The Shepherd's Life (5 page)

I met a man in a pub recently and he knew my grandfather—“You'll be a fair man if you are half the man he was,” he said sternly, then bought me a drink, the accrued interest on some unspoken good turn my grandfather had done for him decades earlier. Anyone new to the community or common would be watched carefully until they showed themselves to have integrity and play by the rules. They say you have to be here for three generations before you are a local (people laugh when they say that, but it carries a lot of truth).

 

10

Floss and Tan are working hard. They cut backwards and forwards, driving sheep across the land. Sometimes one of them will bolt off into a dip or a hollow and return with some ewes that have been out of sight. We sweep the scattered ewes and lambs across the peat hags and the expanses of heather towards Wolf Crags. I see the dogs of the man I am expected to join with. I can't see him, but they are working to his commands from somewhere unseen, so we have effectively joined up. He will have seen my dogs over the brow of the fell and will know I am there. He cuts beneath the crags and meets up with the old shepherd who is in charge of proceedings. I see them a few hundred feet below, swapping notes about how we are doing. Occasionally an arm will extend to point some information or other. Their dogs are scattered across a wide area, working sheep homewards. The crags beneath me are steep and dangerous. If I took five steps forwards, I could easily tumble to my death. I can see for maybe twenty miles.

The first time I gathered these crags I was with an old shepherdess who I was dealing with to take over her flock of fell sheep. We had been friends for many years, but I was being observed to see whether I could manage sheep with a dog on a fell, a kind of unspoken test. Half a dozen ewes and lambs were sticking a hundred yards below us on a grassy ledge halfway down the rock face. I sent our old dog Mac down the cliff face through a little grassy descent between two rocks. He threaded his way and brought them out gently but firmly at the bottom. He made me look good. She said he had done all right, which from her is the highest praise.

*   *   *

When we have cleaned out the crags, we have the sheep in one swirling mass, a woolly carpet laid over the lower slopes of the fell. The noose of men and dogs is tightening now, and many hundreds of ewes and lambs are threading home in front of us. Sometimes in bad weather we lose a man, and wait patiently for him to reappear out of the clouds or mist. So we pause sometimes and wait, holding the line. Then when everyone is done, we drive the massed flock of maybe four hundred sheep down into the sheepfolds that are littered along the lower slopes of the fells. Usually these consist of little more than a drystone wall surrounding a gathering pen and a couple of fenced or wooden-railed collecting pens for sorting them in.

We chase the ewes through the narrow sorting race (a walled alley, down which the sheep flow, with a gate that sorts them left or right into different pens at the end), where they are divided up into their own flocks. You need a great eye and fast hands to shed (switching the shedding gate left or right to divide the unsorted flow of sheep into their different flocks in different pens) because you get, if you're lucky, three seconds to identify the sheep's flock mark and open the gate the right way. I work them into the race and shout out any badly marked sheep or lambs (occasionally a “white” lamb will appear, that is, unmarked having been born at the fell, and we will find its mother and thus its ownership). One of the other shepherd's dogs nips my hand as I push the sheep through.

I yelp and threaten to kick the dog.

His owner shouts to ask what the hell I am doing.

“Your dog bloody nipped me.”

“Serves you right—yours bit me the other day.”

We both laugh.

Two wrongs make it right between us.

Soon the flocks are clear and held by their shepherds and dogs from mixing again. The mountains behind us should be empty and silent.

When the last ones are sorted, the shepherds walk their sheep home for clipping.

Everywhere is noise.

Men shout.

Whistle.

Holler.

Clap and wave hands.

Ewes call for their lambs.

Lambs call back.

Dogs bark.

The men drive the sheep away home. They fleet away like the shadows of clouds blown across the lower slopes of the mountains.

 

11

The past and the present live alongside each other in our working lives, overlapping and intertwining, until it is sometimes hard to know where one ends and the other starts. Each annual task is also a memory of the many times we have done it before and the people we did it with. As long as the work goes on, the men and women that once did it with us live on as well, part of what we are doing, part of our stories and memories, part of how and why we do those things.

