On the opening page of The Farmer’s Wife, Helen Rebanks quotes George Eliot’s famous passage from Middlemarch. Dorothea adds to ‘the growing good of the world’ through her ‘unhistoric acts’ and by having ‘lived faithfully a hidden life’. With this enchanting, funny, fearless book, Rebanks brings her own ‘unhistoric’ life unequivocally out of hiding.
The blood, mud, slog, exhaustion, bureaucracy and financial angst of farming are ever-present
She lives with her husband James (a bestselling writer) and their four children in the Lake District on their farm shared with six sheepdogs, two ponies, 20 chickens, 500 sheep and 50 cattle. Writing in the present tense, she describes the rhythm of her day, from the quietness of the slow-awakening farmhouse at dawn through the increasing clamour of the daylight hours until the peace of night falls.
Being also the daughter and granddaughter of farmers, she remembers the old agricultural world and the rituals of her childhood, including making marmalade while hoisted high on a chair in her mother’s kitchen. Just as the seeds, pith, rind, juice and flesh of each orange play an essential role in the final product, so there is not a superfluous word in Rebanks’s narrative. When her mother’s attention shifts to the B&B guests who supplement a farmer’s income, the teenage Helen becomes responsible for providing the family meals. This undertaking to feed and nurture those she loves is a compulsion from which she never deviates, evident in the many delectable recipes which join the atmospheric drawings by Eleanor Crow in the book.
After Helen registers at art college, a holiday in Florence with her new farmer boyfriend backfires. Her ‘idea of paradise’ is eating market-fresh tomatoes beneath the vines, but James misses being away from the green fields of home.
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