Guest review by Laura Parker: THE PLACE OF TIDES by James Rebanks

 

"This experience has caused Rebanks to dig much deeper as a writer. His enforced time out has him reaching for greater profundity while maintaining a simple, thoughtful style."

Photograph: Kitty Parker

Laura Parker is the author of no books (yet), but she is working on one about drystone walls, and has written a growing collection of articles published by Country Life magazine. Her work covers animals and the art and history of the countryside. She has also been published in Little Toller’s The Clearing, an online journal in which writers explore and celebrate the landscape we live in, as well as in Scottish Field and Scottish daily The Courier. Find out more on Laura's website.

James Rebanks made his name with two books: one about his life as a shepherd in Cumbria (A Shepherd’s Life) and the other on the changing face of agriculture over three generations (English Pastoral). So he was right to warn his 150,000 X-followers that his next book would be different.

The Place of Tides takes him to Fjaerøy, a Norwegian island just below the Arctic Circle where he sheds his modern existence: no internet, barely any phone, limited power, no running water. For seventy days.

It is his account of ten weeks spent in the company of Anna, a woman of seventy determined to continue an age-old way of existence that she herself took up only later in life. Anna harvests down from eider ducks, gathering a material used for centuries for luxurious warmth, and continuing a tradition which has provided a living for the women of this fishing community since Viking times. It is a way of life that is dying out, not just because of cheaper and more abundant alternatives, but because the ducks themselves are getting scarcer.

Highlighting the fine balance between human intervention and nature, the ‘duck women’ build shelters for the birds as they come ashore to lay their eggs, and protect them from predators such as sea eagles and mink (the latter introduced by humans). In earning the trust of the ducks, their protectors take their reward at the end of the season by gathering the down the birds use to line the nests.

Rebanks discovers there is more to his stay than deploying his farming skills through raking seaweed or repairing shelters. Bewildered, he struggles to contain his impatience as the two women (Anna has brought a friend, Imogen) settle down indoors to knit for their first two weeks on the island. Rebanks is left unmoored, reflecting on the frenetic existence he has left behind, along with his wife and four children. He resolves to be a better husband and father. There are still eight weeks to go.

So far, so satisfying to a nature book reader: being taken to a remote frontier world, guided to closely examine a new habitat – there are many intricate observations of the wildlife and weather on the island – and to be made aware of a diminishing natural resource.

Unexpectedly, it is the deepening human relationships that become the heart of this book. Anna turns out to be different from Rebanks’s first arresting sight of her, a tiny but fierce ‘half-wild’ woman standing proud on the shoreline. She is older, frailer, at first unable to work. Constantly trying to be respectful of her world, Rebanks is frequently unsure how to proceed, a Gulliver in a strange land.

“I had sensed I ought to make myself much smaller, working to their commands, relinquishing responsibility.”

He realises, for the first time in his life, that he is in a place entirely run by women. By ‘paying attention’, he begins to see how men treat women, and he cringes. He also learns a great deal from Anna’s attitude to her work.

“Rarely have I seen anyone so absorbed in each living moment .. This way of living demanded a loss of self, a surrendering to the rocks, rain, wind and tides.”

Amid the poignancy – this is Anna’s last season – there are lessons for him, and for us.

“In this radically pared-back life she had found peace and meaning. She was the waves, the light, and the terns rising and falling on the bay. She was the guardian of this place … powerless against the scale of the natural forces at work and against the issues affecting the oceans, yet fierce in her determination to try.”

This experience has caused Rebanks to dig much deeper as a writer. His enforced time out has him reaching for greater profundity while maintaining a simple, thoughtful style.

Rebanks and the women leave the island with a harvest amounting to 2kg of down, which must then be painstakingly cleaned. It is barely enough to make two quilts. But both he and his readers have gleaned so much more about our threatened world.

The Place of Tides is published by Allen Lane.

