The Shepherd's Life

by James Rebanks

  15

  I’d always known, of course, that farming was a tough way to make money. But now I was aware of just how tough things were becoming. It was the same for small farmers everywhere. Our sheep made the same price at market as they had done twenty years earlier. We kept more and more and made less and less money. The cost of everything else was rocketing. The farmworkers got old and were never replaced. Our buildings were thirty to forty years old and slowly falling apart, but there was no money to replace them either. Our tractors and machinery were also aging. Farming was changing too, with a raft of new regulations that would cost a fortune to abide by on an old farm like ours. My father and mother and I were working like dogs, running fast to stand still, but it just got worse and worse. No one in our world knew what to do it about, other than work like hell and hope that something would change. My dad’s catchphrase was “Farming is fucked.”

  Farmers had once been the pillars of the community. But things were different now. The kind of people living in the Lake District altered markedly during my youth. As houses and little farmsteads came up for sale, they were nearly always bought by people from outside. When my grandfather bought our farm in the 1960s, there were as many as twenty-five little farmsteads in our valley. A lot of the people who lived in them earned money from things other than farming, but they were country people. The new people who moved in seemed to have little or no connection to our way of life and idea of the land. We called them incomers or offcomers. Some of the old folk called them foreigners despite many of them coming no farther than from the local town. The difference felt between us and them was cultural—they were almost all middle-class English people with professional careers.

  16

  If you are objective about it, there is an undoubted upside to new people coming into a community—they often bring new ideas, new blood, new money, new businesses, and a new energy that renews communities. There have always been new people coming to the Lake District. Even something as local as my grandmother’s gingerbread owed its ingredients to the Atlantic slave trade economy. We are all, of course, made up of many ingredients. But at age twenty I could only see what was being lost.

  Sheep to “incomers” were things that held them up on the road or escaped and were found grazing in their gardens. At worst, some of these people had such a strong sense of ownership of our landscape as a kind of public landscape that they believed they should have a powerful voice in its future. If anyone threatened to build anything new, they would launch vociferous letter-writing campaigns and scare the wits out of the planning officers. A neighbour of ours who has lived and worked here for more than fifty years was so baffled by their attempts to stop a ruined farmhouse being restored that he said to me, “I don’t know how the Lake District would have gotten built if these buggers had been around stopping everything.”

  People moving into the villages wanted to buy the village green in front of their homes, which was common land, and were angry when they were told they couldn’t. If you walked cattle or sheep through the village (as we had for centuries), now you were liable to get aggravation, because they ate the flowers or left hoof marks on the increasingly manicured lawns. Some new neighbours called the police because they could hear men shouting on the fells above with dogs. We were simply gathering our sheep. Two worlds that didn’t understand each other were colliding. It felt like we’d missed a meeting, and in our absence someone had changed the rules to make what we did cease to matter.

  17

  Shepherds hate other people’s dogs near their sheep. Whilst our sheepdogs are our proudest and most loved servants, other people’s dogs pose nothing but a threat to all our work, because a dog that hasn’t been trained and is left off the lead near sheep might get too excited and go into full hunting mode. It can be difficult to get dog owners to understand the threat, but about once every two years throughout my adult life, a dog has given chase to a sheep or a lamb, and before you know it, the sheep is pulled down, or lies down in exhaustion, and because the dog has not been trained to control itself in these situations, it tears at the wool or the skin, until you have a sheep with its ears torn, or its throat torn out. About once every other month we have a dog incident that threatens to escalate.

  Frankly, every time I see a dog off a lead, I am left fretting and fearing the worst until I see the dog back on a lead and packed into its owner’s car. So I suffer even on the nine out of ten occasions when it all ends okay. Paranoid, maybe. But it is my job to fret about my sheeps’ safety, and responsible visitors know that this fear exists and act accordingly. One person’s freedom is another man’s misery.

  The ethics of dogs and sheep here are simple, and have been forever. Keep your dog out of other people’s sheep and it is none of our business. Let it loose so it begins to chase them or worse, and you have put your dog in the path of a bullet. Shepherds have always had a legal right to protect their flocks. Faced with a rogue dog we have a right, and a kind of duty, to shoot it. If we call the police to intervene, they tell us to shoot the dog.

  Two years ago I was shepherding my pregnant ewes and noticed some sheep whirling in a flock where the fell met the clouds and mist. Something was wrong. I caught a yapping bark or two on the wind. I ran up the fell side. There was no one else around to sort this out. It was a grey, windy, and wet day, and I was running with my plastic waterproofs on. Shuffling along. As I reached the lower fell where there is woodland, a sheep crashed through the undergrowth towards me and lay at my feet. A few yards after it came two Jack Russell dogs. Tiny dogs. But their blood was up. They barely noticed me and dived on the ears of the ewe, tearing them and covering her with blood. I yanked them off by the scruffs of their necks. They were all teeth. I was furious. God only knew what carnage was up the fell or how long this had gone on for. The dogs were maybe a tenth of the size of the ewe, but that made little difference. Even a strong ewe will tire eventually and lie down if the stress overloads her system.

