The Shepherd's Life (14 page)

“Hey, what you doing … I was watching that.”

“You were asleep.…”

“No I wasn't, put it back on.”

In another room my mum, seemingly from another planet, would be ironing or doing some paperwork. She loved Rachmaninoff, the Russian composer, and would often play his “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” either the record, or attempting the real thing on our old piano, sounds of another her that I suspected I didn't know very well.

*   *   *

My father once threw down his cutlery in the midst of us arguing about something on TV and shouted to my mother, “I told you. I bloody told you.… You bring them up to have opinions and this is where it ends up.… Everyone in this house thinks they know best … even the fucking dog.”

*   *   *

There were beginning to be too many people in our house, too many opinions on our farm. I was growing, but it wasn't clear whether there was room to grow into. So I escaped into books.

 

9

I may never have met my other grandfather, but he changed my life and shaped how I saw the world. He went to fight in Burma in World War II. I inherited from him a nine-inch knife he had taken from the corpse of a Japanese soldier whilst he was fighting. It was a strangely out-of-place artefact on my chest of drawers where my socks and underpants were kept. My mother had inherited a few dozen books from him, and they sat in her bookcase, mostly neglected. Penguin paperbacks. Orange and stained-white coats, and their yellowing, long-unthumbed pages. Mixed with sun-faded green or brown hardbacks. Legendary books from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s that I'd not heard of yet. Hemingway, Camus, Salinger, A. J. P. Taylor, Orwell. Turns out my grandfather had impeccable taste in books. And I lucked out because they ended up in front of my hungry eyes at just the moment I needed them.

Each night I would lie awake on my bed, pleased of the space from other people, reading like a maniac. When I left school I didn't read much, but I soon became a devourer of books.

I'd often leave the window wide open, so I could tell what the weather was doing, and hear geese passing over or the friendly chatter of the swallows on the telephone lines. Sometimes I'd climb down from the window, with a book in my pocket, and go for a walk across the fields after they thought I was asleep in bed, listening to the plain call of the curlews, sounding like the ghosts of dead children.

I'd watch the sun set away to the west.

I'd trek home with the orange lights of the farms twinkling across the fields in the dark, and climb back into my room. I'd be woken the next morning, book still in hand, by jackdaws making their metallic calls as they stole sheep feed from the troughs in the barn below.

 

10

One day, I pulled
A Shepherd's Life
by W. H. Hudson from the bookcase like it was a piece of junk. It was going to be lousy and patronizing, I just knew it. I was going to hate it like the books they'd pushed at us in school. But I was wrong. I didn't hate it. I loved it.

The inscription inside the front cover read “G. Naylor, Upper V Classical, B. G. S.” My grandfather had taught at Bury Grammar School, B. G. S. The fact that he'd read books about shepherds made me smile. I opened the book at chapter IV, “A Shepherd of the Downs,” suffered the first few paragraphs, and then fell under its spell. Two things I loved: the brilliant plain storytelling—no messing about—and the sudden life-changing realization it gave me that we could be in books. Great books.

Until I read this book I thought books were always about other people, other places, other lives. This book, in all its glory, was about us (or at least the old Wiltshire version of us). The book is the life story of a shepherd called Caleb Bawcombe, as told to W. H. Hudson when he was an old man in the early years of the last century. I knew the people in this book. They were my grandfather, my father, everyone I knew and respected. I felt like I could work with Caleb and talk sheepdogs, lame sheep, or the weather. There is enough of the old shepherd in that book that I forget that Hudson's pen is between us. By about midnight I'd read the book and went to find my mother who was still ironing.

“Have you read this? Hell, it's good, Mum.…

“It's about people like us.”

“Have we any more books by this W. H. Hudson?”

We didn't. But her eyes were smiling. Later I would learn that the shepherding way of life known to Caleb Bawcombe disappeared, as people like us have all over the world, as the older ways of farming have been swept away by the need for efficiency and scale. Where it does remain is in the mountains, where there is no alternative to the old ways. By the mid-twentieth century, native breeds were sold and replaced by new, improved livestock, and hedges and walls ripped out for bigger fields and machines. Caleb Bawcombe wouldn't recognize farming in Wiltshire now.

When Ernest Hemingway was asked what books an aspiring writer should read, he said you had to read the good stuff by the “big boys” to see the level you had to beat. He listed W. H. Hudson as one of the benchmarks. Today he's mostly forgotten. But even more than Orwell or Hemingway, W. H. Hudson turned me into a book obsessive, someone who believed in the written word. Suddenly my room started to fill with dozens of books. You could chart how much I was reading by the speed with which we got our friend George the joiner to come and put new bookshelves up.

 

11

At eighteen years old I could slog it out with my dad at much of the physical work for the first time. We travelled to my grandfather's farm (which is now our farm, minus a house) to do the work each day.

We are bringing hay bales on a trailer from the field in the valley bottom to the barn. The work is simple but tough. He parks the tractor and trailer next to the heaps of bales (each one holding seventeen or twenty-two bales depending on the height), and we throw them manually onto the trailer. We take turns on the trailer, stacking the bales the correct way, to ensure they will stay on the bumpy road, with them holding one another in place like the stones in a wall, each layer laid on differently to cross the joints. The hardest job was to throw the bales up from the ground, which becomes harder as the trailer load grows upwards. It is one of the muggiest, hottest, and most airless days I have ever experienced. We are wet with sweat within half an hour. The bales seem heavier as the morning goes on. But as we fill each load, we get a breather as we drive the tractor and trailer up the winding lane to the field house (one of our names for a stone barn where we store crop for the winter). Then at the barn my father scurries up the elevator into the hay mew, and I pull the rope that starts the engine-driven elevator; and away it turns rattling, spewing out petrol fumes to add to the sweat and the dust of the hay. I lower the bales onto the elevator from the trailer, and they depart into the darkness of the old barn, then another bale and ever onwards.

