Pastoral Song: A Farmer's Journey

Dedication

For Helen, with all my love

Pastoral

Late Middle English, from Latin pastoralis

Adjective

1) Of or pertaining to shepherds; hence, relating to rural life and scenes.

2) Relating to the care of souls.

Noun

1) A poem describing the life and manners of shepherds; a poem in which the speakers assume the character of shepherds; an idyl.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Pastoral

The Plow and the Gulls

Nostalgia

Progress

Utopia

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by James Rebanks

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Plow and the Gulls

The black-headed gulls follow in our wake as if we are a little fishing boat out at sea. The sky is full of winged silhouettes and screaming beaks, and streaks of white seagull shit splatter like milk down onto the soil. I am riding in the tractor, crammed in behind my grandfather. My backside aches from sitting on adjustable spanners, a wrench, a socket set. We are plowing a twelve-acre field, high on a limestone plateau that tilts slightly down to the Eden Valley in the distance. The land is divided into long rectangular fields by silver drystone walls. It feels like we are on the top of the earth, with only the clouds above us. The birds rise and fall in hungry tumbling waves. The highest soar far above the field like children’s kites, anchored by lengths of invisible string. Some hang in mid air a few feet behind the tractor, wings beating, just above the plow; others glide, motionless, almost near enough for me to touch, with searching eyes and wrinkled yellow legs. One gull floats, with a leg hanging, bent and crippled. The blue-gray Lakeland fells in the distance rise like the silhouetted backbones of giant sleeping dragons.

The three plowshares slice the earth into ribbons, and the shining steel moldboards lift and turn and roll them upside down. The dark loamy inside of the earth is exposed to the sky, the grass turned down to the underworld. The upside shines moist from the cut. The furrows layer across the field like sets of cresting waves sweeping across some giant brown ocean. The freshest lengths are darker, the older ones fading, lighter colored, drying and crumbling, across the field. More seagulls arrive, hearing a rumor blown on the winds to the four corners of the sky. They come across the fields and the woods on eager wings, on flight lines so straight they could have been drawn on a map with a ruler. They scream and cry out to one another, excitedly, spotting the freshly turned soil.

The tractor engine works hard, oil-black smoke spewing from the exhaust, as we head up the hill. My nose fills with the smell of diesel and earth. My grandfather turns backward and forward, half-focused on the straightness of the furrows, using two landmarks ahead, far beyond the headlands, to guide his line and keep it honest. One mark is an old Scots pine, the other a gap in a wall on a distant hill. He tells me about a young plowman he knew who used a white speck as his more distant sightline mark, but ended up with crooked work, because the farthest mark turned out to be a white cow that was walking to and fro across a distant hillside. The other half of my grandfather’s focus is on looking back to ensure the plow does its work behind him. So he sits half-twisted between the two angles, the muscles in his neck taut, his leathery cheeks rough with silver stubble.

The gulls fall upon the virgin soil and grab worms from atop the loosened surface. And then they quickly take to the sky again, racing away, in a mad wing-flapping dash, gulping down their catch as fast as they can before they are mobbed. When they have the feast stuffed safe in their bellies, they are a hundred yards or more behind the plow. They flap back into the air and gain height, and glide down the field until they are above the tractor again, and then they repeat the whole cycle, over and over. Farther down, the rooks march across the field, and some of them take to their black wings and join the swirling crowd.

There is a groan as metal scratches across the limestone bedrock. The tractor suddenly strains, engine toiling, like someone has dropped an anchor, then metal creaking, and stone breaking, and the plow lifts a little and surges forward, released. A slab of rock appears behind the plow, sprung to the top. The biggest stones remain largely submerged, like icebergs, just the scratched tip, or a broken-off fragment, showing above the furrows. The soil on this hard farm is shallow, so this happens again and again.

