The Shepherd's Life (17 page)

We are working in the sheep pens. Sorting lambs for the auction. We handle each one across the back with the thumb and first finger, feeling the fat covering on the back, pressing into the wool. There is an art to selecting them in their prime. We pull those that are meaty into a side pen. I ask my father if I should go. He tells me I have to. That they will do fine at home without me. They might even do better, he adds, smiling.

I can always come back, he says.

This thing that is happening seems to erase the bad blood between us. Everything is suddenly calmer now. Last week we were at each other's throats, and now he's my dad again. I'm no threat to him, and he seems to understand that I'm about to sail into uncharted waters. I think he feels guilty too that I don't really want to go anywhere and that it is because we can't get on anymore. He comes home from selling the lambs that night and seems to be in high spirits; word has got out about it, and his friends have been teasing him, saying I must get my brains from my mother.

I was briefly a minor local “working-class hero” in the pubs of our town. When I told my friend David, whose family farmed up the village from us, he looked at me like I had gone mad and replied with complete sincerity that they must have made a clerical mistake because I was just an idiot like him. People that remembered me at school couldn't quite get their heads around it. Middle-class girls, who'd previously thought I was not quite a full shilling, now suddenly showed a lot more interest. I laughed with my friends about this; one of them replied that I should just take whatever I could. I laughed. But the truth was I'd already found the girl I wanted to be with.

 

28

About ten days into my time in Oxford I became aware of how people communicated. Notes were posted in the porter's lodge in a pigeonhole with your name on it. Mine was now jammed full of increasingly frustrated notes from the history tutors, asking why I wasn't attending all the start-up meetings. Christ. Damn it. I'd thought it had been kind of laid-back and quiet. The last note basically said if I didn't come and see them ASAP, they would have to assume I wasn't on the course and take action. I'd apparently missed social drinks, the inception meetings, explanations of the library system, and a bunch of other stuff that would have helped. So I went to see the professor and confessed the truth. He looked a bit annoyed that anyone could be that dumb, but told me to get to the library and get on with an essay due in a couple of days. I hurried off to the Bodleian Library, where it turned out the books I needed had already been taken by the other students.

 

29

The basic drill was that each week you had one or two tutorials, where you went face-to-face with a professor. Two days earlier you'd handed in an essay on the subject given the week before. You were given a reading list that filled a side of A4. Must have had twenty or more books on it. Your job was to read those books, and others that you might find of relevance, digest them, and then write an essay showing your dazzling originality and clear analysis of the issues. When I was handed my first reading list, I asked the professor how it was possible to read twenty books in a week and do all that. He gave me a look that said “Just do it.” After a while it became second nature either to actually do all that work, or to do enough so I didn't get an intellectual kicking the next week. The first three weeks I got the second mark from the top, a 2:1, which in my understanding was like a B grade. I asked the professor why I wasn't getting top marks. He told me the marks were good, but I should be more me, and less a copy of everyone else there. It hadn't occurred to me that being me was a potential advantage. And then the penny dropped. Everyone in Oxford was bored of perfect kids from perfect schools. Being a bit northern and weird was my greatest strength. It could make me interesting. I could beat the perfect people by doing things they couldn't do.

 

30

I was seated next to a professor. He asked me about my life at home, and I told him. I always gave them what they seemed to want, a little mythical version of me. On the application form I told them I was a drystone wall builder on the Lake District fells, so every conversation for the next three years was about how it must be a big change being in Oxford after working on the fells each day. I had a good evening, talking to him, and at the end he said “Oh well, I imagine you will miss it.” I told him that I hadn't stopped doing it, that I was going back.

He seemed quite confused by this.

He asked what I made of the other students so I told him. They were okay, but they were all very similar; they struggled to have different opinions because they'd never failed at anything or been nobodies, and they thought they would always win. But this isn't most people's experience of life. He asked me what could be done about it. I told him the answer was to send them all out for a year to do some dead-end job like working in a chicken processing plant or spreading muck with a tractor. It would do more good than a gap year in Peru. He laughed and thought this tremendously witty. It wasn't meant to be funny.

