The Shepherd's Life (12 page)

It felt like the whole modern world wanted to rob me of the life I wanted to lead.

 

45

All through my childhood my auntie and uncle farmed just a mile up the road. We collaborated with them on seasonal tasks like making the crop. They bred good sheep, and when I can first remember, they were beating us. My grandfather would take it very badly, because “all of his ducks were geese,” as they say round here. But I loved to go and work with them in the autumn or go to the sales with them. I thought they did some stuff better than us, so I figured I'd learn from them and beat them later.

One Saturday in August we were stacking hay into the mews of the barn so it was safely stored for the winter, and they appeared in the yard. My parents and my auntie and uncle left me filling the elevator (a conveyor belt with spikes that carried each bale upwards and threw them off at the top) with petrol, and they went into the farmhouse kitchen. This struck me as strange. About ten minutes later they came out. There was something in the air. Something unsaid. I looked questioningly to my father and his look said “Don't ask now.” So I didn't. We just worked.

My auntie lugged bales onto the elevator that chugged away, sending bales up in the eaves of the barn, to a mew of hay that grew ever upwards. She was surrounded by petrol fumes and dust. I was up in the rafters, taking bales off the elevator and throwing them to my father. Light streaming through the ridged pinnacle of the corrugated roof. Sweat. Itchiness. Cobwebs. Big fat brown moths would flit about your head. The smell so sweet and dusty it could make you sneeze. My dad was strangely chatty. My auntie caught my eye a few times, and smiled. When we were done, Dad thanked her for helping. She smiled, got in the car, and went. Then they told me.

She came to tell us that she was going to die. She didn't want anyone to see her get ill, to deteriorate. She didn't want anyone to feel sorry for her. She didn't need anyone's pity. I was forbidden to go and visit. I never saw her properly again, just a blurred glimpse of an ill woman in a car speeding past as I worked by the road one day putting up a wall.

 

46

They say that school days are the best of your life, but that's bullshit. I couldn't wait to leave. I had nothing invested in it. And by the time I was fifteen, the teachers were not going to lose any sleep over unburdening themselves of me. You can't push water uphill. You were allowed to leave after the Christmas of your sixteenth birthday, but you needed your teachers to sign you off. All any of us wanted was to get the hell out, so we envied the lucky bastards that had their birthday and strode off across the playground with a white piece of paper in their fists. I have never seen most of those lads again. Today you might exchange mobile phone numbers or stay connected through Facebook or Twitter. But these things hadn't been invented, and few of us wanted any lasting connection anyway.

 

47

My mother had given up on my schooling by that stage. Resigned to it. I more or less stopped going to school after Christmas. Fifteen years old. I'd managed about a year more than my dad or my granddad. When I stayed at home, I worked, a much-needed extra man on the farm. I worked hard, so no one was bothered that the formalities of school were being ignored. (I lied as well so they didn't really know what was going on.) I hadn't done a thing at school from about age twelve anyway. Just fucking around. I chose my study subjects so I could be in the same groups as some girl I fancied. For the last year or two before I left, I worked part-time at home, before and after school and at weekends. A rough shout from my dad told you it was time to get up and go out and work. Feeding or mucking out cattle, or up the fields feeding sheep; and at school bus time my mother would come looking for me, and my father would say he didn't know where I was until it was too late. One day I saw her crying as she went back to the house. Dad would give me a cheeky smirk.

 

48

I went back for some of the exams to keep my mother happy. Missed others. Showed little interest in the ones I attended, but I can remember using the quiet in the exam hall to think. I knew it was dumb to fail exams, but I preferred to fail badly by that point than have anyone think a C was the best I could do. Somehow, despite fucking about, I still got a C in religious studies and woodwork, which made my granddad laugh. “You'd make a vicar maybe.… You can do the funeral service and then bray the nails into the coffin.” I'd confirmed his suspicion that school was a total waste of time. The school was on a major fund-raising campaign to buy computers, and they arrived as I left. Until then the only computers I had seen were in my cousin's bedroom and in the careers office at school. We'd been sent to queue outside the career advisor's door for his enlightened advice about our future professional lives. He was very proud of his careers software package and earnestly asked me a series of tick box questions. Single finger typing. Do you want to work inside or outside? Outside. Do you want to work with people or animals? Etc. After a quarter of an hour of this, the computer started to vibrate and then spurted out a slip of paper. It said I should be a zookeeper. As my dad said, when I told him, “Bloody hell … the stupid bastards.” Then he rocked with laughter and couldn't stop.

 

49

This crappy, mean, broken-down school took five years of my life. I'd be mad, but for the fact that it taught me more about who I was than anything else I have ever done. It also made me think that modern life is rubbish for so many people. How few choices it gives them. How it lays out in front of them a future that bores most of them so much they can't wait to get smashed out of their heads each weekend. How little most people are believed in, and how much it asks of so many people for so little in return.

