Outside his red-brick house, sheets of tarpaulin flap between fallen fence posts, and nettles grow in sheltered corners, beneath the elderberry tree. Leaking freezers, melted dustbins and a rusting wine rack are heaped by the pebbledash wall. The shed contains a bike with flat tyres, a lawnmower which hasn’t seen light in a decade, and cases of damaged crockery from the old house, long before the divorce.

Wearing a torn boiler suit, wellies and a fleece hat to cover his bald head, your father spends his days carrying seasoned husks of fallen ash, birch, oak and rowan, up the farm track, the gales chasing behind him. He drags driftwood from the river’s snake-bend, stacking snapped branches in funeral pyres along the banks.

A few days after floods wiped out your own village, the Wharfe’s rising water broke Tadcaster’s bridge in two. The water coughed up enough debris to cause a fault-line of human detritus that extended across the pea fields: doll heads, Vaseline tins, pop bottles, syringes, children’s shoes, rusting shot-cases and stained sanitary towels. Your father spends his afternoons sifting through the litter, collects it into binbags, then hauls fractured tree trunks towards the house, beyond the latticed blackthorn.

The hamlet where he lives contains seven houses. It has a bus stop (out-of-use), a bench, a parish council noticeboard and a road for rat-runners, tractors and joyriders. Along the verges, which are mapped by discarded milkshake cartons and rampant convolvulus; traditionally laid hedges mark the estate boundary. In spring, red kites follow him to the river.

When the wind changes direction, the smell from the sewage works drifts into his garden. It mixes with a heavy scent of brewing malt and tractor exhaust fumes. It is sickly; evocative of childhood bedrooms, a sepia smog that hangs over the town, the stench in your hair, clothes and mouth. Live here long enough and you won’t notice it.

There’s a reason for all this mess. The long days he spends outside, gathering.

‘It’s cheaper this way,’ he says. ‘All this for nowt, free hot water. Chopping wood warms you three times: sawing, lifting and burning. Nature’s gymnasium . . .’

The house has a back-boiler, no log fire is wasted. His pension would barely cover his heating costs. This is the alternative. Free to those who are fit enough to scavenge.

He doesn’t own the house, of course. It’s part of the estate, for its workers. Graft and labour in exchange for a roof. Aside from the open fire, the only heating source radiates from inadequate storage heaters first installed in 1944.

Over the years he has learnt to live with the nip. Ice on the inside of windows, a toilet that freezes up. A pantry colder than the £10 fridge that leaks through the floor each August. Damp sheets. Bare floors. Asthmatic coughs as the sun starts to rise. On the front doorstep metal buckets, filled with ash, cool off from last night’s fire. Keeping warm is a full-time job.

Not that he wants any pity, it’s just how country life is.

You listen to his running commentary as he drags wood along the lane; the useless government, the National League, the loss of everything that once was. But most of all, a nostalgia for how farming used to be. His mother and father, the old ways.

Quiet days are spent in the past, recalling the lost elation of youth. Fights and drinking and women and clubs. Mistakes, bad behaviour and heartbreak rubbed out. He takes comfort in the myth of the man he once was.

Frankincense . . . orange . . . lemons . . . star anise . . . spice . . . clary sage . . . aldehyde . . . jasmine . . . carnation . . . cinnamon . . . pimento . . . geranium . . . vanilla . . . musk . . . tonka . . . cedarwood . . . A bottle of Old Spice sits on the bathroom windowsill. Mould collects around its base. You gave it to him in 1996. He is still using it now.

*

Twenty-four years ago, your father moved here, following his foot accident. The doctors advised he would never walk again but a corset, strong will and prosthetics fixed him. He always knew farming was the most dangerous profession. More men killed than in the pits or at sea. It was only a matter of time before something happened to him. Now he walks with an awkward gait, leaning forward, hands clasped behind his back, the only indication of the plastic toes lurking beneath his wellington boot.

Now retired from the farm, shifts in the airline meal factory, even his cash-in-hand castration duties on smallholdings around the area, he chops wood each day as a substitute for the endless toil of his working life, and scrapes by, in his own ramshackle fashion.

Once a month, his friend Baz with NHS glasses held together by Sellotape, and a toothless smile, slices large wood rounds with a chainsaw. As a roll-up hangs from his mouth, oily fingerprints mottle the flavoured cigarette paper. Chopping up piles of oak and ash, they talk in the way only countrymen do; stories of lost limbs, escaped heifers on the A64, the pigman who slit his own throat and bled to death in the sty, their friend who sleeps sitting up and hasn’t bathed for a year, the pie trade, slurry pit drownings, petrol prices, tatters stealing gates from the land. They are the last of a dying breed, carrying tales from way back. Stories that have never been written down, only stored in the imaginations and memories of men who tilled the land.

*

‘Base Notes: The Scents of a Life’ is out now and available here, published by White Rabbit Books.