 

31

Being in Oxford was strange for me. I'd never had a life where empty days stretched before me. I'd never woken up and wondered what I'd do today. And suddenly I am waking up, my body clock telling me it is time to start work, but no person or animals need me here. I am like an island in a sea of other people. I don't really like the freedom I am experiencing; it feels pointless and empty. I end up like one of those imprisoned tigers that walks endlessly from one side of its cage to the other. I throw on my clothes each morning and go pretend shepherding; I walk miles around the parks in Oxford, across the fields, past the paddocks full of ponies. I do a lap or two of the quadrant in college. It is like my body and my mind need to treat this like my farm and my farmwork. By about 8 a.m. I am walked out. No one else has surfaced yet in the college. I call home, but that just annoys everyone there because they are working and haven't time to chat. I called yesterday. They don't say it, but I know they have to work harder because I am not there (particularly my mother), and that makes me feel ashamed.

So I go to the libraries each morning early and work until they close at night. I tried to work out how I would explain the subject to my dad or my mates if they asked me to.

But occasionally the sunlight through the library windows catches my eye, and I know I should be out in that. I feel like I have cut myself adrift from everything I love.

After the first year, Helen comes down to Oxford. She bakes cakes and sells them in a caf
é
and at a farm shop to support us. She puts me to work as her baking assistant. The cakes have to be delivered first thing in the morning when the caf
é
and farm shop open, so we bake last thing the night before. We just have one small problem: The kitchen in the small flat we rent from my college is tiny, maybe six feet by four feet in total. So the whole flat is taken over with trays of lemon drizzle, chocolate brownie, flapjack, and Victoria sponges. Helen is a good cook, but my skills extend simply to washing up, mixing ingredients to her instruction, and carrying things to the car. To begin with, the cakes had been a sideline, but after a few weeks the orders got bigger and bigger and we had to work half the night to meet them. The table and sofas are laden with cardboard boxes full of cookies, coffee cakes balanced in gaps in the bookshelves; and even the bed has a few coffee cakes plated on it. We have tremendous rows about my inability to follow instructions, about things getting burnt in the pathetic little oven, or occasionally me dropping something as I go up the flights of stairs from the basement flat to the car. But we did it together, and now, years later we smile at the silly things we did to make enough money to get by. I think it was a good time. It meant we built the foundations of our life together without too many other people or agendas getting in the way. Later when we married and went home to the farm and had children, there would, of course, be many distractions; our life would be less about us, and more about the things and people around us.

But it would be built on strong foundations.

 

32

The strangest thing about leaving the farm and starting to live a different life was that from the minute I left I was always coming back. I quickly realized that my new life often left me with loads of time of my own. Weekends. Holidays. Evenings. You often don't physically need to be at a university or an office all the time. The three terms at Oxford were eight weeks long, twenty-four weeks in total. It quickly became clear that I could still be at home for more than half the year. I could even be at home for half the week sometimes during term.

My boots are covered in sawdust. I am standing in a pen, jostling with other shepherds, where the ewes are held momentarily before they go into the ring to be sold. It is where we can inspect them for the last few seconds. As one lot is let into the ring, my attention either follows them, if I am interested in buying them, or turns down the alleyway for the next consignments coming towards me. I got home from Oxford late the night before, after being there for about a month. It feels strange to be home, as if I am now just a visitor to the land that I love, no longer really part of it. But I got up early and shepherded, and half an hour of work makes me feel part of it again, like I can shed my other skin. There was a heavy dew, or “rime,” on the grass, and the ewes' backs silver. My boots were sodden when I came back in for breakfast. We then drove up the Eden Valley through an autumnal landscape, through air with a bite to it. Sunlight lay like smoke in the hollows, resting, before it made the long afternoon trek up the fell sides. The lichened stones shone silver in the thinning light. The hedges flecked with the blood red spots of rosehips. The chimneys of the farmhouses marked again by first whispers of wood smoke.

My heart aches because I know that in my new life I am divorced from the changing of days and the seasons. Things have changed a great deal in the month I have been away. I see big changes instead of the little ones I have always lived with. Autumn comes quickly here. The life bleaches out of the leaves and grass with each passing day. A landscape of green turns brown. The heather on the fells turns until it is the russet of a kestrel's wing.

