Elegy for a ‘Separate Civilization’

The valley where I live is just inside the borders of the Lake District National Park, in the county of Cumbria in northwestern England. The heavily touristed destinations of Grasmere and Windermere are twenty miles to the south, but our valley lies astride the popular “coast-to-coast” trail, and in local pubs walkers and cyclists may be found drinking pints of Wainwright Amber Ale, named for Alfred Wainwright, a celebrated author and rambler who from the 1950s through the 1980s eulogized the Cumbrian fells, or uplands, in guidebooks that remain in print today.

The valley contains a lot fewer sheep than it did ten years ago, as the children of farmers who have died or retired give up uneconomic tenancies that have been in the same families for generations. The deer have been culled, and the formerly overgrazed fellside is darkening with trees, heather, and other vegetation in line with the government’s policy of restoring Britain’s depleted biodiversity, while rivers that were straightened in the last century have had their curves reintroduced under flood-mitigation and rewilding schemes. The local hunt is much diminished, the pursuit of live foxes having been outlawed in 2004 (though following an artificial scent remains legal), while cottages of the kind inhabited by Michael, the thrifty and resilient Cumbrian shepherd in Wordsworth’s poem of the same name, “stout of heart, and strong of limb,” and his industrious wife, Isabel, have been stripped of their cavernous hearths and hallowed salt cupboards and equipped with the underfloor heating, wine coolers, and Monopoly sets that are indispensable features of the holiday rental property.

This version of the Lake District, rich, environmentally progressive, and increasingly uninterested in farming, is pointedly rejected by Scott Preston in The Borrowed Hills. Steve Elliman and William Herne, the Cumbrian farmers who form two points of the love triangle that is at the center of the novel, are sheep rustlers, drug dealers, bare-knuckle boxers, and murderers. They aren’t very good at these activities. William goes to jail for killing a man, and Steve takes a loaded rifle into the toilet for his own protection. They also show an affinity for the land that makes them recognizable as the distant progeny of Michael and Isabel. They are “bearers of a separate civilization,” as the social scientist Patrick Joyce has put it, that of the peasant farmer, with its own codes and language, honor and capacity to resist. The Borrowed Hills is its strangled, savagely beautiful swan song.

Neighbors separated by four miles of fell and oceans of self-containment, taciturnity, and pride, Steve and William are brought together by a real-life farming catastrophe that has been largely forgotten by Britain’s overwhelmingly urban society. In February 2001 it was found that dozens of farms were infected with highly contagious foot-and-mouth disease, and a worldwide ban was imposed on British meat and livestock exports. Rather than adopt a policy of vaccination, as many experts advised, the government of Tony Blair used the army to slaughter more than six million animals; images of pyres of burning livestock and burial pits overflowing with carcasses (half a million at a disused airfield in Cumbria, the worst-affected county) were seen around the world. When the prime minister visited Cumbria at the peak of the crisis, the crowd that met him with yells of “The only good Blair is a dead one!” included two tearful seven-year-olds whose pet lambs had been slaughtered earlier that day.

The moment when many rural Britons, particularly those in the economically deprived north, lost faith in their mostly southern, metropolitan, agriculturally illiterate political leaders is an inspired choice of backdrop for a novel in which two farmers, in the words of Steve, Preston’s narrator, “get back at them.” Exactly who “they” are is never made clear: the government, the city, the south, tourists, or perhaps—bearing in mind their troubled, introverted, and self-defeating masculinity—William and Steve themselves.

