The Back End Sale, by Martha Spedding

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

Clemency had begged for two years to go to the autumn sale at Garsby, and when her father finally lifted her onto the cart in October 1924 she promised herself she would remember everything. The mart smelt of wet fleece and pipe tobacco. Pens of Swaledale ewes stretched down the hill in rows, each pen hung with a slate bearing the farm’s name, and the dogs lay under the carts with their chins on their paws, watching the sheep as if they owned them. Around the ring the farmers stood three deep in brown overcoats, and Clemency noticed that not one of them seemed to speak, yet the auctioneer, a red-faced man on a wooden box, knew exactly who was bidding. One man touched the brim of his hat; another simply lifted a finger from his stick. A boy no older than Clemency ran the ewes in through one gate and out through another, slapping their rumps with a folded newspaper. When her father’s pen came in, the price was called so fast that she missed it entirely, and she only knew it had gone well because he bought her a hot pie from the van by the gate and did not ask for the change.

List five things Clemency notices at the sale.