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James Rebanks - English Pastoral: An Inheritance - The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of The Shepherds Life

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English Pastoral: An Inheritance - The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of The Shepherds Life
Author:
James Rebanks
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Penguin UK
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Books / Non-fiction
Year:
2020
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THE SUNDAY TIMES NATURE BOOK OF THE YEAR
The new bestseller from the author of The Shepherds Life
A beautifully written story of a family, a home and a changing landscapeNigel Slater
As a boy, James Rebankss grandfather taught him to work the land the old way. Their family farm in the Lake District hills was part of an ancient agricultural landscape: a patchwork of crops and meadows, of pastures grazed with livestock, and hedgerows teeming with wildlife. And yet, by the time James inherited the farm, it was barely recognisable. The men and women had vanished from the fields; the old stone barns had crumbled; the skies had emptied of birds and their wind-blown song.
English Pastoral is the story of an inheritance: one that affects us all. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. And yet this elegy from the northern fells is also a song of hope: of how, guided by the past, one farmer began to salvage a tiny corner of England that was now his, doing his best to restore the life that had vanished and to leave a legacy for the future.
This is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against all the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all.
A heartfelt book and one that dares to hope Alan Bennett
A wonder of a book, fierce, tender, and beautiful Helen Macdonald

Winner of the Wainwright Prize
Winner of the Fortnum & Mason Food Book of the Year
Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize
Shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize
Longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize

James Rebanks: author's other books

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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

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 childrens 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 grandfathers 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 didnt 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 familys two small farms: my fathers rented farm in the Eden Valley, which we left nearly two decades ago now, and my grandfathers 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 didand 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 yearsa 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 farms legal affairs for at least three generations, to learn the details of my fathers will.

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