Four children, 500 sheep, 20 chickens: no time! In her unflinchingly honest memoir, HELEN

MEMOIR

THE FARMER’S WIFE

Growing up, Helen Rebanks would lie on her bed in the family’s farmhouse, wondering about the girls who’d lived there before, reflecting that their stories are never told — only those of the ‘big men’: farmers like her irascible grandfather.

Her engrossing, intimate, unflinchingly honest memoir about the oft-romanticised role of farmer’s wife should go some way to addressing this imbalance.

Helen Rebanks’ memoir is structured around a day, from the cockerel’s crow at dawn (there are no lie-ins for farmers — or their wives) to nightfall. Pictured: Helen

Ordinarily, it would be reductive to talk about a woman in relation to her husband, but, in this instance, it’s right there in the title. Helen is married to James Rebanks — pioneering farmer, shepherd, Unesco adviser, author of the much-lauded The Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral — the latter won the Wainwright Prize for nature writing. But on Instagram James styles himself as ‘Helen’s husband’. As well he might. For it becomes clear that, while James has the vision, Helen is the beating heart. She is the engine that keeps the proverbial show on the road.

And it’s quite the show: four children, 500 sheep, 50 cattle, 20 chickens, six sheepdogs and two ponies roam their Lake District farm. Her memoir is structured around a day, from the cockerel’s crow at dawn (there are no lie-ins for farmers — or their wives) to nightfall. Within this framework, she ranges freely back and forth: from childhood to courtship.

It ranges from dramatic interludes — like sheltering in the sheep shed from a snow storm — to the demanding reality of running a farm and keeping a family of six happy. ‘Someone,’ she remarks with exasperation familiar to any parent, ‘is always hungry.’

As a teen, she loathed ‘the bind of ‘the farm’ ‘ and dreamed of being an artist and travelling the world. Her overworked mother ran a B&B alongside the farm, and Helen was irked to be commandeered into domestic tasks, unlike her brother.

Their combative relationship shifted when she began to understand the unspoken family history of hardship and loss (Helen is named after her mother’s sister, who died as a baby). Stoic repression is the emotional currency in the traditional farming community.

Aged 17, she met her future husband. She moved to Oxford while James did his degree, but found it hard to relate to his fellow students, with their sense of entitlement ‘to a life that’s all about themselves’.

Even then, Helen grappled with the internal struggle which is a recurring theme: what she thinks she ought to be versus what she wants. She was ‘playing’ at the role of city girl with an art degree and career, while guiltily yearning for marriage, a family and a country house with a roll-top bath.

Her message is a simple one: the choices we make about where our food comes from really do matter. Small changes beget big ones

Four children, 500 sheep, 50 cattle, 20 chickens, six sheepdogs and two ponies roam their Lake District farm (Stock Image)

Helen got her dream. Farming exerted an inexorable pull, so they returned to the Lakes, married and, displaying a prodigious capacity for hard work, took on three house renovation projects in swift succession, and had two longed-for babies, Molly and Bea.

But the rose-tinted glasses were not so much cracked as shattered. James worked all hours, dashing between office and farm. When he was home, they were ‘monsters’ to each other. The dream home was a prison, and Helen was falling apart.

It was her impassioned plea to the Lake District Planning Authority (while heavily pregnant with their third child, Isaac) which won the eight-year battle to live on James’ grandfather’s farm and turn a sheep shed into a home in what she refers to wryly as ‘a classic Grand Design’ — an epic scale project on a minuscule budget.

They succeeded, building a home and a pioneering, educational farm (and had a fourth child, Tom). Her message is a simple one: the choices we make about where our food comes from really do matter. Small changes beget big ones.

‘Me time’ is an alien concept: Helen is baffled when asked what she does with her ‘spare’ time. Farming and family life are a relentless combination.

Ten days after the birth of her third son, she turned up at a New Year’s Eve party with two home-made puddings. That night, she was reduced to tears when she overheard a blithe comment that she’d had another child to avoid getting ‘a real job’.

Helen has often felt undervalued by society, ‘as if domestic work isn’t a good way to spend a life’. In its own quiet way, her memoir is a manifesto: every woman has the right to choose the life they want.