See also: James Rebanks' English Pastoral reviewed by Judith Allnatt

ENGLISH PASTORAL by James Rebanks and THE FARMER'S WIFE by Helen Rebanks, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"He and his family had tended to see environmentalists as 'bonkers', impractical opposers of farming realities, but now he made the connection between the decline of once-common birds such as lapwings and the prevalence of modern farming methods."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review and was a Costa prizewinner for her young adult novel Set in Stone. Her recent publication This Book is Cruelty Free - Animals and Us looks at our daily choices - what we eat, wear, buy, use, waste and throw away - and how we can choose better for animals and the environment.

James and Helen Rebanks, husband and wife, have each written about the experiences that led them to the small mixed farm close to Ullswater, formerly managed by James's grandfather, where they now live with their four children. James's 2020 book, English Pastoral - an inheritance, which details his conversion to the nature-friendly farming they now practise, deservedly won the Wainwright Prize and was the Sunday Times Nature Book of the Year; Helen has followed with The Farmer's Wife - my life in days. James's book had been on my pile for some time, so when The Farmer's Wife was a reading group choice, I read both.

James's book invites comparison with Isabella Tree's Wilding, and he acknowledges the influence of her project with Charlie Burrell at the Knepp Castle estate in Sussex. As a young man he travelled to Australia, where he saw very different large-scale land management; swayed by the drive to modernise and increase food production, he began to see his grandfather's ways as antiquated. Gradually, though, he saw that this race to higher productivity drastically harms nature while doing farmers no good, either - pushing small farmers off their land and lowering food prices so that producers have to strive harder and harder to make any profit. 

Reading Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, while living on his father's rented farm, was a catalyst for James. He and his family had tended to see environmentalists as 'bonkers', impractical opposers of farming realities, but now he made the connection between the decline of once-common birds such as lapwings and the prevalence of modern farming methods. Mowing grass meadows for silage, rather than later in the summer for hay, deals death to curlew chicks and other ground-nesting birds; removing hedgerows takes away valuable habitat, shelter and food; endless application of fertilisers exhausts the soil, and spraying pesticides causes the wide-ranging losses of which Rachel Carson warned. "This was business-school thinking applied to the land, with issues of ethics and nature shunted off to the margins of consciousness." 

He set himself the task of farming in a way that was not only nature-friendly but that would restore much of what had been lost. He sought the help of specialists, notably Lucy Butler of Eden Rivers Trust who showed him and his father that allowing streams to meander and form pools and wetlands would amply benefit wildlife and flood prevention (as described in Wildings, too). "I've come to realise that we need a small army of naturalists to help us play our part in the restoration of the countryside. There is more to understand about the ecology of a farm than any farmer can reasonably be expected to know." 

Returning to slow, traditional ways has its cost, and for years James took outside employment to support his family. "I'm not sure I'm much good at being a farmer," he writes. "It is overwhelming. I can't get everything done, let alone done well ... Often I get things wrong. The farm makes almost no money, and whatever money it does make, it devours." He readily acknowledges how much he owes to his wife Helen, and to women in general, who do much of the work that keeps a farm and family functioning.

Over to Helen's own book for more of this, with an emphasis on food; she prides herself on providing her family with wholesome, nourishing meals and includes recipes, many of them traditional, in her memoir. There's a lot (too much) about combining the demands of farm admin and domestic tasks with the care of small children: detailed episodes about looking in the fridge for something to cook, tidying toys and negotiating a supermarket with toddlers in tow soon become tedious. But a section on the 'Beast from the East' vividly describes the urgency of caring for animals and keeping the family warm and fed in an isolated, snowbound building, without electricity. When the worst is over and they venture down snow-banked lanes to the main road three miles away, the traffic is flowing freely, making their ordeal seem part of a different world. 

