A Sign

By Mark Rutterford

She was always walking her dog in the bottom field.

I told her, ‘You’ll have to stop walking here when the barley starts to come up.’

‘When’s that then?’ she asked. Adding, with a hint of mischief, ‘I wouldn’t want to get into trouble with you, Tom.’ She laughed and it disarmed me, just as it had since we were at school.

Hannah kept her word when the green shoots of barley appeared but until then, day after day in February and March, she and her black Labrador were a part of that landscape. I don’t think of it as mine, even though it’s my name on the deeds since Mum and Dad retired. I’m just a temporary custodian of these fields, until another generation comes along.

I wasn’t sure that would happen for me. Farming is demanding and the hours are unsociable. It’s always busy, there are always money worries and meeting someone is hard. It takes a lot of love to settle down with a farmer – ironically, we’re not that easy a breed.

Hannah and I had been an item when we were 16, 17. Before I went to agricultural college and she went to University in Manchester. She stayed there for a few years before returning to the village. She’d been back about a year when we had that chat in the barley field. We knew each other from growing up and being in love, from teenage sex to teenage break-up. So, we weren’t shy with each other, nor flirting when we met in the fields, in the village or in the pub. We were mates, or so I thought.

Hannah asked questions I didn’t want to answer.

‘Are you with anyone?’

‘Are you looking for someone?

‘How do you think you’ll meet anyone, here?’

‘When are you going to get a decent haircut?’

‘What are you waiting for?!’

‘Oh, I dunno,’ I said. ‘Maybe I trust in nature. Maybe I’m waiting for nature to give me a sign.’

Hannah frowned and said in all the years of knowing me, that was the single most stupid thing she’d ever heard me say.

‘So, what about you?’ I retaliated. ‘You’re living like an old maid, walking your dog all the time in those skanky old dog walking trousers of yours. You’re fit you know, you should be dating, swiping, snogging.’

She went off on one then.

‘I’m not one of your heifers, you know!’ she said. ‘I’m not waiting for a bull to come along to knock me up or whatever you call it – to service me. And those are my favourite trousers, they have hidden depths and anyway…me and my trousers have got our eye on someone.’

‘Glad to hear it,’ I said. Not meaning it at all.

‘Was there a compliment in there? You know, about being fit?’ she asked.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘But I’m sure you’ll be mounted in no time at all.’ We both laughed so loud, half the people in the pub turned around to look at us.

We had a running joke for the next couple of months. Every time we met, Hannah teased me about going on Tinder and I called her the scarecrow. In the absence of opportunity or commitment to improve our romantic lives, we were good friends, Hannah and I. Far from exclusive, not at all possessive but spending time together whenever time and the jobs-list allowed.

In June, after another barrage of questions, I asked Hannah about the chap she had her eye on.

‘Don’t lecture me,’ I said. ‘Do something, slowcoach.’

Her response was enigmatic.

‘Oh, I have done something, I’ve planted the seed and I’m letting it grow. I don’t want to frighten him away – I’m not sure he wants the commitment. He might be scared of getting involved. So, I’ll give it a couple more months.’

A couple of months later was August and the barley was almost ready to be cut. There were poppies in the barley field, at least a big clump of them in the middle. There had never been poppies there before. Maybe I’d ploughed a bit deeper than Dad.

It was also my birthday in August. ‘Leo the Oaf’, Hannah assured me, but she had called in a favour from a friend of hers from Manchester on the weekend of my birthday. He was an aerial photographer who planned to fly around, take some pictures and then knock on doors to sell them to proud house owners. Hannah and I would get a sky-high view of the village and the farm.

For some stupid reason, Hannah insisted on giving me a wrapped up present whilst we were flying. We were midway between the airfield and the village when Hannah said, ‘Open it.’ I ripped the paper open to find an item of clothing that was distinctly second-hand and not my size.

‘It’s your skanky old dog walking trousers,’ I shouted above the noise. ‘You’ve not even washed them!’

Hannah shouted back, ‘check the pockets.’

I put my hands into the front pockets to find that both the linings had been cut away, so you could put your hand right through them and down the leg. Those pockets wouldn’t hold a bean. I was confused and looked at Hannah.

‘Hold your hand out,’ Hannah yelled. Then she put a sprinkling of black seeds in my palm.

‘You were waiting for nature to give you a sign,’ she said. ‘Well, maybe she did...’

Hannah pointed out of the window and down to the farm. I could make out the house and the barn and the field of barley below. Where Hannah had walked her dog for all those weeks, I could see the poppies, dense and vibrant. They were in a pattern…in a shape…in the shape of a heart.

Hannah says it was a scene from the film The Great Escape that gave her the idea – when the prisoners were trying to scatter the earth they’d dug up across the camp by letting it out from their trouser legs. Each walk with the dog, allowed another handful of poppy seeds to be dispersed and even though I’d walk by most days and stop for a chat, I never had a clue that this was the seed Hannah was planting.

Hannah says ‘Tom’ was the name of one of the tunnels – deep, but dark and empty…much like me.

I keep threatening to call the police, or to sue Hannah for vandalism or to get an injunction so she could never set foot in that field again.

But it seems a bit churlish now. Because the picture hangs on our wall and it was 23 years, four children and an awful lot of harvests ago.

🩷🩷🩷

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Mark Rutterford is a writer-performer from a rural community near Bath, England. His stories are funny and emotionally engaging – mostly about love, going well or going wrong.

For the last couple of years, Mark has been touring a one-man show named after his two favourite things. 'Love. Stories.' is a whirlwind romance of a show featuring heartache and happiness, ‘The World Cup of Love Songs’ and audience love stories too.

Mark is such a hopeless romantic, he has been recording it as his occupation since the census of 1981.

Website: www.markrutterford.com