Once the work is done, we depart off to the next flock. We might inspect a hundred tups in a day on maybe fifteen farms. It might take ten days to cover the whole breed areas, so different inspectors do a day each generally.
44
I’m on the third or fourth floor of a building just off Oxford Street, London. I left the flat at 5:30 a.m. in Oxford to catch a train, and won’t get home until 10 p.m. My work cubicle is about three feet by four feet square. The shelves above the Mac I’m working on tower up towards the ceiling; they’re covered with the assorted papers and other rubbish of the previous occupant of my chair. The nearest window is about twenty feet away, but it hardly matters because there isn’t anything to see from it except the back of the neighbouring building. There is nothing green to see out there anyway, except a sickly looking little tree in the square below.
I’m working as a subeditor, despite having zero experience at doing that. After a term or two in Oxford I’d realized that to get the kind of well-paid job I needed, I had to get some work experience.
I secretly fancied myself as the next Ernest Hemingway, so I thought maybe I could be a journalist. So I’d applied to some magazines for work experience. Only one replied and I was called down to London to have a chat with the editor.
It didn’t start very well, because when I arrived I had to use an intercom system, and not knowing how they worked I pressed the buzzer continuously whilst I was talking to the person upstairs. They told me angrily that I could stop pressing the buzzer. The whole office buzzed each time the intercom was on and stayed buzzing as long as the button was pressed. When I got up there, everyone peered over their computers and smirked. The editor was very friendly, seemed to realize I was way out of my comfort zone, but kindly agreed to give me a chance. When I came back to start the work experience on the date agreed (some weeks later), I passed a man leaving the building with a cardboard box under his arm and looking flustered. He sort of bustled past me in the doorway. When I got in the office, I was told to sit in the cubicle and wait. I waited about three hours.
Then the editor emerged from her office and thrust a few sheets of paper with scribbled notes at me, and said, “Proof that.…”
“But…”
“Sorry, I haven’t time to talk … just do it.…”
I had a funny feeling that she didn’t recognize me at all. When I took the papers back to her half an hour later, she was on the phone and simply took them from me, motioned intensely for me to keep quiet. She then handed me another piece of paper with scribbles on it. I left the first day completely baffled.
Over the days that followed I began to pick up a few things, not least that subediting has its own language of squiggles that you use. So I learned those, and did the best I could. It was a crazy, manic atmosphere of a kind I’d never experienced, but it would be interspersed with hours when I had done the work, but could not get anyone to tell me what to do next. I’d be waved away by the editor or another member of the staff. At lunchtimes I’d sit on a bench in the square and marvel at the beautiful girls flooding out of all the fashion magazines and fashion houses in that district.
After a fortnight or so I was beckoned into the editor’s office. The magazine had gone to press and the atmosphere had changed. She asked how much they were paying me. I explained that they weren’t. I was there on work experience, and no one had offered to pay me. She seemed surprised. Then she explained that I was basically doing the job of the subeditor sacked a fortnight ago. The man leaving with the cardboard box on the day I had arrived.
She asked me to stay the whole holiday and come back the next summer. The next summer is the only one I have ever spent away from our farm. It was the weirdest few weeks of my life.
I didn’t know anyone in London, and I never wanted to be there. This is not how my life was meant to be. But needs must. It’s like the gods are showing me how tough everyone else’s lives are, and what I have left behind. I understand for the first time why people want to escape to places like where I live. I understand what national parks are for, so that people whose lives are always like this can escape and feel the wind in their hair and the sun on their faces.
45
I promised myself that I would be at home the next summer. I was, but not under the circumstances I’d imagined, because in 2001, the foot-and-mouth epidemic broke out.
Foot-and-mouth disease entered the UK when a pig farmer fed his pigs “untreated waste” as swill that apparently contained contaminated meat. The disease spread like wildfire, infecting thousands of animals and spreading across vast areas, before the UK government got to grips with it. Infected flocks and herds were immediately slaughtered, and to prevent the disease spreading a policy was implemented of culling whole areas to create buffer zones around the disease. Eventually the epidemic was controlled and the disease eradicated from the UK, but not before 10 million sheep and cattle were slaughtered. The centre of the epidemic was Cumbria where we live and farm.
From the high ground where we feed our ewes and lambs, for as far as I can see, there are towers of smoke rising from pyres of burning sheep, cattle, and pigs. The land is shrouded in a grey haze. The wind carries the sickly smell of burnt flesh and the chemical smell of the fires. For weeks we have been under siege. Those not yet struck down by the virus are waiting to be hit by it. Our landscape is riddled with it now, because the government was too slow to react to its spreading in the beginning. Completely oblivious to a farming world where livestock moves around the countryside (as it always has). The TV news shows a map of the cases spreading, an ugly grey stain that seems to cover my whole universe. The solution decided upon was to clear certain zones of livestock so the disease could be contained. The land would be cleared of sheep initially, but the cattle would be left in their winter housing.
