She came to tell us that she was going to die. She didn’t want anyone to see her get ill, to deteriorate. She didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for her. She didn’t need anyone’s pity. I was forbidden to go and visit. I never saw her properly again, just a blurred glimpse of an ill woman in a car speeding past as I worked by the road one day putting up a wall.
46
They say that school days are the best of your life, but that’s bullshit. I couldn’t wait to leave. I had nothing invested in it. And by the time I was fifteen, the teachers were not going to lose any sleep over unburdening themselves of me. You can’t push water uphill. You were allowed to leave after the Christmas of your sixteenth birthday, but you needed your teachers to sign you off. All any of us wanted was to get the hell out, so we envied the lucky bastards that had their birthday and strode off across the playground with a white piece of paper in their fists. I have never seen most of those lads again. Today you might exchange mobile phone numbers or stay connected through Facebook or Twitter. But these things hadn’t been invented, and few of us wanted any lasting connection anyway.
47
My mother had given up on my schooling by that stage. Resigned to it. I more or less stopped going to school after Christmas. Fifteen years old. I’d managed about a year more than my dad or my granddad. When I stayed at home, I worked, a much-needed extra man on the farm. I worked hard, so no one was bothered that the formalities of school were being ignored. (I lied as well so they didn’t really know what was going on.) I hadn’t done a thing at school from about age twelve anyway. Just fucking around. I chose my study subjects so I could be in the same groups as some girl I fancied. For the last year or two before I left, I worked part-time at home, before and after school and at weekends. A rough shout from my dad told you it was time to get up and go out and work. Feeding or mucking out cattle, or up the fields feeding sheep; and at school bus time my mother would come looking for me, and my father would say he didn’t know where I was until it was too late. One day I saw her crying as she went back to the house. Dad would give me a cheeky smirk.
48
I went back for some of the exams to keep my mother happy. Missed others. Showed little interest in the ones I attended, but I can remember using the quiet in the exam hall to think. I knew it was dumb to fail exams, but I preferred to fail badly by that point than have anyone think a C was the best I could do. Somehow, despite fucking about, I still got a C in religious studies and woodwork, which made my granddad laugh. “You’d make a vicar maybe.… You can do the funeral service and then bray the nails into the coffin.” I’d confirmed his suspicion that school was a total waste of time. The school was on a major fund-raising campaign to buy computers, and they arrived as I left. Until then the only computers I had seen were in my cousin’s bedroom and in the careers office at school. We’d been sent to queue outside the career advisor’s door for his enlightened advice about our future professional lives. He was very proud of his careers software package and earnestly asked me a series of tick box questions. Single finger typing. Do you want to work inside or outside? Outside. Do you want to work with people or animals? Etc. After a quarter of an hour of this, the computer started to vibrate and then spurted out a slip of paper. It said I should be a zookeeper. As my dad said, when I told him, “Bloody hell … the stupid bastards.” Then he rocked with laughter and couldn’t stop.
49
This crappy, mean, broken-down school took five years of my life. I’d be mad, but for the fact that it taught me more about who I was than anything else I have ever done. It also made me think that modern life is rubbish for so many people. How few choices it gives them. How it lays out in front of them a future that bores most of them so much they can’t wait to get smashed out of their heads each weekend. How little most people are believed in, and how much it asks of so many people for so little in return.
So leaving school was the best thing that ever happened to me. I felt a sense of elation that spring and summer. I was fifteen and I swore the day I left school that I would never let myself be trapped in a place like this ever again. I was going to live on my terms.
At least, that’s what I reckoned.
50
My grandfather was seventy-two years old. He had a stroke. After a while they put him in a care home. He couldn’t speak properly. It seemed like a cruel end for someone who lived and worked in some of the most beautiful landscapes in the Lake District. He seemed utterly trapped. For some years previously my grandmother had feared he would die in the fields, and they wouldn’t know where to find him—she would shout angrily at him, “The crows will go with your eyes.” He would smile, put on his jacket, and go back to the fields.
But now there was no going back to the fields.
51
I am wearing blue suede boots. Don’t ask me why—I am seventeen and dumb and trying to be cool. I look like an extra in a Blur video circa 1994. I am visiting him in the hospital after his stroke. My grandfather is dribbling out of one side of his mouth and looks like a trapped animal. He is furious with his inability to control his mouth and speak clearly, which makes it worse. One quick glance as I came through the door, and I knew he was going to die. Still, he looks pleased to see me, and is amused by my blue suede boots. He can’t speak much, but his arm reaches down and points to my feet. A dying man, who can’t even speak properly, is teasing me about fashion. When my father comes in, my grandfather clutches his hand and says one almost broken word, the name of his farm. Then he sits and listens keenly to every detail of work taking place on his land, keeping a keen eye on his son and me for any sign that he was being told a good news fairy tale for a dying man. My dad and granddad might have spent years fighting, but now they look like best friends. My grandfather is almost tender in a way I have never seen before. He looks scared and keeps looking at me as if to check I believed in all he’d worked for, but he didn’t need to worry. I did, and I still do.
