MEMOIR

High Caucasus

by Tom Parfitt (Headline £25, 332pp)

The children arrived at school on September 1, 2004, the first day of the school year, ‘carrying new satchels and bunches of flowers for their teachers . . .’

One of the first-graders, seven-year-old Dzera Kudzayeva, had been chosen for the ‘first bell’ ritual, in which a new girl is hoisted on the shoulders of one of the oldest boys and rings a handbell. The town was called Beslan.

Shortly after the children assembled, the militants arrived, jumping off a flat-bed truck, firing automatic rifles in the air and shouting Allahu Akbar! 

They shot two security guards and then took hundreds of children and their teachers hostage inside the school. 

Days passed; the situation became chaotic, with local men arming themselves with guns, and Russia’s ruthless special forces, Spetsnaz, arriving.

The militants were Chechens, seeking revenge in the pro-Russian Christian republic of North Ossetia for the countless brutalities Russia had inflicted on their own Muslim homeland of Chechnya, paying brutality back with even worse brutality.

They released a few breastfeeding mothers and their babies, but the rest of the captive children were made to strip to their underwear, herded into a baking hot gymnasium and denied drinking water. They were forced to drink their own urine.

Finally, chaos erupted, bombs exploded, fire broke out and the building was stormed — resulting in the deaths of 333 people, including 186 children. 

Parfitt, a correspondent in Moscow for British newspapers, saw it all.

‘In a man’s arms, a girl of nine or so had blood trickling from the corners of her mouth . . . the corpses of four children lay covered in sheets . . . a man in camouflage with his fists raised in bloody rags . . .’

Many journalists witness dreadful things to bring us the news, but Beslan was an especially hideous massacre of the innocents. 

Even though Parfitt insists, bravely, that he didn’t suffer from PTSD afterwards, he certainly struggled.

Soon there came recurring nightmares, especially one in which he saw a mother who had just lost her child in the massacre, falling to the ground in slow motion, ‘floundering, plunging before my helpless sight. Three seconds torn from a reel of terror and decelerated into endless purgatory.’

One evening, ‘I was pulling on my socks when I began gabbling incoherently’. He decided he had to do something. 

And so he did what many traumatised survivors have done: he turned to nature, to mountains, to forests and rivers, and to the slow, wordless magic of a very, very long walk.

He would trek from end to end across the Caucasus mountain range, through its many troubled but beautiful republics, like Ingushetia, Dagestan, and Chechnya itself: eight regions in all, with the Foreign Office advising against visiting all but two of them.

Parfitt hoped to experience a more tranquil region, to find his own peace, and try to understand how something so atrocious could have happened.

The result is this book, High Caucasus, one of the most harrowing, beautifully written and finest accounts of a mountain trek that I have ever read — an instant classic. 

You might describe it as a secular pilgrimage in search of some kind of salvation, or at least partial healing and understanding. 

Parfitt comes to absolutely love this landscape: ‘The North Caucasus had cast a spell over me that no place has matched, before or since.’

He vividly evokes a world where life is very tough, but so are the people: a world where Abkhazian women trek miles across the border to sell armfuls of mimosa blossoms for a few roubles to the Russians, while the menfolk shoot bears and then ‘sell the fat for people to rub on their chests when they’re ill’.

He meets numerous jolly, if often tipsy, shepherds with huge moustaches, wearing sheepskin jackets, spending months up in the high summer pastures with their flocks, defending them from wolves and sleeping in sparse huts. 

They are always keen to press vodka upon this exotic foreign walker, and discuss the world together.

An orthodox priest tells him he has heard that London is very bad for crime. ‘East 17,’ he said. ‘Same as the group.’ ‘Ah,’ says Parfitt, ‘Walthamstow.’

There are many such comic moments, as when he fears he’s heading into a gunfight, hearing bullets fly, but a local assures him: ‘More likely a wedding.’

Soon he encounters ‘a pristine blue Rolls-Royce Phantom with a man sitting on the passenger window and firing a Kalashnikov into the air’. All very cheery, nothing to worry about.

Parfitt concludes his great adventure with the feeling that history is something all peoples must both remember and forget, so as not to be trapped into attitudes of smouldering hatred and longing for revenge.

And yes, nature heals, as do long days with simple but far from stupid people.

