The Shepherd's Life (11 page)

“I don't know anything,” she'd say when asked about the past. The secret was to work her into the subject, until she'd talk and talk. She had taken in refugees in 1940, and still turned up her nose at their manners fifty years later. Some tramp had arrived on the doorstop, all high heels, lipstick, fur coat, and no knickers, but this urbane creature had soon evacuated back to the bombing zones. Deciding it was safer to face the Luftwaffe each night than my grandmother's scowls. But her tone changed when she told sad stories of a young POW from Hamburg who had worked on the farm and shared their table, her cataract-clouded old eyes twinkling some story that I couldn't read.

When she was old she had a kind of altar: a table of photos with all of us, her tribe, in shiny silver frames, in christening dresses, wedding dresses, and racing colours. The mantelpieces littered with silver tankards and cigar boxes with inscriptions of long-forgotten racehorses that my grandfather had trained on the farm, with magical names like Pentathlon and Cool Angel, names that raced through our lives, hooves pounding. Knickknacks and paraphernalia of the glory days, when it all made sense. A stallion carved from some dark wood pranced beneath the TV. She'd sit in the car at Cartmel horse races, sending her runners to the Tote. And on the way home she'd buy us all fish and chips with her winnings.

She told tales about her “Momma” that no one really listened to or understood. And later, when Granddad was gone, she had a little flat, her flat. She poured glasses of whisky, and told stories of her man. She loved to talk about him when he was dead. And he glowed in those stories, like some great dead king.

 

39

One school night I was walking with my dad across one of the meadows to check on our ewes before it rained. He stopped suddenly. Told me, “Be quiet.” Then crawled forward for twenty yards, and kind of pounced like a fox, with his cap in his hands. He smiled me across. He'd caught a leveret, a baby hare. It was nestled gently in his flat cap in the grass. One of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. It looked up at us with deep glassy eyes and screamed. We let it go, and it sloped off to get out of sight. Towering dark cotton-wool clouds were gathering all about us, and away to the Pennines thunder and flashes of lightning. We ran back to the Land Rover with big fat raindrops soaking us.

 

40

I dreaded the thought of going to secondary school. Our little village school was full of kids like me, their fathers were friends with my father, and often their grandfathers too, all the way back. There was a scattering of nonfarm kids amongst us, but they played games I had no interest in, like Dungeons and Dragons, and they were fashionable with new trainers and stuff. But secondary school was ten miles away in the local town. It might as well have been another universe.

I remember asking a kid on the first day what his dad did, and being told, “Fuck off and mind your own business.” I was now in a place with different rules. Where being me was a liability. Being a farm kid here was something that got you hassled, or labelled a yokel. Even getting to school was a pain in the ass. The lads from the village where the bus departed from used to steal your schoolbag and throw your things out of the window. This escalated for weeks until I grabbed the smallest of them and punched him a few times on the floor between two seats. Because of that, some of the others decided I was “all right.” I could pick on other people with them instead of being bullied. One day the school bus had to be stopped because a dart was thrown down the bus and cracked the windscreen. When we got to town, I was liable to get a smack from someone else from town because I was in the bus gang. The whole school had a brutal
Lord of the Flies
gang thing going on.

History lessons at school didn't really go like I hoped they would. We never did any kind of history of us or our landscape. I think the teachers might have been surprised at the idea that people like us had a history of any interest. Instead, we studied the history of Native Americans. This was, I'm now sure, potentially very interesting, but then it left me confused and disappointed; and I'm not sure our history teacher actually knew anything about the subject. We also briefly studied World War II and the Cold War, but in such a tedious way I quickly lost interest. I remember being given a sheet of paper that was a cartoon showing the difference between capitalism, fascism, and communism. It was hard to tell what was wrong with communism or why they might be pointing atomic bombs at our house, or why we had a hand-turned air-raid siren in our back kitchen.