In June and July on a suitably dry day, when we were not otherwise engaged in the hay meadows, my grandfather would gather the sheep into the sheep pens. I remember this day from thirty years ago as if it were yesterday. The men are sorting the flock through a shedding gate at the end of an alley, so the lambs were in one pen and the ewes in wool in another. They would then run these ewes into a building where my father would clip them. My mother would be trampling the wool down to pack it into the bags.

Dad's T-shirt is wet with sweat.

He straightens his back occasionally as if it aches.

He catches the sheep from a pen, and turns it with a twist of its neck over his leg, onto its bum. His hand reaches up and pulls the rope, worn shiny silver with use, that starts the motor. The other hand tucks the ewe's leg behind his bum, and picks up the clipper hand piece. The stomach is clipped first, with a hand reaching down to protect the teats, or the penis. Then the wool on the back leg is opened out round to the tail and the backbone. The machine sweeps the fleece, in successive blows of the arm, from the sheep's bodies. Dad is like a machine, the sheep sort of entranced by his movement, an all-consuming dance between him and the sheep. It is a carefully choreographed thing in which the sheep is turned, shuffled, and rolled in clever purposeful ways so that each sweep of the shears takes a full clipper comb–width of wool from the body, with that part of the body stretched safely so there is no vulnerable clefts of skin caught and cut by the shears. The ewes are ready for clipping so the fleece rises from the skin, lifting away from the body with the comb of electronic shears gathering it in and the cutter cutting it cleanly and neatly from the body. The ewe loses its fleece without stress and is back with its lambs before it knows what is happening.

Dad will shear maybe two hundred sheep in the day. He wears moccasins sown out of a hessian wool bag and rough stitched across the top of his feet. These help him to feel the sheep, to caress them round his legs to get the cutting comb full of wool without cutting loose folds of skin. You can clip in boots but you will lack the feel of the sheep and the flexibility needed to bend in all the right places. His motor hangs from a ladder that is jammed between two rafters in the barn. From it hangs a driveshaft that powers his hand piece that is silvery smooth from heavy use. Once or twice a summer a ewe will struggle, and be nicked by the clipping machine. My grandfather would sew the wound up if it were deep with the thick needle he used to sew up the wool bags, or, if just a nip, he'd send me up the hay mew (the thirty-foot-high block of small hay bales, stacked carefully and methodically in the barn—built like a house's walls with crossed joints to stop it sagging and falling down) to gather cobwebs which he would then press on, helping the blood to coagulate and stop the bleeding.

*   *   *

A few years later, when I am in my midteens, I learn to clip from my father. It feels like it is impossible. I am awkward and clumsy, and the sheep feels like it is fighting me. I have no stamina, and my feet are not moving when they should. My knee bending, steps, and rolling somehow not quite in sync, I can't find the rhythm I need. I try to fight through it and it just gets worse.

He is always faster and fitter than me.

I feel like giving up. Walking away.

It is cruel work for men.

I get tired and the sheep feel it and fight the process.

But tough work knocks the silliness out of you when you grow up in places like ours. It teaches you to get tougher or get lost. Them that are all talk are soon found out. Left sitting feeling sorry for themselves exhausted by mid-afternoon whilst the older men are grafting away like they have only just started.

Dad would look across, mid-sheep, and ask if I was tired, a taunting question. I felt like punching him. I couldn't keep up with him for years. I hated that, and fought it, and I got beaten worse. Later I stopped trying to race him. I found I was beating him sometimes. He got older. I'm not the fastest clipper around, but I'm not bad, make a tidy job. After a few days to get my fitness up I'm reasonably fast.