The night creeps in. The shadows lengthen. The seagulls head off for their roosts in giant Vs. They look to me like the bomber formations in war films. The fells tremble and flicker in the darkening blue light. The headlands are plowed, the work is done. And we head home. The tractor headlights shine a halogen-yellow tunnel through the branches that arch over the road. Rabbits scurry across in front of the tractor into the verges. I sit, yawning. Fat white stars flicker in the blue-black sky. As the tractor travels back through the little village, the houses are glowing with electric light, TVs and people walking about in their kitchens or slumped in their living rooms.

*   *   *

Every journey must start somewhere, and this is where mine began. I sat in the back of that tractor, with the old man in front of me, and for the first time in my life thought about who we were and what the field was, and the relationship between the gulls and the plow. I was a boy living through the last days of an ancient farming world. I didn’t know what was coming, or why, and some of it would take years to reach our fields, but I sensed that day might be worth remembering.

This book tells a story of that old world and what it became. It is the story of a global revolution as it played out in the fields of my family’s two small farms: my father’s rented farm in the Eden Valley, which we left nearly two decades ago now, and my grandfather’s little Lake District fell farm, seventeen miles to the west, where I live and work today. It is the story, warts and all, of what farming was like here in my childhood, and what it became. It is about farmers like us, in our tens of thousands, across the country and around the world, and why we did the things we did—and what some of us are now trying to do to make it right. The last forty years on the land were revolutionary and disrupted all that had gone before for thousands of years—a radical and ill-thought-through experiment that was conducted in our fields.

I lived through those years. I was a witness.

Nostalgia

The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.

J. A. Baker, The Peregrine (1967)

A healthy farm culture can be based only upon familiarity and can grow only among a people soundly established upon the land; it nourishes and safeguards a human intelligence of the earth that no amount of technology can satisfactorily replace.

Wendell Berry, The Agricultural Crisis as a Crisis of Culture, in The Unsettling of America (1977)

We sit silently in the waiting room, perched awkwardly, like nervous crows, on the stiff-backed chairs. Formal portraits of the founding fathers of this law firm look down sternly from the walls. Seated beside us there are a slightly graying mother and her daughter. The daughter whispers to the mother and she whispers back. Then they are ushered up the stairs by a man in a pinstriped suit. These stuffy Dickensian offices are beside the sandstone church in our local town. The steps up to the door have been worn away by the best shoes of generations of country folk scurrying in and out to sort out various legal issues.

The first mention of my family on paper concerns a legal dispute about land ownership with a local aristocrat in 1420, in the neighboring parish. We are here at the solicitors that has handled our farm’s legal affairs for at least three generations, to learn the details of my father’s will.

My grandfather’s solicitor was simply spoken of as Charles, as in We’d better ask Charles about that, when anything remotely legal came up. Little market towns like ours have long had a smattering of middle-class professionals who serve the needs of farmers and others who live from the land.

A young woman who seems to be a trainee secretary offers me a cup of coffee. An older woman has prompted her, with a nudge and a whisper, to ask me, but it soon becomes clear the young woman doesn’t really know how to work the coffee machine. It seems she is trying to do her best in a new job but has yet to find her feet. Her hands tremble with the cups. I’m not a posh coffee person, she says to us under her breath, embarrassed. The older woman moves her gently but firmly to one side and makes the coffee. The young woman, now back behind the desk, looks as if she’d like to run away. I know that look. Until I was in my twenties, I was terrified even of having to chat with posh people (anyone vaguely middle-class or university-educated). I felt small around them, or else I simply turned surly and quiet. They had all the words. They knew all the things I didn’t.

No sooner has the coffee arrived than we are politely escorted by the older woman across the corridor and into a room with leather-upholstered chairs around a varnished table. Through the window, beyond the table, two gray pigeons strut after each other on top of a slate roof. A woman enters the room behind us and passes my mother with an armful of old and bulging folders tied with string and ribbons. She makes her way around the table and introduces herself, and tells us that these are the deeds for our land. The ribbons are untied and the bundles slouch and spread like a fat man’s belly released from a belt. I long to open out these papers, this thick wedge of untold stories, and hold them in my hands, but clearly not many people ever do that here because she tells us the legal necessities we have come to hear and the deeds remain spread loosely, but unopened, on the table. The solicitor starts to speak, but I don’t hear her words. She sees that I am distracted and pauses. I ask if I can look at the deeds. She says I can. She pushes some of them toward me and begins to explain. The first two or three documents are open in our hands at their stiff folds, like giant cardboard butterflies unfolding their wings.

