The Shepherd's Life (8 page)

“Us two old men will go and get them sheep.”

I'd ride with him, looking out of the open Land Rover window. One day the door wasn't latched properly and when he braked, I swung out, holding the window for grim death until I was rescued from midair. I vaguely recall escaping various other painful and imminent deaths at auction marts, clambering up the railings to escape wild cattle or feeling the air whoosh past as a bullock kicked out and just missed me.

The world I was born into extended between our two farms; the outer limits of civilization were friends who did similar things to us, some as far afield as the Pennines or the valleys of the Lake District. Those were the outer boundaries of my known universe.

I was always curious about other places, but I had no desire to go to any of them. And we didn't do holidays. Instead, I'd be packed off with my granddad to stay on their farm, where I would follow him around all day, and climb into their bed at night.

 

24

Early summer has quieter moments when we all breathe a little easier after the slog of lambing. My grandmother and grandfather would “take the sheepdogs for a walk.” This was a walk for maybe a mile up the lane beneath the fell where they lived. In reality it was all about enjoying the sight of their farm in its summer mode of abundance. The ewes and lambs grazed contentedly below. The fells shimmered in the dusk, red, orange, and blue. The hayfields below like patches of purple with their flowered grasses headed up. I could almost taste the sweet hay smell, the pollen in the air. The valley echoed always to the sound of ewes calling their lambs.

There is a rusting metal gate halfway up that lane where they would stop and look over their home. The setting sun would bathe the valley, the fields a golden haze of insects, thistles, and flowering grasses. I'd listen to them talk, and feel their love of, and pride in, this place.

Some summers, we walked our cattle up into an isolated little valley called Dowthwaite Head, to graze land belonging to a farmer my grandfather knew called Mayson Weir. Once we got there, the cattle would graze away across the fields, flies and dust rising around their feet, their tails swishing in the sunshine. They'd be “fat as butter” when we went back for them in the autumn. The movement upwards of sheep and cattle enabled the best land below to be protected from grazing to make hay.

Mayson was a character. You could get lost up there in his whitewashed farmhouse having a whisky. “Go on, you'll have another.” Then it was too late to argue. My grandfather's glass would be three fingers deep with whisky. I'd sit listening to them joking and swapping stories and gossip. I'd munch custard creams or gingerbread. I remember them telling of a shepherd who had died when a bunch of them had gone to a pool to cool down on a hot summer day. He had dived in and not come back up. Sometimes Mayson would disappear and come back with some home-cured bacon from his back kitchen. It would be covered in the fuzz that grows on it. He'd cut some off and produce a fry-up. Today, thirty years later, I am friends with Mayson. Families like ours roll on beside each other, through the ages, with the bonds enduring. Individuals live and die, but the farms, the flocks, and the old families go on.

 

25

When my grandfather bought our farm in the fells he took us into the landscape of another breed, the Herdwick. Herdwicks are born black with white ear tips but change colour as they age, until they have a white, hoar-frosted head and legs, and a blue-grey fleece. They are arguably the toughest mountain sheep in Britain. Snow. Rain. Hail. Sleet. Wind. Weeks of dour wet weather. No problem. At one day old with a good mother they are almost indestructible, regardless of the weather, with a thick leathery skin and a carpetlike black fleece that keeps them dry and warm. They can live on less than any other sheep in these conditions and come off the fells with a lamb of value in the autumn. Recent scientific research has shown that Herdwicks are genetically rather special—they have in them a primitive genome that few other British sheep carry. Their nearest relatives are sheep in Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and the northern islands of Orkney. It is believed that they go back to ancestors that lived on the islands of the Wadden Sea, or further north in Scandinavia. Local myth has always said they came with the Vikings on their boats, and the science now suggests this is true. Since they arrived, they have been selectively bred for more than a thousand years to suit this landscape.

