23
My younger sisters were never as indoctrinated with the farm as I was. They were part of it too, but not blinded by it. They were always a lot more modern and with it. This was partly because things, including attitudes, were changing rapidly around us. The four and eight years, respectively, that separated me from my sisters made a big difference. It was also different because they were girls. In many farming families, the daughters have none of the boys’ embarrassment about being something different, and know that their role is to leave and do something else to earn respect (either that or marry another farmer and start their own branch of the family doing much the same as their own folk). The same farmers who are proud of their sons for flunking school to come home to work on the farm are also proud that their daughters work hard at school and go off to do other things in the wider world. Attitudes to education have changed as well, with many farmers now proud (and perhaps a bit relieved) when their children choose to stay at school and live a different life; but that wasn’t so true when I was young. It meant my mother got more of her way with my sisters, and they repaid her efforts with the kind of exam results to make any parent proud. They got into the local grammar school, a quite different school experience than that which I’d had. I’d been a little shit, and they were top-of-the-class material. It was hard to believe we were the same family.
24
I applied to the local adult education centre when I was twenty-one (it always sounded to me like they should be teaching porn) to do A levels in the evenings over two years. The teacher called me and told me I couldn’t get into the course because I had no qualifications worth mentioning. I’d have to do them first, then reapply. I asked him whether the class was full, and it wasn’t. So I asked him to give me a three-week trial, and if I was out of my depth and a nuisance after three weeks, I’d leave of my own volition and they could keep my course fee for the year. He prevaricated a bit and said it was irregular but he’d go along with it. So after I got my farmwork done, I’d jump in my parents’ car and drive to Carlisle (half an hour away) and sit in classes from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. The first week I was very nervous. I told myself I was in control and could leave if I didn’t like it. I didn’t tell anyone except my family and asked them to keep quiet about it. I wasn’t doing it for anyone except myself, to show myself I could do it. The teacher had offered me the perfect challenge. I hate being told I can’t do something. There were about twenty of us in the classroom. A couple of elderly folk studying for a hobby, a couple of youngsters trying to improve their CVs, and about fifteen single mums. There was at the time some weird policy about benefits that said you either had to try and get a job or had to be in education in order to qualify for benefits. So it was common practice for single mums on benefits to do a night a week at college with their friends. They were young, funny, chatty, and probably quite bright if they wanted to be, but mostly they were just totally disinterested in the course we were on. I sat with them and enjoyed the fun they were having. But since I’d left school, something had changed in me. I was on a mission this time, in the room because I chose to be there. It made all the difference in the world. The teacher would ask a question. Silence. The ladies at the back would pay no attention at all. The earnest few would try and answer and get it wrong. And then I’d answer it correctly. It was fairly easy if you’d read the books I had. In fact, after a couple of lessons it felt a bit like I knew more about some of the subjects than the teacher. I knew the academic debates about different issues. The teacher, to his credit, encouraged it. When I asked him after the three weeks whether I was still on the course, he told me not to be so bloody stupid. I’d got straight As. He started asking me a couple of questions each week after class. Why had I got no GCSEs? What was I reading? What did I do? Did I want to go to university? Had I thought about applying for Oxford or Cambridge? I laughed the last one off. “No way, I hate students.” And I did.
I’d never once wished I’d gone to university. The few people I knew who had didn’t seem to have come back any the wiser for it. They seemed to come home full of nonsense. And they never really fit in again. Still, the question threw me a bit, because although I genuinely didn’t want to go anywhere, if he thought I was that good at this book stuff, then perhaps it meant I had options. And I needed options. Books and doing my A levels became a kind of escapism, something to think about that I could control. I was discovering something about the wider world—that you could shape your own fate to a much greater degree than I’d ever experienced. If you read more, worked harder, thought things through smartly, or wrote or argued better than other people, you won. For a while I found this newfound freedom quite exciting and liberating. I found it a bit of a buzz to just be good at something, something that was nothing to do with my family or our farm, or anyone else except me.
25
I just had one small problem.
I couldn’t write by hand.
I was always poor at handwriting at school, and for nine years after leaving school had not needed to write anything. What little writing I did, recording sheep numbers and other functional short notes, I did in block capitals. So when I signed up to do my A levels at evening classes, I wrote the weekly essays on a word processor. Typing with one finger, handing in tidy well-presented sheets of paper. And then, whack, it struck me in the face. It was about a month before the exam date and I would have to write the answers in essay form by hand and not in block capitals. Helen made me a pre-exam test to see whether I could write the essay answers by hand. Half an hour later I threw down the paper and stormed out of the room. My writing was almost illegible. Even worse, I found it so difficult to hold the pen that I spent all my time focusing on my handwriting and none thinking about what I was writing. Scariest of all was that the harder I tried, the firmer I gripped the pencil, the worse things got, until my hand was cramping, I was sweating, and losing my head. I was panicking. I was also ashamed. What sort of idiot knows all the answers but can’t write them down?
