THE FARM

2009-11-21T10:30:00.000-08:00

The Farm: The Story of One Family and the English Countryside recorded the last remnants of a way of life that is dying before our eyes - that of the small family farm in Britain. It began when I travelled home to attend the sale of my family's farm in Yorkshire. The Bensons had been farming there for 200 years, but modern economics had made it impossible to continue. My brother, father and mother had to sell what they could and find another way to earn a living. The story of the sale, its aftermath and the family's recovery was set against a background of great change in the countryside, and explored social and personal issues: my own disastrous childhood on the farm, my father's sadness, and the lost generation of people in the village. It was a story of pigs digging up lawns, men wrestling bulls to prove a point, and love affairs among haystacks and tractors, but like any family story, it was about more than that. It was also about childhood, parenthood, change, death, food, alienation and belonging - and about the bonds between people and the land and each other.

The Farm became a UK number one bestseller, a Radio 4 Book of the Week, a Richard and Judy's Book Club choice, and was shortlisted for The Guardian's First Book of the Year award. This site contains additional information about it, and updates the story.

The Farm on stage

2008-04-14T12:50:00.000-07:00

From the end of April, the New Perspectives theatre company will be touring a stage adaptation of The Farm by Daniel Buckefield. All the relevant information about the tour is on their website here. I've done a bit of work with Daniel and with the actors, which was strange, but probably not as strange as it was for them. Guy came with me to one rehearsal. Jai, the man playing him asked what he really felt when his favourite boar was sold at the farm sale. "Nothing, really," he said. "Well I have to act something," said Jai. "Otherwise the reviews will say I'm rubbish." Guy had rather met his match. After the rehearsal they drove off in the pick up together to discuss Guy's emotions in the pub.

Some images from the production are shown below.

Sowthistle

2008-04-12T15:36:00.000-07:00

I had several ideas for titles before I settled on The Farm, one of the more misguided being
A hill in a hole: an account of the natural history, people and peculiarities of Sowthistle, a Yorkshire village at the turn of the century. I suppose this is the sort of idea that you begin to like when you have been spending a little too much time on your own. The title was to be explained in the following introduction that may have been written after filling some solitary hours with a little too much reading of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegone books. Just in case it wasn't confusing enough, I also planned to include a quote from Kilvert's Diary. I have posted the whole mess - soon abandoned, luckily - below.

“A ludicrous, naïve simplicity about his reflection and conclusions. He thinks Providence took particular pains in making his parish which he thinks which he thinks one of the most wonderful in the world.”

Francis Kilvert, on the Rev Edward Jones' book on Aberystruth Parish, Kilvert’s Diary 1870

The village of Sowthistle sits on top of a long, high ridge of land on the Yorkshire Wolds, with broad and deep chalk valleys to the north and south and shallow ones to the east and west giving it a tremendous view towards the rolling hills to the north, west and south, and the flat and low clay vale to the east. “Situated on an elevation between valleys” is the description what we learned at school, labouring with coloured pencils at cross sections interpreted from Ordnance Survey maps. “Onanillinanole”, is the one one we learned from our mothers and fathers, meaning “on a hill in a hole”. An outsider might think this an unflattering description, but to the practical mind of Grimlingdale it evoked a pride bordering on smugness because it meant that the village would never flood. “Sowthistle’ll nivver flood tha knows,” old men in flat caps would tell us as children, loitering after chapel, or laying on the grass outside the green cricket hut, watching weighty cricket players belt balls into Mr Dee’s wheat.
“I know,” we tried to answer, unheeded by the story teller who of course asked himself neither whether you knew this obscure geological fact, or whether as nine year old child you could be in any way interested in it. “It’s – “
“Because it’s onillinanole!” This statement, intended to mystify and then prompt us to curious, cuff-tugging questioning, elicited only bored, defiant silence. We stared straight ahead, watching the hands of the preacher shaking those of the departing congregation, or the bowler furiously rubbing on his thigh a fraying ball long past any useful gleaming.
“That’s on a hill - in a hole! If tha thinks about it, which ivver way tha goes out of t’village, you go downhill – and then uphill. Think aboot it – whither tha goes Northburn Road, Kirksfield Road, Winterswick Road or York Road, th goes doon, and then up. So the watter will allus run oot o’t village…” The long refrain, recited in the East Yorkshire dialect that in the old men sounded as sofly undulate as our hills, faded out as we refocused minds elsewhere, and rose warbling into the skies like the tears of gardenfires in sunshine, where we ignored them.