  As I pulled the dogs away snarling, a man tumbled down through the trees, full of apologies and mortified at the situation. He’d let them off on what he thought was an empty mountain. They had begun to hunt the sheep until they were oblivious to his calls. But I had a dilemma on my hands. Two dilemmas. To me, he had shown that he could not protect our livestock from his dogs. If I handed them back he might even lose them immediately. I had a mind to have them killed. The man took full responsibility and admitted it was his fault, not the dogs’. But I told him that went without saying. He started crying and begging for their lives, and clutching my arms, which only made me angrier. I had blood on my hands and didn’t know whether it was mine or the sheep’s. The truth is I considered smashing their heads against a rock.

  I was furious enough to have done it.

  But the ewe wasn’t mine, so I told him instead that I would take the dogs and hand them over to the owner of the sheep, and the shepherd (a good friend of ours) could decide on the appropriate course of action. I told the dog owner that I would report him to the police and he could face the consequences.

  Later in the day, when I had calmed down, and was feeling guilty for being so tough on him, I learnt that the farmer had handed the dogs back after reading the owner the riot act. The police had explained the seriousness of the situation and that he was lucky to get them back alive.

  When I was growing up I thought my father and his peers were needlessly rough in their handling of situations like that. They would swear and give people an old-fashioned rollicking if they had dogs off leads where they shouldn’t have. I used to think that some gentle explaining would suffice. But you live and learn; I’ve tried the gentle friendly approach until I am blue in the face and it generally results in the other person carrying on regardless. So now I rant and rave and generally do a great impression of a furious farmer who will shoot their dogs with immediate effect unless they are put on a lead.

  It works much better.

  18

  Most of my memories of t
hose years after I left school are of helping Dad with work through the changing seasons. An eel slithers across the mud back to the water. With each mechanical handful of sediment that he scoops out of the channel come dozens of eels. He is sitting on an old faded-yellow Ford digger. I am holding a spade and jumping about, gathering up eels in my hands. Most are little longer than shoelaces, and hardly as thick as a pencil. They have made their way here from up the rivers and from across the seas (the Sargasso Sea, the books said, but I had no idea where that was). They have buried themselves deep in the mud at the bottom of our little becks, but not deep enough now. Sometimes a much larger eel would writhe out of the disturbed mud. My dad shouts, “Look at that big black bugger. Grab it.” It is three feet long. I step back, scared by the dead grey eyes and its muscular snakelike movement. It writhes back into the muddy water. Countless little becks and drainage channels like this let the water away from the land. My father and I are cleaning out the small stream that runs through our land and which drains our hay meadows, lowering the water table and keeping our meadows as grass instead of slowly becoming a field of sieves. But the streams inevitably silt and stone up within a few short years. If we want to maintain our land, we have work to do; it is not naturally like this. The old men know where every drain was hidden on the land, and pride themselves on it. As the streams are cleaned out, the terra-cotta drains reveal themselves and start to trickle again. Sometimes we pull out lengths of hollowed tree trunks, split down the middle and laid upside down to create a drain; other times the drains are handmade with rough stone, drains from many centuries ago. There are archaeological remains in the neighbouring valley of some of the small farms scattered across the valley side three thousand years ago.

  19

  My friends and I used to hang out in a pub a couple of miles away from my home. We would do dumb stuff for kicks. Once someone came into our local pub and said there was snow on the fells about fifteen miles away. So we got in a car and went and filled the boot with snow. When the local nightclub closed we bombarded people with snowballs—which fairly baffled them for about a minute because it was quite mild with no snow at all in the town. Then the mood changed and we had to leg it from a bunch of big lads that were intent on giving us a good kicking and chased us off through the streets. Running for our lives. I could hear the Iggy Pop song from Trainspotting in my head as I legged it down little lanes between houses, some big lad’s feet thumping the tarmac behind me. They didn’t catch us. Everyone always seemed to be fighting or screwing someone they shouldn’t have. One of my best mates used to get so drunk he couldn’t stand up, and we’d take him to the ER where the nurse would groan at the sight of him. About once a month he’d smash his face up falling over a wall or something.

  I remember one night we got into a fight with some lads, and the next day the police called and said one of them had been found dead. After fighting with us he’d got into a fight with some other lads and that was the end of him. The police knew it wasn’t us, but we had to make statements.

  It was that kind of northern town.

  One Saturday night I came out of the fish-and-chip shop and a lad I knew was punching someone who looked unconscious in a side alley where we stood to eat. We pulled him off, and the other man got up, groggy, and went home.

  I remember feeling sick.

  Something could easily go wrong and then one of us would be caught, banged up, and the game would be over. Fighting wasn’t really my scene.

  Drinking.

  Fighting.

  Shagging.

  I could see it lain out in front of me for years. I didn’t fancy it. But it was hard to know what to do; the optimism I’d had on leaving school had drifted away.

