The Shepherd's Life by James Rebanks Page B

him generations later. A lot of farming families have stories like this, their own myths of how they came to be who they are.

 
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    My grandfather had an eye for things that were beautiful, like a sunset, but he would explain it in mostly functional terms, not abstract aesthetic ones. He seemed to love the landscape around him with a passion, but his relationship with it was more like a long tough marriage than a fleeting holiday love affair. His work bound him to the land, regardless of weather or the seasons. When he observed something like a spring sunset, it carried the full meaning of someone who had earned the right to comment, having suffered six months of wind, snow, and rain to get to that point. He clearly thought such things beautiful, but that beauty was full of real functional implications—namely the end of winter or better weather to come.

 
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    From the beginning my grandfather taught me the classic worldview of what Europeans would call a peasant, and we would simply call a farmer. 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. There was also a strong sense of what others would call egalitarianism, which exists in many pastoral communities in northern Europe, that judged a man or woman on their work, their livestock, and their participation. Historically there had not been the wealth to differentiate between farmer and farmworker in these valleys, at least not in ways that divided them socially and culturally. The aristocratic families didn’t, or couldn’t, really exert their power here, and there was little idea of class. The men, farmers and labourers, worked together for the most part, ate at the same table, drank together in the pub, watched the same sports, and generally lived very similar lives. The farmers who owned land perhaps thought they were a little smarter than those who had never managed to get a farm of their own, or the farmworkers, but any form of snobbery or class distinction was fairly alien. You couldn’t get away with being a snob. The world was too small. There were too many chances for others to make you pay heavily for it. Respect was mostly linked to the quality of a man or woman’s sheep or cattle or the upkeep of their farm, or their skill in their work and management of the land. Men or women who were good shepherds were held in the highest esteem, regardless of being to modern eyes “just employees.” To be a shepherd was to stand as tall as any man.

 
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    I went to a really good little primary school. But my bookish mother and school didn’t stand a chance. I knew from the start that school was just a diversion from other things that mattered more.
    But it wasn’t all wasted. I had a magical teacher called Mrs. Craig who read me I Am David (about a little Jewish boy escaping a concentration camp). She also read us the Odyssey and I remember loving the bit about Odysseus and his men clutching the bellies of his giant fat sheep to escape the one-eyed giant’s cave. I still love these books. The teachers said kind things to my mother about me being “bright” and “enigmatic.” But the bottom line was I belonged to the farm.
    My grandmother once scolded me for idleness when she caught me reading in her house. The gist of it was that there couldn’t possibly be so little else of value to do on the farm that I could justify reading a book in daylight hours. Books were considered a sign of idleness at best and dangerous at worst. My school successes (increasingly rare, as I got older) also seemed to worry my grandfather, like a flashing warning light that he might lose his heir to another culture. There was nothing much useful in books. School had to be attended. But it was just a dull obligation.

 
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    I remember a school night in the hayfield, in an eight-acre banked field called Merricks. It was five minutes