When he looks into my face, we share a thousand unspoken thoughts about the farm and our family. In that moment I’m not just a grandson. I am the one who carries on his life’s work, I am the thread that goes to the future. He lives in me. His voice. His values. His stories. His farm. These things are carried forwards. I hear his voice in my head when I do work on the farm. It sometimes stops me doing something foolish, and I pause and do it how he would have done it. Everyone knows he was a major ingredient in the making of me, and that I am the going on of him.
It was ever thus.
52
The summer after my grandfather died I climbed to the woods high above where we lived and looked down over the Eden Valley. A land where the hay was baled and stacked in countless meadows, and cattle and sheep grazed in thousands of fields. I just sat silently and watched the world go by, with my back to a tree. An old greyish hare hopped up the bank, stopped at my dusty boots, and took a long slow look at me, then headed off on his way to wherever. Summer-wild cattle grazed past the little wood, kicking up insects in the golden haze of dusk, oblivious to my presence. As I lay against that smooth old beech tree the world rolled past me like a dream. A kestrel circled high above the woods, ignoring its ever-hungry offspring mewing from the branches of another beech tree further along from mine. And the whole land was bathed in a warm peach-red August glow. Wood pigeons flapped noisily out of the long sun-bleached grasses where ewes and lambs grazed. Away to the quarry a couple of roe deer does strayed from the darkness of the plantation to sunbathe and graze contentedly.
A strong dog fox made his way along the shadows cast by the plantation, under a wooden gate, and along the fence until I lost him in the sea of grass. Moments later he reappeared near where the wood pigeons had been grazing when I last spied them. Pigeons scattered all ways, flapping powerfully away at the grasses and thistles. The dog fox pounced again and again, and then, defeated, he trotted out of the long grasses and rolled playfully on the turf. Far below me the first lights of the village flickered on and the last
swallows raced one another across the hillside. I knew the old man had gone and would never come back, and that things would never be the same again. Summer was passing.
AUTUMN
Unspoilt. Unvisited. Until Thomas West wrote his guidebook, the Lake District was unknown and unloved. No poets came, no tourists toured and the average nymph or shepherd saw nothing worth a second look.
ABOUT A 2008 EDITION OF A GUIDE TO THE LAKES BY THOMAS WEST
The mountains are as a rule a world apart from civilizations, which are an urban and lowland achievement. Their history is to have none, to remain always on the fringe of the great waves of civilization, even the longest and most persistent.
FERNAND BRAUDEL, THE MEDITERRANEAN AND THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN THE AGE OF PHILIP II, VOLUME I
1
The autumn after my grandfather died my grandmother gave a silver cup in his memory to the auction mart for the champion tup. I won it with a tup lamb I had told my grandfather about before he died. He was the best we had ever had and was head and shoulders above his peers at the sale. I’d prepared and shown him well, so he was at twelve o’clock when it mattered. During the judging I’d stolen the high ground in the middle of the ring to stand my tup on. I’d set him perfect like a king looking down on the others—an old showing trick. He knew he was the best, and we were simply telling everyone else in case they hadn’t noticed. My dad winked at me and smiled when he saw that.
The tup was made the champion of the sale and sold for the top price, bought by another respected shepherd to pass on his attributes to the fifty or more ewes he would be mated with.
Everyone forgot that I’d failed my exams.
I felt like I’d come out the other side of school and nothing could stop me. I was my grandfather’s grandson.
Then it all started to fall apart.
2
It was a morning full of grey silences and mizzling rain. Dad emerged from the house in his grey suit. My grandfather’s will was being read by the solicitors, and my dad, after thirty odd years’ hard work, was about to learn his fate. He had worry written all over his face. He left me working with a man called John who sometimes helped out on our farm and specialized in filthy jokes. John chattered on all morning in the sheep pens. “Don’t worry, Son. Your granddad loved this spot, and he thought the sun shone out of your arse!” I turned the words over in my head, and tried to believe them. Granddad had always threatened amending his will whenever there was a fight. For years the farm overdraft had grown inexorably, eating up our capital and leaving everyone worried about how it would be sorted out. At times it felt like our strategy was just to work harder, slog it out until things improved. But they didn’t.
When Dad returned he was calm, and resigned to what he’d heard. He had poured his whole life into our farm and the end result was that he couldn’t keep everything going. Something would have to be sold. Inheritance is often messy and imperfect on family farms. Men like my father spend their whole lives building up the farm and rarely have much other cash. It is common for the son or daughter who takes on the farm to have to sell land or borrow money to pay out sisters and brothers. If you are the one on the farm it probably always feels rotten. In the following months the bungalow was sold and a flat bought for my grandmother in the local town. There was talk of selling all of my grandfather’s farm, and only keeping the rented farm where we lived; but in the end Dad kept the rented farm in the Eden Valley plus the land from my grandfather’s farm. The bungalow and a couple of fields where my grandfather had lived were sold. Granddad’s land was to be farmed by us, but remotely now from fifteen miles away. We had a farm without a house. This had some very real practical effects: there was no house anymore for me or my parents to move to in the future—this broke my heart a little bit.
