The Shepherd's Life (23 page)

*   *   *

As the Lake District fells rise up in front of us, I feel those fells encircling me like friends, and I punch my fist and shout, “
I am home!
”

Helen laughs at me and says I am crazy.

I'd gone to prove a point to myself, and maybe to other people too. But there wasn't much satisfaction in it. I lost the hunger to keep proving it.

 

10

Grey clouds pass overhead. I am picking stones in the middle of a vast brown field. My job is to drive a digger, stop every thirty or so yards, and throw any stones that the plough has turned up into the loader bucket on its front. I am working on my cousin's farm. He drives past and teases me that he's never had such a well-educated slave. I laugh and tell him to fuck off. I'm grateful for the work. Within a day or two of getting back, I am soon getting plenty of offers. Walling. Clipping sheep. Milking cows. Picking stones.

None of this work pays enough to buy a house here, or to get a mortgage to convert the barn on my grandfather's farm. I knew I needed a “good” white-collar professional job. With a good white-collar job I could work nine to five, keeping the holidays and every weekend for the farm, plus a couple of hours every morning, some lunchtimes as I was passing by, and every night. I could do a lot of farming every week, be there most days. It meant switching between suit and farm clothes every day, but I hoped that in about ten years we would be able to do the things we wanted to do: build a farmhouse, and keep the farm going.

 

11

Since getting back from Oxford I have worked on the farm with my father, but managed to fit that round another professional life to earn a living. I got a series of jobs focused on the economics of historic places, and realized I was fascinated by the subject. The Internet and smartphones meant I could work from home a lot and with flexible hours. Today I am an expert advisor to the UNESCO World Heritage Centre in Paris. I work with them freelance to help ensure that tourism benefits host communities. One of my shepherd friends says I'm “a bit like James Bond.” I go to lots of random places and no one knows quite what I am up to.

*   *   *

Sometimes I am doing my other work whilst I am standing in the sheep shed. No one else needs to know. A colleague on the phone will say they just heard a sheep.

I tell them they imagined it.

My other working life has allowed me to build a farmhouse on our farm.

 

12

Twenty years have passed since my grandfather died and the farm was in trouble.

After Oxford Helen and I ended up living in Carlisle for a couple of years, thirty miles north of the farm. I'd leave Helen each morning to go to the farm, or to work elsewhere to earn our living. When I got back, she would thrust our new baby into my hands and say “your turn.” Next door to us lived a lovely old couple. The husband, Fargie, called water “council pop,” because when they were young they couldn't afford anything else to drink, and his mother had made a joke of it.

Later we moved to a village not far from where I grew up in the Eden Valley. My friends teased me that we were moving very slowly back towards the farm but that it would take about three lifetimes at the current rate of advance.

*   *   *

Helen loved the house we had in the village of Newby. Our second daughter, Bea, was born in the bathroom there, and the next day an old neighbour of ours came round and told us she was the first child born in the village (rather than the local hospital) since he was born seventy or so years earlier. Helen didn't really want to leave the home she made there. She was worried that we were moving to a farm in the middle of nowhere, away from her friends and her neighbours and a life she had built, to an old barn in the middle of a field to start again. Moving to the farm was always my dream. Helen accepted it because she loved me, and was loyal to things I needed to do. She was farming born and bred, but like many sensible daughters of farmers she'd kept a step removed from farming. She now jokes that it took me nineteen years to persuade her to show any interest in farming, but now she does a lot of jobs on the farm and knows more than she lets on.

In the end, we were able to convert a barn on the farm into a house, and this is now our home. Our children have settled in at the local school.

My whole world is now on that farm.

My family. My sheep. My home.

