I don't know if Manchester has such a thing as a Great and Good, still less whether I am amongst its gilded number, but last year a friend of ours who sits on the board of the Portico Library invited my wife and I to the annual dinner at which the Portico Book Prize is awarded. Lots of smartly dressed people sat in a big room, eating and drinking while the likes of Michael Wood and Val McDermid dished out awards.
Our table was divided between lawyers and writers. The lawyers bought most of the wine and the artists did most of the drinking; the lawyers gazed benevolently on, perhaps thinking that although they led less glamorous lives they at least could afford to stand their round.
One of the prizes was given to a man called James Rebanks, for his book The Shepherd's Life. Six months on I have finally got round to reading it.
Essentially Rebanks' book tells the story of his upbringing on a Cumbrian hill farm, his exile to a History degree at Oxford and subsequent return to his roots. It is a description of the hill farmer's year and and an encomium to his farmer forebears. Rebanks loves the land, and having sampled the bright lights of academic glory (a First, no less, and this from a man who went straight into A Levels without having any GCSEs) he tells us that country life is best.
I didn't particularly warm to Rebanks (not that that will bother him one jot), and not merely because he tells us in the opening pages that at his school (Workington or Keswick, I'm guessing) he and his classmates competed to smash the most expensive piece of equipment they could, or that a boy they bullied killed himself many years later. Hats off for confessing. It would have been easier not to.
Rebanks tells us pretty early how much he dislikes the Wordsworthian view of the Lake District, and later makes clear his contempt for tourists, so lacking in true comprehension of the way of life sustained by Rebanks and his neighbours. More than this, he has a sense of rootedness in the landscape, mirroring perhaps the heftedness of his beloved Herdwick sheep to their ancestral hillsides, which would not shame the most ardent Israeli West Bank settler or 1990s Serbian militiaman. You would call it a blood-and-soil nationalist argument, although relating as it does to a modest part of northern Britain you'd probably have to call it blood-and-soil provincialism instead.
It's about as charming as it sounds.
Rebanks is clearly a formidable character. He can write, and his book is absorbing and interesting. It's also, when you stop and think about it, rather unpleasant. Here are some things he gets wrong.
1. The original Wordsworthian view of the Lake District is one rooted firmly in reality. No one who has read Dorothy Wordsworth's diaries could be in any doubt about the hard life the poet and his sister led in Grasmere.
2. Moreover it is the widespread resonance of the Wordsworthian view (however inaccurately shared) which led to the Lakes being made a National Park, thus preserving it from the urbanisation which Rebanks despises.
3. The people who gave Rebanks the Portico Prize and bought his book were neo-Wordsworthians to a man and woman, and no doubt if and when his agents sell the film rights (Tom Hardy would make a very good Rebanks) it will be because the money men calculate, correctly, that there are enough Wordsworthians to keep the multiplexes busy.
4. The people who, Rebanks says, leave his gates open and allow their dogs to chase his sheep are also ultimately the customers for the lambs he sells. The preservation of his livelihood (in sofar as it's viable at all) depends on them (I suspect that must hurt).
5. Without the Wordsworthians the Lake District would be in terrible trouble. Tourism is the only successful industry the region has. If Rebanks has any doubt, he should go to the less glamorous parts of rural Wales and see what sheep-farming without tourism looks like. Tourists may be inconvenient to Rebanks, but they bring money to other Cumbrians not so fortunate as to live on the family farm.
6. When I caught the drift of Rebanks' argument I started looking out for the word subsidy and wondering whether it would crop up. It appears (on p.77) in the context of his grandfather hoodwinking a Ministry of Agriculture official over biodiversity (we're invited to conclude this makes him something of a card), but elsewhere is strangely absent. Rebanks admits that his lifestyle is only viable because he does a bit of work for UNESCO on the side, and so you'd have to imagine that without the Single Farm Payment sustaining it would be considerably more difficult. Where does the SFP come from? Ultimately from taxpayers who eat Rebanks' produce and walk across his land. Subsidy is the elephant in the room and Rebanks ignores it.
7. Rebanks would have the reader believe that his ilk are uniquely responsible for the condition of the landscape, and that without them it would return to wasteland. What nonsense. Without the overgrazing of sheep farming, the fells would quickly return to their natural state of scrub and forest. Much of Cumbria is a wet monocultural desert at present. Wildlife would flourish. Cumbria would probably be even more richly beautiful.
I have an interest to declare here, in that I'm part-owner of a house in Cumbria. It's in the middle of a working farm which must at one time have employed a number of men, but in the age of mechanisation gets by with just one plus the occasional help. Blood-and-soil provincialism is much in evidence there, but the house, let to visitors most of the time, brings in tens of thousands of pounds of income to the north west every year. That's almost certainly more than the farm does.
Rebanks is right that the image of the Lake District is a chocolate box one, and I can testify that farming all year round is a gruelling job requiring a hardiness and resistance to the elements of which most of us are not capable. It's also true that the average visitor's notion of its beauty is perhaps a factitious one (although no more subjective than that of the farmer himself).
But what Rebanks doesn't seem to grasp is that the existence of his way of life is the result of the complex interaction of economic and social forces, an interaction which depends for its success on a thoroughgoing engagement with the wallets and aesthetic preferences of people he alternately sneers at and patronises (that's you and me, by the way). He paints a picture of his life which, for all its purported mud and gore realism, is a just as much a fantasy as the picture-postcard view of the Lakes he despises.
Far from Rebanks' much-vaunted rugged individualism, Cumbrian sheep farmers are in fact profoundly dependent on the consumers, holiday makers and taxpayers of urban Britain, without whom his "always been here, always will be" is just a few muddy fields and a mortgage to pay.
(I said that Rebanks wouldn't care one jot what was written about him, but I'm glad our house is on the other side of the Lakes. Judging by his jacket photo I'd say he wields a useful right hook.)
