The Shepherd's Life (13 page)

Everyone forgot that I'd failed my exams.

I felt like I'd come out the other side of school and nothing could stop me. I was my grandfather's grandson.

Then it all started to fall apart.

 

2

It was a morning full of grey silences and mizzling rain. Dad emerged from the house in his grey suit. My grandfather's will was being read by the solicitors, and my dad, after thirty odd years' hard work, was about to learn his fate. He had worry written all over his face. He left me working with a man called John who sometimes helped out on our farm and specialized in filthy jokes. John chattered on all morning in the sheep pens. “Don't worry, Son. Your granddad loved this spot, and he thought the sun shone out of your arse!” I turned the words over in my head, and tried to believe them. Granddad had always threatened amending his will whenever there was a fight. For years the farm overdraft had grown inexorably, eating up our capital and leaving everyone worried about how it would be sorted out. At times it felt like our strategy was just to work harder, slog it out until things improved. But they didn't.

When Dad returned he was calm, and resigned to what he'd heard. He had poured his whole life into our farm and the end result was that he couldn't keep everything going. Something would have to be sold. Inheritance is often messy and imperfect on family farms. Men like my father spend their whole lives building up the farm and rarely have much other cash. It is common for the son or daughter who takes on the farm to have to sell land or borrow money to pay out sisters and brothers. If you are the one on the farm it probably always feels rotten. In the following months the bungalow was sold and a flat bought for my grandmother in the local town. There was talk of selling all of my grandfather's farm, and only keeping the rented farm where we lived; but in the end Dad kept the rented farm in the Eden Valley plus the land from my grandfather's farm. The bungalow and a couple of fields where my grandfather had lived were sold. Granddad's land was to be farmed by us, but remotely now from fifteen miles away. We had a farm without a house. This had some very real practical effects: there was no house anymore for me or my parents to move to in the future—this broke my heart a little bit.

So on that grey day when my grandfather's will was read my dad didn't want to look at me. He told John what had happened and I listened. Then he turned to me, looked me in the eye, and said, “I'm sorry, Son.” And I tried to be a man and smile, a tough smile that wasn't true.

 

3

In the months that followed my dad probably needed me to shut up. Be quiet. Work hard. Support him. Just help him work our way through this tough time. But he didn't get that kind of son. Maybe no one does. After my grandfather's death we all moved up a step in the pecking order. I heard some old men talking about a young lad recently and they said of him, “That's the trouble with lads, they think they are men before they are men.” I was like that. By the time I was eighteen I'd worked part-time for about ten years on the farm, and had done three years full-time since I left school. I had a head full of ideas about how I wanted to do things; I thought I knew best. As far as I was concerned I was a man. I found people of my own age, who went to university, childish and pointless.

 

4

My grandfather, father, and I played out the oldest piece of theatre in the history of farming families. My grandfather had been the patriarch, the boss, who had started our branch of the family and started our farming business. Our farm was really his farm. Like lots of old farmers he'd clutched it tightly to his chest when he was old. My father was assigned possibly the worst role in the play, that of suffering the father as boss, and the son as usurper. He was doing the lion's share of the work, and never quite getting the control of the farm that his efforts deserved. I was assigned the role of the blue-eyed boy, apple of my grandfather's eye, the perfect farm lad who would be the farm boss someday.

 

5

Father.

Son.

Grandson.

Some fathers and sons we knew seemed to work together like mild-mannered friends. Not in our family. Fathers and sons in our family tend to bicker like hyenas round the remains of a zebra. For a few brief years in my late teens we would fall out about anything and everything.

*   *   *

The lesson I took from my dad's life was that if you let your father push you around, you could work for a pittance for maybe twenty years and ultimately not be able to afford to keep the farm together. I wasn't up for years of playing second fiddle and quite possibly putting myself into the trap he had just escaped. And he'd egged me on to think like that for the past decade or more. But now the wheel had turned and he was the boss and I the son.

Maybe things would have been easier if the farm had been making money. But it wasn't. I was more militant because I could see that I might end up with nothing even if I served my time. My father couldn't be generous even if he wanted to because there wasn't much to be generous with. So our relationship deteriorated. Eventually it broke. It was at least half my fault. Back then, my dad and I were the meeting of a rock and a hard place. There were only two possible outcomes: buckle down and accept he was the boss or leave and do something else. Lots of farm lads did a shift off the farm, including my father who had worked for a while in a local quarry after some fall out or other with my grandfather.

As a kid I didn't see how prescribed these roles were by circumstance. I thought I was special. I thought that there was something wrong with my dad. It was all going wrong on his shift, so it was his fault. My grandfather was the only one to follow and respect; he had created what we had. I look back and realize I was wrong about all of this. I suppose that's what growing up is, realizing how little you know and how many things you've been wrong about.

I look back now, many years later, and laugh at us. We have suffered each other, shared our worst faults. Seen each other at our most worn down. Snapped at each other. But I wouldn't change any of it even if I could, because I know my dad, and granddad, in ways that most people never do. Saw and shared their finest moments. I shared their world, and understood the things they did and cared about. I let them down at times, as they let me down too. I made them proud at times, as they too made me proud. We clashed sometimes. But who wouldn't? Our lives were entwined around something we all cared about more than anything else in the world. The farm.

