anxious at all. “A good one.” He looked at Frederick. “Well done, lad.”

He did not go red this time when he said lad. He did not seem to notice he had said it.

---

At two o’clock in the morning the shed door opened and let the cold in, and Jack Fennell came through it with a flask in one hand and a paper bag in the other and his hat pulled down over his ears, and stopped just inside, and looked down the row.

Frederick was sitting on a bale at the end of the row with his back against the hurdle and a blanket round his shoulders, which Mrs Ellis had brought, and a mug of tea, which Mrs Ellis had also brought, and his sleeves still rolled up, watching the ewe in the pen halfway down lick a lamb that was now standing, on four legs, very badly, like a deckchair being opened by somebody who did not understand deckchairs.

Jack came down the row.

“Mum sent soup,” he said. He held up the flask. “And Bridget sent.” He looked in the paper bag. “Something. I don’t know what it is. She said give him this and I didn’t ask.” He looked at Frederick. “You’ve got sheep on you.”

“I pulled a lamb.”

Jack stopped.

“You what?”

“I pulled a lamb.” Frederick nodded down the row. “That one. The one falling over. Will’s hands were too big. Mine weren’t.”

Jack looked down the row at the lamb in the pen, standing on its four bad legs under its mother, falling over, getting up, falling over again, with its tail going like a propeller. He looked at Frederick on the bale with the blanket round him and his arm still streaked to the elbow with something nobody wanted to think about.

He sat down on the bale.

He did not say anything. He unscrewed the top of the flask, and poured soup into the cup that was the lid, and held it out, and Frederick took it, and drank it. It was leek and potato. It was very hot. He held it in both hands.

At the far end of the shed Mr Ellis had gone back to the ewe with the twins. Will had gone into the house to wash. The shed was quiet except for two hundred ewes breathing and the wind over the top of the hill and the lamb in the pen halfway down, saying, at intervals, its one outraged word.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” said Frederick.

“I know.”

“Will didn’t ask you.”

“I know he didn’t.” Jack looked at the lamb. “I heard you were coming up. Gaz heard from Little Rob who heard from his mum who does the Ellises’ books. So I knew.” He pulled his hat down further. “And I thought, he’s going to be up there all night in a shed. In the cold. And he’s never been in a shed in his life. And nobody’s going to bring him any soup.” He looked at the flask. “So.”

“Mrs Ellis brought tea.”

“Tea’s not soup.”

Frederick drank the soup.

Jack sat beside him on the bale in the warm shed at two in the morning with his shoulder against Frederick’s shoulder under the blanket, and watched the lamb fall over, and get up, and fall over, and did not say anything for a long time. It was the longest Frederick had ever known him to be quiet. It was longer than Ready Token. It was longer than the bonfire.

“What’s it like?” said Jack at last.

“What?”

“Pulling a lamb. I’ve never done it. I’ve lived in this valley my whole life and I’ve never done it. Will’s done it since he was six.” He looked at the lamb. “What’s it like?”

Frederick thought about it.

He thought about the hot dark and the tiny folded hoof in his palm and the waiting, and then the bringing forward, slowly, and the rush, and the lamb lying in the straw not breathing, and then the sneeze.

“It’s like the Speech,” he said.

Jack turned his head.

“The Speech from the Throne. In the Lords. In November.” Frederick looked at the soup. “You’re in this enormous thing that’s much older than you and much bigger than you and you can’t see anything and you don’t know what you’re doing and everybody’s waiting. And you just have to find the one small thing that’s the wrong way round and put it the right way round. Slowly. And then wait for it to push.”

Jack looked at him for a long time.

“That’s the daftest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said.

“I know.”

“That’s the daftest thing anyone’s ever said to me in my life,” said Jack, and put his head on Frederick’s shoulder, under the blanket, on the bale, in the lambing shed, and closed his eyes. “Tell me about the Speech, then,” he said. “From the beginning. You told the ewe. Will said. Through the door. You told her the whole thing in four accents.” He settled. “Tell me.”

So he told him.

In the paper bag from Bridget, when he opened it at four, there were two pancakes, cold, rolled, with sugar and lemon on them, wrapped in greaseproof paper, and on the paper, in Bridget’s square hand, in pencil: FOR THE PARAPET.