Even on the endless wet grey days I never regret being here—which is good because we get a lot of them. Sometimes it feels like
Groundhog Day,
especially in winter. After the autumn sales there is a morning-after-the-night-before feeling in the air. There is only winter in front of us. An ominous feeling, because it can become cold and wet as early as October and it can stretch right through until almost May before it feels warm again, a whole eight months of the year that tend to feel like winter. We rarely get the seasons like they do in the south of England. Spring and autumn are often hurried transitions, never really equivalent in length or spirit to winter. Only summer sees the world relax a little.

 

13

I wake to the sound of wind and rain scolding at the window. I can see from my bed a dirty brown rug of heather, mud, and skeletal oak trees. The beck roars away in the ghyll, tumbling over the stones. The fells stand capped in a dirty smudge of cloud. That tiny moment of looking out tells me what my day will be; whether I am to have an easier day in walking boots, or whether I will be fighting through in layers of warm and waterproof clothing.

So from the moment my eyes unfasten, a clock is ticking in my head, marking time, telling me daylight is limited, and that the flock have not been so lucky as me, have endured whatever the weather has thrown at them through the night. Powered by guilt or shame, the voice is telling me not to screw up. Daylight is limited in the winter months. As the sun crests above the fells to the east I know the clock has started ticking. I have a finite period of time to get around my stock and squeeze in whatever other jobs need to be done. On good days I don't notice it. On bad days the clock ticks heavily in my skull. There is no opt out. Something might die because you couldn't be bothered.

There is little joy in working in the sodden wet days of winter. It proves too much for some people. When the National Trust has rented out farms to people new to this world, folk that are often giddy with enthusiasm for the farming life, it tends to end badly. The get-up-and-get-out voice in their heads isn't strong enough, and they just don't care enough about the sheep and the land to sustain their initial enthusiasm once the going inevitably gets tough. Things fall apart, and they soon leave. The voice in our heads is what holds the Lake District together, puts the walls back up, drains the fields, keeps the sheep well tended and bred. Many of these things defy rational economics. Some of our friends spend maybe fifty or more days a year rebuilding the walls on their farms, when letting them fall down and selling the stone might be the modern solution. It is done because it should be done.

I grab breakfast. Corn flakes or porridge.

There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes. That's what they say. I'm not totally convinced, but anyway, I layer up. Thermal underpants Vests. T-shirts. Until I look like a pass-the-parcel version of myself. Chunky. Wrapped. Warm. I have that sinking feeling that now, at 6 a.m., this is the warmest and driest I will be all day.

Keeping dry is the biggest challenge, so our farmhouse kitchen is a mass of sodden jackets, overalls, and hats and gloves. The room has a slightly humid, damp, and sheep-laden smell. The clothes are never quite dry. I've had pneumonia and no one will be surprised if I get it again. It would once have killed men and women here in damp little houses. I wear out good jackets faster than we care to buy them, so they are quickly torn, ripped, and shredded. I look like an old man when I'm farming. I look like we look in ancient black-and-white photos of us.

*   *   *

My job is simple: get around the fields and feed and shepherd the different flocks of ewes—dealing with any issues that arise.

First rule of shepherding: it's not about you, it's about the sheep and the land.

Second rule: you can't win sometimes.

Third rule: shut up, and go and do the work.

 

14

There is a moment each December when the ewes start to need supplementary feeding with hay. The sheep lose condition as the harshest weather slowly takes a toll on the flock through winter. We endeavour to reduce the negative effects by feeding and care, but the ewes inevitably lose condition. There are many days when I know that despite my best efforts the sheep are in a worse condition at the end of the day than at the start—rain lashed, covered in snow, up to their knees in mud, or sheltering sullenly from the lashing winds behind the walls.

*   *   *

As a boy, I would go out with my grandfather and help build the hayracks that he constructed from fence posts and wire netting. I would hold the fence posts whilst he knocked them into the crusty, chilled ground. As the hammer fell, you would wonder each time how good his aim was, and soon learned to hold in such a way that you could withdraw your arm quickly if he missed or slipped. He would laugh and tell me the story of two brothers he knew that did a lot of fencing, and one of them got his hand mangled by the other. As one brother pulled the hammer high above his head, the other was testing the fence post for firmness by putting his hand on the top and giving it a shake.