They came to collect our sheep at lambing time. We loaded pregnant ewes into the wagons. The few lambs that had been born were loaded as well. I have never done anything that felt so wrong, so against everything I was ever taught to do.
The auctioneer sent to value them for compensation cried and said it was “criminal to kill such good breeding sheep.”
Many of the sheep were descendants of the good ewes my grandfather had bought in the 1940s. Sixty years’ work wiped away in two hours.
Our cattle later got the disease anyway and were shot in the fields by a police sniper. Killed one at a time, with a crack of a rifle, until the fields around the village looked like something out of a war movie. The villagers stood on the green in disbelief, watching. My neighbour stood with a shotgun at his field boundary, ready to shoot any cattle that threatened to jump his fence and infect his clean cattle. He apologized but said he had to protect his stock. I told him I understood. I’d have done the same. My dad wanted nothing to do with the whole miserable business and went in the house, leaving me to supervise amidst the chaos. I felt dirty and ashamed. At one point I turned to someone in disbelief and said, “Is this really happening?” and they replied, “I think so.”
After it was over, the slaughter finished, and the men gone, I walked around the farm in disbelief. It was a beautiful evening in the English countryside, with a peach red sunset, but the fields were speckled with our dead cattle. Red cattle. White cattle. Black cattle. Strangely peaceful, they lay in all sorts of mangled and contorted ways. I knew those cattle, so it was like seeing old friends dead. The setting sun creating all kinds of grotesque shadows. My mind couldn’t quite process it. It was surreal, like I was watching a movie. The farm was eerily silent, something we had never known before. The next day our dead and bloated livestock were loaded by diggers like trash into wagons and led to a hole in the ground miles away. There was a look on my father’s face of pure disgust at this whole spectacle.
When the last wagon had gone I went into the barn, away from everyone, sat down in the shadows, held my head in my hands, and sobbed big fat dusty tears.
Then the farms were empty. And we didn’t know what to do
without livestock to care for. I waited to hear my dad getting up, but there was nothing to get up for. Our sheep and cattle were dead. Someone had pressed Pause on our way of life, and we weren’t sure if anyone would ever press Play again.
One day as we were working my mobile phone buzzed in my pocket. It was Helen, who I had left working in Oxford whilst I spent the summer working at home. She told me to go and turn the TV on. Something had happened to a skyscraper in New York. I couldn’t really process what she was telling me. But I told everyone. We went to the farmhouse. I turned on the TV and we stood and watched through the kitchen window. We were all wearing our farm waterproofs. The plane hit the World Trade Centre from several angles on an endless TV news loop. And we stood slack-jawed and confused as the second plane hit the second tower. Then we stood spellbound as the towers fell in their vast sad clouds of dust and swirling bits of paper. None of us really knew what was going on. It felt like the world was falling apart around us.
46
Our farm in the fells was one of the last farms towards the mountains culled during the epidemic. Had it spread west a few more fields, the disease would have got on to the unfenced lakeland fells, where it would have decimated the ancient hefted fell flocks on the commons. Ninety percent of the Herdwick sheep in the world exist within twenty miles of Coniston. Herdwick sheep were at grave risk of being wiped out. But an essentially urban government didn’t understand. To them a sheep was a sheep, a farm simply a farm. The idea that something precious was on the edge of destruction was never really grasped. We are often in the hands of other people, our fate in the hands of shoppers and supermarkets and bureaucrats. In the end the fell flocks mostly escaped (though many young fell sheep were culled when they were caught in the killing zone on their wintering grounds in the lowlands). Many great flocks of sheep and herds of cattle were destroyed, but thankfully not all.
47
I stayed home all that summer. We hired a bunch of my mates and cousins to undertake the massive job of pressure washing the entire farm until it was spotlessly clean to the government inspector’s satisfaction. Without livestock on the farms, everyone and everything was different. People you knew who had never relaxed in their whole lives suddenly were thrown out of their old ways. And the farms were clean and that was disconcerting and made them feel strangely clinical and dead.
The pubs and restaurants suffered as well because people assumed that everywhere was closed so the visitors didn’t come that summer like previously. There were tensions too, because different farmers had gotten different auctioneers to value their stock for compensation purposes and some had valued higher than others. Some people felt cheated. Perhaps the worst off financially were those farmers that hadn’t got the disease, so were not compensated, but were unable to sell their livestock so for months effectively frozen as businesses. Costs mounting. Income nil.
But it was not all bad. There is a certain community spirit that throve in those circumstances. Our farm had probably not had so many people working on it for decades and once we got past the grimness of what had happened, we had quite a lot of fun working together. Soccer matches after work. Nights out at the pub.
48
In the months that followed my mother and father quite sensibly gave notice to leave the rented farm (because it sometimes lost money by the time you had paid the rent), and did so a year later. They would buy a house on the edge of the local town and farm my grandfather’s land remotely. We would keep the farm in the fells and see what happened. I worked with my dad for months.