At last the Caucasus comes to mean not just the horrors of Beslan, but also ‘a curtain of cloud rising like smoke over a ridge . . . a bowl of mulberries on a sunlit windowsill’, while ‘above all, filling the horizon from west to east in a chain of wonder, rises the frosty palisade of the mountains: vast, sparkling, immutable’. 

A magical book.

NATURE’S CALENDAR 

by Kiera Chapman, Lulah Ellender, Rowan Jaines, Rebecca Warren (Granta Books £14.99, 400pp) 

Every year there are a few days when you have a sudden awareness that the seasons are changing: a balmy spring-like day after weeks of cold, or that afternoon in late summer when the leaves are on the turn.

While we British talk endlessly about the weather, most of us are quite oblivious to the incremental changes that are taking place all the time, both underfoot and overhead. 

Imagine one of those time-lapse films of bluebells pushing through the earth and then bursting into flower: this book is the literary equivalent of it.

Nature’s Calendar was inspired by a 17th-century Japanese calendar, which divided the year into periods of five or six days rather than months, and gave each segment a title reflecting what would be happening on that date, like ‘Bamboo shoots sprout’ or ‘First lotus blossoms’.

This British version, minus the bamboo or lotus blossoms, has been put together by four authors — an ecologist and nature writer, a lecturer in human environment, an author and a historian.

They asked people on social media to share their observations of how the landscape around them was changing over a period of a few days, and organised a vote to find which ones had the most resonance. 

After a year, they had drawn up their list of 72 of them.

The essays on each microseason are a sprightly mixture of botany, science, folklore and personal observation. 

Some of the topics are very familiar — the arrival of snowdrops and daffodils, the joy of rain-dappled roses in mid-summer, the ripening of blackberries in autumn — while others are rather more obscure.

Have you ever noticed that there are more spiders around the house in early autumn? As the chapter for September 8-12, ‘Arachnids Assemble!’, explains, this is when male spiders venture out in search of a mate. 

And if you’re wondering where the spiders have come from, the slightly unsettling answer is that they’ve probably been lurking out of sight in the nooks and crannies of your house for some time.

The chapter for February 9-13, ‘Birdsong Builds’, points out that, while the peak of the dawn chorus is still several months away, late winter is nevertheless a wonderful time of year for hearing birdsong, as birds gear up for mating. 

What’s more, the bare trees of February mean you have a far better chance of spotting the birds than you do in May. 

There is a delightful chapter on the magnolia, whose flowering is pinpointed here as March 31 to April 4. (Readers in the West Country, where magnolias start flowering earlier, might quibble with this date.)

These glorious blooms have a smell which is, apparently, mildly hallucinogenic.

Fossils have shown that magnolias were growing more than 100 million years ago; they are so ancient, in fact, that they are pollinated by beetles, since bees weren’t around to do the pollinating when they first evolved.

From the chapter called ‘Thunderbugs On Fizzing Elderflower’, you will learn that honey-scented elderflowers are home to hundreds of tiny black insects. 

These are thrips, or thunderbugs, and if you’ve ever been wearing a yellow T-shirt in summer and found yourself covered in black bugs, these are the culprits.

To mark mid-November, surely the dreariest time of the year, when Christmas and the winter solstice still seem an age away, there is a lively essay on leaf decay, a complex process of deconstruction which is carried out by an equally complex array of micro-organisms, fungi and animals. 

The smell of decaying leaves is so evocative, the writers suggest, that we should appreciate it ‘in the same way that we savour fresh coffee or a fine wine’.

Nature’s Calendar, designed to be dipped into rather than read in one go, is a reassuringly old-fashioned book, the sort of volume the Famous Five might have consulted before going on one of their jaunts.

It’s full of pithy observations on the natural world, and some rather charming line drawings.

 It proves that, as long as you know where to look, there are wonders unfolding all around us right through the year.

WHAT BOOK would classicist and writer MARY BEARD take to a desert island?

By Daily Mail Reporter

Published: 16:35 EDT, 21 September 2023 | Updated: 17:18 EDT, 21 September 2023

BOOK OF THE WEEK

Hunting the Falcon

by John Guy and Julia Fox (Bloomsbury £30, 624pp)

There is a piece of jewellery in the Victoria and Albert Museum which was given by Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn at the height of their love affair, before things went sour.

It is a gold whistle, shaped like a pistol and intricately engraved. Besides making a sound to lure a falcon back to its owner’s glove, the whistle incorporates two toothpicks and a spoon for removing (human) ear wax.