*   *   *

The first time I saw Herdwicks on our farm was as a child. They have more character than more modern sheep. The six-month-old lambs stood there, watching me knowingly. Dark-brown fleeced, with sturdy white legs, a touch of the teddy bear about them in their early winter coats. My grandfather had bought a hundred from a neighbouring farmer to fatten them. He was rather startled by them, as (unlike our other breeds) they seemed to think his modest farm was paradise and got fat quickly, and he was able to sell them for a profit. They had probably lived their whole lives until that point on some of the rockiest and most unforgiving mountain terrain in Britain. Like a lot of farmers in the twentieth century we were keen to keep the most modern improved sheep we could on our land. And our modernizing farming worked okay, in a world with abundant and cheap fuel, fertilizer, feedstuffs, and cheap labour. But keeping improved breeds on land that is a bit too tough for them is hard work: they ail more, eat more, grow slower than they should, and ultimately die sooner. Later, as oil and feed prices rose, and the cost of the inputs on our farm rose, we would learn that native breeds like the Herdwick are the best suited to a life with little supplementary feed in this landscape. But, at that time, Herdwicks seemed to us noble, but like a thing from the past. Herdwick sheep are sometimes misunderstood as being a rare breed, or existing purely because of nostalgia or because of Beatrix Potter and the National Trust (because of its role in buying some of the farms here to conserve them and, through that, conserving the fell flocks in situ). Herdwicks aren't rare, with more than fifty thousand breeding females, and they are still the only commercial sheep for the highest Lake District fells. They are currently experiencing a renaissance of interest as farmers try to find ways to farm tough land with fewer inputs, and because people are waking up to the quality of their traditional, naturally produced and tastier meat.

Each breed of sheep has its own community of breeders that come together at different auction markets for the sales. So my grandfather knew and dealt with farmers from across the Swaledale country, from the Lake District in the west to Durham in the east, and from the southern Pennines to the Scottish borders. The auction marts are in many ways the centers of our way of life, the places where we come together to trade but also to socialize. When I was a child, they were situated where they always had been in the centers of the local towns, with sheep and cattle still walked in from local farms. In the last thirty years they have mostly moved to the outskirts of the towns to industrial estates—in the name of scale and modernization. But I think something important has been lost through this, a link between people who live in towns and our world.

The different breeds also have their own calendars, with everything from lambing to clipping being carefully timed to fit the annual growing cycle and to ensure that they are in peak condition for the autumn sales, which are mainly breed specific.

My grandfather went to these sales and bought lambs from the high lakeland fells in the autumn to fatten during the winter on his better land. These lambs are called stores. He sold them a few weeks later when they had put on weight and condition for a profit to the butchers at a “fat lamb” sale. I can remember being taken to buy them, when about knee-high to the grown-ups, to the little auction mart at Troutbeck. It is just over the brow of the fell from our farm, a mile or so as the crow flies. It was little more than a tiny wooden octagon-shaped shed, topped with a corrugated tin roof, surrounding a ring where the sheep were driven for sale, surrounded in turn by acres of pens holding thousands of sheep. The ring was a sea of sawdust, surrounded by wooden seats where the buyers could congregate, facing the wooden rostrum of the auctioneer. The sheep stood outside in long rows of pens made of wooden or metal hurdles (gates). Drovers, some still wearing clogs, and all with sticks or flapping plastic feed bags would bring the sheep to the ring or walk them away. As each pen was bought in the ring the buyer's name would echo down the pens from one drover to the next until it was scratched in chalk on the little blackboard on the pen gate. On wet days the heat of the sheep would result in a damp, wet, woolly smell. Steam would rise from their backs. They'd push us kids to the front through the legs of the old farmers, or palm us off on the older kids to look after, and bung us some Fruit Pastilles or a Mars Bar to keep us quiet. We'd sit munching a gob full of chocolate, watching thousands of sheep sold whilst our fathers and grandfathers did their business. I loved listening to the old men talking. One of them was my grandfather's cousin, and they said he had been to Oxford University when he was a youth. I remember thinking that was a strange thing for an old farmer to have done.

 

26

Making hay.

Clipping.

Looking after the ewes and lambs.

Gathering.

This is what summer means to us.