  Then one night we were at a party and I met a girl called Helen. She had red hair and was pretty. She was a friend of my sister. I was twenty-one. She was eighteen. She had worked hard at school, read books, and knew all the stuff I didn’t. She was smart, and confident about it, and puzzled why I wasn’t. When I was around her, I was able to be just me, and I was tired of being anything else. She believed I could do anything I set my mind to.

  That made everything possible.

  From the moment we got together twenty years ago, she made me want to buckle down and make our life a good one. She makes me better than I am.

  My friends were horrified at the sudden change in me. A good fool ruined. If she was out in the pubs of our town, I would find a corner to talk to her in, and I couldn’t be moved.

  No more clowning around.

  Instead of entertaining everyone with mischief, I had tuned out.

  20

  In our local pub there were shelves either side of the fireplace lined with books that no one read. Book wallpaper. Occasionally I would take one if it caught my eye. Quietly I’d ask the landlord if I could borrow it and stuff it in my jacket before anyone else noticed. It wasn’t cool to be into books.

  One of the regulars was a veteran of the Korean War. As part of a machine gun crew he’d mown down thousands of Chinese soldiers as they’d yelled and charged at them across a valley. They’d killed them all, and the valley was full of corpses and screaming men all night. A slaughterhouse. His hands shook a little as he told these stories.

  One day I took a book off the shelves—a World War II memoir written by a German fighter pilot, who had, strangely, no regrets about fighting for the führer. The veteran saw it and asked what I was carrying, looked at it, and then declared that we youngsters knew nothing, because we didn’t even know what the plane on the front of the book was. My mates looked blank. He was about to set us straight.

  “Messerschmitt one-oh-nine,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Messerschmitt one-oh-nine … A G two R two … I think.”

  Silence. Everyone was looking at me weird, wondering if I had made it up. Then they all looked at him. The veteran nodded, then started to grin.

  Weeks later, there was a quiz in our local pub. We never entered a team against the teams of teachers and professionals who turned out and appeared to know bloody everything. Instead, we’d sit and drink and wind each other up or play pool. One of my mates figured we could win a quiz about World War II. About two hours later we were winning the quiz, and I was pretty much the only one answering questions. My mates were grinning from ear to ear and slating teachers at the bar about how easy it was. We were getting funny looks from the other teams, who were trying to work out how the village idiots were winning the pub quiz. In the end we lost by a point on the last general-knowledge round, a question about a 1960s TV show I hadn’t even heard of.

  Later that night one of my friends said, “What are you doing here … with us fucking idiots? You should go to university and do something smart—you’re smarter than these teachers. You should fuck off and do something.”

  I was unsettled, because I didn’t want to be any different from anyone else. And I certainly didn’t think I was any better or smarter than them. It was a stunt, some showing off based on having read a few dozen World War II books. But sometimes you can’t go back when people know something new about you.

  21

  Things got bad. My dad and I fell out about a tup he bought. I hated it. With hindsight it was probably not a bad specimen, but at the time it wasn’t what I thought we needed for our flock. It had some black wool in its neck that it shouldn’t have had. He thought it was a birthmark and wouldn’t be passed on to its lambs. I disagreed and thought it would put a horrible flaw in our flock for years to come. It would have been easy to try it on a few ewes and see, but it provided a spark for us to explode at each other. For weeks we fought, bullied, said cruel things, tested each other, spotlighted each other’s flaws, and scored points in front of others. There were times when I could have killed him, and I’m sure he felt the same. On odd occasions we were dragged off each other, fists flying. Something broke. I said I was off, that I was leaving the farm. I knew I could swallow my pride and back down, but it wouldn’t
solve the big issues and I wouldn’t respect myself. I’d seen people that should have left the farm and done something else but who had stayed too long. You could see them becoming surly and bitter, and I could feel that growing in me too. But I didn’t really know what to do. I barely knew what a CV was. If I’d had one it would have read: GCSEs—didn’t try and failed. Work—on a farm. And I had no money at all. I didn’t even have a car and I lived fifteen minutes’ drive from the nearest town. I guess the best thing I had going for me was that I had nothing to lose.

  22

  My two younger sisters turned out far smarter than me: straight-A students, the kind of girls that get on the front of the local newspaper, clutching a piece of paper after their exam results. Sometimes I’d help the elder of them with her homework. She found it funny that her brother who had flunked school read so many books and knew so much stuff. One night she challenged me to do her history homework. I think she had a hot date or something, so she left me to do it. It was like a joke between us to see how I did. I stayed up late and typed out (with one finger on a word processor she used) the essay. A few days later, she was seriously pissed off because the essay came back with a rave review from her teacher. He’d told her it was even better than her usual high standard. I laughed, and told her that school was a “piece of piss.” She told me that was it, no more goes at her schoolwork. She made it clear that whilst I may be brainy, she at least was at school and would get A levels—I wouldn’t. So from that moment on I kind of knew I could do A levels if I wanted, or needed to.