The Thornby Match, by Leonard Pask

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

Frank Dyer had ploughed his father’s fields since he was twelve, but the Thornby ploughing match of October 1948 was the first time anyone had judged him, and nothing went as it did at home. He drew a bad lot, a strip at the bottom of the field where the ground was heavy and wet. He was so anxious to begin that he set his first furrow before the steward had dropped the flag, and was called back in front of everyone. The horses, a borrowed pair who had never worked together, felt his nerves through the reins and pulled to the left, so that his opening ridge wandered like a sheep track. Halfway down the strip he glanced up to see whether his father was watching from the hedge, and in that moment the share dug in too deep and the horses stalled. He forgot to measure his furrow with the stick his uncle had cut for him, and when he remembered, he found he had been cutting two inches too wide all the way down. At the headland he turned too sharply and the plough came out of the ground with a lurch. Still, his finishing furrow was clean and straight, and one of the judges, a broad woman in a tweed hat, wrote something on her card and nodded at him.

List five mistakes Frank makes during the ploughing match.