Helen bought me a children’s book for learning handwriting. I was surly and ungrateful, but eventually I could scribble words that someone could read, though even to this day I break out in a cold sweat if I am ever asked to write anything more than half a dozen words by hand.
In the years since I had left school I had observed the professional people who were buying houses in our village. These people seemed to earn more money in a week than I did in months, and it looked like you had to get an education to play their game. So I decided to. I was going to whore myself in a world I didn’t like. And I figured that if you are going to be a whore, you should be a high-class one. I decided to do something I didn’t really want to do. I would apply to university and see if I could get into Oxford. If I could, I would consider going. If I couldn’t, I would bin the whole idea. So after a few months I had one A level to show for my efforts, was halfway through some others, and had a teacher who was prepared to write me a gushing letter saying I was some kind of dysfunctional genius who deserved a second chance.
26
I’d never been to Oxford, or anywhere like it.
They call it the “dreaming spires” but to me it just looked like endless streets full of stuffy church buildings, libraries, or palaces. Each college was, and is, like its own village, and operates like its own little half-hidden community. The streets had a strangely outdated film-set quality, with people hurrying past on old-fashioned bicycles, some in academic gowns, or striding past in long woollen coats and black polished leather shoes. The colleges are entered through little doors that are not entirely welcoming unless you belong through them. Through the little doors each college has a “porter’s lodge” staffed with men that looked to me on first arrival like 1920s “manservants.” I cringed inside with discomfort when they kindly tried to help me, and instinctively hated the class-ridden set-up of this place. Beyond the lodges are shadowy cloisters, perfectly tended lawns, an occasional deer park, and long ivy-clad buildings with endless doors t
hat lead in to staircases, or teaching rooms, where bookshelves rise from floor to ceiling. Each shadowy corner of Oxford is haunted by its past, so within minutes of being there I learnt that Japanese emperors, Nobel laureates, First World War officers, and endless poets or artists had lived in those rooms once. I felt like this was another England than the one that I was born into.
It seemed quite ridiculous that I might get in.
But they were apparently looking for people from “different backgrounds” and I perhaps turned up at just the right moment. They accepted my CV was a bit “unconventional” and took some essays and an application form as proof of my having some brains. It wasn’t much—but it did secure me an interview, which I travelled down to on the train half cocky and full of myself and half scared witless.
I needn’t have worried. The interview went like a dream. I found myself in front of a bunch of bored professors who did a kind of bad-cop good-cop routine on me. Age eighteen I would have wilted, but I was now in my early twenties. It was easy if you weren’t really bothered. So, much to the amusement of the other professors, I got into a row with one of them. I like arguing. I’m good at it. When he went too far, and said something a bit silly, I teased him and said he was losing his grip. As I left the room after my time was up, I smiled at them as if to say, “Fuck you, I could do that all day.”
They all smiled back.
I knew I was in.
27
We are working in the sheep pens. Sorting lambs for the auction. We handle each one across the back with the thumb and first finger, feeling the fat covering on the back, pressing into the wool. There is an art to selecting them in their prime. We pull those that are meaty into a side pen. I ask my father if I should go. He tells me I have to. That they will do fine at home without me. They might even do better, he adds, smiling.
I can always come back, he says.
This thing that is happening seems to erase the bad blood between us. Everything is suddenly calmer now. Last week we were at each other’s throats, and now he’s my dad again. I’m no threat to him, and he seems to understand that I’m about to sail into uncharted waters. I think he feels guilty too that I don’t really want to go anywhere and that it is because we can’t get on anymore. He comes home from selling the lambs that night and seems to be in high spirits; word has got out about it, and his friends have been teasing him, saying I must get my brains from my mother.
I was briefly a minor local “working-class hero” in the pubs of our town. When I told my friend David, whose family farmed up the village from us, he looked at me like I had gone mad and replied with complete sincerity that they must have made a clerical mistake because I was just an idiot like him. People that remembered me at school couldn’t quite get their heads around it. Middle-class girls, who’d previously thought I was not quite a full shilling, now suddenly showed a lot more interest. I laughed with my friends about this; one of them replied that I should just take whatever I could. I laughed. But the truth was I’d already found the girl I wanted to be with.
28
About ten days into my time in Oxford I became aware of how people communicated. Notes were posted in the porter’s lodge in a pigeonhole with your name on it. Mine was now jammed full of increasingly frustrated notes from the history tutors, asking why I wasn’t attending all the start-up meetings. Christ. Damn it. I’d thought it had been kind of laid-back and quiet. The last note basically said if I didn’t come and see them ASAP, they would have to assume I wasn’t on the course and take action. I’d apparently missed social drinks, the inception meetings, explanations of the library system, and a bunch of other stuff that would have helped. So I went to see the professor and confessed the truth. He looked a bit annoyed that anyone could be that dumb, but told me to get to the library and get on with an essay due in a couple of days. I hurried off to the Bodleian Library, where it turned out the books I needed had already been taken by the other students.