In these pages is the nearest thing to a written history of our land that exists. The waxy sheets are spider-scrawled with almost illegible copperplate handwriting and pastel-shaded sketches of fields. Giant antique letters open each crammed page. Melted burgundy-red wax stamps are surrounded by earnest signatures. As my eyes become accustomed to the script and field sketches, I see a half-familiar world opening up of field names and landscape features—trees, becks (streams or smaller rivers), lanes, and barns—a parallel paper-and-ink negative of the grass, stone, soil, wood, and landscape that I know. There are historic features I have never seen before, like archaeological finds, all marked Celtic.

The history of the ownership of every field is in these bundles, and every transaction is detailed in them, going back centuries. The last time these were seen must have been by my father or my grandfather, and before that by the people who farmed here before we did, because the deeds have been stored away from our grubby hands, in the archives. They were only consulted when there was a dispute about a boundary or ownership of some place or item or other, or when somebody died. The field names catch my eye:

Greenmire

Little Greenmire

Smithy Brow

High Stoney Beck

Clovenstone

Cloven Stone Rigg

Browfield

Wood Garth

Long Field

Somewhere in this bundle of deeds is the transaction for my grandfather’s purchase of a hundred acres here in the early 1960s. He had taken my father, then a skinny teenager, and his brother-in-law Jack, who knew that country better than he did, for a Sunday afternoon ride out to see something. He drove them to see this little run-down, scruffy, badly fenced, scattered collection of fields, mentioned in these deeds, that together made up a fell farm. He declared he was going to borrow the money and buy it for summer grazing for his cattle and sheep. It cost £14,000. There is also the paperwork for my father and mother’s purchase of fifty acres in the middle of those fields from another retiring farmer—to make it a whole farm—and later the addition of a farther sixteen acres in the 1990s when the adjoining land came up for sale. Soon this archive will contain the deeds for the fourteen acres my wife and I bought up the lane behind our house in the weeks after my father’s death, because they are near to our farm and will be useful for our sheep and cattle.

These deeds show land passing from one family to the next, again and again, and remind me that a farm isn’t a fixed thing but often changes with every generation, as families buy or rent, or sell land. This history is messy and complicated, like that of most families. People’s attachment to their land is renewed by each generation—through their holding on and working it. It could also be lost. As the solicitor speaks, I know that my family’s future on this farming landscape in a corner of northern England will be determined by my ability to earn enough from our land (and any other way I can think of) to pay our bills, service our debts, and make some money for us to live on. Ever since I was a teenager I have worked on our farm, and been the shepherd of a flock of sheep, but this is different. When we walk back down those worn sandstone steps of the solicitors, I know that I am now the farmer.

*   *   *

The months after my father’s death were the hardest of my life. I had always wanted to be the farmer, the captain of the ship with my hand on the wheel, but the moment it happened it felt empty. The world seemed a dull shade of gray. Beyond our little valley, people everywhere seemed to have gone insane, electing fools and doing strange things in their anger. England was divided and broken. Suddenly in those months I felt lost. It was as if I had been following in someone else’s footsteps down a path, talking to them, reassured by them when the going got tough, and then they had disappeared. The farm was a lonely place—a poorer thing when it wasn’t shared. And with every passing year farmers were becoming fewer and fewer, a vanishingly small and increasingly powerless share of the population. Our world felt fragile, like it might now break into tiny pieces.

*   *   *

The UN says that 5 million people move from rural communities to urban ones every month, the greatest migration in human history. Much of this took place two or three generations ago in Britain, the first industrial nation. So ours is now one of the least rural societies on earth. The majority of people now live in towns and cities, and we tend to give little serious thought to the practical realities of farming, the vital moment when we come up against the natural world.