The Farmer's Wife goes back and forth in time, from childhood, through the couple's residence in Oxford while James was studying history there, Helen trying various ways of making a career for herself after finishing an art degree, and renovating a house. Far from giving an idyllic picture of farming life she is frank about rifts and tensions between James and herself at tough times, and writes of the devastation to both their families at the time of the foot-and-mouth pandemic. From Oxford, Helen "could only watch and listen to it all unfold from afar. After a couple of weeks she (her mother) told me the news we'd all feared: there was a contaminated farm nearby, and all our sheep and newborn lambs had to be slaughtered. Dad was busy helping sheep give birth, knowing that they were all destined to be culled and burned or buried soon ... Men that you'd never normally see showing emotion were now filmed with red blotchy faces, trying to hold back the tears for the BBC." In Oxford, "people around me seemed oblivious to it all."

Both authors have much to say about how dissociated most people have become from the food they buy and eat, and the importance of understanding the connections between our choices, farming and the natural world. "We need to be highly suspicious of food that seems too cheap to be true," Helen writes, "because somewhere a field, an animal, a farmer or a worker is paying the price for that." But neither pursues the connections between animal agriculture, carbon emissions and biodiversity loss. Although James has much to say about the industrialisation of agriculture he only briefly suggests that eating less meat would reduce the environmental impact of food. Helen is disparaging about plant-based eating and seems proud of her children when they argue with a teacher about the school's introduction of Meat Free Monday. One paragraph particularly infuriated me: 

"The worst farming on earth is acres and acres of wheat, soy and maize grown by ploughing, which creates whole landscapes devoid of nature. These crops are wholly dependent upon synthetic chemicals - pesticides, herbicides and fossil-fuelled fertilisers that are disastrous for the soil, rivers, oceans, insects and birds. Eating 'plant-based' products supports these systems." (My emphasis). 

 

I felt like throwing the book across the floor at that point. Helen Rebanks must surely know, even if her editors don't, that most arable crops are grown to feed farmed animals, not humans directly. Not everyone who wants to eat meat has access to pasture-fed local produce; most meat bought and consumed in the UK is reared in intensive systems and fed on precisely the kind of crops she deplores. Reducing meat consumption is the best and only way to reduce the need for arable farming on such a vast and unsustainable scale. It's exasperating to see such a staggering piece of misinformation in a book designed for popular appeal, where many readers won't question its logic.

 

Because of this and other irritations I found English Pastoral by far the more rewarding of the two books, with its lyrical glimpses of landscape, weather and wildlife. "In the biggest darkest pool, clouds of minnows, little trout, swirl around erratically, their bodies scratching scribbles on the skin of the water"; "at dawn and dusk the valley bottom feels a little primeval, with the cattle and roe deer often grazing in a sea of mist"; "the air is heavy with mint, trampled by sheep feet".

One question that goes unanswered is how either James or Helen can possibly find time for writing and all that goes with publication, amidst the constant, pressing demands of farm and family. But both conclude their books with quiet contentment and appreciation of the life they have made. 

James: "The modern world worships the idea of the self, the individual, but it is a gilded cage: there is another kind of freedom in becoming absorbed in a little life on the land. In a noisy age, I think perhaps trying to live quietly may be a virtue." 

Helen: "Caring roles in our society are all too often invisible, ignored in the crazy 'look at me' world we live in ... Learning that the word 'mundane' has its roots in the Latin word 'mundanus', of the world, made me see everything through a different lens. To me, caring for my family is, and always has been, the most important work in the world."

English Pastoral: an inheritance is published by Allen Lane

The Farmer's Wife: my life in days is published by Faber

Read Linda's review of Wilding by Isabella Tree

and of Sixty Harvests Left by Philip Lymbery

This Book is Cruelty Free: Animals and Us is published by Farshore.

Guest review by Judith Allnatt: ENGLISH PASTORAL - AN INHERITANCE, by James Rebanks

"In a world trembling at the brink of climate disaster, this is both a timely and a hopeful book..."

Judith Allnatt writes short stories and novels for adults. Her novels have been variously shortlisted for the Portico Prize for Literature, the East Midlands Book Award and featured as a Radio 5 Live Book of the Month. Short stories have appeared in the Bridport Prize Anthology and the Commonwealth Short Story Awards, and have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service.

