The Shepherd's Life (20 page)

“It's a shame but his teeth are just slightly over the edge of his pad.… I think we'll have to turn him down.…”

“By he's a good tup, but you'd have to say that leg is a little bit twined [twisted]. I don't think we can pass him.… Sorry, lad.”

Being one of the inspectors calls for the diplomatic skills of Henry Kissinger. You risk upsetting the breeder if you turn the sheep down, potentially ending your chances of ever selling him sheep again. But pass a sheep with a fault and it is likely to be noticed and brought to other people's attention later at the sales. The whole point is to protect buyers at the sales, who should be able to buy with confidence, knowing that men who know what they are doing have okayed the sheep. So the inspectors sometimes do a funny little set piece scene in which they spot a fault and look uncomfortable; they have a bit of a steward's enquiry, and usually the breeder, to save their embarrassment, will intervene.

“Don't worry, it's not right. I never realized it was that bad. Turn it down, you'll have to.”

The inspectors, freed from their embarrassment, fail it and move on to the other tups.

 

43

If I had only a few days left on earth, I would spend one of them inspecting Herdwick tups. The inspectors are driven around the Lake District valleys to all the beautiful stone-built little farmsteads. Some nestle under rocky crags, and all are surrounded by endless miles of walls that track up the fell sides and carve the valley bottom into irregularly shaped meadows. As you approach the farm, the coordinator, who lives in that valley, will tell you about the history of the farm and family so you understand the people and place before you.

“This was once one of the greatest Herdwick farms.… My father said there wasn't another flock to match it … but the son was no good.… When he left, the National Trust put in some daft bugger from down south and the sheep were wasted … but there are still some good uns.… And this new lad is trying to turn the job around.… They say he has a nice one this time.”

Each farm has its own stories that are sustained only in the memories of the other farmers and shepherds. Even individual fields or bits of the commons have names. We know most of these folk, but often you will not have had a reason to visit their farms. At each place you are made welcome, though people are nervous as well, as the decisions could spoil their autumn sales. Out of the farmhouse will come the whole family and everyone does their hellos. We are almost always asked if we'd like a cup of tea and a bite of cake. Then we are ushered to the sheep. They will be penned in yards that are often little changed from when Beatrix Potter bought some of these places. The ironwork on the gates is often worn shiny with use, and the timber rails smooth and often red from tups.

Standing before us are maybe a dozen (sometimes many more) Herdwick tups. These tups are charged with passing on their masculinity to their sons, so any sign of softness or standing femininely is frowned upon. They should stand four square, or as we say a leg in each corner like a sturdy oak table with chunky legs. Their white heads glisten in the summer sunshine. About half have curly powerful leg-bruising horns (Herdwick ewes don't have horns); other tups without horns are called cowed. The kind of white in the head and legs matters; any sign of dullness or grey, or large black spots, is frowned upon. You can tell the quality of the breeding often from the whiteness behind the front leg in the armpit. It is just weeks since they were sheared so their powerful grey bodies are thick and long and athletic. There are dozens of little things I am looking for, practical things like the size, healthiness, alertness, mobility, legs, fleece, and teeth. Without these things, the sheep cannot live on the fells. But because sheep are cultural objects, almost like art, I'm looking for style and character as well, and finer breed points, like how white their ears are. White lugs won't help them survive the winters, but they will help me breed sheep that I can sell to discerning shepherds. The little aesthetic things become the symbols of good breeding over a long period of time.

Once the work is done, we depart off to the next flock. We might inspect a hundred tups in a day on maybe fifteen farms. It might take ten days to cover the whole breed areas, so different inspectors do a day each generally.

 

44

I'm on the third or fourth floor of a building just off Oxford Street, London. I left the flat at 5:30 a.m. in Oxford to catch a train, and won't get home until 10 p.m. My work cubicle is about three feet by four feet square. The shelves above the Mac I'm working on tower up towards the ceiling; they're covered with the assorted papers and other rubbish of the previous occupant of my chair. The nearest window is about twenty feet away, but it hardly matters because there isn't anything to see from it except the back of the neighbouring building. There is nothing green to see out there anyway, except a sickly looking little tree in the square below.

