Of course, his mother was correct. Jackson was only doing what everyone was doing then. A farmer could not afford to be sentimental about land. He learnt that as he learnt to farm. Eventually he would come to grub out more hedges, cut down more trees and fill more ponds than Jackson had, to work every fertile square yard of his soil. It was like she said, it was what a farmer did. He’d been to college and it was what they taught, and it was what you learnt when you bought the machinery that was bigger than the machinery had been before, so that you could work with fewer men and bigger fields. And if you didn’t, well, you couldn’t be competitive, could you? You wouldn’t survive.

Only by that time she had changed her mind. Perhaps he would never do quite right before her. She was watching as he took the farm back, and he was failing her, as if he was doomed to fail before her eyes. Perhaps it would have been better if she had not kept it for him so that he had to follow, looking like his father, in his father’s footsteps, resented by her for being what he was being which was only after all what he was and what his father had been before. Bit by bit, he took the farm back, and though it was what she had been waiting for all these years he had the feeling that she didn’t want it to happen any more. He had begun with the barn, which he needed to put his machinery in. He emptied it of its junk. He rid it of the fantail pigeons that nested in the rafters, put it back how his father would have had it. She had loved the fantails, which had come as a pair and had bred into a flock over the years, ornamental white birds, not wood pigeons, that used to perch exquisitely in the sunlight on the crest of the roof, or coo and strut and display on the ground of the yard. She asked if they couldn’t have stayed. They’re the sort of birds that live in dovecotes, not barns, he said. Look at the shit on the floor. If his father had been around, there wouldn’t have been a single pair of fantails nesting in the barn. But his father hadn’t been around. It was she who had let them colonise the place. We’re a farm, Mum. We’re growing food for people to eat. In this context they’re just a kind of vermin. It hadn’t been his choice to have the farm; it was she who had hung on to it. How could she then not let him farm it as he saw fit?