Judith’s latest novel, The Silk Factory, is an eerie story of love and memory drawing on both the Luddite weavers’ rebellions in the nineteenth century and a modern day haunting. She has lectured widely on Creative Writing for over two decades and is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. She lives with her family in Northamptonshire and is working on her fifth novel. For more information and blog posts see Judith’s website.  Twitter: @judithallnatt

English Pastoral is both urgent in its call to arms for the planet and poetic in its lyrical description of life on the author’s farm in the Cumbrian fells.

The book is structured in three acts. The first concerns the traditional farming that he learnt from his grandfather: rotating crop and pasture, using manure to nourish the soil and harvesting once a year. These were the farming methods evolved over centuries that worked both with and for nature. Spilt grain helped birds survive through the winter and cutting hay once for fodder rather than frequent grass cutting for silage allowed a habitat to survive for ground nesting birds such as curlews.

The second act explains the pressures of a growing world population and the industrialisation of farming: the growing of monoculture crops and the widespread use of pesticides, literally weeding out biodiversity; the spiralling use of fertilizers on soil ever more compacted and degraded; the use of massive machines on huge fields stripped of ancient hedgerows. These are practices that work efficiently to maximise production, but this drive for ever-lower food prices leaves little room for wild things and the cost to the natural world and the climate goes largely unheeded.

The third act explores hope for the future - the equivalent of the ‘redemption’ frequently used at this point in the structure of fiction. It describes James Rebanks’ return to some traditional farming methods. He chooses Herdwick sheep for their hardiness to Cumbrian weather. Belted Galloway cattle are introduced that can stand wintering outside and don’t need to eat silage indoors. Thus at one stroke he removes both the need for multiple crops of monoculture grass and the practice of spreading the resulting slurry: an acidic form of muck that destroys soil quality rather than well-rotted manure, which builds it. 12,000 trees are planted on his land. With the help of the Eden Valley River Authority, river and beck are rerouted and transformed from straightened, dredged, draining channels to meandering curved watercourses, slowing their pace to help protect towns downstream that were previously devastated by floodwater from unprecedented levels of rain. As the river wanders, gravel is deposited and salmon and trout that need gravel shoals on which to spawn return. He documents the otters, hares and owls returning to his land, alongside the rare wildflowers in the meadows. He speaks with equal enthusiasm of micro-organisms and numbers of earthworms - indicators of healthy soil. And what of the curlews? Driven out during the years of losing their chicks to the harvester, they are starting to return along with the swallows and swifts that dive to snatch the flies above muck-nourished fields.

Hung along the narrative thread that follows the farm’s fortunes, are vignettes of farming life: sheep stranded on an island of grass in floodwater, his father’s manic delight in the five yearly gorse burning, a son’s pride in winning a silver shield for being ‘best tup handler’.

The book is beautifully written. Old phrases such as ‘leading in the hay’ are used naturally as a matter of course. (Surely an echo of the thousands of years preceding this mechanical age, when men led horse and cart from field to yard). The face of the fells, changing with weather, the hour and the season is brought alive by the close observation and choice images of the writer.

In a world trembling at the brink of climate disaster, this is both a timely and a hopeful book. James Rebanks demonstrates that his farm is now not just carbon neutral but carbon positive – it is storing more carbon than it creates. Whilst pragmatically recognising that chemical intervention has its place, he makes the case for using traditional methods wherever possible and for encouraging and cherishing farming that improves the land and stewards the wildlife upon it. He points out that big corporations hunt in rural corners for genes in stock or crops in order to breed animals and plants capable of surviving new challenges such as climate changes. Yet, with every small farmer swallowed up by large scale monoculture farming these opportunities narrow and treasure is lost.

Most of us live in towns and cities and have little close contact with the land that feeds us. We buy packaged food from supermarkets and don’t think much about where it comes from or how it is produced. This book turns our eyes in this unwonted direction. What we see is that we can’t afford to ignore issues of regeneration and stewardship any longer, and that what happens to our land has far-ranging consequences for what will happen to our planet.

English Pastoral is published by Penguin.

See also: Wilding, by Isabella Tree, reviewed by Linda Newbery