 

6

I am sitting on a hay bale in our barn. Four years old. My grandfather sits next to me with a pair of hand shears in one hand and a carding comb in the other. In front of us, a Suffolk tup tied by a bale string head collar to a hayrack. It struggled for a few minutes when he first tied it up, but now it stands patiently, enjoying being pampered. From time to time it burps and it smells of grass. Two other sheep are tied up on either side of us, and my father and mother are working on them. They are cleaning their legs, scrubbing their faces, tidying up their coats, and trimming under their bellies with the hand shears to give the sheep clean lines.

Up the village our relatives and neighbours are all working on their sheep as well; there is a keen sense of competition between us.

Shepherds are judged on the quality of their sheep relative to everyone else's. For years I copy and learn from the older men until I can do lots of the work. At the sales these little things we do may make the difference. The men chat about the best sheep they sold in the past, and whether these are as good or better. I tell them that I like the one we are working on most. My granddad tells the other men I am a good judge and I swell with pride. These sheep are the descendants of two pedigree ewes he bought for a lot of money in the 1940s, now part of a flock of sixty. We sell thirty tups each autumn.

Everything that makes us who we are culminates in the autumn. Sheep farms, particularly fell farms, earn most of their annual income in the few weeks of the autumn from September to November. There are literally hundreds of different sales and shows throughout the countryside of northern England. It is the matching of people with winter grass on lower ground, and people with a surplus of sheep produced on the higher ground through the summer. But it is about more than practicalities: it is the time when we make the decisions that define the quality of our flock. The most prestigious part of these autumn sales is the production, preparation, and sale of the tups in each breed.

Improving a flock of sheep is (in theory) simple. You need to buy a tup that brings to your flock better genetics. Choose him well, and he makes your sheep better quality, more beautiful, and ultimately worth more. The flock of ewes is your core asset, it rolls ever onwards fixed to your farm, but half of the genetic package each autumn is the tup you buy to match to them, each tup mating with as many as a hundred ewes. So good shepherds are obsessed, every year, with identifying the tup, or tups, that will have an improving effect on their flocks. There is a kind of genius to this, in spotting from the hundreds available the one that will match your flock. It matters deeply. The value of your sheep and their reputation can rise or decline rapidly depending on these decisions. A great flock has a particular style and character that reflects the hundreds of judgements that went into creating it, sometimes going back many decades or even centuries. It is not just the sheep that are handed down through the generations but often the philosophy too: ideas about which characteristics to focus on so as to retain the character of the flock. Fashions change over time, and flocks sometimes go out of fashion. Then the shepherds have to choose whether to change their approach or hold tight and wait for their favoured traits to come back into vogue. I find the depth of commitment and thought in this whole endeavour breathtaking.

 

7

The first tup I ever sold was to a lady called Jean Wilson. I was nine years old. She was friends with my grandfather. I was told she was coming to buy a tup and that my father would be away working on a piece of distant land. I was to get the sheep into the yard with the dogs, show her the ones we were willing to sell, and to negotiate a sale.

“She's not daft,” I was told. “She'll be fair with you, but she strikes a hard bargain. Be ready for her.”

So Dad told me the price he wanted, £250 for the best one, and the others less.

Jean is a born and bred sheep woman and has forgotten more than I know now, but I'd helped sell sheep for years previously and knew how it was done.

She arrived in the yard after supper, asked me if I was in charge of “sheep-selling operations” and then smirked when I said I was. She followed me to the sheep pens.

She pawed over those tups, had their faults figured out in minutes, and interrogated me about which was the best one.

I told her she wanted “the thickset one with all the bone. He's the best bred and would do you some good.”

She smiled. I'd grown up with these sheep and knew their breeding inside out. She liked that.…

“Aye, that's what I was thinking.… But what's he going to cost me?”

“Three hundred.”

We both knew I'd overcooked this a bit.

“That's far too much. I was thinking a hundred and eighty pounds was plenty.”

“You can have that little one for that, but not the smart one.”

She didn't reckon much of that idea, as I knew she wouldn't. She was set on buying the better one. So I tried to give the impression we weren't bothered about selling, we could keep it. About an hour later, after we'd danced around the other options, established which school I went to, the weather, again explored the prices of the others, and dismissed them in turn, we returned to the one she wanted. I told her another man wanted it and he'd not quibble about the price.

She bought him for £250. But demanded and got £10 “luck money” to “help him be right.” When my dad got home and heard the deal he said, “Bloody hell, I thought she'd get you down to £200.…”

Then he laughed. Jean and I have been mates ever since, today she is my arch-rival with my flock, on good days she is something of a mentor, and most importantly she is one of our best friends.

 

8

My life was simple in the years after I left school. I worked, ate, slept, worked, ate, and slept. I had my evenings mostly free—nothing in them except watching TV with my family. In our house the TV sat on whatever channel Dad wanted and you watched that—you could sometimes persuade him to change, but mostly it stuck on that channel even when he fell asleep. Some Clint Eastwood movie would be on. (Dad loved the one with the orangutan that punched people when Clint said, “Right turn, Clyde.”) If Dad was awake, he'd clap and rub his hands excitedly at the best bits. If he was asleep and you tried to change the channel, he'd sit bolt upright.