As we grew older we realised the flooding fact was entirely bogus. The Yorkshire wolds, resting on permeable chalk, are so well drained that none of the villages have ever flooded. The whole area supports just one feeble, workshy trickle of a stream called the Gypsy Race, which appears ruttling long ditchbottoms only when bolstered by weeks of rain and retires weakly into its chalky bed at the merest hint of a dry spell (local historians often refer to the Gypsy Race, with its sudden showings and disappearances, as “fascinating”, although it is anything but). The irony in the assertion of Sowthistle’s impregnabilty lay in the broad, shallow dip in the main road at the crossroads at the heart of the village. One quadrant of the junction was taken up by the pond, which, in heavy rain, overflowed into the peculiar dip rendering it impassable to most cars. At least once every summer, when thunderclouds black as night settled over us and opened, pond and road briefly merged into one expanse of weedy green water, the landlord of the pub opposite the pond stood on the step looking worried, children stood at the edges hoping to see drivers get water on their sparkplugs and conk out, and at each end of the village, Trevor the village policeman put up the signs warning: FLOOD.

What happened to them all?

2008-02-21T16:33:00.000-08:00

The question I am most often asked by people who have read the book is, "So what are you all doing now?" In some ways, not much has changed; my mum, dad and Guy still live in Sowthistle, Helen is still a teacher in Hull, and I still live in London, where I work as a journalist. However, there have been a few alterations and additions.

My mum and dad, directed by Billy's dad and his mates, finished the house and settled in. Guy decided he liked the caravan, and stayed there. Aided by a man from the village called Dave, my dad and Guy worked on the straw business, buying and selling a little more each year. The underlying principle here is that because fewer farms combine arable and livestock, fewer want to keep the straw from their harvested corn for bedding. If my dad and brother can get it off the field quickly, it gets rid of it for the farmer. They then store it in a shed - having the shed is important - until stock farmers up in the hills, where straw is short supply, run short and need to buy it in.

In the summer of 2007, in the middle of the heavy rain and flooding, my dad had to go into hospital for heart surgery, and since then Guy has taken charge of the straw operation. He also continues to work for Jim Croskill. Not long after The Farm was published his relationship with a woman from Kirksfield faltered and finished, and since then he has been, on and off, single - although I did have a few queries from female readers. Deciding that reading might help him attract a better class of partner, he overcame his notorious aversion to books and now consumes them (modern American fiction, mostly) with great appetite; in 2007 he read the works of Truman Capote in what seemed like three weeks. So far this has not lead to romance, but he is currently venturing into internet dating. He has a new Nissan truck, and these days tends to attract criticism because of it; he was verbally assaulted in the car park in Kirksfield in 2007, but the assailant relented when he explained he used the vehicle for work.

Helen is now engaged to her partner Tim, whom she first met in the infants at Sowthistle Church of England primary school - I think they were joint winners of a painted egg competion one Easter. She is head of literacy at her school in Hull, which makes me feel proud of her, although I would be proud of her as a sister anyway, if only for her punching of the idiot Liverpool supporter as mentioned in the book. The Farm probably made her sound a bit anti-countryside, which she isn't really - indeed on the Spring evening that I am writing this, she has e mailed me to ask if I know anyone in the East Riding who could go into her school and talk to the children about the growing of crops on farms. We continue, as we have done for ages to recommend books to each other that almost invariably the other one hates, although I liked Stephen Amidon's Human Capital, which she bought for me at Christmas. She came with me to the launch of Richard Judy's Book Club the year The Farm was in it, and we met Gloria Hunniford, who was very courteous and shorter than you expect.