So on that grey day when my grandfather’s will was read my dad didn’t want to look at me. He told John what had happened and I listened. Then he turned to me, looked me in the eye, and said, “I’m sorry, Son.” And I tried to be a man and smile, a tough smile that wasn’t true.
3
In the months that followed my dad probably needed me to shut up. Be quiet. Work hard. Support him. Just help him work our way through this tough time. But he didn’t get that kind of son. Maybe no one does. After my grandfather’s death we all moved up a step in the pecking order. I heard some old men talking about a young lad recently and they said of him, “That’s the trouble with lads, they think they are men before they are men.” I was like that. By the time I was eighteen I’d worked part-time for about ten years on the farm, and had done three years full-time since I left school. I had a head full of ideas about how I wanted to do things; I thought I knew best. As far as I was concerned I was a man. I found people of my own age, who went to university, childish and pointless.
4
My grandfather, father, and I played out the oldest piece of theatre in the history of farming families. My grandfather had been the patriarch, the boss, who had started our branch of the family and started our farming business. Our farm was really his farm. Like lots of old farmers he’d clutched it tightly to his chest when he was old. My father was assigned possibly the worst role in the play, that of suffering the father as boss, and the son as usurper. He was doing the lion’s share of the work, and never quite getting the control of the farm that his efforts deserved. I was assigned the role of the blue-eyed boy, apple of my grandfather’s eye, the perfect farm lad who would be the farm boss someday.
5
Father.
Son.
Grandson.
Some fathers and sons we knew seemed to work together like mild-mannered friends. Not in our family. Fathers and sons in our family tend to bicker like hyenas round the remains of a zebra. For a few brief years in my late teens we would fall out about anything and everything.
* * *
The lesson I took from my dad’s life was that if you let your father push you around, you could work for a pittance for maybe twenty years and ultimately not be able to afford to keep the farm together. I wasn’t up for years of playing second fiddle and quite possibly putting myself into the trap he had just escaped. And he’d egged me on to think like that for the past decade or more. But now the wheel had turned and he was the boss and I the son.
Maybe things would have been easier if the farm had been making money. But it wasn’t. I was more militant because I could see that I might end up with nothing even if I served my time. My father couldn’t be generous even if he wanted to because there wasn’t much to be generous with. So our relationship deteriorated. Eventually it broke. It was at least half my fault. Back then, my dad and I were the meeting of a rock and a hard place. There were only two possible outcomes: buckle down and accept he was the boss or leave and do something else. Lots of farm lads did a shift off the farm, including my father who had worked for a while in a local quarry after some fall out or other with my grandfather.
As a kid I didn’t see how prescribed these roles were by circumstance. I thought I was special. I thought that there was something wrong with my dad. It was all going wrong on his shift, so it was his fault. My grandfather was the only one to follow and respect; he had created what we had. I look back and realize I was wrong about all of this. I suppose that’s what growing up is, realizing how little you know and how many things you’ve been wrong about.
I look back now, many years later, and laugh at us. We have suffered each other, shared our worst faults. Seen each other at our most worn down. Snapped at each other. But I wouldn’t change any of it even if I could, because I know my dad, and granddad, in ways that most people never do. Saw and shared their finest moments. I shared their world, and understood the things they did and cared about. I let them down at times, as they let me down too. I made them proud at times, as they too made me proud. We clashed sometimes. But who wouldn’t? Our lives were entwined around something we all cared about more than anything else in the world. The farm.
6
I am sitting on a hay bale in our barn. Four years old. My grandfather sits next to me with a pair of hand shears in one hand and a carding comb in the other. In front of us, a Suffolk tup tied by a bale string head collar to a hayrack. It struggled for a few minutes when he first tied it up, but now it stands patiently, enjoying being pampered. From time to time it burps and it smells of grass. Two other sheep are tied up on either side of us, and my father and mother are working on them. They are cleaning their legs, scrubbing their faces, tidying up their coats, and trimming under their bellies with the hand shears to give the sheep clean lines.
Up the village our relatives and neighbours are all working on their sheep as well; there is a keen sense of competition between us.
Shepherds are judged on the quality of their sheep relative to everyone else’s. For years I copy and learn from the older men until I can do lots of the work. At the sales these little things we do may make the difference. The men chat about the best sheep they sold in the past, and whether these are as good or better. I tell them that I like the one we are working on most. My granddad tells the other men I am a good judge and I swell with pride. These sheep are the descendants of two pedigree ewes he bought for a lot of money in the 1940s, now part of a flock of sixty. We sell thirty tups each autumn.
The Shepherd's Life Page 9