Early in the crisis William prevents the army from entering his farm, Caldhithe, leaning on his rifle and insisting that he will cull and dispose of his own sick animals. Steve, whose father’s sheep have already been slaughtered, arrives to find “soldiers…young lads with fresh-shaved heads and polished shitkickers, sat up on bonnets looking wormy, passing about fags and sausage rolls.” Negotiating his way past a hulking, red-haired local police inspector known as Simply Red, who is directing operations, and leaping the farm gate with his only surviving lamb, Rusty, hidden under his coat, Steve is intercepted by William’s teenage son, Danny, who hands him a walkie-talkie. Over a crackly line William tells Steve of his intention to disobey the law and save those of his sheep—ninety, as it turns out—that are symptom-free:

“We’re sending the strong ones out to the fells…. Then we’ll take care of the rest ourselves.”

“Not much good hiding them if you’re telling people you’re doing it.”

“Not people, just you.”

“What you telling me for?”

“Because you’re going to help.”

With that, Steve tells us, “I started following William Herne,” and there is indeed something sheeplike in his stolid but refractory devotion to his leader, who is introduced to us with a “handprint of grime across his balding head” and whose authority is such that his dogs “shite on command.”

A demilitarized society offers few opportunities for male bonding on the traditional model. Burning dead sheep is one. “We built a pyre,” Steve relates, but the carcasses refuse to burn:

We found metal poles, two giant pokers, and beat their backs, spanking them like rugs. “Get on. Get on.” Soaked the next lot with paraffin, with diesel oil, now that really got them going, went in heavy, squirting petrol at the coldly burning base, flames shot twice as high and took our eyebrows up to heaven. I waited as it roared and popped, rip rap, rip rap, shifted with loud bangs as if each spent bullet had come alive. We pulled rags across our mouths to taste the air less badly. Took swigs of water from melted soup flasks and spat on our thumbs and hands, tried rubbing the wetness back inside our eyes. Tried batting at the floating ash, stop it landing on our sleeves—and it landed all the same, turned to grease about our necks so we grew a second skin. I’d take dizzy, swimming in my head, both hands on my poker to keep standing, and William would slam against me, working side by side, my shoulder held up, no place to fall, and I’d thank him for the break. Sundown turned the far horizon red and with the smoke spilling up it looked as if we’d set all Cumbria afire.

For three days they feed the conflagration, and afterward Simply Red visits Caldhithe to humiliate the farmer who defied him. In a scene that captures their mutual hatred, William enters the farmhouse to find the policeman occupying his chair and holding the cup of tea that Helen, his wife, has made him. Simply Red tells him that ninety sheep have been found in the upper fells. “Some idiot must’ve left them out and forgotten,” he goes on archly. “Can you imagine?” “Never been one for forgetfulness,” William deadpans, but Simply Red won’t be deflected:

I was riding in a helicopter, don’t get to do that much. Was over that spot, the flat one with the rocks, when we saw these sheep. Beautiful animals. Could see that from the air. Had to keep the chopper nearly flush to the ground as we shot them.

In the real-life disaster of foot-and-mouth, the government paid generous compensation to farmers whose animals had been culled, a policy that, in the words of a highly critical report on the official response by the satirical magazine Private Eye, “played a significant part in buying the willingness of many farmers to see their animals slaughtered.” William is not such a farmer. “I’m not interested in any of your bloody schemes,” he says when Simply Red goes on to press a thick stack of application forms to his chest. And he “stepped away, held the stack in two fists like a chicken’s neck and tore it clean in half.”

The libertarianism that Preston holds to the light in The Borrowed Hills defies political categorization. There is no alliance between a gun lobby and evangelical Christianity as there is in the United States. Steve and William carry guns not out of conviction but because their criminal activities require it. The closest Steve comes to organized religion is when, after a period away from Cumbria driving long-distance trucks, he returns to bury his father at a Methodist chapel that “doesn’t hold service save Christmas and Easter and no one turns up when it does.” That same night Steve moves into Caldhithe, and William gives him use of an unsalubrious little house that is henceforth referred to as “Yow House,” with typical Cumbrian adornment.