My mum has worked hard in the last few years, first on the house and more recently looking after my dad (see above). After the recent changes in my life (see below), I have come to appreciate what she did for the family both when we were growing up, and then at the time of the sale. One rarely sees any acknowledgment of the roles played by farmers' wives in supporting the family and keeping the business going, which is an outrage; many, many farm operations would simply collapse if it were not for them. Her garden in the spinney is a colourful, leafy labyrinth, although she fights an ongoing war against the rabbits, who she feels take liberties because she is a soft touch. She also has a pet pheasant, and is visited regularly by a lesser-spotted woodpecker. Since the house was completed, she has been knitting a Noah's ark complete with two of every animal she can think of.

As for me, in March 2006 Anne gave birth to our daughter, Violet. The two of them make me happier than I thought I would ever be, although while having a child reduces the time I have for much surface-level worry, I find that the sort of cultural losses that bothered me when I wrote The Farm bother me more now that I think about what my generation will leave behind for Violet's. She is a London girl, and I don't know if she will ever like the country at all, but I would like her to be able to visit it and see food growing there, rather than themeparks. I continue writing and living in London with regular working stays in Yorkshire, and am working on a new book about my mum's family and the coal industry in South Yorkshire.

The Yorkshire Wolds - a Visitor's Guide

2007-07-21T09:00:00.000-07:00

When you first walk along the bottoms of the steep, dry chalk valleys around Thixendale in the Yorkshire Wolds, there comes a moment when you feel spooked; in the great, lonely, eerie space with the world is reduced to a strip of sky and two grassy, wildflower-speckled banks that in the last 1000 years have been touched only by sheep, you wonder what it is, this weirdness, this peculiar sense of… nothingness, and then you realise; it is silence, a muffled silence made only starker by the cawing of a solitary crow overhead. The Wolds are populated sparsely enough for you to be utterly alone for hours here, and the valleys sink below the distant murmur of traffic. Such quiet would of course be expected in wildernesses to the north, but this is classic, deeply-rolling, hip-and-bosom English countryside. Elsewhere, such land is studded with fussily mock-rustic second homes and overrun by Freelanders and Golden Labradors, but perhaps because few of the Wolds’ charms can be glimpsed from the main roads, most potential second-homers and tourists arriving here keep going on towards the grander dales and moors. In the quiet they leave behind you can sometimes imagine yourself in the English countryside of forty or fifty years ago.

I grew up on a small family farm in these hills, but this eulogy is not just Yorkshire patriotism. When I left the area at 18, I took it for granted, and thought mountains and moors, the sort of spectacle you could grasp from inside a car, was the only scenery worth making a fuss about. It was only when I came back for the sale of the farm a few years ago, and began seeking solace in walking and driving the hills with my younger brother Guy, that I came to appreciate their quiet, soothing charm and the unself conscious vitality that comes from being a working countryside.

David Hockney, who has been painting the area in oils and watercolours since he “fell in love” with the landscape while driving across it from Bridlington to visit a dying friend in Wetherby in 1997, has spoken of the “hot, living” quality of this “very beautiful, Yorkshire landscape, a very preserved corner of England, that has hardly changed in fifty years. [Where] the ground is extremely fertile, so one does not find anything for tourists - no teashops, just beautiful, undulating hills.” And while there are a few tea shops now, along with some rather pleasing, chintz-free guest houses now, and a scattering of modern, rural-revivalist bakeries, microbreweries and gastropubs, the beauty and rare authenticity of the place remain, and reward investigation.

The Yorkshire Wolds are a sixty-mile knuckle of hills that bulks suddenly up out of the flatlands to the west and south, and curves round to crash into the sea, on the rough salt-whipped coast in the east. Their defining feature is the dry chalk valley, “slack” in the local dialect, whose sides, being too steep to plough out, retain ancient plant mixes and rare flora such as bee orchids. They are best tackled initially by meandering along the straight, narrow enclosure roads by car, but the way to see them, properly is on foot, either on a footpath along the valley bottoms, or along the old sheep-droving lanes whose width means that their rich variety of grasses and plants have survived the postwar herbicide onslaught.

