The Shepherd's Life

by James Rebanks

  31

  Making hay in daydreams tends to be idyllic and sunny, but in real life it can be a bitch of a thing. I can remember 1986, the worst summer, when we burned all our hay. A disaster. You need nearly a week of dry and sunny weather to make hay. And you need to be able to travel on the meadows with a tractor and mower to mow the grass at the start of that week. What could possibly go wrong in one of the wettest places in England?

  * * *

  In 1986 it just never stopped raining. Black clouds. Miry fields. Endless rain. Sometimes summer never quite happens. It must have offered brief moments of respite because somehow we got the hay baled, but then the heavens opened and it rained for days and days. If you understand the importance of good hay, there is something irretrievably sad, pitiful, and pathetic about ruined hay. What should be a lovely sun-bleached green slowly becomes grey, rotten, and dead. What should have been our harvest for the winter rotted into something worse than useless: a time-consuming liability. We tried stacking the bales against each other, on days when the wind blew and rain eased. But the bales now sagged deadweight beneath the baler twine in our stinging hands. More rain. Fat splashing drops. The heaviest I’ve ever seen. The hay was ruined. It had started to sprout green on the tops of the bales. It would never dry. Everyone knew. Even if we got it into the barns, it would heat. It might even combust and burn the barn down as sometimes happened on farms. Or it might simply rot. There was no point in bringing it in. Rooks skulked in the ash trees, waiting for worms under the heaps.

  * * *

  The fields were now green with fog (the sweet regrowth after cropping that we use for the lambs that are weaned [our word is “spained”] off their mothers in August and September). The bales sulking and leaving rotten dead marks where the grass should now have been cleared. However bad it was, the hay needed to go somewhere. Clearing the fields of this sodden junk was like moving corpses. Cruel work. Sickening for men. Pointless. Rotten smelling. We took thousands of bales to the ruins of an old stone barn. Created a fire beneath one corner of the pile. Stood back and watched. But the cursed stuff couldn’t even burn properly. It smouldered sulkily for weeks. I can still smell the hay burning in a stupid, pointless, charred heap. We brought bales to the heap for days until the fields were cleared. Sweating, with rain dribbling down our necks. When we were finished, we had nothing to show for weeks of work or a year’s growth on the meadows. No hay in the barns. Fields now boot deep in grass except for coffin-shaped, yellow, dead stains where the bales had lain. My father turned away and said, “Never mention this to me ever again, I don’t want to remember it.” Grey smudgy clouds anchored to the fells and it rained for weeks.

  32

  My grandfather is asleep in an old brown armchair that is for his use, and his use only. He has read the local newspaper and fallen asleep in it after his midday meal. He is old and tired because he starts early and works too hard for an old man.

  But I wish he would wake up.

  Sometimes when he is not working he tells me stories.

  He loves to tell stories. True stories. This is how he passes on his values. How he tells me who we are. They have morals, these stories.

  We don’t give up, even when things are bad.

  We pay our debts.

  We work hard.

  We act decently.

  We help our neighbours if they need it.

  We do what we say we will do.

  We don’t want much attention.

  We look after our own.

  We are proud of what we do.

  We try to be quietly smart.

  We take chances sometimes to get on.

  We will fail sometimes.

  We will be affected by the wider world …

  But we hold on to who we are.

  It was clear from his stories that we were part of a tradition, that long pre-dated us, and would long exist after us. The stories left you feeling proud to be part of that tradition, but very aware that as individuals we were bound by duty to carry it on, bound to try and live by those values. His main lesson was above all to get along with people; don’t burn your bridges or they will stay down for a long time. Having the same families live and work alongside each other for many centuries created a unique kind of society with special values.

  In my grandfather’s world, a person’s life was not a thing of his own invention, a new thing on a blank slate. We are bound by our landscape. Shaped by it. Defined by it. Like all good grandparents my grandfather could only see the best in me, and that always made me stand a little taller.

  Fathers’ names are still interchangeable with those of the sons, and surnames with the names of the farms. The story about your family was something to be aware of, because a bad story could shame you for years.

  We are, I guess, all of us, built out of stories.

  I know his stories almost off by heart …

  He told stories of his grandfather on his mother’s side of the family, T. G. Holiday. From what I could gather, my granddad had worshipped and copied his grandfather much as I did mine. So even though I never met this man and he died long before I was born, there is a connection and continuity between us. My grandfather built himself out of stories about T. G. Holiday and I built myself out of stories of him.

  T. G. Holiday sits proudly on my bookshelf in a sepia photograph I have inherited. It must date from the 1890s or 1900s. The picture shows him standing in a field surrounded by bullocks, a hazel stick in hand and a large droving dog sitting loyally by his feet. Bowler hat. Muttonchop whiskers. He looks deep in thought and not that interested in having his photo taken. The cattle are each eating from their own wooden buckets or stone troughs. In my grandfather’s stories T. G. was a kind of mythical heroic character.

