Free The Shepherd's Life by James Rebanks

push us kids to the front through the legs of the old farmers, or palm us off on the older kids to look after, and bung us some Fruit Pastilles or a Mars Bar to keep us quiet. We’d sit munching a gob full of chocolate, watching thousands of sheep sold whilst our fathers and grandfathers did their business. I loved listening to the old men talking. One of them was my grandfather’s cousin, and they said he had been to Oxford University when he was a youth. I remember thinking that was a strange thing for an old farmer to have done.

 
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    Making hay.
    Clipping.
    Looking after the ewes and lambs.
    Gathering.
    This is what summer means to us.
    Making good hay is like a commandment from God if you live here. People would once have faced ruin or even famine if they couldn’t feed their animals through the winter. Misjudging your crop even now is an expensive gamble that can wipe away the year’s profit in an instant. They say that about once every ten years it was virtually impossible to make hay. It would rain and rain and never let up. So my deciding to be born at hay time meant there was more than one thing of importance happening.

 
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    I arrived on a sultry July day as my father and grandfather were making hay in the meadows on our farm, trying to beat the impending rain that every farmer fears as he secures the crop needed for winter. Grass that dries in the sunshine and is then baled and stored in the barns makes for wonderful winter fodder; it bursts out of its bales on a snowy day when the sheep need it and you get a breath of summer. Even the flowers in the meadows can be seen pressed in there. But hay that is rained on starts to rot. A little rain and it makes hay that is a little bit like grassy strands of cardboard. The ewes will eat it in winter and it will keep them alive, but it is not the same. A lot of rain and the hay becomes a rotten, inedible, and bitter-smelling mess. Eventually it is useless.

 
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    My mother had struggled to get pregnant, until she received some then-innovative fertility treatment. Though her grandmother always insisted that she’d actually been cured by riding a horse of my grandfather’s and having her insides “jiggled about a bit.” Our council house was half a mile down the road from the village, in a row of four. It faced our fields, was grey rendered, and fronted the road. In the photos my parents look surprisingly fashionable in a 1974 kind of way, Dad with his wavy hair, sideburns, wide-collared shirts, and tight trousers with flares and Mum pretty and always looking like she worshipped me. Mum and Dad look, in those same photos, strangely like extras in a Jaws movie. Longer hair. Dreamy looks.
    The house was wallpapered with hideous 1970s patterns. My parents didn’t have much, but in the pictures they look very young and really happy. Dad has a bit of mischief in his eyes. They say Mum was always reading me books. Mum says she can remember being hustled out of the way with her new baby (me) when it was time to feed the men on the farm. Grandma lived and breathed being a farmer’s wife. Good meals on the table when she said they would be. Nothing should get in the way of that. Later Mum had a fridge magnet that said, “Dull women have immaculate homes.”

 
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    The day before I was born, my cousin had come to stay so Mum could babysit him, but during the night she felt something starting, so she walked the mile to the phone box in the village (ours didn’t have a telephone). The rather stroppy matron she got on the phone told her to stop panicking, I wasn’t due for six more weeks, go back to bed and stop being such a silly first-time mother. Fine. She walked home and went to bed. The next morning, my dad disappeared to work mowing the hay. My mother took my cousin home in the car. When she got there, my auntie was concerned about her and took her to our local little hospital. She was rushed to the nearest