This blend of ceremonial display and intimate bodily functions perfectly symbolises the crazy extremes of the Tudor court. 

On the one hand, Henry ran his household as an opulent showring where fountains flowed with wine (at least they did on the day of Anne’s coronation, which cost a staggering £65 million in today’s money) and international summits couldn’t start until a flunky had covered a whole field with a giant carpet made of gold.

Yet, at the same time, the court ran on brute physical realities. Torture was used to enforce daily discipline, and a sudden visitation by the plague could end the starriest of careers and create a new opening for an ambitious upstart.

As a woman there was extra jeopardy. Give birth to a princess when everyone was expecting a prince and you could be banished from the court. Smile at the wrong man for a second too long and you could lose your head.

In this revelatory biography by two leading historians, we see Anne Boleyn more clearly than ever before.

Conducting a fingertip search of the original sources, Guy and Fox present Henry’s second wife as neither a tragic heroine, nor a scheming minx, but as a startlingly modern woman.

Born into a middling family on the rise, Anne wanted to be queen for all the right reasons.

While the luxury was nice — no one loved a wardrobe refresh more than a girl who had been brought up in Paris — what she really wanted was the chance to put her liberal reforms into operation.

Anne was progressive about religion, encouraging the circulation of the Bible in English so that ordinary people could understand the Word of God for themselves.  

And she was ambitious about eliminating poverty, advocating a national works programme to employ poorer citizens. 

Highly educated and genuinely clever, she also provided scholarships for promising young men to attend university.

Henry found all this mesmerising — here was a woman who could match him in brainpower and originality. 

Anne cleverly strung Henry along for six years, ratcheting up the sexual tension to a sizzle, only agreeing to sleep with him once she knew for certain their marriage was just weeks away.

But what she hadn’t foreseen, say Guy and Fox, was that, once Henry had finally claimed her as his wife and Queen, all the fun went out of it.

Having a sparring partner for a girlfriend was sexy, but as a wife, not so much. 

You get the feeling that the authors, being a married couple, understand the dynamics of the Henry-Anne relationship better than any of the many historians who have speculated about it down the centuries. 

Anne started over-stepping the mark as far as the King, whom the authors brand a ‘narcissist’, was concerned. 

While, early on, he had been happy to strip his former wife Katherine of Aragon of lands, houses and jewellery to give to Anne, now there was something ugly about the way the new queen continued to diminish her rival.

She had even been heard saying that, given half a chance, she would arrange to have Princess Mary, Henry’s child by Katherine, executed. These words would come back to haunt her.

Worst of all from Henry’s point of view, Anne started nagging whenever she caught him looking at another woman, including the one who would replace her, Jane Seymour. 

Resenting being taken to task, Henry rounded on Anne, telling her that she must shut her eyes and ‘endure’, and that, moreover, he could cast her down as quickly as he had raised her up.

Of course, Henry would have forgiven Anne’s petulance in a jiffy if only she had managed to give him a healthy son and heir.

Following yet another miscarriage, Henry was heard to say grimly: ‘I see that God will not give me male children’. 

From here it was a small step for the increasingly paranoid king to start believing that his marriage was cursed and that Anne must have practised sorcery on him. 

Vengeance was quick. Anne was tried on May 15, 1536 and put to death just four days later.

For the record, Guy and Fox do not believe that Anne slept with any of the men she was accused of being with. 

Instead, they point to the fact that she modelled her own household on the French court, where it was normal for men and women to meet and talk together as equals.

But for Henry, all this democratic informality seemed suspiciously salacious. The most preposterous accusation was that Anne had slept with her own brother, George Boleyn. 

Guy and Fox suggest that it was Henry’s guilty obsession with his own ‘incest’ that led to him believing something so outlandish.

Previously, he had slept with Anne’s sister, Mary, and also with his brother’s wife, Katherine — could this be the reason why he was now being punished by being deprived of sons?

Despite the bogus nature of Anne’s trial, Guy and Fox believe that a Rubicon had been crossed. From now on, Henry was adamant about what sort of wife he wanted — a doormat and not a co-pilot.

On one occasion, meek Jane Seymour briefly questioned Henry’s decision to suppress the smaller monasteries. 

‘Remember,’ he warned her menacingly, ‘that the last queen died in consequence of meddling too much.’