I'm working as a subeditor, despite having zero experience at doing that. After a term or two in Oxford I'd realized that to get the kind of well-paid job I needed, I had to get some work experience.

I secretly fancied myself as the next Ernest Hemingway, so I thought maybe I could be a journalist. So I'd applied to some magazines for work experience. Only one replied and I was called down to London to have a chat with the editor.

It didn't start very well, because when I arrived I had to use an intercom system, and not knowing how they worked I pressed the buzzer continuously whilst I was talking to the person upstairs. They told me angrily that I could stop pressing the buzzer. The whole office buzzed each time the intercom was on and stayed buzzing as long as the button was pressed. When I got up there, everyone peered over their computers and smirked. The editor was very friendly, seemed to realize I was way out of my comfort zone, but kindly agreed to give me a chance. When I came back to start the work experience on the date agreed (some weeks later), I passed a man leaving the building with a cardboard box under his arm and looking flustered. He sort of bustled past me in the doorway. When I got in the office, I was told to sit in the cubicle and wait. I waited about three hours.

Then the editor emerged from her office and thrust a few sheets of paper with scribbled notes at me, and said, “Proof that.…”

“But…”

“Sorry, I haven't time to talk … just do it.…”

I had a funny feeling that she didn't recognize me at all. When I took the papers back to her half an hour later, she was on the phone and simply took them from me, motioned intensely for me to keep quiet. She then handed me another piece of paper with scribbles on it. I left the first day completely baffled.

Over the days that followed I began to pick up a few things, not least that subediting has its own language of squiggles that you use. So I learned those, and did the best I could. It was a crazy, manic atmosphere of a kind I'd never experienced, but it would be interspersed with hours when I had done the work, but could not get anyone to tell me what to do next. I'd be waved away by the editor or another member of the staff. At lunchtimes I'd sit on a bench in the square and marvel at the beautiful girls flooding out of all the fashion magazines and fashion houses in that district.

After a fortnight or so I was beckoned into the editor's office. The magazine had gone to press and the atmosphere had changed. She asked how much they were paying me. I explained that they weren't. I was there on work experience, and no one had offered to pay me. She seemed surprised. Then she explained that I was basically doing the job of the subeditor sacked a fortnight ago. The man leaving with the cardboard box on the day I had arrived.

She asked me to stay the whole holiday and come back the next summer. The next summer is the only one I have ever spent away from our farm. It was the weirdest few weeks of my life.

I didn't know anyone in London, and I never wanted to be there. This is not how my life was meant to be. But needs must. It's like the gods are showing me how tough everyone else's lives are, and what I have left behind. I understand for the first time why people want to escape to places like where I live. I understand what national parks are for, so that people whose lives are always like this can escape and feel the wind in their hair and the sun on their faces.

 

45

I promised myself that I would be at home the next summer. I was, but not under the circumstances I'd imagined, because in 2001, the foot-and-mouth epidemic broke out.

Foot-and-mouth disease entered the UK when a pig farmer fed his pigs “untreated waste” as swill that apparently contained contaminated meat. The disease spread like wildfire, infecting thousands of animals and spreading across vast areas, before the UK government got to grips with it. Infected flocks and herds were immediately slaughtered, and to prevent the disease spreading a policy was implemented of culling whole areas to create buffer zones around the disease. Eventually the epidemic was controlled and the disease eradicated from the UK, but not before 10 million sheep and cattle were slaughtered. The centre of the epidemic was Cumbria where we live and farm.

