Helen Rebanks grew up on her family’s Lake District farm and married into another just six miles away. For the past 25 years she has juggled getting up at dawn to sort out her four children, birth a sheep, drive a quad bike, cook a nutritious supper and worry about whether the generator will fail and bring the whole enterprise to a grinding halt. It is neither glamorous, nor fun nor even, as she makes clear in this vinegar-sharp memoir, necessarily fulfilling. Mostly it involves shouting at people you love and wondering whether this is the tiredest you’ve ever felt while still being, technically, awake.
This is not All Creatures Great and Small redux. There are no funny stories about putting your hand up a cow’s behind or the time a visiting townie ran screaming from sheep. Rather, Rebanks starts with an epigraph, the famous quotation from Middlemarch, in which George Eliot projects her heroine Dorothea’s life into the future and describes it as being anonymous and uneventful yet consisting of small good deeds that make the world a better place. This is setting the bar high, but Rebanks’s purpose is to endorse Eliot’s elevation of what the Victorian novelist called “the workaday world”. Routine needn’t be a drag if you learn to pay attention. “Life”, Rebanks concludes, is nothing but “a constant remaking and reshaping of ourselves and our days”.
Rebanks’s experience has extra resonance because she is the wife of James Rebanks, whose The Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral, both concerned with farming life on the northern fells, were breakout bestsellers. The Farmer’s Wife is, then, a necessary account of the invisible work that rural women do to keep the agricultural show on the road. As a rebellious, arty teen, Helen Rebanks pitied her grandmother and aunts – frayed, tired women who rarely ventured outside the farmhouse, smelled of carbolic and hardly looked as if they were leading a life of pastoral delight. In particular, her mother appeared to Rebanks’s scathing young eyes as fretful, disorganised and, perhaps in an act of silent rebellion, a terrible cook. The only nice food in the house was the dry-cured bacon and free-range eggs served to the guests in the farmhouse B&B. Everyone else helped themselves to Pop-Tarts and Coco Pops while the real work of the farm ground on.
It is this dishonouring of the everyday that hurts Rebanks most. For that reason, she decided early on to become a very good home cook. This was not so much to mark the distance from her mother but to answer a larger concern about the importance of cooking from scratch using local and seasonal ingredients (even when eating out, Rebanks refuses to let smashed avocado pass her lips). Above all, she wants her readers to understand their ethical burden to pay more for their food in order to ensure a sustainable and safe passage from farm to fork.
To give us an idea of how we should be eating, Rebanks intersperses her memoir with recipes for meals that crop up in the main narrative. It is at this point that the tone starts to wobble. After describing the ghastly, claustrophobic atmosphere at her parents’ house, where she is temporarily staying with her husband and first child, she immediately supplies the recipe for the lasagne (serving 6 to 8) that they eat, in case you feel like recreating what sounds like the supper party from hell.
Nor does it help that Rebanks peppers her text with advice that occasionally falls into the camp of the bleeding obvious. When it comes to steak “choose the best steak you can afford from a farm or shop you trust”. We learn that free-range organic eggs “are a brilliant source of protein and are full of nutrients. They are a meal in themselves.”
Despite these stumbles, Rebanks does an excellent job of writing women’s labour back into the story of the English farm. The result is a tart anti-pastoral that nonetheless reminds readers that satisfaction and joy is to be looked for not in life’s big set-piece moments but in the ordinary obligations of the everyday.
• The Farmer’s Wife: My Life in Days by Helen Rebanks is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