On the Spring Sunday afternoons when I first came back here to explore the hills with my brother, we would begin in the southern slopes down near the Humber estuary and tack northwards. Through the snug, bricky, picture-postcard villages of Brantingham, Bishop Burton and Walkington; past the common land of Beverley Westwood where farmers still share grazing rights; across the green lane where, on the third Thursday of March every year since 1519, amateur horsemen and women have run in the mud-spattered Kiplingcotes Derby, England’s oldest horse race (the finishing post, marked on OS maps, is on the narrow road across Londesborough Road).

Moving north towards the High Wolds around Millington you get deep into rolling, arable country. On our journeys after the sale, I used to talk to Guy a lot about his work at the new farm he had had to go to work at, and I remember that while it didn’t make me any keener on intensive farming, it did change the way I looked at the fields.

There is a modern, cynical view, expressed by various commentators, that because our countryside is almost all shaped by human endeavour, we ought to give up on the idea of nature altogether. But as anyone who works there knows, most open country in England combines the cultivated, the untouched, the recalcitrant natural and the abandoned work-sites in such fascinating ways that half an acre can be a chronicle of centuries. Look at the freakish, wooded humps of the dozens of iron-age barrows in the fields. Look how modern agricultural diversification is covering the green and pleasant land with a summer patchwork of sweetshop colours, the sherbet lemon of oilseed rape, pale parma violet of lavender, aniseed-red of linseed, mingling with the green hues of wheat and barley. Look at the hedge-planting and meadowland field margins being left as the EU payments at last reward stewardship rather than higher yields. The best English rural writing – Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne, for example, or Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield – has come from close observation and understanding of a small area, and as work on the land become more industrial and remote, this amateur-naturalist-cum-historian is a tradition we are in danger of losing; I can’t help feeling that restoring it, and our awareness of what it actually in the landscape, would restore some of the accountability of our food producing sector. Anyway.

The most dramatic hills and valleys are in the High Wolds between the villages of Thixendale, Huggate and Millington, and it is here that the walking is best. Guy and I used to amble around the ancient ash woodland just outside Millington, where in summer the smells of cow parsley and wild garlic spice the flat, sweet odour from the charcoal burning, and then have a pint sitting in the old nineteenth century settles at The Gate, although tourists should note that there is also a tea-room, The Rambler’s Rest, whose food is mostly locally-made. If you’re only stopping for the afternoon, a circular walk from here to Thixendale with a cup of tea at the end of it should take up about two to three hours.

Driving out of the dales and across the tops of the High Wolds makes arriving in the 18th century estate village of Sledmere all the more remarkable; here Capability Brown not only landscaped the all the surrounding fields so that the Sykes’ families views might be improved but also demolished and rebuilt the entire village to create a more pleasing aspect. The village, dotted with unusual monuments, has an artificial, Port-Merrion-ish air about it that must have fascinated Hockney, who painted a wonderful picture that hangs in the Hockney Gallery in Saltaire. I should perhaps add that Sir Tatton Sykes, the current incumbent, includes the socialite and writer Plum Sykes, who will be getting married here in the summer, thus creating a somewhat rare opportunity for celebrity spotting on the Wolds. Guy, whose place of work is just outside the village, is unlikely to be invited as he once upset Sir Sykes by failing to move his tractor far enough off the road as the Baronet tried to pass in his car.

Just outside Sledmere going north, you pass a sign marking the boundary between the East and North Ridings of Yorkshire. Throughout the Seventies and Eighties, when the Government renamed the East Riding “Humberside”, the signs welcoming you to “England’s Newest County” were routinely “corrected” by otherwise respectable citizens, until the change was reversed. Once over the county line, our preferred route was down along the floor of the Great Wolds Valley, and then up onto the vast, bowed-back hills to the north from which on clear days you look out miles across a wet, fieldy plain to the coast. It feels lovely and lonely and windswept up here, the white wooden road signs for Kelk, Langtoft and Thwing reminding you, as the ones for Wetwang, Skerne and Lund, reminded you earlier how Scandinavian the north east of England is; the little-known, lilting East Yorkshire dialect is so close to its Viking roots that it is said Danish Soldiers sent here in the First World War could converse with the locals in their own language.