And yet we are all still tethered to the land in a practical sense—our entire civilization relies on farming surpluses, which free most of us from growing our own food, allowing us to do other things. We are no longer the slaves of the dark Satanic mills of the industrial era, but millions of us are still reluctantly chained to desks in the soulless corporate offices that followed. We act as if we popped into town to earn a living a generation or two ago, but will be going home soon to a place in the country. There are few things we profess to care about more than our most beloved landscapes, or nature; few dreams more enduring than finding our way back to the pastoral of small villages, farms, and thatched cottages, with little fields edged by hedgerows smelling of honeysuckle.

They used to call England a green and pleasant land, but in truth it was never entirely green, nor entirely pleasant. It was a tough old place with almost every acre used by humans, but there was much in it that was good. And yet the truth is that the countryside that feeds us has changed. It is profoundly different from even a generation ago. The old working landscapes and the wildlife that lived in them have mostly disappeared, replaced by an industrial farming system that in its scale, speed, and power is quite unlike anything that preceded it. This new farming has proved to be both productively brilliant and, we now know, ecologically disastrous. The more we learn about this change, the more unease and anger we feel about what farming has become. Our society was created by this farming, and yet we increasingly distrust it.

This was a lousy time to inherit a farm. I was now solely responsible for making the decisions about how we managed my family’s land. In the months after my father’s death five years ago I began to feel a kind of despair. Our role was now being challenged and criticized as never before. Reports of bad news and scientific studies about the decline and loss of wild things on farmland became commonplace on the TV and radio. Rain forests were burned, rivers poisoned, soils eroded, and countless landscapes made sterile and bereft of nature. Anger filled the newspapers and the news. Being a farmer felt for the first time like something you were supposed to say sorry for. And with some sadness and shame I could see that there was truth in all this. My new role wasn’t heroic, as I had imagined it would be in my youth. It was just confusing and complicated, and fraught with doubts. Countless choices—some large and fundamental, and others tiny, incremental, and day-to-day—that would shape this little bit of England for better or for worse were now mine to make. It felt like a lot rested on my knowledge, or lack of it, and my values and beliefs. And I was suddenly aware of how constrained my choices were, and how little I knew. I would have to work out how to make money from our land without wrecking it. I had inherited a complex bundle of economic and ecological challenges—and that, perhaps, was what it really meant to be a farmer.

When we lose our way, it often pays to retrace the footsteps on our journey until we get back to familiar territory. In those painful first months, my grandfather’s farming became for me such a moment from which I could navigate through what had happened in order to understand what had gone wrong. I thought a lot about how he managed his land and cared about his animals and the natural world around him. I tried to understand afresh what it meant to be a farmer. I returned in memory to a day spent plowing a field in April, nearly forty years ago. Every detail was frozen in my head. Forty years doesn’t sound long ago, but in farming terms it is like returning to the age of the dinosaurs. Perhaps I would only discover old mistakes, or get a nostalgic sense of what that traditional farming was. But I returned to the past with a sense of hope, that it might hold some of the answers—and help me to work out what kind of farmer I could, and must, become.

*   *   *

As I sat in the back of his tractor watching the seagulls, it felt as if Grandad and the seagulls behind his plow were part of the same whole, the one as true as the other. They both had timeless claims on the earth; they both belonged to the same cycle in that landscape. They needed each other. I was aware, perhaps for the first time, with absolute clarity that we were farmers and that defined us beyond anything else. We changed the earth to grow food so that we, and others, could live. My grandfather was rooted in work, connected to the soil and the crops and the animals upon it. I loved his closeness to the land. I was dimly aware that lots of people didn’t live like us. Most families, even in our village, had traded in their relationship with the land for new lives away from the fields, birds, and stars.

Earlier that spring my grandfather had decided it was time for my farm education to begin. He set out to teach me the ways of his world. I had perhaps always been vaguely aware of the cycles of the work, as I had trailed after the men since I could walk, but this was different. He had sensed in the preceding months that the farm was losing me. I was work-shy and beginning to hide in the house, huddled by the TV. He knew that I would either learn to love farming now or drift away and be lost from it forever. I was old enough to be