Farm Boy Read Online Free PDF

Zoey. We werent going to win but we werent going to give up neither. You shouldve heard the noise that crowd made. Filled my legs with strength of a growed man it did. I never thought I would manage the turns but like Father said the horses did it all. I just did what I had seen him do and followed the horses.

     
    I was coming back towards the crowd when I saw it happen. Harry Medlicott was turning fast on the headlands as he always did but this time it were too fast even for him. The tractor never hardly slowed down like he should. He just keeled it over in the ditch and leant up against the hedge with his ploughs ploughing nothing but air and his great muddy wheels spinning round and round. It were a handsome sight that. A sight for sore eyes. The engine choked and stopped and then there was a lot of smoke. When it cleared I could see Harry Medlicott jumping up and down. Like a mad thing he was. Well you can imagine the crowd was wild with it all by now and cheering me on. I ploughed on and on. Up and round and down and round and up and round and down and round. I kept my eye all I could on my line. I knew I had to keep my furrows straight. I hadnt to take my eye off them. But from time to time I had to sneak a look at the tractor to be sure he was still there in the ditch where I wanted him to be and every time I looked he was.

     

     
    And all the time I was making up the lost ground. I called out to Joey and Zoey just like Father did. I was showing off a bit I reckon. They two horses knew what was going on without me saying a word. They were pulling faster and faster never a foot wrong and together like one horse with eight legs.
    By the time old Farmer Northley at last waved his flag for the end of the match I was so tired I could hardly stand. When he counted up the furrows Harry Medlicott had ploughed sixty and we had done sixty one. All of them good deep straight furrows just like they should be. We had won.

     
    To be fair to Harry Medlicott he came right over and shook Father by the hand and me too. Said I was a good lad and ruffled my hair with his oily hand.
    Well then Corporal says Harry Medlicott to Father. You won fair and square. Its your tractor if you can pull it out of the ditch.
    And by that evening with the help of a dozen or more men we pulled the Fordson back onto his wheels. We couldn’t start him though so we hitched him up to Joey and Zoey and between them they pulled him all the way across Burrow Brimclose and into the barn. They enjoyed that I reckon. So the Fordson was ours for ever and Joey and Zoey never had to plough again.

     
    Joey lived on long after dear old Zoey till he was near enough thirty. He had ten good years of retirement most of it up in the orchard. Loved his apples did Joey. Looked well on them too.

     

     
    Father says to me once its not the same working with a tractor. Cant hardly talk to a tractor can you. But all the same I can mind he looked after that old Fordson like a baby. Never get rid of it he says to me. Family history that old tractor.

     
    In spite of his bad leg Father went on working till the day he died. Every evening when it was getting dark he would walk up the lane to shut up the fowls against the fox. Never let anyone else do it no matter how much his leg was paining him. And then one evening he goes off and doesn’t come back. I found him lying outside the fowl house with his stick still in his hand. The doctor told Mother and me it was the best way to go. He would never have knowed a thing.
    When my time comes I want it to be just like that. Good and quick. Maybe I’ll be shutting up the fowls just like Father was and someone will find me outside the fowl house and the police inspector will come along and look for footprints and fingerprints and write in his report
    Death by natural causes.
Fowl play not suspected.
     
    Make me smile that would

     
    THE END

 
    Grandpa’s story came with me in my rucksack, all the way to Australia. I read it