Steve is contemptuous of tradition, which he defines as “things there’s no good reason to be doing.” The history that matters to him is the line of a dry stone wall five hundred years old. It’s the instinct of a flock of sheep to graze the same unenclosed hills and never stray from them, knowledge that is passed from ewe to lamb, generation after generation. The severance of this line of transmission makes foot-and-mouth a particularly brutal caesura, which William and Steve defy through the latter’s rescue of Rusty, the one surviving lamb, from which they go on to breed a new flock, saving centuries of carefully blended genetic traits.

“Each day I’d wake in the dark,” Steve tells us,

leave the house in the dark, and go join William by his flock in the dark. Only thing I could see was my breath, and the air was sweet enough and thick enough that it was breakfast all on its own…. In fair weather, we’d give them turns on good feeding grounds, finishing lambs on field beans and radish, finishing mutton on cocksfoot and mustard, and we’d drive them with dogs and sticks, a scabby parade of ewes over the grasslands and up the fells to rough graze. Flock would run through [the local village of] Bewrith as we yelled at offcomers sat outside the pubs to pick their feet up, and we’d chase enough sheep through to put the whole village to sleep. Most days Danny would pitch in, and we’d go at it like the land itself was telling us what it needed.

Steve is the kind of narrator who lets us know more than he intends to. He mentions that he can only read while wearing glasses, which gives us pause to think that perhaps he doesn’t do much reading. In passing we learn that he was once a wrestling champion, but only in the course of events do we appreciate how strong he is and how lethal he can be when roused. That Helen is the love of his life is clear from the gangling, innocent way he introduces her:

Knew her from our school days and she was good to me when she’d no reason to be. She was better-looking than you’d guess. Was big in the way only a woman can be—five foot four for standing but could blank your thoughts like a field of sun when you close your eyes.

When someone says something smutty about the two of them, “I got up and tipped the side table without meaning to.”

Preston gives Steve a unique cast of mind and some wonderful lines. A poacher leaves “a smile of bones.” A reluctant farmhand tries “haggling with his thoughts.” Another does his best to “run off without picking up his legs.” Of William’s son, Danny, a promising young delinquent, he observes that “if he went to school, it must’ve been in secret.” When he and William are trying to flush out a fox that has been savaging the stock of a neighboring chicken farmer, “William gripped a whistle with his teeth and blew out a fox call, put some pain into it, squeezed his mouth to tighten up the pitch to a lass’s screaming.”

Steve is the more committed farmer, William the more committed criminal—his refusal to accept government compensation has left him hard up. Steve’s experience as a driver qualifies him for inclusion in a scheme to steal a flock of rare-breed sheep in the dead of night from a farm down south. The heist does not go according to plan. A neighbor wakes up, and when Steve tries to run out on his fellow gang members, one of them, George, a man so big that “if you found his skeleton in the woods, you’d think it the leftovers of a dead shire horse,” throws him at a car, smashing his arm. The decrepit getaway truck breaks down as they enter the fells, and Steve and William are obliged to unload five hundred sheep and drive them home across thirty miles of vertiginous and wind-blasted crags, shelves, and corries. (Imagine John Wayne driving cattle out of Texas, only without the horses, the six-shooters, and the sun.) It’s night again by the time the two men stagger into Caldhithe, but to Steve it’s worth it when Helen “held me…and I could feel her crying on my neck, started to squeeze me as she shook with tears…. ‘Thank you for bringing him back, Steve.’”

“Our Helen,” Steve calls her, as if they’re related. If only there were more of her in The Borrowed Hills, for she is the only character with a claim to competence. The daughter of guesthouse owners and the proprietor of a shop in Bewrith selling souvenirs (Lake District place mats, Kendal mint cake, and, from my experience of such places, Wainwright guidebooks), she took it upon herself to care for Steve’s dying father while his son was away driving trucks, not that Steve had any idea at the time. When he moves into Caldhithe, she reminds him that he is in her debt, gives him a ladder, and tells him to clear a blocked gutter. “It’s missing half its rungs,” he complains. “You’ll get up it twice as quick, then.”