  T. G. was a tenant farmer on the Inglewood Estate. He bought Irish cattle and met them in the little harbour at Silloth with his men. He’d have wagons loaded with troughs for feeding them on the journey back to the farm. He also bought flocks of geese off those boats, and tarred and gritted their feet so they could be walked back to the farm. They walked these animals home, taking a couple of days or more, sleeping at night by the roadsides. He fattened the cattle and geese on his pastures and sold them in local markets when they were in peak condition and worth the most. Without anyone much noticing, he made money from his dealing, because during World War I he quietly accumulated lots of war bonds as an investment. Some time later he sold them for profit and filled two suitcases with money, which he kept at home for two years.

  Then one day he loaded his suitcases into his cart and went to an auction of three good farms. To the disbelief of everyone present, he bought all three farms and paid in cash. As he travelled home that day he passed a crowd on the roadside in Penrith, and realized they were selling a row of cottages with sitting tenants. Perhaps to finish off whatever point he was making that day, he bought the row of cottages with the cash left in the suitcases. He sold them to the individual tenants for a profit in the next few months.

  If you were a tenant farmer and wanted to make your mark on a small farming community, then you couldn’t do it much better than T. G. Holiday did on that day. He was thereafter someone of standing. He set each of his sons off on the bought farms, educated his daughters (including my great-grandmother Alice), and helped them get started with their own husbands. He is still known and spoken about with respect by older farming folk. His descendants in several families are still proud of him generations later. A lot of farming families have stories like this, their own myths of how they came to be who they are.

  33

  My grandfather had an eye for things that were beautiful, like a sunset, but he would explain it in mostly functional terms, not abstract aesthetic ones. He seemed to love the landscape around him with a passion, but his relationship with it was more like a long tough marriage than a fleeting holiday love affair. His work bound him to the land, regardless of weather or the seasons. When he observed something like a spring sunset, it carr
ied the full meaning of someone who had earned the right to comment, having suffered six months of wind, snow, and rain to get to that point. He clearly thought such things beautiful, but that beauty was full of real functional implications—namely the end of winter or better weather to come.

  34

  From the beginning my grandfather taught me the classic worldview of what Europeans would call a peasant, and we would simply call a farmer. We owned the earth. We’d been here forever. And we always would be. We would get battered from time to time, but we would endure and win. There was also a strong sense of what others would call egalitarianism, which exists in many pastoral communities in northern Europe, that judged a man or woman on their work, their livestock, and their participation. Historically there had not been the wealth to differentiate between farmer and farmworker in these valleys, at least not in ways that divided them socially and culturally. The aristocratic families didn’t, or couldn’t, really exert their power here, and there was little idea of class. The men, farmers and labourers, worked together for the most part, ate at the same table, drank together in the pub, watched the same sports, and generally lived very similar lives. The farmers who owned land perhaps thought they were a little smarter than those who had never managed to get a farm of their own, or the farmworkers, but any form of snobbery or class distinction was fairly alien. You couldn’t get away with being a snob. The world was too small. There were too many chances for others to make you pay heavily for it. Respect was mostly linked to the quality of a man or woman’s sheep or cattle or the upkeep of their farm, or their skill in their work and management of the land. Men or women who were good shepherds were held in the highest esteem, regardless of being to modern eyes “just employees.” To be a shepherd was to stand as tall as any man.

  35

  I went to a really good little primary school. But my bookish mother and school didn’t stand a chance. I knew from the start that school was just a diversion from other things that mattered more.

  But it wasn’t all wasted. I had a magical teacher called Mrs. Craig who read me I Am David (about a little Jewish boy escaping a concentration camp). She also read us the Odyssey and I remember loving the bit about Odysseus and his men clutching the bellies of his giant fat sheep to escape the one-eyed giant’s cave. I still love these books. The teachers said kind things to my mother about me being “bright” and “enigmatic.” But the bottom line was I belonged to the farm.

  My grandmother once scolded me for idleness when she caught me reading in her house. The gist of it was that there couldn’t possibly be so little else of value to do on the farm that I could justify reading a book in daylight hours. Books were considered a sign of idleness at best and dangerous at worst. My school successes (increasingly rare, as I got older) also seemed to worry my grandfather, like a flashing warning light that he might lose his heir to another culture. There was nothing much useful in books. School had to be attended. But it was just a dull obligation.

  36

  I remember a school night in the hayfield, in an eight-acre banked field called Merricks. It was five minutes past the dictated curfew for me. But I was a little man, too busy for homework and books and all that stuff. Nine years old. Working with them—that counted, with an itchy neck, stinging hands, and prickled legs. Then on the skyline, a car caught the red sunset. A familiar Ford Sierra trailing dust down the lane. “Quick!” said one of the men and he pointed to the half-stacked heap. “Get in the middle.” I jumped into the heart of the stoop (the hand-built heaps of seventeen small bales that when finished stood as high as a man) between two bales; half a dozen other bales were tucked around me. As I was entombed, I watched the car reach the field gate through a peephole left open between bales. The old man chuckled as he laid on the “top uns.” I could hear the car roll up the grassy stubble. “Have you seen him?” All I could see was the flyspecked bonnet of the car, my heart pumping, in my grassy tomb.

