Rachel Wolcott, Fact & Fiction

WAG 25 Crimes and Misdemeanors

Sheriff Kendra is already dealing with too many crimes, so this week, I’m going to put my mind to another storyline lingering in the back of my mind. I don’t know if there is a crime here, but there certainly is a kind of crime scene and a minor misdemeanor. [more about WAG here.]
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This kitchen. She spent almost her entire childhood in this room. Eating all her meals at the table, the family didn’t have a dining room, watching her mother cook or do the washing up. When she was old enough, she helped too, peeling potatoes and carrots, making cups of tea, doing chores for her mother. She loved making cakes for Sunday lunch and had mastered the Victoria sponge by the time she started primary school. The same curtains, speckled with tiny red flowers, hung at the window above the sink and on the side of the cupboard where the mugs lived, was the corn dolly her mother had pinned there 25 years ago. Bought at the Tendring Country Show from another farmer’s wife, it kept them safe, brought them a gentle prosperity. Her mother kept the radio on Classic FM these days, loved the Flower Duet and Bryn Terfyl. She’s almost in tears when he sings Shenandoah. These are the sounds Jenny hears the kitchen, the music comes out of the oven, the taps and rises into the rafters with the kettle’s steam.

Two steps beyond the kitchen door what was a small patch of lawn has been churned into thick mud by tractors and lorries crossing the yard. Sunday afternoon there was a break in the weather and in the sunshine and a convoy of lorries arrived and men wearing white coveralls and face masks, enormous black Wellington boots. They loaded the dairy herd, 109 Jerseys lowing and struggling up the muddy ramps. Each lorry was sprayed down with disinfectant before leaving the farm. Her father, now 67, watched them roll into the lane, turning left towards St Osyth to an abattoir within the infection zone where the herd would be slaughtered and incinerated.

Foot and mouth had been confirmed two farms away on a Tuesday and the January gales off the North Sea pushed it across the fields, hopping from blade of grass to flinty pebble then onto a stray leaf, which landed in the milking parlor. But Rookery Farm had been in lock down before the disease landed on the peninsula. They started using the word biosecurity at the breakfast table. Between milkings her father watched the twenty-four hour news channel, watched pyres built from sheep and cattle burn. When her mother told him to turn it off, watch the darts, he sat and shook his head. He picked up the phone and called around to his neighbors, men he’d usually chat to at the Whalebone. They were panicking and waiting for the all clear that wouldn’t come.

Her mother was passive by nature and easily upset. Like many women of her generation she was very much a domestic. Her rounds of cleaning, airing, baking, preparing, scrubbing and mending were ongoing. She sewed up one hole only to find a stray button that needed reattaching. She arranged flowers at the church and prayed for the forgotten. On occasion she had helped with the cows, but preferred her vegetable garden. She was the type of person whose produce was widely discussed by fellow horticulturalists.

When the cows left, Jenny and her mother pulled on their boots and walked through the silent parlor, the empty cowshed. Their mournful stroll ended at the garden. A few Brussels sprouts clung to a thick stalk and the leeks were almost ready to pick. Jenny wasn’t sure if either of her parents had slept much since she’d been home and worried as her mother teetered along in front of her, inspecting the winter crop. Her mother sat herself daintily atop an upturned bucket and pulled her husband’s silver flask from her pocket. She struggled to unscrew the cap, but when she managed it, took a hefty pull before handing it to her daughter. The whisky burned her throat and its vapor rose into her sinuses. She passed it back to her mother who took another two swigs before bursting into tears.