29
The basic drill was that each week you had one or two tutorials, where you went face-to-face with a professor. Two days earlier you’d handed in an essay on the subject given the week before. You were given a reading list that filled a side of A4. Must have had twenty or more books on it. Your job was to read those books, and others that you might find of relevance, digest them, and then write an essay showing your dazzling originality and clear analysis of the issues. When I was handed my first reading list, I asked the professor how it was possible to read twenty books in a week and do all that. He gave me a look that said “Just do it.” After a while it became second nature either to actually do all that work, or to do enough so I didn’t get an intellectual kicking the next week. The first three weeks I got the second mark from the top, a 2:1, which in my understanding was like a B grade. I asked the professor why I wasn’t getting top marks. He told me the marks were good, but I should be more me, and less a copy of everyone else there. It hadn’t occurred to me that being me was a potential advantage. And then the penny dropped. Everyone in Oxford was bored of perfect kids from perfect schools. Being a bit northern and weird was my greatest strength. It could make me interesting. I could beat the perfect people by doing things they couldn’t do.
30
I was seated next to a professor. He asked me about my life at home, and I told him. I always gave them what they seemed to want, a little mythical version of me. On the application form I told them I was a drystone wall builder on the Lake District fells, so every conversation for the next three years was about how it must be a big change being in Oxford after working on the fells each day. I had a good evening, talking to him, and at the end he said “Oh well, I imagine you will miss it.” I told him that I hadn’t stopped doing it, that I was going back.
He seemed quite confused by this.
He asked what I made of the other students so I told him. They were okay, but they were all very similar; they struggled to have different opinions because they’d never failed at anything or been nobodies, and they thought they would always win. But this isn’t most people’s experience of life. He asked me what could be done about it. I told him the answer was to send them all out for a year to do some dead-end job like working in a chicken processing plant or spreading muck with a tractor. It would do more good than a gap year in Peru. He laughed and thought this tremendously witty. It wasn’t meant to be funny.
31
Being in Oxford was strange for me. I’d never had a life where empty days stretched before me. I’d never woken up and wondered what I’d do today. And suddenly I am waking up, my body clock telling me it is time to start work, but no person or animals need me here. I am like an island in a sea of other people. I don’t really like the freedom I am experiencing; it feels pointless and empty. I end up like one of those imprisoned tigers that walks endlessly from one side of its cage to the other. I throw on my clothes each morning and go pretend shepherding; I walk miles around the parks in Oxford, across the fields, past the paddocks full of ponies. I do a lap or two of the quadrant in college. It is like my body and my mind need to treat this like my farm and my farmwork. By about 8 a.m. I am walked out. No one else has surfaced yet in the college. I call home, but that just annoys everyone there because they are working and haven’t time to chat. I called yesterday. They don’t say it, but I know they have to work harder because I am not there (particularly my mother), and that makes me feel ashamed.
So I go to the libraries each morning early and work until they close at night. I tried to work out how I would explain the subject to my dad or my mates if they asked me to.
But occasionally the sunlight through the library windows catches my eye, and I know I should be out in that. I feel like I have cut myself adrift from everything I love.
After the first year, Helen comes down to Oxford. She bakes cakes and sells them in a café and at a farm shop to support us. She puts me to work as her baking assistant. The cakes have to be delivered first thing in the morning when the café and far
m shop open, so we bake last thing the night before. We just have one small problem: The kitchen in the small flat we rent from my college is tiny, maybe six feet by four feet in total. So the whole flat is taken over with trays of lemon drizzle, chocolate brownie, flapjack, and Victoria sponges. Helen is a good cook, but my skills extend simply to washing up, mixing ingredients to her instruction, and carrying things to the car. To begin with, the cakes had been a sideline, but after a few weeks the orders got bigger and bigger and we had to work half the night to meet them. The table and sofas are laden with cardboard boxes full of cookies, coffee cakes balanced in gaps in the bookshelves; and even the bed has a few coffee cakes plated on it. We have tremendous rows about my inability to follow instructions, about things getting burnt in the pathetic little oven, or occasionally me dropping something as I go up the flights of stairs from the basement flat to the car. But we did it together, and now, years later we smile at the silly things we did to make enough money to get by. I think it was a good time. It meant we built the foundations of our life together without too many other people or agendas getting in the way. Later when we married and went home to the farm and had children, there would, of course, be many distractions; our life would be less about us, and more about the things and people around us.
But it would be built on strong foundations.
32
The strangest thing about leaving the farm and starting to live a different life was that from the minute I left I was always coming back. I quickly realized that my new life often left me with loads of time of my own. Weekends. Holidays. Evenings. You often don’t physically need to be at a university or an office all the time. The three terms at Oxford were eight weeks long, twenty-four weeks in total. It quickly became clear that I could still be at home for more than half the year. I could even be at home for half the week sometimes during term.
The Shepherd's Life Page 12