The best place to end the journey is the coastal village of Bempton, where the jagged, 400-ft chalk cliffs are home to Britain’s biggest and most varied colony of seabirds. This isn’t just a bird-watching thing; watching the flocks of wheeling and diving gulls, gannets, and puffins as the sun glitters on the sea below you is an experience that somehow lifts you out of yourself, especially after the slacks’ spooky silences. Finally, if you are find the need to put something back inside yourself, we can heartily recommend the fresh fish and chips from the High Street Fisheries just down the coast in the very chalk-and-flint-y village of Flamborough.

First published in The Guardian July 2006

The family's reactions

2007-04-22T02:04:00.000-07:00

When I trying to write The Farm, or The Nearest Faraway Place as its terrible working title was, I didn't think anyone much beyond family and friends would read it. I didn't really know what I was doing, and I had no idea how you made chapters hang together, let alone how you were supposed to translate actual life into prose. Because I imagined it would sink without trace, I didn't think as much as I might have done about including some intimate details of the family's experiences. It wouldn't matter, would it, if no one was going to read it? This meant that when some people did read it, they were curious to know what the poor family members thought of having their private lives exposed in this way. It is a question I often get asked at readings.

My dad and brother were not bothered by it. It helped that a year or so before the book came out I wrote a story about them and the farm in The Observer, and a lot of local farming people reacted very warmly and positively to it. I did discuss the reference to my dad's depression with him before writing about it, but he felt that if writing about it might bring the general situation further into the public domain, then I should do it. With Guy, the only thing I discussed was an argument we had had, and that I wanted to write about. I said it might make him sound a bit aggressive. He sad anyone who thought that would think it already anyway, so I could put in what I wanted.

My mum was upset when she read about the sale and its immediate aftermath because she had tried to put those thoughts aside in the intervening years. However, she also said that if the book brought any attention to what was happening to people on Britain's farms and in its countryside, and to its food, then it was worth it. The thing she most objected to was me mentioning that she used to like my dad warming her feet in his hands. "I can't believe the whole of Yorkshire knows that about me," she said once. Well, more than once.

The depiction of Helen my sister was regrettable in that in places it suggests she is sterner and colder to country life than she really is. And because she appears in the story less often, it can seem that she was relatively marginal, which is incorrect. This made me realise several things, not least that deadpan humour is hard to pull off, and stories are not so much about what the teller puts in as what he leaves out. Anyway, she mentioned this only once, which shows, of course, what a terribly kind and understanding person she really is, as opposed to the black-cloaked wicked witch that we now joke about.

Other reactions? Some relatives didn't like the swearing. I can see why, but I would include it again, because men at work do swear, and I wanted to write about the reality of countryside rather than the sanitised Sunday night telly version. This was not out of a tedious desire to rub people's nose in the muck. In our culture at present there are people who believe that intellect, the finer feelings of love and attachment to place, are not found in the breasts of people who dirty their hands at work, and swear when they are angry. I wanted to show that this wasn't true.

And finally, some readers have gently suggested that I played up my clumsiness and lack of skills with tools and machinery. By way of an answer, I usually point out that this has never been raised by anyone who knew me when I was a teenager. When I was digging the meadow in the early stages, I went to borrow a rotavator from Mal Garside, my dad's friend. He was clearly reluctant to let me have it. "Are you worried I'll break it?" I hazarded. "Nay lad," he said. "I's worried it'll be break thee."

The Farm audiobooks

2007-04-22T01:48:00.000-07:00

I have read a slightly abridged version of The Farm for an Orion books audiobook CD, which you can read about, buy or download here. It's also available on iTunes. The unabridged version, read by the actor Richard Stacey, is available here.

The trouble with writing about your family

2006-06-21T08:30:00.000-07:00

It was during a long conversation with my mother about her feelings for my father that I realised I was in for trouble.

I had begun writing a book about my family history, and I was talking to her about why she was attracted to my father when she met him in the late 1950s. My father was a farmer, and I was vaguely expecting – alright then, hoping – that she would say something about his patience and understanding, or his way with animals. Those were some of the qualities that I found striking in him - qualities that, I realise now, I was then focusing on because I thought they would make him seem like a farmer in a book ought to seem. A quote from my mum would point them up nicely.

“Well,” she said. “He was very good-looking.”