When I remember the 1980s, I think of how shit that school was. It tested past the breaking point all the well-meaning stuff they tell you when you are young, like “stand up to bullies” or “report them to the teachers.” Brilliant idea—if you want a good hiding from some big lads from uptown. The lads two years above us were mean fuckers. Some were rumoured to be in the National Front and were “known to the police.” They lorded it over us and some of the teachers by intimidation and by ganging up on anyone dumb or brave enough to annoy them. There was no goddamn way I was going to get on the wrong side of them.

 

41

One afternoon when they pushed through the bus queues (just because they could), everyone stepped back to let them through except some kid next to me called John. He murmured under his breath, “Fuck this” and stood his ground. The older lads looked a little shocked but still circled round. I'd never seen anyone quite as brave as this kid. He stood about six inches shorter than the older lads, his fists clenching for the fight. I wished I was him, or brave enough to help him … but my legs were already unconsciously backing away. “I'm not scared of you, you are a bully…” he said to the biggest lad who was striding towards him. “I've as much right to be here as you.” I'd seen this kind of thing in movies.… The underdog puts up a brief fight and the bullies back away, having learnt a valuable life lesson. For a brief second I thought that might happen. The lads paused for a second. Then the big lad pulled John over by his bag strap, so he stumbled to the tarmac. John got a half swing away as he tumbled over, but he had no chance. The biggest lad laid a few punches into him. The other lads piled in and kicked him on the ground a few times. A few minutes later John's blazer had a sleeve torn open at the shoulder. His mouth was trickling blood. He was doing his best to retain some of his dignity as they laughed their way down the tarmac. He still looked proud, but he now looked much younger and seemed to be shaking.

 

42

But it wasn't all grim and northern clich
é
s. Each August my father's cousin would bring her family for their holidays to the farm, bringing a trailer or two and her parents, her husband, and three boys. We didn't do holidays. Like ever. So I used to look forward to them coming because it made my life seem briefly like a holiday. Inevitably, they were more modern than we were. Her husband worked in a nuclear power plant as a computer expert. And they worked all year to come and have a holiday in the Lake District. They would go fell walking, swimming, sailing, running, to pubs for meals, or for picnics in beautiful settings. They were on some
Swallows and Amazons
vibe. They crossed Wainwright's off the list. They would sail on the lake with their own dinghy, or later would windsurf. They would barbecue. Drink beer in the evenings and play board games. They would head off each day for an adventure in the fells, or visit a ruin or something. They were fun and kind and a bit different from us. They'd take me with them sometimes, as we didn't do any of this stuff. If there wasn't something going on at the farm, I enjoyed going with them. Though often I was needed on the farm so stayed behind. They'd often pitch in to help with the seasonal work. I was the farm cousin that showed them stuff: frogs in a wall, nests of birds I'd found, or how to do farming things like put a wall back up. Dad and Granddad were a little more detached. They didn't have much time for messing about.

 

43

Maybe once or twice a summer we'd trek up a mountain, me not quite ever having the right fell-walking gear (usually clad in T-shirt and trainers or farm boots). We'd pass people on the path wearing enough specialist climbing gear for an ascent on Everest.

I was never sure which fell we were climbing, because, out of our own valley, we don't know their names. My southern cousins knew far more than I did about the fells because of the guidebooks.

I remember holding one of Wainwright's guides, of the eastern fells, in my hands as I sat with my visiting cousins on a crag somewhere up above Ullswater. The crooked lake stretched silver beneath us, glimmering in the sunshine.

If my grandfather was invisible or little more than white trash in our head teacher's sermon in 1987, then the high priest of her belief system was another old man of similar vintage: Alfred Wainwright. And now I had his book in my hands. I'd never seen one of these before because we didn't really think of the Lake District as a place of books or for leisure. I'd only ever once climbed a mountain for leisure with my parents. We went for a picnic, and a gust of wind blew away the paper plates my mother had brought. Dad hadn't wanted to do the picnic anyway; they had a minor row, and we retreated back to the farm. Fell walkers we weren't.