BOOK OF THE WEEK

THE WEIMAR YEARS 

by Frank McDonough (Apollo £25, 592pp)

A Munich housewife dragged a suitcase full of banknotes to her local grocery store. She left it outside while she went in to do some shopping. When she came out, someone had stolen the luggage, but had tipped out the worthless money.

This was in 1923, at the height of hyperinflation in Germany. A loaf of bread cost 700 marks in January, 100,000 in May, two million in September, 670 million in October and 80 billion in November. A cup of coffee costing 5,000 marks was worth 8,000 marks by the time you’d drunk it.

The jacket of McDonough’s brilliant new book on the Weimar years (a prequel to his acclaimed two-volume The Hitler Years), shows a photo of German children playing on a street, using blocks of worthless banknotes to build a castle. Those notes also made good wallpaper.

What had gone wrong to cause this economic madness? McDonough tells the whole complicated story of the Weimar Republic with superb mastery of his material, lavishly illustrated with full-page photos of mass protests and rallies, and a succession of Chancellors with moustaches, leading inexorably to the rise of the dictator with the moustache.

Frame by frame, through 15 years of well-intentioned but chaotic democracy, we watch the ground being laid for the catastrophe of the Hitler regime.

What this book shows with terrifying clarity is that everything in global politics connects. The seeds of disaster were sown in 1919. The Allied victors of World War I, determined to punish Germany for their ‘war guilt’, demanded enormous, crippling reparations payments.

Under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, Germany was obliged to pay 20 billion gold marks by 1921, then two billion per year for the next five years, rising to four billion for the following four years, then six billion per year till 1963.

Germany squealed and protested and felt utter revulsion for this punishment. For one thing, it didn’t accept guilt for having started the war. Nor did lots of Germans even accept that Germany had lost the war, as their territory was never conquered. They kept requesting ‘payment holidays’ from the Allies.

The Prime Minister Lloyd George took pity on them, advising the French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré that this merciless ‘pauperisation of the German people’ was counterproductive. Poincaré strongly disagreed. He would not let up on his extortionate demands. When the Germans started overprinting money in 1922, thus lowering the value of its currency, Poincaré thought they were bankrupting themselves on purpose to wriggle out of the payments. So France carried out its threat of invading and occupying the Ruhr area until Germany paid up.

It was at this humiliating moment that the German government instigated a policy of ‘passive resistance’. Germans were encouraged to go on strike and cease to do business with the Allies. And how did the government finance this policy? By using 30 factories to print bank notes night and day to pay workers and businesses: a version of the ‘furlough’ system. It was a disaster. At the height of the craziness, the highest-denomination was a 100-trillion-mark banknote.

With hindsight, we know that any democracy — however chaotic — was better than the evil dictatorship and killing machine that would follow. But McDonough shows how the Weimar system was fraught with flaws from the outset.

This book acts as a salutary warning of the dangers of proportional representation. During the years from 1918 to 1933, there were just two presidents (Ebert until 1925 and Hindenburg until 1933), but 20 different coalition governments, under a succession of Chancellors who lasted for an average of nine months each.

There were far too many political parties, each with its own acronym, making some of these pages a bewildering mass of capital letters.

Forty-one parties contested the 1928 elections. This was an unworkable fragmentation of politics, whose failure Hitler pounced on to argue for the need for a single strong ‘Fuhrer’. He blamed ‘the November Criminals’ (as he called the politicians who’d signed the Versailles treaty) for unleashing an era of poverty and chaos.

If only the New York Times had been right in 1924. When Hitler came out of his spell in jail after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, they wrote: ‘It is believed he will retire to private life and return to Austria.’ If only the pledge signed by Germany, France and Belgium in the Locarno Treaties of 1925, that they would ‘never attack each other again,’ had been kept.

Thanks to a few moderate, adaptable, fundamentally good politicians, particularly Gustav Stresemann (Chancellor from August to November 1923, then Foreign Minister till his too-early death in 1929), constructive talks were opened up between Germany and the U.S., who came up with the Dawes Plan, then the Young Plan to help Germany meet its (new, slightly lowered) reparations payments by managing its own economy better.

But always in the background you hear the drumbeat of the fledgling Nazi party and the increasing success of Hitler and Goebbels’s propaganda method: ‘Find out what people hate and make them hate it more.’