When they were fifteen or so they played truant together, and she led him into the fells where they swam in a tarn, but when he wanted to kiss her he got confused and wept instead. Even now he is disconcerted by her sexual power, telling her, “I think you’re the sort of lass who’d wear a short skirt around a fella and tell herself it’s because it’s hot out.” “I’m the sort of lass,” she shoots back, “who doesn’t let good weather go to waste.”

She’s the path that leads away from the angry, despairing life of the fells, but predictably it’s when Steve sees her on the farm that he loves her most:

All the ground she walked on seemed firm. Hidden muscles in her arms. Freckles woke up on her face. You’d point to any fell and she knew its name. Told the clouds when to burst and saw gales on the backs of sparrows and read every shade of the sun.

Years earlier when she was training to be a nurse in Manchester, miserable and lonely, she ran into William, a face from home. “He was in the city to meet some dog breeder,” she recalls, “and all he had to do was say hello and I remembered what it felt like for someone to be friendly again. He gave me a lift back here the next day.” But William is pessimistic and controlling, and it seems likely that she only stays with him because she feels a responsibility toward him and Danny. Identifying Steve as someone who may keep her men out of trouble, she comes knocking at Yow House bearing homemade food and all her powers of persuasion whenever he expresses reluctance to join William’s increasingly lunatic criminal enterprises.

Even when William goes to jail and Steve and Helen become lovers on an off-the-books basis—every transaction in The Borrowed Hills is off the books—she warns him not to get used to her. And one can understand why. A grown man who asserts that “money’s only good as what it buys you and I could get all that for free on William’s farm” is hardly a realistic long-term prospect.

Triangles are about power, and despite the gender imbalance of the male-dominated fells, it is Helen who enjoys an advantage over the men because she alone has purchase on the post-agricultural world. At some point in William’s descent into criminality the marital relationship breaks down, while Steve’s feelings for her never mature beyond the puppy love she stirred in him as a teenager. What makes the triangle rare and surprising is that it is not destroyed by jealousy but dwindles and dissolves amid rueful feelings of love even before William takes his own path out.

Yow House, never desirable, becomes a positive menace as William’s criminal activities proliferate and his new associates take it over. At various times it boasts huge quantities of drugs, fighting dogs, an enormous disemboweled salmon (poached, but not that kind of poached), a pet fox, and a girl named Alice who was “sat against the wall, eyes closed, hair wet with spew.” Steve has the satisfaction of defeating George, the giant who injured his arm, in a bare-knuckle boxing match. “Remind me to never piss you off,” Danny tells him when it’s all over, and “two grazing teeth dropped out my gob and sat there on my lap.”

In the latter stages of The Borrowed Hills extended spasms of violence and a sequence involving a cannabis farm owned by the so-called Brown Hills Gang disturb the delicate equipoise among Preston’s three main characters. The passages that stay with us are those that expose the human qualities of frailty and compassion, hitherto hidden or distorted, under the pure and clarified light of the natural world.

“All you’ve got in life is what you can look at,” Steve tells us. “Best make sure it’s not a pavement full of dog shit or the wrong side of a supermarket checkout.” To be a hill farmer in Britain is to pursue a way of life that has been condemned to a slow death by the indifference of the government, increasingly erratic weather, and environmentalists who maintain that the hills should be liberated from sheep and used to sequester carbon. The loneliness of the hill farmer is a rare loneliness. But there’s a reason why 18 million tourists visit the Lake District each year and why Wainwright guidebooks keep selling. When Helen was studying in Manchester, she tells Steve,

I’d step out the house I was sharing, and I couldn’t ever stop. Walk down one street and it would turn into another one with more of the same, the same shops, same people, and it felt like they were always pushing me just to have a little bit of space for themselves. And there’s nowhere to sit. For miles. I don’t know when they stop. Here, well, there’s always the ground for you to sit on.