Wainwright created a series of hand-drawn and hand-written guides for walkers that explain each of the mountains of the Lake District. Originally these were produced and self-published as a hobby, but they became a cult classic in Britain and beyond, selling millions of copies. Each guide gives the reader an overview of the landscape, a series of views, some navigation advice on what can be seen from the summits, and accounts of the “natural features,” “ascents,” “summit,” and “the view.” Wainwright became a TV celebrity—the Old Man of the Fells. He empowered millions of people to take to the footpaths and climb the mountains. He created a new way of experiencing the Lake District—with people now ticking off the fells he wrote about—“doing the Wainwrights.” They are beautiful, thoughtful little books and exert a powerful hold on how other people see our landscape.

So I was looking down at the landscape farmed by my father's friends, and cross-checking it against the guide. It struck me powerfully that there was scarcely a trace of any of the things we cared about in what Wainwright had written. Apart from the odd dot on the map for a farm or a wall, none of our world was in those pages. I am wondering whether the people on that mountain see the working side of that landscape, and whether it matters. In my bones I feel it does matter. That seeing, understanding, and respecting people in their own landscape is crucial to their culture and way of life being valued and sustained. What you don't see, you don't care about.

It is a curious thing to slowly discover that your landscape is beloved of other people. It is even more curious, and a little unsettling, when you discover by stages that you as a native are not really part of the story and meaning they attach to that place. There are never any tourists here when it is raining sideways or snowing in winter, so it is tempting to see it as a fair-weather love. Our relationship with the landscape is about being there through it all. To me the difference is like the distinction between what you felt for a pretty girl you knew in your youth, and the love you feel for your wife after many years of marriage. Most unsettling of all to me was the discovery that people who thought about this place in this way outnumbered us by many hundreds to one. I found that threatening to our very existence in an age when we increasingly had to do what we were told by politicians and the general public, but no one else seemed much concerned. I told my dad it was weird that none of these book people were much interested in what we did. His response was,

“Don't tell them—they'd only ruin it.”

 

44

We are on the tarmac waiting for school to begin. We are bored, so are kicking one another or our schoolbags. Some girl starts yelling at one of the lads. He has drunk out of the water fountain and she's yelling that he'll die if he drinks that. She says it is radioactive. We all stare at her like she is crazy. She is one of the smart kids that will soon leave for the local grammar school and we enjoy winding them up. Chernobyl had blown up a day or two before and according to this girl its radioactive waste was heading our way in the clouds.

The lad at the water fountain looked a bit shocked at being screamed at. Then he smiled wickedly and drank some more of the water. She shouted at him, telling him he was stupid, that the clouds were spewing out radioactivity. Then we all ran around in the rain with our mouths open and our arms wide-open like sycamore seeds, filling our mouths with rain. She declared us idiots, her eyes aflame with fury.

In the weeks to come we'd learn that those clouds deposited radiation across our mountains, and government inspectors came to the wettest fell farms to test the sheep. Restrictions were imposed on moving some sheep from the worst-affected land for years. You don't really expect men in white suits with Geiger counters clicking in hand to turn up on your farm. It added to the general impression of my youth that the wider world was stupendously fucked up.

The whole time I was at school I wanted to be at home on the farm. I was convinced then, and I still am, that home was a more interesting and productive place to be for me. Making anyone do something they don't want to do with thirty other bored kids seemed to me absolutely pointless. I'd look out of the windows and watch the swifts rising above the town, their scythed wings glistening in the sunshine.

One morning my grandfather caught a badger alive in a snare (he was trying to catch a mink which are an invasive species). He wanted to release it. He told my dad to pick me up from school on the way to help him rescue it. Dad knew you couldn't walk into a classroom and take your kid off to do things like this. So he didn't. Granddad told me all about it later that night, how they'd released it and it was fine (but not before it had tried to take his leg off). My blood boiled. I'd sat bored in a classroom all morning whilst someone tried to teach me Esperanto.