Another inbuilt flaw of the Weimar Republic was Clause 48 of its Constitution, which granted the president powers to appoint and dismiss elected governments, dissolve parliament and suspend civil rights during times defined by him as a ‘national emergency’.

President Hindenburg and his inner circle felt a ‘supreme indifference’ towards sustaining democratic government. In the early 1930s, they were basically running Germany themselves. This paved the way for a dictatorship.

It was Weimar’s penultimate Chancellor Franz von Papen who won Hindenburg over to Hitler, seeing that his popularity was rising inexorably. ‘It is my unpleasant duty,’ Hindenburg said to his circle in January 1933, ‘to appoint this fellow Hitler as Chancellor.’ He stipulated that it must be of a ‘national coalition’. To which we can only utter a hollow laugh.

Those 13 Weimar years had been politically chaotic, but they allowed a remarkable cultural and artistic freedom to flourish. Although this is mainly a political book, McDonough dips in and out of the cultural life.

There were 899 cabaret venues in Berlin in 1930. The all-night dancing, the uninhibited cross-dressing, the liberal attitude towards homosexuality, the wonderful freedom of artistic expression in movements such as the Bauhaus, all had their 13 years to breathe freely, before being snuffed out by puritanical, racist and philistine Hitler.

Yes, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the ensuing rise of unemployment didn’t help the Weimar Republic, but McDonough stresses this was not the sole cause of its death and the rise of Nazism.

Britain and the U.S. suffered the same economic crash, but managed to avoid a Fascist dictatorship. He believes Hindenburg’s decision in 1930 to create a presidential authoritarian regime opened the path for Hitler — a catastrophe for Germany and the world.

THE NIRVANA EXPRESS 

by Mick Brown (Hurst Publishers £25, 400pp)

It’s all The Beatles‘ fault. Anyone who has endured someone’s hazy account of ‘finding’ themselves in India can blame John, Paul, George and Ringo.

In the summer of 1967, when the band studied meditation under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the foothills of the Himalayas, they made spiritual tourism profoundly groovy. But, as Brown explains in The Nirvana Express, the Fab Four were just the latest in a long line of Western figures to fall under the spell of holy men from the East.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, these schools of thought, often loosely connected to Hinduism and Buddhism, enthralled Europeans and Americans seeking a quiet alternative to the more shouty dictates of Christian fundamentalists and the bling of Catholicism. George Harrison was just one of many seduced by the idea that ‘each soul is potentially divine’.

In a lively narrative, delivered with wit and warmth, Brown shows how Eastern mysticism went from being suspect to venerable, and back again to a subject of scepticism. Along the way, he delivers an outrageous cast of characters — film stars, novelists, heiresses and heretics — and shows how soothing swamis and dodgy charlatans left their mark on Western ways.

It all began with the Victorian love of learning. In 1879, Sir Edwin Arnold published The Light of Asia, a poetic imagining of the life of the Buddha that sparked curiosity in some colonialists out East and adventurous minds at home.

By the early 20th century, Indian philosophy had become fashionable. Sir Edwin Lutyens, the most celebrated architect of the Edwardian era, was not a fan. His wife, Emily, embraced theosophy — which combined world religions in an Avengers Assemble manner — and became an ardent admirer of Krishna, the sweet-natured 16-year-old son of an Indian clerk who had been randomly chosen as its unlikely Messiah.

While Lady Emily devoted herself to the boy, poor Edwin spent periods working in India, where he saw little beauty beneath the poverty.

Emily wrote to him to say he was no longer welcome in her bedroom and, subsequently, made less than spiritual overtures to Krishna. These in turn were rebuffed.

Others were less easily swayed. The infamous occultist Aleister Crowley — dubbed ‘the wickedest man in the world’ — found Eastern spiritualism far too passive. But gurus continued to attach themselves to celebrities and socialites to gain traction and funds. In the 1930s, Meher Baba, a spiritual master with an eye on Hollywood, sought, but failed, to win the patronage of Greta Garbo.

As Brown notes, Indian spirituality went mainstream in the 1960s when The Beatles became fans. The saga of the most famous band in the world and the Maharishi — known as the ‘giggling guru’ due to his impish humour — is a tale of curiosity and disappointment.

