There are snow warnings pinging on my phone all the way up the M6 on the morning I drive to meet Helen Rebanks in the Lake District, but when I arrive at Pooley Bridge on the edge of Ullswater, the whiteness is confined to the tops of the fells – Glenridding and Arthur’s Pike and Helvellyn beyond – and to their reflections in the steady lake.
Rebanks has known the contours of these hills all her life. She and her husband James have their now famous farm in the next valley. I’ve been reading her book, The Farmer’s Wife, over the previous days, and walking to meet her I’m reminded of a paragraph in which she talks of forcing herself just occasionally to stop her car by the lake and take in this view as a tourist might – rather than as the scene of frantic school runs, or as a never-ending workplace, with all the anxiety and weariness of trying to keep the farm intact for another generation woven in.
