English Pastoral: An Inheritance

"It has. It’s a lyrical account of his childhood on the Lake District farm that he’s made famous; an account of how he learned about stockmanship and community and the rhythms of the land from his father and grandfather. He details his own early intoxication with the idea of ‘progress’, his flirtations with technology and his later disillusion, and he details how he has slowly begun to see there are no winners in the race to industrial farming. It’s been a massive bestseller, as was his previous book The Shepherd’s Life . And I think it’s very interesting to reflect on why that should be. That’s not to say it’s not a wonderful book in its own right. It certainly is. But I think that the fact of its enormous success is significant. Not even 2% of the British population work the land. Many British people have no idea what mud is, right? And yet Britons feel themselves, despite that, to be at heart a rustic people. I think they buy the book because they think this is a book about themselves. Even if they work in an air conditioned office, they still regard themselves as farmers. “Most of us come from nowhere. We belong to nothing except a football supporters’ club or the payroll of a company” There is, too, a growing uneasiness with the food we shovel into ourselves, and a worried interest in where it comes from. These, I think, are some of the things contributing to the success of this book. But there’s something else, which is that this is a book about the importance of place and the business of belonging. Most of us come from nowhere. We belong to nothing except a football supporters’ club or the payroll of a company, neither of which could care less about us. We are desperate to learn how to belong; how to be rooted. We know that we are relational animals; that to thrive we have to give in a costly way—whether it’s by baking cakes for the village hall (if it’s been spared by the developers), or by visiting sick neighbours. What Rebanks does is describe agriculture as a holistic system of relationality; a system of existing in and for and by a place. It’s a mode of life characterised by a vibrant reciprocity. Most of us long for that reciprocity; it’s what we’re built for. But few of us experience it. Rebanks does. There’s a moving passage where he describes how, as he walks around the farm, the distinction between him and the place blurs until he doesn’t know where he ends and the farm begins. The great religions of the world know that when the self begins to blur like that, you’re onto something big; something connected very closely to human thriving and happiness. But that insight is at odds with everything that we are told by our ludicrous political leaders and by our economic masters, who all worship the idea of the atomistic self. Have you ever met an atomistic self? I hope not. You’d want to run a mile. Just think how dreary their narcissistic monologues would be. But people know, don’t they, that that’s not the way they’re meant to be? They know that the worship of the self is not only deadly for us as individuals, but deadly for our society and our ecosystems and our politics. Rebanks gives a picture of how human life ruled by the rhythm of the seasons and bonded to place might work, and we feel a desperate thirst for it—a half-remembered nostalgia. So I think that’s what he’s tapping into, very brilliantly. One of the many things I admire in this book is that, although there is anger and concern, there is no rancour. That’s very impressive. If I were writing about these things, I would never be able to swallow my bile. Rebanks is obviously a wonderful human as well as a splendid writer. Yes. We are used to thinking of Romantics as people in dandyish clothes who sit in raptures by mountain streams, thinking beautiful but rather irrelevant thoughts about the natural world and putting them down in rhyming couplets. Rebanks’ writing is properly Romantic, which is a high compliment. The Romantic movement was a reaction against the idea that matter is all there is; that matter is all that matters. It insisted that everything is connected to everything else."