Rural rhythms

The closure of a local business reverberates

The last week of August, 2023

The cherry tree opposite our kitchen window keeps good time. While my hands are in the suds I can watch birds pecking suet in frozen branches, spring blossom blaring, or mischievous rustlings in heavy summer foliage. Right now, a single scarlet leaf trumpets change.

I keep a perpetual diary where I note weather patterns, moon cycles, garden failures and successes, and I can look back across the years to see that our cherry is working reassuringly to schedule. I nurture the idea that deep below the current stramash of global politics, economics, and nonsense we call progress, a resonant heart beats like an unhurried grandfather clock.

Seasonality may now be a quaint idea, but I believe there is still a time for everything and a shape to life that is not the spear-like trajectory we seem to favour. Our turning cherry is the signal to clear and stack the woodshed, to prepare the Rayburn for constant work ahead, and have the chimneys swept. I hear the call to return inwards, but not quite yet. The air is still warm and rowan berries are just turning. The first brood of swallows perform acrobatics against the evening sky. But invincible summer begins to look a little overstretched and messy around the edges, so I set to trimming and clearing, re-creating light, space and structure.

A seductive sense of productivity builds while I garden and I ignore my body’s requests to pause for tea and a biscuit. I end up getting tired and grumpy while taking on more unnecessary tasks, perhaps seeking the virtue of one more achievement. This week, at the end of a long day, I found myself raking the gravel around the house which is caked in swallow shit. I pushed myself and my long suffering soil rake too hard, and the latter finally snapped with misuse. Just a week ago I could have taken it to be fixed quickly at our local one-stop agricultural shop, but having just learned of their sudden closure I knew I’d have to buy a whole new rake. 

Hearing that John D. Falla and Son Ltd. (more commonly just ‘Falla’s’) had closed was like hitting an unseen pothole in the road. For as long as I can remember, it has been the first port of call for farmers and land workers, small-holders and gardeners such as myself. In this ‘middle-of-nowhere’ that we call home, Falla’s was somewhere where missing nuts and bolts were found, broken shafts and plates welded, lawn mowers serviced and scythes sharpened. When the local pub ceased being oriented to locals, you could still hear the frank and economical dispensing of local news while settling accounts at Falla’s. I learned as much from overhearing conversations as I did from perusing the racks of lubricants, hoof cleaning tools and safety gear; the intimate details of farming life laid bare.

As a customer of slighter than average stature, I would meet the eyes of stockier clients trying to hide their surprise at my presence. But never was I made to feel unwelcome even though I had no livestock or heavy machinery to wheel into the yard. Once, I only needed a single hinge and was taken into the back store room where an assistant patiently searched through towering shelves of neatly contained nuts, bolts and screws, all available singly or in bulk.

I regret only once having reason to go through the giant sliding doors into the welding barn where the welder was creating a falconry cage for a nearby estate. And I only passed through the office a few times, where a single person sat behind perspex and dummies displaying workwear turned gently above serviced garden machinery waiting for collection. I knew the central barn best, with its gas heaters blasting impotently throughout the winter, and rain finding its way around the edges of the tin roof in summer. Mid morning, there would be the sweet smoky smell of bacon rolls being made, and the comfortingly banal background noise of Radio 2.

It is sad to think of those ramshackle buildings laying quiet. In urban places the currents of change are swift and strong, a constant process of renewal that keeps a cityscape alive. But rural spaces are reinvented with more hesitance, particularly now as uncertainty grows about the viability of productive life here. 

Everything that Falla sold - though not everything it provided - can be ordered online. It is likely that the buildings will remain empty until they are converted into housing, detaching Bonchester Bridge from the rhythms of the farming life that surrounds it.