Making good hay is like a commandment from God if you live here. People would once have faced ruin or even famine if they couldn't feed their animals through the winter. Misjudging your crop even now is an expensive gamble that can wipe away the year's profit in an instant. They say that about once every ten years it was virtually impossible to make hay. It would rain and rain and never let up. So my deciding to be born at hay time meant there was more than one thing of importance happening.

 

27

I arrived on a sultry July day as my father and grandfather were making hay in the meadows on our farm, trying to beat the impending rain that every farmer fears as he secures the crop needed for winter. Grass that dries in the sunshine and is then baled and stored in the barns makes for wonderful winter fodder; it bursts out of its bales on a snowy day when the sheep need it and you get a breath of summer. Even the flowers in the meadows can be seen pressed in there. But hay that is rained on starts to rot. A little rain and it makes hay that is a little bit like grassy strands of cardboard. The ewes will eat it in winter and it will keep them alive, but it is not the same. A lot of rain and the hay becomes a rotten, inedible, and bitter-smelling mess. Eventually it is useless.

 

28

My mother had struggled to get pregnant, until she received some then-innovative fertility treatment. Though her grandmother always insisted that she'd actually been cured by riding a horse of my grandfather's and having her insides “jiggled about a bit.” Our council house was half a mile down the road from the village, in a row of four. It faced our fields, was grey rendered, and fronted the road. In the photos my parents look surprisingly fashionable in a 1974 kind of way, Dad with his wavy hair, sideburns, wide-collared shirts, and tight trousers with flares and Mum pretty and always looking like she worshipped me. Mum and Dad look, in those same photos, strangely like extras in a
Jaws
movie. Longer hair. Dreamy looks.

The house was wallpapered with hideous 1970s patterns. My parents didn't have much, but in the pictures they look very young and really happy. Dad has a bit of mischief in his eyes. They say Mum was always reading me books. Mum says she can remember being hustled out of the way with her new baby (me) when it was time to feed the men on the farm. Grandma lived and breathed being a farmer's wife. Good meals on the table when she said they would be. Nothing should get in the way of that. Later Mum had a fridge magnet that said, “Dull women have immaculate homes.”

 

29

The day before I was born, my cousin had come to stay so Mum could babysit him, but during the night she felt something starting, so she walked the mile to the phone box in the village (ours didn't have a telephone). The rather stroppy matron she got on the phone told her to stop panicking, I wasn't due for six more weeks, go back to bed and stop being such a silly first-time mother. Fine. She walked home and went to bed. The next morning, my dad disappeared to work mowing the hay. My mother took my cousin home in the car. When she got there, my auntie was concerned about her and took her to our local little hospital. She was rushed to the nearest city hospital in an ambulance. My auntie called the offices of her husband, a solicitor in the local town, to get him to go and fetch my father from the hayfields. He rushed out in his car and his pin-striped suit. Waved my dad down on the tractor, handed him the keys to his car, and told him to get a move on to the hospital, I was coming.

My uncle was left standing in his polished shoes in a dusty hayfield, miles from anywhere, not sure what to do. So he drove the tractor fifteen miles back to the farm. Half an hour later my father screeched into the car park at the hospital and came to find Mum. I should have been born in the autumn. But I was healthy and strong. My first day intertwined with the happenings of the farm. The first time I saw my dad he would have been in his work clothes. Dusty. Sweaty. Smelling of summer hay. Once I was born, he went back to get on with making the hay. (When the elder of my two younger sisters was about to be born, he took my mother to hospital via a field that needed shepherding and nearly didn't get her there on time.)

 

30

Some of my earliest memories are of summers in the hayfields following my grandfather around. I would be sitting or sleeping behind the forever-bouncing seat of a tractor whilst someone else baled or turned the hay. Once I was mobile, it was a time for running and leaping over rows of hay, building dens in the bales, fishing in the streams that cut through our meadows. As long as the sun shone it always felt like a special time of the year. Like all was well with the world because the cattle and sheep could look after themselves, for the most part, for a few weeks in summer, and we were going to have the crop to feed them in the next winter.