The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,42
special sweet was made from this very rich milk and sent by the cow’s owner to friends and relations, sent in very small portions, like a consecrated offering from a religious rite.
Our few cows (perhaps like Gray’s or Goldsmith’s herds) were poor things compared with the healthy, big animals on the downs. But these animals on the downs, even with their beauty, were without the sanctity, the constant attention of men, which as a child I thought cows craved. These cows in railed pastures or meadows had numbers scored into their rumps. No sanctity at birth, and none at death; just the covered van. And sometimes, as once in the derelict, mossy yard at the back of Jack’s cottage, there were reminders of assisted insemination or gestation going wrong: when for some days, isolated from the animals that had all come out well, oddly made cattle were penned up there, with that extra bit of flesh and hair (with the black and white Frisian pattern) hanging down their middle, as of cow material that had leaked through the two halves of the cow mold.
And now, with the disappearance of the cattle, there came to the old and new lanes and ways of the downs around the farm (whose life might have seemed to the visitor unchanging and ritualized) a moment of stasis, suspense. There had been great activity; now there were more ruins than ever.
The manor in whose grounds I lived, so many of its rooms shut up; the gardens of the manor, the forested orchard; the children’s house there, with the conical thatched roof, the thatch rotting, the thick stack of the damp reeds slipping out of the wire netting in one place, creating the effect at the bottom of a diagonal slicing of the reeds; the squash court that was not squash court or farmhouse; the old granary with the double pyramidal roof.
Beyond the renovated church, the old farm buildings had been taken down and replaced by the prefabricated shed, which was now empty; with the round convex silver mirrors at the entrance to the cow yard as reminders of the traffic that had once been. The pink house with the green-stained thatched roof and the shredding straw pheasant on the roof; its garden now a piece of waste ground. The new barn and the new half-slatted cow shed at the top of the hill with the windbreak of pine and beech, trees which had grown so much since I had first seen them. At the bottom of that hill, the silage pit with the thick timber-plank walls against the excavated hillside, the timber planks stained with creosote; the tires all around, bought in such number from people who dealt in such things, tires worn smooth from many miles on many roads; and the rubble of the excavation, hummocked and chalky white and full of grass and weeds.
And these were set among older ruins. The small old farm building, perhaps from the last century, far to the right at the end of the overgrown track at the foot of the hill; and all the many farm buildings, old or very old, at the back of Jack’s cottage. Along the droveway: the beehives; the house-shaped old rick; the old stone house, ruined walls alone, surrounded by trees which, tall and overhanging the ruin when I had first seen them, were now ten years older: vegetable nature moving on, stone immovable.
And in the walk in the other direction, away from the old Land-Rover run of the old manager: the great Swiss rolls of hay still stacked in the space between the wood—how grown!—and the hill of larks, with the ancient barrows at the top, part of the pimpling of the downs as seen against the sky: those rolls of hay now as black and as earthlike as the older bales that, at the other end of the droveway, had indeed, below their tattered plastic sheeting, turned to earth. Grass to hay to earth.
MY OWN time here was coming to an end, my time in the manor cottage and in that particular part of the valley, my second childhood of seeing and learning, my second life, so far away from my first.
I had tried almost from the beginning to make myself ready for this end. After the glory and surprise of the first spring on the riverbanks—the new reeds, the water clearing to crystal (“freshing out,” as I learned to say), but this water green and dark with olive-blue suggestions and