At midday we both remark on how little air there is; we know that after our picnic and bottles of orange squash are gone we will be out of drink. But after half an hour lying in the shade we have recovered and go back for the other half of the bales in the hayfield. We get ever sweatier and more fatigued. Our drinks run out about an hour after lunch and we both start to worry how we will keep working for hours without it. Usually we drink from the becks (streams) or a water trough, but these are almost dried up and covered in an unattractive film of dust and flies. Our neighbours are all away from home, and the nearest shop is half an hour's drive away, almost halfway home, and neither of us has any money on us to buy anything anyway. We could pack up and go home, but that is fifteen miles away and the sky is darkening away to the west like it is soon going to thunder.

There is little choice but to see this thing through, get the hay in the barn, and then head home. Eventually we have just one load of bales left to load. Each bale is weighing like lead, and some of them are tumbling back off the trailer (they will need to be picked up and thrown again) instead of floating up as they had earlier in the day. As the final bale goes onto the trailer, we both know that we are dehydrated. But as we reach the old barn to complete our work, the trailer wheel hits a stone and the whole load tips off on the hillside, and some of the bales tumble down the bank. My father and I exchange a look of absolute horror, and we both smile darkly at a day that is getting worse fast. The bales have to be lugged back up the bank, and then thrown onto the trailer again. Eventually we get to the barn, unload the hay there, and bolt the big wooden doors that mean the hay is safe and dry. As we leave we are both breathing hard and heavy, gasping for air that isn't there.

We stop at a friend's house and drink a belly full of cold tap water, and immediately we both feel sick. We have heatstroke. The next day we both have headaches and are sickly.

My father always reminds me of that punishing day, like another kind of dad might remind another kind of son of a family day out at the seaside.

Something he and I had done together.

 

12

Later that year, some gawky teenage town kid that now lives in the house across the road calls my dad a sheep shagger and then tells him to go fuck himself. I expected my dad to knock him to the floor, but he didn't.

He'd told the kid he couldn't walk at will over our land, and that by leaving gates open, sheep in different flocks had been mixed together.

The kid swaggered off, laughing, and my dad turned to me and shook his head.

 

13

I'd somehow convinced myself that working hard on the family farm would be a thing that people respected, that people would respect me as I had my grandfather. I soon realized that this wasn't the case. In our family it was normal to work on the farm, it wasn't news. Outside the family it was of no significance to anyone. The result was I felt I ceased to exist as far as the rest of the world was concerned, sort of swallowed up by the farm. On the one hand this was fine by me (I was so glad to have escaped from school), but it was also annoying, because it seemed to confirm that if you went to university you somehow mattered, whereas if you worked hard in an old-fashioned, rooted kind of way, you were not worthy of interest or praise. I also couldn't help but notice that certain young ladies in the nightclubs of our local town showed no interest whatsoever in me the minute they established I was a farmworker.

 

14

An old shepherd is hunched over a silver aluminum gate. The square pens in front of him are crammed with grey woollen backs. He speaks, but only the sheep listen, and me, because I am passing.

“These are bloody good well-bred sheep.… You young ones should have your arses kicked, to let them ewes be thrown away like that.”

He is angry because the auction mart has just sold these sheep badly. They were sold for £22 each. A catalogue misprint had them as draft ewes when they should've been advertised as stock ewes. The difference between these two words is huge to this old man. One word, “draft,” means they are the spare, lower quality, or usually older ewes in the flock. The other word, “stock,” means they are the core ewes of the flock itself, that a flock is being dispersed. Ended. He thinks they have been disrespected, ignored, and forgotten in the acres of wiry grey sheep. They were balloted early (the sale order is pulled out of a hat to ensure that no one is favoured over anyone else in the sale order). So they had been forgotten, mostly ignored, and sold before a decent crowd could get to the ring. That autumn we saw ewes given away because they were worth so little; others sold for a few pounds each.

His words whisper out over the pens, lost in the wind that sweeps over the fields, roads, and towns and away across the fells. The day the flock was sold, the auction was half-empty. Cars and wagons streamed along the A66. Not a soul from the “farm” attended. They were “at work” in the local town, had ceased to be sheep people a generation before.

The past falters and dies by little steps.

Then it has gone, and old men go home, disappointed.

I went home that night and wondered if anyone really cared about what we did. I wondered whether I would just end up some sad old man talking to myself about sheep that no one would give a damn about. The 1990s and 2000s were a time when the prevailing thinking was that we, small farmers in marginal areas, were yesterday's people; the future of our landscape would be tourism and wildlife and trees and letting it go wild. Each autumn more of the great flocks would be sold or reduced as old men retired, or reduced in number as various environmental schemes resulted in thousands of hefted sheep being sold off the fells to reduce the numbers. They call it destocking. Some of it is necessary to redress the twentieth-century excesses that we are as guilty of as are farmers elsewhere. But it was felt as a grave insult to many folk who work this landscape because the loss of one flock or its reduction weakens the whole Lake District fell-farming system, making what we do more fragile. When people in positions of authority spoke about our home, we felt they valued everything in it except the things we valued, that producing food was a pathetic, cheap thing. This wasn't the farming fairy story I'd imagined, with me as the blue-eyed prince.

 

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.”