The Shepherd's Life (10 page)

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 carried 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 clich
é
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.

Bacon and egg, sweet from the dripping left in the pan too long, egg yolks freckled with old fat. Toast carpeted with butter and syrup, cut at a funny angle. Rice pudding like a cake, rich and creamy, with a caramelized brown halo around the dish's rim. Fish and chips wrapped in old newspapers, delivered to the door of our dens in the hay or the woodshed. She baked every week: rock buns. Apple pie. Shortbread. She considered it a grave insult to her housekeeping skills if a visitor wouldn't have a cup of tea and cake.

Their home was like my home. A place where I was doted on and spoiled. My earliest memory is being about five years old and lying in bed with them, because I wouldn't sleep in my own bed, playing with and comparing their ears. On the wall hung a tapestry of Jesus that I hated but could never work out why.… We Love Him Because He Loved Us First, it said. There was a little ornament on the sideboard of an old woman sewing that looked just like Grandma. And an owl with a broken porcelain ear. We smashed that by mistake, and she nearly cried.

She didn't really understand new things like TV. She barely even tried. She lived in a world that died sometime in the 1970s and 1980s. A world that felt like it stretched from the beginning of time until then, where a woman was judged on her cooking, her house, and her garden. She didn't understand the emerging new world of the 1980s, our world, of books, money, computers, credit cards, and holidays. She lived with an unquestioned belief that these things were aberrations, foolishness, and fleeting fancies, the rubbish of now. So she taught us good rules that no longer made sense. Rather than understand our brave new world, she closed her eyes tight shut and turned away. When my life changed in my twenties and I had to briefly become something else, the shared understanding between us broke. We were like foreigners to each other. I hated that and missed her.

When I was in my late teens my mother and aunties organized a “pizza party.” It was quite an event—our first foray into “foreign food” (a takeaway ordered from the newly opened Italian restaurant in our local town—and, yes, this is only twenty years ago). Grandma was horrified. She arrived looking quite cross like we had all forgotten ourselves. She was convinced that “pisa” was a terrible newfangled idea, and that we might all be poisoned if we ate such “rubbish.” She declined to taste a slice, her faced scrunched up in disdain, and thought we had all gone mad when we tucked in and enjoyed it. However she recovered some pride and struck a blow for England when she pulled out a tin of freshly baked shortbread that she had smuggled into the party. When we had eaten that, she went home convinced that her shortbread had seen off the challenge of foreign food forever.