Leaving the farm is supposed to make you have another life, but my leaving just made me realize that the farm was the beginning and end of everything for me. When I was young, my grandfather had stood with me in a barn that was isolated up in some of his fields; he said someday I should make it into a house and live there. And now that idea was in my head. It was my goal. It was the first thought in my head in the morning and my last thought at night. As the joke goes, it isn’t a matter of life and death; it is far more important than that.
49
Because all of the farms later restocked at the same time, prices were inflated. We were cautious. We were not sure what to restock our farm with, so we bought some Herdwick draft ewes from Jean Wilson. They transformed from old tired-looking creatures when they got on our grass and left us thrilled with how well they had done. One day as we were working amongst them in the sheep pens, Jean came to talk to us. She told us that some of the ewes were good enough to breed pure (instead of crossing them to produce lambs just for meat). So she brought us a distinguished old Herdwick tup to use. Jean is formidable, so we did as we were told. The next spring we had our first Herdwick lambs. Those old ladies were the start of our current flock. Two of them turned out to be very fine breeding ewes. One of their first lambs grew up to win our local sheep show and gave me the bug for breeding them. One day I said to my dad, “I think I’ll breed the Herdwicks.” He smiled and said that was fine. Since then we specialize in different breeds. Today, I have the granddaughters and great-granddaughters of those old ewes in my flock. My current farming life was reborn during those sad months when it seemed like everything was broken.
One empty sunlit Sunday morning in my third year as a student (some weekends I couldn’t go home), Helen and I wander through the Oxfordshire landscape, in a rusty VW Golf. We pass through little villages with duck ponds and gastropubs. Through farmland with leafy narrow lanes, thatched cottages, and past huge tractors leading grain. A foreign landscape peopled with strangers.
We stop by a plain little concrete house, a farmworkers cottage, where an old man sits in the sunshine on a step. There is a muddy puddle on the other side of the road, where house martins are gathering mud for their nests. I say “Hello” and we make small talk about the birds.
Then I notice the plastic bowl by his feet. The puddle is his doing, a kindness to the birds. And they repay him by building nests in his eaves from the delicate little parcels of mud.
He watches them and smiles.
I turn to Helen. “I have to go home now, love.”
She smiles and says, “I know.”
WINTER
About living in the country?
I yawn; that step, for instance—
No need to look up—Evans
On his way to the fields, where he hoes
Up one row of mangolds and down
The next one. You needn’t wonder
What goes on his mind, there is nothing
Going on there; the unemployment
Of the lobes is established. His small dole
Is kindness of the passers-by
Who mister him, who read an answer
To problems in the way his speech
Comes haltingly, and in his eyes reflect
Stillness. I would say to them
About living in the country, peace
Can deafen one, beauty surprise
No longer. There is only the thud
Of the slow foot up the long lane
At morning and back at night.
R. S. THOMAS, “THE COUNTRY”
1
He sees me before I see him—a young bull-necked raven. Coal black. Scared of nothing, and with a belly full of the dead.
Ravens live on our failures. Brutal. Arrogant. Cruel. And sometimes stunningly beautiful.
I am reading an ear tag for my records, and write it down on a soggy and dirty notebook: “15,547. Dead. Pneumonia.”
Had I turned the corner with a shotgun, the raven would have risen over the wall and skulked off to a tree just out of range with a laughing and throaty “kraark,” but he is knowingly disinterested in a man armed only with a ballpoint pen. His thick black hoary neck ruffles as the wind catches his feathers. Greedy. Delirious. He rises like he has a stone in his belly, punch-drunk on carrion.
Our casualties are not often pretty, because life and death often isn’t. Winter is attritional on the flock. Two old ewes, too old for this winte
r, bellies bloated, and eyes stolen, lie in the yard. They lie next to a young vixen with a hole blown through her belly, insides almost outside, a resentful fang bared on her gnarled wild face.
Atop the corrugated roof of the bullock shed the raven steps from one claw to the other. Every movement of his thick dark body says he is gorged. On laboured wings he departs into the darkness.
There are moments like this, when you are half-beat and dark news shadows menacingly over you.
* * *
One of these ewes lying dead meant a lot to me. She was the best I had. She was like the matriarch of the flock. She led the flock out of the snowdrifts last winter when they were in danger.
2
Snow. Shepherds fear and loathe deep snow and drifting winds. Snow kills. It buries sheep. It buries the grass and makes the sheep even more dependent on us for survival. So we suffer everyone else’s excitement. Snowballs. Snowmen. Sledging. We fear. A little snow is harmless; we can hay the sheep and they can endure the cold easily enough. But the combination of wind and deep snow is a killer. It kills sheep, and can easily kill men and women. If you’ve ever seen ewes lying dead behind walls after the snow has cleared, or seen lambs lying dead where they were born, you will never love snow so innocently again. Still, as much as I fear and loathe its worst effects, it does make the valley beautiful. White. Silent. Cruel. It muffles all the usual noises. Only the wind-like cry of the beck, a little quieter than usual. I can tell it is deep snow before I open my eyes just by the missing noise. But a clock is ticking in my head, telling me that until I have seen and fed all the sheep my work will not be done.
The Shepherd's Life Page 15