‘Can I go now?’ said the farmer I was talking to over my gate, and he looked so scared I felt a bit ashamed of myself.
I had flagged him down as he went by in his rickety blue tractor that’s so old it looks like Noah used it to load hay onto the Ark. I told him I hadn’t seen him for a while. He usually waves or comes in for a chat. He has been our favourite neighbour since we moved to West Cork.
As he owns the land above us where our water well is situated, that’s all to the good. We went out of our way to befriend him from the get-go, but after deluging him in home-baked fruitcakes and offers of dinner, for he lives alone, we realised he was our sort of person anyway.
Getting chatting to him on the drive one day, after he brought us some haylage he had left over, we discovered he was a fellow conspiracy theorist.
He’s the only anti-vaxxer in the village apart from us, and we don’t really count because we’re blow-ins. Ireland has one of the highest vaccination rates in Europe, sothe builder boyfriend and I kept our big mouths shut when we came here and didn’t let on to anyone that we were lunatic antis.
But then this neighbouring cattle farmer who owns our water supply came round one day and we got chatting, and lo and behold it transpired that he was as loopy as we are.
He didn’t care who knew it either. He held forth on Big Pharma, denounced the EU, voiced support for Trump, then started on about how weather engineering was purposefully ruining all the crops to starve us to death – which is where the conspiracy theorists lose me, but I nodded along. He does own our water.
We hit it off a treat. We were on such good terms that I used to fret about how moist my fruitcakes were before I sent the builder boyfriend down to his house with them. If the BB knocked on the door and didn’t get an answer, I’d bake a fresh one a few days later rather than risk the cake drying out a bit. I’d send a dozen mince pies at Christmas, and open invites to Christmas dinner and Boxing Day lunch. ‘Heads up, Melissa,’ said a po-faced English neighbour when I told her, ‘they don’t call it Boxing Day here. It’s St Stephen’s Day.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ve invited him to that as well.’ And when I told him he roared with laughter.
Oh yes, we were on terrific terms with this cattle farmer, and then all of a sudden he stopped coming by our house. We hadn’t seen him for the best part of a year when I flagged him down. And he was weirdly edgy as he got out of his tractor and asked me how things were going.
I said I needed to roll my fields, expecting him to say he would do it for us. But he shifted nervously and said he didn’t have a roller. Then he said: ‘The man with the roller round here is him…’ He gestured down the road to where the farmer opposite me lives. ‘And he won’t lend it to you.’ And he made a face. Oh, I see, I thought.
I’ve been fighting the farmer opposite because he built a house for his son on his land almost as close as could be to my house without putting the planning notice up properly. Well, we suspect the council put it up, it was photographed, then taken down. So I never got the chance to object, or ask for mitigations to the plans. The notice finally went up for all to see on a brand-new peeled post on the day they started building, and when I called Cork council they said the notice had been up for months. ‘I get it,’ I said. ‘I get exactly what’s going on here.’
He’s got friends in places where they can help him, and I can just shut my trap.
So he built this house hard into the side of a steep hill, against the advice of the engineer who had to write a report warning it would flood, for whatever that was worth, and he connected the run-off from the site into the drain under the road which goes into the ditch by the side of my land. And he drained an entire hillside into this ditch, which obviously then burst its banks and permanently flooded our best dry field, and the only one that’s even vaguely flat, making it too wet to put the mares into and leaving me no option but to turn Darcy and pony out onto the long driveway where they eat down the grassy verges when I’m not expecting B&B guests.
I’m not an unrealistic person. I know no help is coming. But I’m not the type to lie down. I’m going to make things as difficult as I can for this neighbour and the council – and to anyone who says I have to be quiet because of colonialist guilt, I say I don’t have any.
To anyone who says I have to be quiet because of colonialist guilt, I say I don’t have any
I didn’t cause the British to oppress anyone. Half my relatives are Italian and the other half are descended from gypsies. I refuse to be tangentially blamed for anything to do with the Empire just because I’m a UK passport-holder living in Ireland, and I’m not apologising to anyone for not wanting my field flooded.
I don’t think I deserve whatever I get, as the English blow-ins are meant to. Plenty of my relatives came down hungry and poor off a hillside in the Abruzzo, fled to England and got put in internment camps during the war.
But the farmer who used to like us has to side with his Irish friend. Of course he does.
He hopped from one foot to the other, looking sideways to see if his friend over the road could see him talking to me and then, as the panic mounted, and he looked fit to wet himself, he said: ‘Can I go now?’
I did feel guilty then for a second, because I realised I had reduced a grown man almost to tears. It was a sad state for a proud non-conformist to get into, poor chap. ‘Yes, yes, you can go, before he sees you talking to me,’ I said.
He pretended he didn’t hear that above the noise of his old tractor as he turned it around and drove back down the lane to his friend’s house, where he pulled up, presumably to offer his sincere apologies for fraternising with an agent of imperialism.
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