“Right,” I said. “But what else?”

“Umm, he was very tall as well. I remember liking how tall he was.”

“Yes yes ok, mum, but what about his personality?”

“I can’t really remember… he used to warm my feet for me, that was nice. Oh, and I know - ” Suddenly she brightened up, apparently recalling something. Great, I thought, here it comes; his gentleness when he delivered a calf, his calm appraisal of the weather, the sense of timelessness as you watched him bestriding the furrows -

“He was a very good kisser. What you young lot would call a passionate kisser today. And he always used to call me ‘sugar’, I loved that. I thought it was really romantic and…”

“Romantic?” I gave up trying to keep my facial expression neutral. “Dad?”

“Ooh, I remember when we used to go to the pictures, it was…”

“Right, thanks mum! Tell you what, let’s have a cup of tea, and then, er come back to it.”

That exchange took place right at the start of my interviews and research, and it taught me two things. First, that asking your parents about their love lives is generally a bad idea, and secondly, that even your closest relatives may think of people and events from your shared past in ways utterly incomprehensible to you. The first you can easily live with, but the second means that trying to write down your family history can become a somewhat troubling experience.

The book I was writing had been sold to its publisher as the history of a farm and the surrounding Yorkshire countryside. However, as our farm was an old-school family affair on which my brother and sister, mother, friends, neighbours and I worked in our spare time, its I couldn’t tell its story without telling ours.

I should explain here that the story was as messily up and down as most families’. The farm had been in the family for generations, and as the eldest son I should have taken it on. However, lacking any practical abilities whatsoever, I ran off to London to become a journalist; my sister Helen became a teacher, and it was left to my brother Guy to work with my parents. Together they struggled financially, and had to sell up in the late 1990s.

When I came to record all this and the aftermath of the sale, I found it easy enough to establish places and dates for big family events, but stunningly difficult to get anyone to agree on details. One of my most potent memories, for example, is of taking charge of some ill pigs one harvest when I was about 17. I thought by saving some of them I might redeem my klutzy image, and built them a special pen in a barn, and spent my spare time feeding them. In the end they all died, and when I told my dad the last one had gone, I realised he had known this would happen, and that he would not have let Guy, who was being trained seriously, persist in such a sentimental illusion; in short, it meant everyone had realised before I did that I’d be leaving.

Did my brother, father or mother remember the ill pigs as a major turning point too? Er no; they did not, in fact, remember them at all. The only person who did was Helen. She had helped me with them herself - only for me, in my egocentric self-absorption, to subsequently forget about her. After months of this, and of the challenges to long-held ideas about family members and myself, I realised how separate we all are, in the end. It’s quite a bleak feeling, and it means that you can only ever really tell your story, not everyone else’s.

Even after accepting that little bit everyday existentialism, you face the problem of showing people what your family members are like. Recording what they did and said is the best way, but this becomes difficult if, in the British way, they don’t say anything. My family was perhaps a particularly hard case because it fits the Yorkshire farming stereotype very well, but the ways we reveal feelings are probably common; the glance away, the silence left a beat too long, the deliberate gruffness meant convey affection. Ask any of the men a direct personal question and they deflect it like Michael Vaughan flicking a ball to the boundary. When I asked my brother how he felt about the sale that meant the loss of his job, and ten generations of work, he said “Well, you get over it.”

Ironically, it was in writing about Guy that I found a way to deal with this, and learned something else about family life in the process. My brother is a living textbook definition of Yorkshire stoney-facedness, and even when he does speak his words tend to have a different meaning to the literal one. At one point I thought I had so little material that I was going to have to give up on the memoir altogether, and then one day in frustration I just typed: Guy prefers not to speak at all. He communicates chiefly through the eyebrow raise, the shrug, and the brief lift of the chin. When he greets you at a train station by asking “what the fuck you got in this suitcase” it is his way of saying Hello, how are you?”

A few days later it dawned on me - Yorkshire farmers might tend to be extreme cases, but this is true to a certain extent for all families. Being so familiar and intimate with each other, we communicate well beyond the literal. We have learned to read each others’ facial expressions like meteorologists reading a sky, and we have an elaborate set of codes which in later life will amuse, baffle and infuriate those friends and lovers whom we invite into the fold. (“I’m sure your mother didn’t mean that -” “Shut up! You don’t KNOW her!”).