  “Nope.” Then silence: for just a telling grown-up moment. “Well, it’s past his bedtime, and it’s a school night.”

  “Reckon I’ll tell him, if I see him.”

  “Reckon you should.” The car crept away back home, and I watched it through my peephole.

  37

  My grandfather worked, but he also played hard and drank hard. Tuesdays were auction days. It was an all-day thing with a bunch of other established farmers (farmworkers and sons did the work at home). After the sale was done, they’d end up in a pub, pissed. Word would get around the womenfolk and eventually the men would be hunted down. A disgruntled wife or two would arrive and drag her man out of the pub. Once I picked up one of their shepherd’s crooks from the pub floor where a drunk had knocked it down and he gave me £5 for “being a gentleman.” My grandfather seemed to know everyone and be on good terms with most of them. Like he’d been up to mischief with them all at one time or another.

  * * *

  He passed on a worldview that stretched back into the depths of time—his stories inherited from his grandfather spanned back and forth across vast periods of time as if the 1850s or 1910 were yesterday. The silver and brass my grandmother polished included things brought home by soldiers in the family from the Boer and Crimean Wars.

  Granddad could read and write, and everyone in our world thought he was smart, but there was only one book in his house and it was about horse ailments. It’s fairly safe to assume he had never read Wordsworth. What use were books and schools to this man?

  My grandfather was aware of the modern world, and could adapt to it. But he also held its values and newfangled inventions at arm’s length. He would return from the auction mart and ask my mother, who was “educated” (one term at Norwich University before meeting my father and chucking it in), to work out the figures “on the computer.” The computer, which he didn’t entirely trust, was a small battery-operated handheld Sony calculator. Intellectually we were, in short, little more than what in Europe would be called peasants, with a classic, small “c” conservative worldview inherited through an oral tradition based on stories and passed-on wisdom and experiences, and yet we existed within 1980s Britain as everything changed around us. If you removed the tractors and machinery from the farm, much of what we did, and how we did it, was ancient. Granddad even called things by ancient names, like “mowdies” for moles, or “mel” for the post hammer we used, and “gaeblic” for the iron pole you make holes for the fence posts with. He called for the “yows” (ewes) with strange shouts that didn’t mean anything to modern ears.

  “Hoeeew up, hoeeewup.”

  “Cus, cus, cus, cus.”

  Years later I would watch a TV documentary about reindeer herders in Sweden and one of them called reindeers in a very similar way.

  He had a wicked sense of humour and mischief bubbling beneath the surface. There was a touch of the Brer Rabbit about him. He could handle himself. I can remember officials from “the Ministry” (of Agriculture) coming to talk to him about the biodiversity in our hay meadows and what they expected him to do to manage those meadows for the flowers and birds in return for the subsidy they paid. After an hour and a half of observing him nodding and agreeing to everything they suggested, they departed, and I asked him what they wanted. He said, “No idea.… The secret with them daft buggers is to say yes to everything they want, and when they’ve gone, carry on regardless.”

  38

  My grandmother was a farmer’s wife of the old-fashioned kind. Women like her once were everywhere across our countryside, working behind the scenes to feed armies of men, and playing an important role in the farming of the landscape. In the lakeland valleys the women often did the farming while the men went to earn wages in the mines or elsewhere. Grandmother kept her house and the garden spotless, weeding with an old mother-of-pearl-handled butter knife. No weed was safe from her for several hundred yards around her farmhouse.

  I once drove into a farmyard with my dad and he noticed the wild yellow poppies growing out of the wall. “Your
grandmother wouldn’t have liked that.… She would have thought this place was being let go.”

  Grandma was “long-suffering,” as the cliché goes. My grandfather was a character, and all agreed he would have been at times a proper bastard to live with. There was some stable girl decades earlier he’d got pregnant. This was common knowledge, but never spoken of. It was swept under the carpet where it remained as a visible lump.

  So theirs was not like Hollywood movie love; more like the love between crocodiles. His idea of fun was chasing her across the kitchen, trying to grab her round the waist and cuddle her, while she swiped at him with the frying pan and called him a dirty old man. He’d wink at me like it was a lesson in woman handling.

  Maybe I had the blindness of a grandchild, but it felt like she enjoyed the fighting. I felt it despite the words. Sometimes it looked like hatred, sometimes just like love.

  They had been through a lot together, had a good life, albeit full of troubles and incidents. When I worshipped him, he was getting old, and frustrated that old age was beating him. But he was still full of mischief. Theirs had been a shotgun marriage, and not the only one in our family, judging by the dates of firstborn children in our family tree. Grandma’s stories often featured lost babies or children that had died of TB or polio or in accidents on the farms.

  She polished the “brass” with Brasso like our lives depended upon it. The stale smell of cold beef and potatoes was the smell of the back kitchen. She fed pet lambs with old Schweppes lemonade bottles with worn red teats. Collected dog food in an old pan on the kitchen worktop, then soaked it in milk.

  My abiding memory is of her bent double, apron tied tight around the middle, like a roll of muslin tight bound with string, angrily chiselling out weeds from between the cobbles, or in the kitchen turning out meals for the whole family.