I picked up The Shepherd's Life expecting an immersive description of a rural lifestyle, as a respite from my suburban world. The book delivers on this expectation. It interleaves practical details about the day-to-day operation of a Lake District sheep farm with lyrical descriptions and just the right amount of shepherding jargon ("lowsing the tups"). The well-chosen photos add to the ambiance.
The fields are sliver-wet with a late-autumn dew, and where the sheep have run the grass has been shaken back to green.
The introductory section, titled with a nice piece of northern English dialect ("Hefted"), got me to approach the story with bigger questions in mind. On the first page, before any mention of sheep or fells, Rebanks relates a story of an assembly from his schooldays:
Sitting surrounded by a mass of other academic non-achievers listening to an old battle-weary teacher lecturing us how we should aim to be more than just farmworkers, joiners, brickies, electricians, and hairdressers. We were basically sorted aged twelve between those deemed intelligent (who were sent to a "grammar school") and those of us that weren't (who stayed at the "comprehensive"). ... This bloody teacher woman thought we were too stupid and unimaginative to "do anything with our lives." We were too dumb to want to leave this area with its dirty dead-end jobs and its narrow-minded provincial ways.
The rest of the section notes the gap between the (literally) Romantic view of the Lake District and the experience of its residents.
I don't believe that outsiders fail to recognize the dignity and pride of shepherds, joiners, and brickies –– many of us read books like this one because we feel that the lives portrayed may be somehow more authentic than ours. However, the attitude of the education system and of Lake District tourists shows how condescending our admiration is. By starting the book with these stories, Rebanks got me thinking about what makes a life or lifestyle meaningful, what constitutes success, how tradition interacts with progress, and my proper comportment as a tourist.
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