The Farmer’s Wife by Helen Rebanks
Helen Rebanks has written an engaging, honest and upfront account of her life as wife of one of the most famous farmers in the country, James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd’s Life, English Pastoral and The Illustrated Herdwick Shepherd.
While for some, the description ‘wife’ might be an appellation to be avoided in modern times, Helen doesn’t balk at it. She has reclaimed the role of the farmer’s wife. With a husband, four children, six sheepdogs, two ponies, twenty chickens, five hundred sheep and fifty cattle to care for, she is always ‘watering or feeding someone!.
The book is divided into Dawn, Morning, Afternoon, Late Afternoon and Evening. So, you follow her through her busy day which usually starts at 5.30am. But, interspersed throughout are episodes going back to her childhood, early life with James and key moments in their life together.
Helen grew up on a farm but had no intention of becoming a farmer herself. She wanted to be an artist and in fact went to art college. (I think the beautiful illustrations on the back and front covers of the book must be by her, though not signed.) Growing up, relations with her mother were not always easy, especially when it came to the kitchen. While her mother was just not interested, Helen developed a love of good food and cooking nurtured by TV programmes like Ready Steady Cook and then by a trip to France where she discovered what food could really taste like. Throughout the book, she talks about favourite meals that she enjoys feeding her family and the recipes are all given at the back of the book as well as pantry staples.
She met James when only 17, obviously a passionate farmer but different from other farm boys she met in that he read books! She supported them financially with a run of small jobs while he studied at Oxford. After marriage, they lived in a little terraced house twenty minutes’ drive from James’s family farm, where he worked as well as holding down a hated desk job. Not an ideal situation for James but Helen loved being near to other young families and the ease of being in a town. There follow some difficult times with both exhausted, financially stretched and snapping at each other and at times having to move back in with Helen’s parents. Many readers will relate to the struggles and pain they went through, and the honesty with which she describes it.
James had the dream of converting a barn to build their own home on his father’s farm where he kept his own flock of Herdwick sheep. They submitted planning applications to the Lake District Planning Authority for eight years before finally it is passed. This at a meeting where, pregnant with their third child, Helen was the one, to James pride and surprise, to speak passionately about the importance of the application and their desperate need to live on the farm that they were farming.
Once in their beloved permanent home, while life didn’t become any less tough it became more united and focussed on the farm and the family. A particularly testing experience was when, shortly after the birth of Tom their fourth child, the storm The Beast from the East hits the farm with massive amounts of snow fall. They are living off grid at the time and the farm generator fails. Helen proposes that they all move up to the sheep shed which has a small generator used for shearing which could at least power a phone. She packs everything up including the inevitable warm nutritious meal and they survive two days of being snowed in until it is no longer safe and they manage to get to James’ parents with the children.
It is clear that Helen loves the farm and their way of life as much as James does. She may never have intended to become a farmer or a farmer’s wife but throws herself into the role with enthusiasm and tremendous energy. She speaks with pride about all they achieved in transforming the land and increasing the biodiversity. Leading a group of school children around the farm, she takes delight in pointing out otters and oyster catchers and how they have ‘rewiggled’ the stream to create a flood plain. She boasts to them that their hayfield contains 110 different species of wild grasses and flowers.
Helen writes now from an enviable place of peace and purpose. She and James work as a partnership, careful not to push themselves or each other beyond their limits - ‘A swim in the lake is as important as making the hay’. And she recognises the value of the part she plays in the whole enterprise: ‘Caring roles in our society are all too often invisible. To me caring for my family is and always has been, the most important work in the world’.