As the ewes come down the alley to the bustling ring in their different consignments, interest in them grows, until in the last section of the alley where I stand to inspect them with other shepherds. This sale is when we buy the draft ewes from the fell farms, the ones we breed the hybrid mule lambs from to sell. My father (like my grandfather before him) travels to the sales at little auction marts like Middleton-in-Teesdale and Kirkby Stephen. We go to buy ewes that have lived on the Pennines but which are now sold for a new life at a lower, less harsh altitude. The fields and streets around the auctions fill up with badly parked Land Rovers and wagons. You see as many as three generations of the same families, trooping down the streets to the auction. Little fell-bred old men with bent backs and bandy-legs, flanked by strapping, beefy grandsons about two feet taller. Traditionally it was a day to wear your good clothes. My grandfather would cast an eye up and down me to make sure I was properly turned out. He'd have on a tweed suit and a tie. Boots polished. I could get away with jeans if I had a shirt and tie on under a jumper.

I feel the sheep's backs for condition; decide their quality with a glance at their colour, fleeces, legs, and heads; and check their teeth by grabbing a sheep and peeling back its bottom lip (sheep only have teeth on the bottom jaw). The teeth tell me a lot. A sheep as a lamb has baby teeth, little sharp needlelike teeth, but then at a year old, the two central teeth change into broader white teeth. A year later the next one on either side of the central two change to adult teeth; and the year after that the whole mouth is in its adult form, like a tight little row of tombstones made of white Portland stone meeting at the edges. As the sheep ages, the teeth get longer and start to weaken, with gaps between them, until eventually they become wobbly and fall out. They can actually graze with no teeth at all, but there is a stage when the mouth is broken when they struggle and lose condition. When ewes are broken mouthed, they are sold for meat because their ability to feed themselves and produce lambs has gone.

So, on days like today my job is to stand and check the mouths of the ewes. I was taught to do this by my father over many years until he decided I was a good judge and now he takes my word for it and sits across the ring from where he can see the sheep and bid if he wants to. Because of their age, these ewes' mouths will be mature, but the art is to judge from these teeth whether the ewes will last several years or just a year or so. Our judgement of their value is in many ways a judgement about their age and durability largely based on their teeth. A good mouth might mean you get three years from the ewes; a bad mouth may mean just one year. I check hundreds through the day, and my dad watches from the other side of the ring, questioningly, wanting me to ask whether the sheep in the ring have good mouths or are to be avoided. A little smile or a wink and they know these sheep will wear well. He buys some of these if they are at the right price. A tiny shake of the head or turning away tells him to leave well alone. The difference in price might be £20 per ewe, and a large farm might sell hundreds of draft ewes each autumn, so little things like teeth matter. A lot of my farming friends see me at the sales, and are none the wiser that I am now at university. I don't tell them. Others know, and are watching to see if I have lost the plot. One or two folk are not sure what I am anymore. They start to say, “I thought you were…” then realize it is still me and we talk sheep.

The draft ewes from the most prestigious flocks are coveted because, although they are not young, they represent an opportunity to purchase ewes that can breed exceptional offspring. They may live for only two, three, maybe as many as five or six more years, but in that time they may breed for you lambs that are better than your own ewes are capable of breeding. For all these reasons, anyone starting to breed fell sheep seriously has limited chance to get among the best bloodlines. Sales of genuine stock ewes in their prime from a respected flock are few and far between. So this sale is of many run-of-the-mill sheep that are effectively commodities, many bought to breed lambs for meat, but also a good number of higher-quality sheep that are the object of keen competition and immense pride. The sheep being sold are actually the oldest ladies in the fell flocks (albeit with some miles left in the tank) or those sorted out because they don't breed as well. A fell flock is like a conveyor belt with the oldest (five to six years old) ewes moving off each autumn at the top, and new, younger, home-bred females (in their second year of age) pushing on to the bottom to take their place. Every year the flock is renewed by fresh young ewes, and through the sale of the older ewes.