Farmer’s wife Helen Rebanks: ‘There was a fire in me about speaking up for the women who hold things together’

The wife of bestselling author James has written a book of her own shining a light on small-scale farming. She talks about the pressures of Brexit and preposterous trade deals

Helen Rebanks is driving towards her farm, which is between Keswick and Penrith in the Lake District but, before we get there, she pulls up unexpectedly by the side of the road. She gets out of the car and leads the way into a field where her husband, James Rebanks, bestselling author of The Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral – books about life as a traditional farmer – is working with a herd of black-and-white cattle. He is about to load his animals – belted galloways – into a trailer and move them on to pastures new.

On the ground are leftovers from yesterday’s sheep-shearing (300 done, 200 to go). Helen informs me that these are “daggings”, which are good to put on hedges and mulch saplings as they help retain moisture in the ground. It is not the most convenient moment for introductions but James’s face breaks into the widest of smiles when, over the fence, I tell him how much I loved his wife’s new book.

Not long ago, he celebrated it himself on Twitter: “Had some fancy words prepared for this moment… but have binned them. Love this woman so much. Now is her time. She’s a wonderful writer. And this is a special book. Bursting with pride, much more so than for anything I’ve ever done.”

He is right: The Farmer’s Wife is a special book. It stands up for itself and it is a treat in its own right. Before coming to visit the Rebankses, I spotted an acknowledgment at the back of English Pastoral in which James thanks his wife for keeping the show on the road, doing, “all the mundane stuff that no one celebrates”. Her book includes that mundane stuff, and what is against-the-odds wonderful is that she makes the ordinary sympathetic, relatable and even gripping.

Helen has the good sense to leave humble details humble, without trying to big them up, overcomplicate or gild them. The Farmer’s Wife doubles as an inviting, wholesome and mainly traditional recipe book. As we park at the farmhouse – a converted barn – I start to brag about having had a go at making her crumbly date slice. It was a success, I tell her, with the sweet smell of dates filling my kitchen like a good review.

We pull up at the barn: a beautiful, unpretentious, south-facing building in grey stone. It has a drystone wall around it, a wide patio surrounded by groups of goldenrod in raised beds. She writes about it in her book. It was originally her husband’s dream to convert the agricultural building on their land but she was not keen at first, because it would be an upheaval having to leave the village house upon which she had lavished so much home-making care. But I can see how understandably pleased she is with it now.

Helen leads the way into her spacious kitchen with pale beams above, sunflowers in a vase and an Aga upon which she cooks: Granny Pyper’s marmalade, roast beef and yorkshire pudding and, a favourite of her late father-in-law’s, coffee cake. “I was determined to have a farmhouse kitchen like the one I’d grown up in if I was going to live up the side of a fell,” she says. “And I was going to make it as warm and inviting and as pretty as it could be.”

On the strength of reading the book, I already feel that Helen is a friend and I have to keep reminding myself I’m meeting her for the first time. She is 45, small, and is wearing a blue blouse, jeans and brown boots with elasticated olive sides. Yet one can imagine how she would have looked as a schoolgirl. She has an animated face, with a redhead’s enviably pearly complexion. Her hair is tied back in a ponytail. She is, I already know, a doer and a dynamo, as well as being a natural writer (and an artist – she went to art college). She sits opposite me now at the kitchen table, one hand warming itself around a cup of tea as I wonder aloud whether part of her reason for writing the book was to protest against the unfairly low status of farmers’ wives.

“Absolutely, there was a fire in me about speaking up for this way of life, for small, traditional farming and for the women who hold things together – and for their unseen, unpaid work,” she says. Helen has shown the book to some of her friends and there has been a “powerful” reaction of recognition and even tears – hers and theirs – because their story is almost never written about. Nowadays, she agrees it can seem bordering on radical to choose full-time motherhood; she recognises that it is “almost impossible financially for many couples”. But she says that it is not her intention to promote any gender-based division of labour.

“Gender roles can trap you,” she says, adding that what counts is using whatever skills you happen to possess. She has baking in her genes (her maternal grandfather was a baker) and in her youth, while James was working towards getting a double first in history from Oxford, she set about baking in their basement flat in the north of the city and made a success of selling her cakes to a local coffee shop. “There are a lot of skills to managing a home and the load of it all, and I’ve honed my skills over the years,” she says. “James is good at what he does outside on the farm with livestock and has worked with sheep and cattle his whole life.”

They have four children: Molly, 17, Bea, 15, Isaac, 11, and Tom, five, and it is important to her to bring them all up to recognise that “indoor work is as important as outside work and to respect the domestic life”. She has her boys “emptying the dishwasher, hoovering, putting the washing in, picking wet towels off the floor. It’s a work in progress.”