From the high ground where we feed our ewes and lambs, for as far as I can see, there are towers of smoke rising from pyres of burning sheep, cattle, and pigs. The land is shrouded in a grey haze. The wind carries the sickly smell of burnt flesh and the chemical smell of the fires. For weeks we have been under siege. Those not yet struck down by the virus are waiting to be hit by it. Our landscape is riddled with it now, because the government was too slow to react to its spreading in the beginning. Completely oblivious to a farming world where livestock moves around the countryside (as it always has). The TV news shows a map of the cases spreading, an ugly grey stain that seems to cover my whole universe. The solution decided upon was to clear certain zones of livestock so the disease could be contained. The land would be cleared of sheep initially, but the cattle would be left in their winter housing.

They came to collect our sheep at lambing time. We loaded pregnant ewes into the wagons. The few lambs that had been born were loaded as well. I have never done anything that felt so wrong, so against everything I was ever taught to do.

The auctioneer sent to value them for compensation cried and said it was “criminal to kill such good breeding sheep.”

Many of the sheep were descendants of the good ewes my grandfather had bought in the 1940s. Sixty years' work wiped away in two hours.

Our cattle later got the disease anyway and were shot in the fields by a police sniper. Killed one at a time, with a crack of a rifle, until the fields around the village looked like something out of a war movie. The villagers stood on the green in disbelief, watching. My neighbour stood with a shotgun at his field boundary, ready to shoot any cattle that threatened to jump his fence and infect his clean cattle. He apologized but said he had to protect his stock. I told him I understood. I'd have done the same. My dad wanted nothing to do with the whole miserable business and went in the house, leaving me to supervise amidst the chaos. I felt dirty and ashamed. At one point I turned to someone in disbelief and said, “Is this really happening?” and they replied, “I think so.”

After it was over, the slaughter finished, and the men gone, I walked around the farm in disbelief. It was a beautiful evening in the English countryside, with a peach red sunset, but the fields were speckled with our dead cattle. Red cattle. White cattle. Black cattle. Strangely peaceful, they lay in all sorts of mangled and contorted ways. I knew those cattle, so it was like seeing old friends dead. The setting sun creating all kinds of grotesque shadows. My mind couldn't quite process it. It was surreal, like I was watching a movie. The farm was eerily silent, something we had never known before. The next day our dead and bloated livestock were loaded by diggers like trash into wagons and led to a hole in the ground miles away. There was a look on my father's face of pure disgust at this whole spectacle.

When the last wagon had gone I went into the barn, away from everyone, sat down in the shadows, held my head in my hands, and sobbed big fat dusty tears.

Then the farms were empty. And we didn't know what to do without livestock to care for. I waited to hear my dad getting up, but there was nothing to get up for. Our sheep and cattle were dead. Someone had pressed Pause on our way of life, and we weren't sure if anyone would ever press Play again.

One day as we were working my mobile phone buzzed in my pocket. It was Helen, who I had left working in Oxford whilst I spent the summer working at home. She told me to go and turn the TV on. Something had happened to a skyscraper in New York. I couldn't really process what she was telling me. But I told everyone. We went to the farmhouse. I turned on the TV and we stood and watched through the kitchen window. We were all wearing our farm waterproofs. The plane hit the World Trade Centre from several angles on an endless TV news loop. And we stood slack-jawed and confused as the second plane hit the second tower. Then we stood spellbound as the towers fell in their vast sad clouds of dust and swirling bits of paper. None of us really knew what was going on. It felt like the world was falling apart around us.

 

46

Our farm in the fells was one of the last farms towards the mountains culled during the epidemic. Had it spread west a few more fields, the disease would have got on to the unfenced lakeland fells, where it would have decimated the ancient hefted fell flocks on the commons. Ninety percent of the Herdwick sheep in the world exist within twenty miles of Coniston. Herdwick sheep were at grave risk of being wiped out. But an essentially urban government didn't understand. To them a sheep was a sheep, a farm simply a farm. The idea that something precious was on the edge of destruction was never really grasped. We are often in the hands of other people, our fate in the hands of shoppers and supermarkets and bureaucrats. In the end the fell flocks mostly escaped (though many young fell sheep were culled when they were caught in the killing zone on their wintering grounds in the lowlands). Many great flocks of sheep and herds of cattle were destroyed, but thankfully not all.