Perhaps the most impenetrable codes will be those that allow us to talk obliquely, referring to things, people and events in ways that imbue them with extra layers of meaning. This is not limited to families, of course, but it is chiefly in family life, where we all know so much about one another, that it happens unconsciously and accidentally.

For example, the moment I realised how much stuffing the loss of the farm had knocked out of my dad was not during the auction, but one winter evening months afterwards when my mum asked him if he wanted to watch a western she had videoed that afternoon. They love westerns in the way that some people of their generation love rock and roll, and their courtship and subsequent married life had involved watching at least two a week. That evening he said he wasn’t bothered, because “We’ve seen 'em all anyroad. You always know how it’s going to end.” To anyone else, a fair comment on an old film genre; to his wife and children the sign that he had momentarily lost interest in himself and the world.

What all this taught me was that the real truth of family life is rarely experienced at those moments when you are conscious of it. Looking back, you will remember meaningful moments not from anniversary parties, or events caught on DV tape and photographs, but from moments when you were looking the other way; the day you taught the dog to sit up, the walk to the bus stop from the cinema singing the songs from the film together, the summer you nursed the sick animals with your little sister. Of course the memories will be gnawed and twisted by time, but it will be the experiences whose meaning was bestowed by the togetherness of friends and family that endure. I don’t want to sound schmaltzy, but it seems to me that when so many businesses are trying to sell us family happiness to us in the shape of a themepark ticket or cuddly toy, this is worth bearing in mind.

People often ask me if my family minded being written about. The answer is not really. My mum didn’t like the inclusion of swearwords, or the detail about her liking my dad to rub her feet to make them warm, and I worry about a some chapters where I made my poor, slandered sister sound stern when in fact she was funny.

To be quite honest I shall regret this latter point for the rest of my life, and because of it and the other problems, I would tell anyone thinking of doing the family memoir thing to think carefully about it before beginning. I certainly find myself being reminded that you can tell only your story and not the whole family’s. When the book was published I was invited to talk about it at a Yorkshire Post Literary Luncheon in Harrogate. I took my brother, and afterwards became separated from him in the chatting throng. I was a bit worried about how he’d get on with the befrocked and suited county set, but afterwards, as he drove us home in his truck, he said he’d had a good time. There was just one thing that puzzled him, he said. “What does ‘taciturn’ mean? People kept telling me that’s what I was, and I didn’t have a clue what they meant.”

First published in The Guardian, June 2006

Jessie, Queen of the Yorkshire Wolds

2005-08-21T09:32:00.000-07:00

Jessie is the other person, besides my family, to whom The Farm is dedicated. She was on the small side, strong in every sense, and to me she could not have been more of the East Riding wolds had God moulded her from the sweet, flint-speckled chalk soil. Jessie babysat for Helen, Guy and I when we were small, and often came to help us on the farm, joking, swapping gossip, discussing village politics, bossing anybody who wasn't pulling their weight. She had a seemingly supernatural capacity for hard work, enjoyment and organising village events – galas, parties, darts teams, charity collections, all the hard labour on which villages thrive. These days you hear people talking about "communities" as if they are things that somehow happen spontaneously and naturally when human beings live together. They do not. Communities happen people walk the streets in the winter rain begging prizes for fund-raising summer fetes, and stop and talk when they pass by, and when necessary tell miscreants off on behalf of everyone else. Jessie was also a devout Christian, a member of the Church of England. At midnight mass on Christmas Eve, when our family always sat behind hers in Sowthistle church, you could hear her voice singing above all the others. My sister used to say that when she saw Jessie praying she knew how powerful a concept faith was.
I took this picture in the autumn of 1990, when we were picking potatoes. The gloves are liners, worn to keep your hands warm and dry under the rubber ones that kept out the mud and wet of the soil. We used to have this joke about them being like the white gloves people wore to balls. Jessie died in 2003, and is badly missed by Sowthistle. If there is a heaven, she will definitely be in it, and and will probably have Jesus in her darts team.