So leaving school was the best thing that ever happened to me. I felt a sense of elation that spring and summer. I was fifteen and I swore the day I left school that I would never let myself be trapped in a place like this ever again. I was going to live on my terms.

At least, that's what I reckoned.

 

50

My grandfather was seventy-two years old. He had a stroke. After a while they put him in a care home. He couldn't speak properly. It seemed like a cruel end for someone who lived and worked in some of the most beautiful landscapes in the Lake District. He seemed utterly trapped. For some years previously my grandmother had feared he would die in the fields, and they wouldn't know where to find him—she would shout angrily at him, “The crows will go with your eyes.” He would smile, put on his jacket, and go back to the fields.

But now there was no going back to the fields.

 

51

I am wearing blue suede boots. Don't ask me why—I am seventeen and dumb and trying to be cool. I look like an extra in a Blur video circa 1994. I am visiting him in the hospital after his stroke. My grandfather is dribbling out of one side of his mouth and looks like a trapped animal. He is furious with his inability to control his mouth and speak clearly, which makes it worse. One quick glance as I came through the door, and I knew he was going to die. Still, he looks pleased to see me, and is amused by my blue suede boots. He can't speak much, but his arm reaches down and points to my feet. A dying man, who can't even speak properly, is teasing me about fashion. When my father comes in, my grandfather clutches his hand and says one almost broken word, the name of his farm. Then he sits and listens keenly to every detail of work taking place on his land, keeping a keen eye on his son and me for any sign that he was being told a good news fairy tale for a dying man. My dad and granddad might have spent years fighting, but now they look like best friends. My grandfather is almost tender in a way I have never seen before. He looks scared and keeps looking at me as if to check I believed in all he'd worked for, but he didn't need to worry. I did, and I still do.

When he looks into my face, we share a thousand unspoken thoughts about the farm and our family. In that moment I'm not just a grandson. I am the one who carries on his life's work, I am the thread that goes to the future. He lives in me. His voice. His values. His stories. His farm. These things are carried forwards. I hear his voice in my head when I do work on the farm. It sometimes stops me doing something foolish, and I pause and do it how he would have done it. Everyone knows he was a major ingredient in the making of me, and that I am the going on of him.

It was ever thus.

 

52

The summer after my grandfather died I climbed to the woods high above where we lived and looked down over the Eden Valley. A land where the hay was baled and stacked in countless meadows, and cattle and sheep grazed in thousands of fields. I just sat silently and watched the world go by, with my back to a tree. An old greyish hare hopped up the bank, stopped at my dusty boots, and took a long slow look at me, then headed off on his way to wherever. Summer-wild cattle grazed past the little wood, kicking up insects in the golden haze of dusk, oblivious to my presence. As I lay against that smooth old beech tree the world rolled past me like a dream. A kestrel circled high above the woods, ignoring its ever-hungry offspring mewing from the branches of another beech tree further along from mine. And the whole land was bathed in a warm peach-red August glow. Wood pigeons flapped noisily out of the long sun-bleached grasses where ewes and lambs grazed. Away to the quarry a couple of roe deer does strayed from the darkness of the plantation to sunbathe and graze contentedly.

A strong dog fox made his way along the shadows cast by the plantation, under a wooden gate, and along the fence until I lost him in the sea of grass. Moments later he reappeared near where the wood pigeons had been grazing when I last spied them. Pigeons scattered all ways, flapping powerfully away at the grasses and thistles. The dog fox pounced again and again, and then, defeated, he trotted out of the long grasses and rolled playfully on the turf. Far below me the first lights of the village flickered on and the last swallows raced one another across the hillside. I knew the old man had gone and would never come back, and that things would never be the same again. Summer was passing.

 

 

 

AUTUMN

Unspoilt. Unvisited. Until Thomas West wrote his guidebook, the Lake District was unknown and unloved. No poets came, no tourists toured and the average nymph or shepherd saw nothing worth a second look.

ABOUT A 2008 EDITION OF
A GUIDE TO THE LAKES
BY THOMAS WEST

The mountains are as a rule a world apart from civilizations, which are an urban and lowland achievement. Their history is to have none, to remain always on the fringe of the great waves of civilization, even the longest and most persistent.

FERNAND BRAUDEL,
THE MEDITERRANEAN AND THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN THE AGE OF PHILIP II,
VOLUME I

 

1

The autumn after my grandfather died my grandmother gave a silver cup in his memory to the auction mart for the champion tup. I won it with a tup lamb I had told my grandfather about before he died. He was the best we had ever had and was head and shoulders above his peers at the sale. I'd prepared and shown him well, so he was at twelve o'clock when it mattered. During the judging I'd stolen the high ground in the middle of the ring to stand my tup on. I'd set him perfect like a king looking down on the others—an old showing trick. He knew he was the best, and we were simply telling everyone else in case they hadn't noticed. My dad winked at me and smiled when he saw that.

The tup was made the champion of the sale and sold for the top price, bought by another respected shepherd to pass on his attributes to the fifty or more ewes he would be mated with.