*   *   *

The ewes are plagued with flies by clipping time, and flick their ears to shake them off. Our farm has lots of trees and woodland so we get lots of blowflies and bluebottles. By July the flies are at their worst, and we cannot wait to get the sheep clipped and dipped (soaked to the skin in a chemical “sheep dip” to repel flies), so they can look after themselves better. A handful of ewes each summer have fly strike (maggots). Creeping, hungry, vicious little bastards. They take hold in a soiled patch of wool, then in the flesh, or in a foot. We first know when a ewe holds a leg up as if in pain, twitches, tries to bite her side, or simply gives up on the way home and lies down. A struck foot is sometimes a mass of wriggling maggots; a tail or patch on the wool is harder to spot and can spread across the body. Left untreated, the maggots can kill and clean a sheep to the bones in a month. The flies swarm around an affected sheep, the smell making them desperate. Clipping these is unpleasant because flies bite your arms. A horsefly leaves a red swollen welt on my father's arms, and he curses like a demon. My grandfather takes a struck ewe to the side and pours on Battles Maggot Oil. The maggots wriggle out, abandoning ship at the smell of the noxious stuff. The floor becomes flecked with dead and dying maggots. Away to the side are the ewes in wool, waiting to be clipped. The shed is a cacophony of sheep noise as they shout to the lambs that are waiting noisily for them to emerge into the sunshine. The clipped ewes find their lambs by their calls, but the lambs often seem confused by the skinny bald creature that greets them. Rushing off again to find a mother that looks right.

*   *   *

A good clipper can shear as many as four hundred sheep a day (some more), but two hundred is a respectable score and would break most people. My father would sometimes help neighbours in a gang. A team of four men can shear well over a thousand in a day. This requires a whole bunch of other people to gather the sheep, sort the lambs off, push the ewes onto the clipping trailer, wrap the wool, mark the sheep after they are sheared, lead the batches of sheep away, and generally keep things moving. It's the time of year when tempers are short, the buildings alive with the hum of the shearing machines, sheep baaing, dogs barking, and men shouting. Some years are a bloody nightmare for shearers. Wet sheep cannot be clipped, so you try and get them in barns before it rains. But many are sheared in fields with mobile clipping trailers being erected, so weather can ruin a day. Today we use electric clipping machines, but it is still bloody hard graft, and as many helpers as possible is a good idea. Lots of young, and not so young, shepherds earn their keep through the summer in gangs of shearers that travel from farm to farm doing the work. Some farmers' wives still compete with one another to put on the best clipping-time tea (no one has the heart to tell them that being full of cakes and scones is not great when you have to bend double all afternoon).

The only thing wrong with clipping time is that wool, one of the great products of the world, is sold for so little. Once wool was a key cash crop from farms like ours, a major part of the income. They say caravans of horses or donkeys led bales of wool across the fells to Kendal (which was built on the wool trade) until late in the nineteenth century. Much of the wealth of the monasteries that owned much of the Lake District in the Middle Ages was created from wool. Today, if we paid someone to shear them, it would cost about £1 per sheep. The fleece is only worth maybe 40p. So we don't count on wool generating us more than a token payment. Some years we don't bother to sell wool because the price is so bad, and burn it. Herdwick wool is wiry, dark, and hard (which makes it ideal for sheep on mountains and for tweed type jackets, insulation, or carpets that last for a very long time, but less than ideal for competing with fleece and other man-made products). Look at old pictures of Herdwicks and you will see they had more wool than they do now, because farmers respond to market incentives and have bred sheep with less and less wool, and we clip to help their welfare, not earn a living.

But my grandfather would still scold me if I didn't tug off the dags of dirt, or failed to pick up the lockings (handfuls of loose wool) from the floor.

As my father releases a clipped ewe, he throws the fleece to the side. My grandfather sweeps it up and casts it like a fisherman's net across the wrapping table. The fleece lies for a second like a coat inside out. He pulls any dirt from it and picks out any straw or twigs. He rolls the outsides of the fleece inwards so the fleece forms a foot-wide rug. He rolls it into a ball starting at the neck end until he reaches the tail. Then with a pull and a twist, he turns the tail into a kind of rope. In one movement he would bind the tail rope around the bundle and tuck it firmly beneath itself on the other side of the roll. The fleece now was tied and would be thrown to my mother to be stuffed firmly into the corner of the wool bags. When I was small and too young to work, I'd be in that wool bag, greasy with lanolin. I'd just lie there as the shed hummed to the sound of the motor of the clipping machine and the sheep calling each other. I can remember lying there, looking up at the swallows coming and going to the nest on the beam above me as if nothing were happening, the young birds occasionally peering over the edge to watch the commotion. I'd fall asleep in this woolly cocoon to be woken later by my fussing grandmother who then plied me with shortbread or something else she had baked. She'd spit on a hanky and rub my face clean.