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”.
