Penguin
Pp. 287
Sheep are big business. Last
month (August 2020) in Lanark, Scotland, a sheep called Double Diamond sold for
a world-record sum of £367,500. James Rebanks knows that sheep are important. As
a shepherd, he understands that farming and shepherding are crucial to the
economy and the livelihood of many. He explains that this is hard work but that
he loves it and enjoys the connection that he gets from the land. What he doesn’t
seem to understand is how privileged he is and how many of the people he scorns
would love to have been given his opportunities.
The
Shepherd’s Life
is not particularly well-written but Rebanks received an advance from an agent before
he had written it. Although he appears to despise people who don’t do his work,
they seem to be interested in him. He writes a sort of auto-biography, which
also contains a lot of information about farming and a lot of assumptions about
what non-farmers think of him and his industry. Many of his blunt and
antiquated attitudes are irritating and arrogant, such as his inherent sexism
and antipathy towards intellectuals, but the sections on sheep-farming itself
are interesting and the most engaging.
As a child he followed his
grandfather around the place knowing that he would inherit the farm because he
is male. He has sisters, but it was “different for girls…their role is to leave
and do something else to earn respect.” This knowledge of his purpose in life
means that he feels ownership of the land. “We owned the earth. We’d been here
forever. And we always would be. We would get battered from time to time, but
we would endure and win.”
For him and his family, “our
sense of belonging is all about participation. We belong because we are part of
the work of this place.” And what if we can’t inherit a farm? Will we never ‘belong’?
He dislikes Alfred Wainwright, Chris Bonnington and William Wordsworth because
they’re ‘not from round here’ and so have no right to talk about ‘his’ land; he
thinks climbers, poets, walkers and daydreamers are pointless, and that
tourists are “minor irritants, like ants – they got in the way and they had
strange ideas, but a little bit of bad weather and they’d be gone again to get
on with stuff that mattered.”
The book itself is poorly written,
grammatically clunky and very repetitive; a lot of sections start out telling
us what someone is doing in the present tense, as he tries to set a basic
scene: “My father is wielding a white-handled meat saw…” “My mother is sitting
on a wooden chair in our barn…” “We are working in the sheep pens.” The use of
generic pronouns is also problematic, for example, he writes of his grandfather,
“He had a rough whiskery face when you kissed him goodnight.” This begs the
questions, when did I kiss him, and what was his face like when I didn’t? He
acknowledges, “We are, I guess, all of us, built out of stories” and yet, he doesn’t
narrate his own very well.
He became inspired by books when
he picked up a copy of A Shepherd’s Life
by W.H. Hudson (the story of a shepherd called Caleb Bawcombe) and says he
admires “the brilliant plain storytelling, no messing about”. It is predictable
when he talks of reading; it is of male authors – Camus, Salinger, A.J.P.
Taylor, Orwell – and that his biggest inspiration is the hyper-masculine
Hemingway. After criticising the poets, he tries to write his own, and I
certainly hope he’s a better sheep farmer.
He divides the book into four
seasons, as everything they do is connected to the weather and the natural
cycle. In many respects, shepherding and farming have not changed in centuries.
“You could bring a Viking man to stand on our fell with me and he would
understand what we were doing and the basic pattern of our farming year. The
timing of each task varies depending on the different valleys and farms. Things
are driven by the seasons and necessity, not by our will.”
If you remove the tractors and
the machinery, the farming practices are ancient, and it upsets him that these
traditions, skills and knowledge are being lost or dismissed. He commends the ‘old
ways’ and wants future generations to see the reality of farming and agriculture.
His book is almost a call to arms to protect the natural mechanics and importance
of farming.
James Rebanks is a tough person to like – he has some interesting things to say about sheep and the farming of them in the Lakeland fells, but he tells them in a didactic and hectoring tone. If he could climb down from his privileged perch, his message about sustainable farming might be easier to hear.
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