In 1967, the band went to the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane to hear the guru speak (George’s wife, Pattie Boyd, recalled that ‘they seemed to do everything as a group; if one of them did something they would all want to do it’). The following day, the four musicians decamped to a teacher training college in Bangor, North Wales, where the Maharishi was teaching Transcendental Meditation. The retreat was cut short, however, when the band learned of the death of their beloved manager Brian Epstein.

The Beatles later studied under the guru in India, at an ashram overlooking the Ganges. Mia Farrow, raw from her separation with Frank Sinatra, joined them along with her sister Prudence (Lennon wrote ‘Dear Prudence’ in her honour).

A gifted salesman, the Maharishi swiftly labelled himself ‘The Beatles’ spiritual teacher’.

Less famous disciples, writes Brown, were obliged to bring ‘six fresh flowers, two pieces of fruit, a clean white handkerchief and a financial donation.’

It didn’t take long for cracks to appear.

Ringo disliked the food and headed home early. The rest of the band followed suit when rumours circulated that the Maharishi had made passes at Mia Farrow.

‘We thought there was more to him than there was,’ noted Paul McCartney. Lennon was more candid, recalling how stunned The Beatles had been to learn of Epstein’s death and the Maharishi’s response when they told him Epstein had died. ‘And he was sort of saying, ‘Oh forget it, be happy’ — f***in’ idiot.’

Only George kept the faith, retaining a lifelong interest in Eastern religions. But The Beatles’ Indian sojourn created some incredible music: more than half of the White Album was written at the ashram.

Perhaps the most complex of the Indian godmen was the Bhagwan Rajneesh, suggests Brown. The Gordon Gekko of the swami scene, Rajneesh looked both to the heavens and the bottom line, building an empire in the 1970s and 1980s that included a town in Oregon — which he renamed Rajneeshpuram — and the world’s largest collection of Rolls-Royces. In 1976, the actor Terence Stamp arrived at Rajneesh’s Indian base in Pune and immediately recognised a fellow performer, likening him to Orson Welles.

Stamp became ensconced in the ashram: ‘I had a new name, I was wearing orange, I was studying tantric sex. It wasn’t uninteresting!’

Rajneesh’s American enterprise, which drew thousands of visitors, crumbled in the mid-1980s, following reports of violent therapy sessions, sex scandals and a litany of crimes: followers were convicted of bio-terror attacks, arson and attempted murder. Their leader was arrested, fined and deported back to India.

Brown shows how the gurus’ woolly wisdom was both their strength and weakness (there’s a touch of Yes Minister to some of their opaque declarations). Yet the influence of these mystics endures today. ‘Yoga classes are now held in church halls,’ Brown observes. ‘Meditation has been stripped of its spiritual connotations and rebranded as ‘mindfulness’.’

In his previous book, Tearing Down The Wall Of Sound: The Rise And Fall Of Phil Spector, Brown revealed how a musical icon became a murderer. There are more fallen idols here.

A pattern forms of a pure creed curdled by greed, and the instability of both gurus and believers. Brown illustrates the subjective reality of spiritual highs with an amusing story about the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg.

In 1948, Ginsberg, whose mystical journey took in Buddhism, mescaline and LSD, claimed to have had a visitation from God while reading a William Blake poem in his New York apartment.

‘Overcome by an urge to share the good news,’ writes Brown, ‘Ginsberg crawled out of the window onto the fire-escape and tapped on the window of the neighbouring apartment, which was occupied by two girls. The window opened: ‘I’ve seen God!’ Ginsberg screamed excitedly.

‘The window slammed shut. ‘Oh,’ Ginsberg later lamented, ‘what tales I could have told them if they’d let me in!’ ‘

MEMOIR

THE FARMER’S WIFE 

by Helen Rebanks (Faber £20, 336pp)

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.

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.

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.

WHAT BOOK would chef, author and television presenter Nadiya Hussain take to a desert island?

By Daily Mail Reporter

Published: 17:01 EDT, 14 September 2023 | Updated: 17:12 EDT, 14 September 2023

BOOK OF THE WEEK 

RUSKIN PARK

by Rory Cellan-Jones (September Publishing £18.99, 320pp)

In 1996, BBC journalist Rory Cellan-Jones was clearing out his mother’s council flat in Ruskin Park House, South London, following her death. He came across a kind of treasure trove.

‘Everywhere,’ he writes, ‘there were bundles of letters — hundreds, possibly thousands of them.’