Grandad would then roll out the fencing wire (“pig netting” he called it) and then fold it in half, creating a kind of crude wire envelope. Then I would hold it to the posts and he would tack the wire on so it was nailed on at chest height. When we had finished it looked like some half-baked fishing net. But then we would cut open half a dozen hay bales. Good summer hay. The most beautiful smell on our farm, a smell that is sweet and good. It is a breath of sunshine in your face in the depth of winter. It breaks open in thick slices that reveal the pressed flowers, vetches, grasses, and herbs that were folded into it by the baler in July. As we spread it in the winter for the ewes, the ground is scattered with countless seeds of meadow grasses. Timothy. Common bent. Meadow fescue. Yellow rattle. Some farmers feed more generously than others—some see feeding as a weakness for hardy mountain ewes. The truth is we feed our ewes well with hay, and try and hold their condition as long as we can to ensure strong healthy lambs. Last week the ewes would have turned away from this hay, because fresh grass was still available, but now they line up and start to tug handfuls from the hayrack we have built. We stuff the encyclopaedia-thick slices into the wire envelope that threads away across the hillside.

For the last ten years my father and I have put out by hand a ton or two of hay each morning in about a dozen different racks and other contraptions across the farm to keep it accessible and as dry as possible until eaten. On a frosty morning it is idyllic work, but there are not so many of those days. Usually it is wet or cold, and your eyes ache with hayseeds blown in them. We slather, slip, and slide about in the mud that is created round the hayrack. The wind catches the lids of hayracks and threatens to hurl them away, or rips a gate from your hands and clatters it back against the wall. There is not enough daylight to get all the outside work done. When urban friends come to visit, I get uncomfortable as they drink tea and chat at 3 p.m., because I know (and they don't) that that last hour of daylight is all I have to do three more jobs that are impossible in the dark. In some ways this makes you an uptight pain in the ass. But it speaks of the fact that electricity freed most people from the cycle of the sun in northern climes. There is no light switch for our land, so we live by the up and down of the sun.

 

15

These are the days when the wind blows right through you, filling you with a sense of hopelessness. Days when the sheep stand sourly behind the walls. Short sullen dark days in winter when you are just holding on, days when you can hardly stand up and you can't help but be aware that man is but a feeble thing in a hostile universe that doesn't care.

We dwell, it seems, for weeks in midwinter inside a grey cloud. Everything wet to the touch, and slowly rotting back to the earth. Deep green moss half hides the curves of stones in the walls like the quilt over my children's entangled legs each morning when I leave. Silver lichen clutches out to the air from gate stoops, branches, and fence posts. They say we grow lichen here because the air here is clean. Uncorrupted. And sometimes you can taste the sea salt in our winds, though we live an hour's drive from the North Sea. The land becomes sodden. Fields running with water, bubbling from drains and springs untamed. The hillsides seem more water than land sometimes. Men and sheep wear out fast here. We beat the winter by still being here when it blows out, and by recovering quickly in the summer. Sometimes I think our sense of belonging relates to how much weather we have endured—we belong here because the wind, rain, hail, snow, mud, and storms couldn't shift us.

Our resistance to change is the key to us. Through my life my father has resisted each new technology that professes to change everyone's lives for the better. Quad bikes, mobile phones, credit cards, computers … each in turn was met with complete scepticism and years of resistance.

I won't lie and say I love each day of winter. Because I don't. But there is the dream of summer to carry me through, and moments of beauty that transcend the mire and the slog. Snipe bursting from the sieves as we approach, and hares watching, then bursting from their well-worn forms at the last moment. The daylight wanes halfheartedly. Flocks of fieldfares fold backwards, under wings flashing silver, tumbling over the wind, and away down the thorn dykes.