His mother, Sylvia, had kept nearly every letter she had ever received and made carbon copies of many she had sent. In one rectangular red box, he found something special. A message to him from his mother: ‘For Rory, to read and think about in the hope that it will help him to understand how it really was.’ Also inside was a collection of love letters from the 1950s, exchanged between Sylvia and the father Rory did not even meet until he was 23.

It has taken Rory nearly 30 years to be ready ‘to undertake the journey this accumulated pile of paper invited me on’. The result is this tender account of his mother’s life, which also tells ‘the story of how I came to be born’. His memories of his mother had been shaped by her later years, in which she had grown increasingly eccentric and potentially embarrassing. Now, through her letters, he was able to understand ‘just what a remarkable person she was’.

He recalls visiting BBC Television Centre in West London for the first time in the 1960s in her company. She worked in the drama department there, and it ‘seemed a magical place, more exciting than any theme park’. Where else could a small boy watch a Blue Peter rehearsal? Or spot Doctor Who villains queuing for their food in the canteen?

Sylvia had begun her BBC career during World War II, earning £3 10 shillings a week as a secretary in the Bristol offices. Within a short time, she had moved into the Talks department, working for the poet and critic Geoffrey Grigson.

Already married, she enjoyed the freedom and new opportunities that the war brought to many women. She was in a rewarding job, dealing with famous writers such as Walter de la Mare and Dylan Thomas.

Her husband expected her to leave all this behind when Stephen, Rory’s half-brother, was born. ‘The only thing seems to be to chuck the BBC job,’ he wrote. Sylvia had no intention of doing so. Her marriage crumbled in the post-war years. In 1947, she left a letter for her husband on the table of their Bristol home and departed, taking Stephen with her.

She ended up in London, working in television in the pioneering years of the early 1950s, the era of live transmissions. As a production assistant, Sylvia had to cope with whatever was thrown at her.

One half-hour drama demanded the presence of an elephant in the studio. It was she who was expected to find the animal and a small boy to ride it. The job was given to Stephen, who was enjoying a budding career as a child actor.

It was during another BBC drama production in the summer of 1956 that Sylvia met Jim Cellan-Jones. She was a 42-year-old acting floor manager; he was 25 and her assistant.

‘When I met you I thought you were pleasant and gentle, sweet and attractive, and I liked you more than anyone I had met for a very long time,’ Jim later wrote to Sylvia. The love letters Sylvia placed in the red box allowed their son to follow a relationship doomed to end unhappily. The unplanned consequence of the affair was Rory.

He confesses to the embarrassment he felt on first reading the letters. ‘No child really wants to have to imagine their parents’ sex life,’ he remarks.

‘It was hell seeing you on Thursday,’ Jim wrote, ‘and not being able to sweep you off into a corner and neck furiously.’ In what his son calls ‘barrack-room crudity’, Jim also remarked: ‘As the soldier said, don’t bother to paper the bedroom walls before I come over because all you’ll be seeing is the ceiling.’

Outside the bedroom, Jim and Sylvia were enjoying nights on the town. Sylvia described a visit to a production of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, after which they went backstage to meet an actress Jim knew. They had, she reported, ‘seen several good films and been to one rather interesting bottle party’.

At one point they even discussed marriage: ‘Jim and I talked about it, and wondered if I might be able to get a divorce in America,’ Sylvia wrote to her sister Joan, ‘but it’s all too involved, and one would need lots of money.’

The two were together so much that it’s likely tongues were wagging at the BBC about an affair that was growing ever more obvious. On some occasions, Sylvia seemed confident in their relationship; at other times she fretted about the age difference. ‘A great pity about all those years between us!’ she wrote to Joan. ‘But there’s nothing I can do about it, so must make hay while the sun shines.’

Eventually, the sun ceased to shine. Rory was, in that quaint, old-fashioned phrase which, he notes, one contributor to his Wikipedia entry insists on using, ‘born out of wedlock’.

When Sylvia announced her pregnancy, Jim initially took responsibility. ‘I have committed misconduct with Mrs Rich on a number of occasions,’ he informed her lawyer. ‘I am the father of the child she expects.’ He talked of marriage. It soon proved no more than talk. The age gap and the concerns of Jim’s parents that there might be a public scandal contributed to the couple’s estrangement. Before long, Sylvia wrote sadly to her lawyer that, ‘he has said so many things and obviously not meant them’.

By the time Rory was born, it was clear Sylvia would have to raise him alone, with only some financial support from Jim, who went on to become a renowned TV director, responsible for episodes of The Forsyte Saga and the 1970s series The Roads To Freedom.

As a boy, Rory’s connection with his father was limited to one brief visit to a BBC control room, accompanied by his mother. Sylvia blithely ignored the ‘On Air, No Entry’ sign and dragged him in to witness a director sharing a joke with his assistant. ‘That was your father,’ she remarked as they left a few minutes later.

Rory did not properly meet Jim until 1981 when, in his last year at Cambridge, he wrote a letter suggesting they should get to know one another. Over the next few decades he formed a loving relationship with both his father and the half-siblings he discovered he had. Meanwhile, Sylvia continued to work at the BBC until she retired in 1974. Her last years were not happy ones, living alone in a small flat, missing her son and her work at the BBC, which had given her life meaning, structure and excitement.

In their son’s words, his father and mother were ‘two people trapped by circumstances, boxed in by the social mores of the times’. Ruskin Park is Rory Cellan-Jones’s touching tribute to both his parents, but particularly to the mother he came to know more fully from the letters she left behind.

HOPE 

by Niall Harbison (HarperElement £18.99, 320pp)

Niall Harbison had been smoking, drinking, taking drugs and gambling since he was 13, and he finally hit rock bottom in his early 40s. After a six-day bender on booze and Valium, he ended up in intensive care in a Thai hospital, hooked up to drips and monitors.

Despite his addictions, Harbison had been successful in his career. A trained chef, he had worked in restaurants and then on yachts — rock star Bono was particularly partial to his full Irish breakfast.

The yachts were always fully stocked with expensive drinks, and Harbison often drank so much he’d black out. After a few years he gave up cooking and moved into digital marketing, eventually selling his company for several million euros. On a whim, Harbison moved to the island of Koh Samui in Thailand in 2018, taking his beloved rescue dog Snoop with him.

When his girlfriend left him because of his drinking, he went into a downward spiral. After his stint in hospital, he realised that something had to change. ‘I knew that whatever I did next, I had to do with all my heart and soul,’ he said.

His recovery, which took a year, mostly involved long walks in the jungle with Snoop. On his walks he became aware of how many stray dogs were on the island: tens of thousands, he estimates. Many of them were ridden with fleas and worms, infected with ticks, and hobbling from injuries, yet he observed that ‘their spirits were amazingly unbroken, despite their tough lives’.

Harbison started buying dried food for the dogs and, within a week, he was fully committed to feeding them every day. At least half the dogs, he realised, wanted affection as well as food, and ‘after years of feeling I was a waste of space, I guess it was pathetically gratifying’.

While he longed to scoop them up and take them all home, Harbison accepted that the island dogs were content to live on the streets or in the jungle. ‘They’re often happiest in their natural environment,’ he says.

Every day he would find new packs of dogs or litters of puppies, and he had visions of his moped toppling under the weight of gigantic sacks of kibble. On a day when he found 50 puppies, he felt like crying with frustration. Simply feeding the dogs was hopeless, he concluded: his strategy had to include neutering and other health treatments.

Pleasingly, he has been able to call on the skills from his old life. Kibble is expensive and, he thinks, probably tastes like cardboard. He decided to cook the dogs fresh food: a mixture of rice, vegetables and meat. Adding chicken blood, he says with relish, makes it particularly tasty for them and it’s dirt cheap.

‘I had a hunch the ‘customers’ would be a damn sight more appreciative than some of the rich and famous I’d served before.’

He has also put his expertise in social media to good use, raising money from all over the world. Harbison keeps his followers updated on the ‘doggie nirvana’ compound he’s creating, and on dogs such as King Whacker, whose head was split open by an attacker but who made a miraculous recovery, or Britney, used in dog fights and then dumped in the jungle.

He claims to have only been badly bitten once, and he marvels at how sweet and trusting even the most scared, flea-bitten dog is.

Although he still suffers from depression, he has no fear of slipping back into addiction, because he’s simply too busy helping the dogs. There is no time for a girlfriend and besides, he sighs, who would want a bald Irishman who smells permanently of dog food?

Harbison’s aim is to help 10,000 dogs each month, and you wouldn’t bet against him achieving it.

Hope is a lovely book about someone who has been lucky enough to find his true purpose in life. People think he has saved these dogs, he says, but ‘really they saved me’.