Hats off to her, I think, but fail to ask her how she does it. Her girls, equally, are “incredibly capable working outside on the farm as well as doing their own washing, or cooking something to contribute to the meal”. The younger daughter, Bea, is skilled at lambing and first tried her hand at it aged six. She seems likely to become a farmer herself.

Helen grew up on a farm but as a teenager had no ambition to become a farmer’s wife. Falling in love with James changed that and she emphasises that her way of life has been chosen. “I’ve never felt that, as a mum, I was demeaned in any way – it is a powerful role.” In addition to their children, the couple have six sheepdogs, two ponies, 20 chickens, 500 sheep and 50 cattle. Throughout our conversation, 11-year-old Flossie, a retired sheepdog, puts her head on my knee and intermittently looks up with an enquiring eye as if to ask: would you like to interview me instead?

When I ask which of her charges is most challenging, she answers unhesitatingly: “The children. It is the emotional, invisible labour with children that is the most challenging, the worry you have even when they’re fine, you always have them in your mind.” She continues: “You question yourself all the time. There’s no appraisal at the end of the year – thank goodness. You have to hold faith that you’re looking after these children in the best way you can, helping them to learn to be kind and open. The thing is to constantly question: what am I doing? Could I have done that better?” And, she adds, “If things go wrong, I’ve learned, over the past few years, that repairing is huge. Being able to say, ‘I didn’t do that right.’ Or, ‘That wasn’t great, was it? Let’s talk about that.’”

She shows that real confidence is about being able to admit to the lack of it. Identifying missteps is part of what makes her strong and she writes as much about the hard and floundering periods of her life alongside the good times. Life was especially tough after their first baby was born. Does she now think she was suffering from postnatal depression? “Acutely – although it wasn’t diagnosed,” she says. Reading about this time, I tell her, I found myself wondering whether part of the problem might have been that she sets her domestic standards too high? She agrees but reckons that, partly because of the visitor-free pandemic, she is more relaxed these days. “In the past, I’d have tidied all this before you came,” – she gestures at a corner crowded with wellington boots – “but I’ve come to realise people don’t see my clutter as I see it.” A little later James comes in from the fields and admits, over a lunch of bruschetta and tomato, which he prepares, to having felt rueful when reading in her book about their hardest times together.

Helen’s book reminds us that dreams need to be striven for. Everything about making their barn happen has been a challenge to the Rebankses and it was, they now believe, Helen’s spontaneously eloquent speech to the planning board that eventually got them the go-ahead.

The site itself was a mess: “We had to bring in the tractor and muck it out as a sheep had lambed in it. It was surrounded by mud and fields.” For 18 months, they lived in a caravan with three children and a baby. In the winter, and especially when the “beast from the east” struck, this was “tricky”. Did they ever despair of the work being finished? “Absolutely. We told the builders to stop at one point because we had run out of money.” It was only when the contract for The Shepherd’s Life came through that they realised the work could go ahead: “We were pinching ourselves.”

Helen tells me she wants to present farming as a positive choice (although she does not make the mistake of trying to sell it as an idyll). But I am still not sure how she will react to my next question – about the rising suicide rate among Cumbrian farmers. She has been talking haltingly about herself and I’m unprepared for the firecracker fluency of her reply. “Farming is going through a huge challenge with the government, post-Brexit,” she says. “Since the 1950s, farmers have been encouraged to produce, produce, produce and have been supported. But then came the catastrophe of foot-and-mouth [disease] and there was rebuilding for some; others went out of business. Farmers have relied on EU subsidies which, however imperfect, were at least a system – basic payment for the land you farmed. But that has been incrementally reduced year on year, so farmers’ income keeps coming further down.”

She is almost spitting over the government’s trade deals with other countries. “The most recent is Mexico, for eggs – from battery hens. Our egg producers are going out of business because feed costs, heating, lighting, energy costs – everything to do with production – has gone up. There are fewer British eggs because supermarkets won’t pay the true cost of production. How are farmers supposed to make a living?”

As I listen to her, it is clear how close to her heart all the detail of this is. She explains that farmers have overdrafts for machinery and fertiliser (which has gone up from £300 to £700 per tonne) and clarifies that their situation is different only because their regenerative farming methods save money. They do not need to buy in fertiliser because they work with “the ecology of the sun”.

But such methods are not practical for everyone. “A lot of farmers are trapped in awful circumstances with huge debt and not enough staff,” she says. “It is no surprise the suicide rate is at an all-time high.” She recognises that we are in an economic climate with high mortgages and fuel bills where there are people who cannot afford food, but resents the idea that “it’s on farmers to make that work. The government’s importing of food is a travesty, an exploitation of our environmental footprint on to acres somewhere else in the world.”

It makes her furious and she is not done: “Not only are farmers expected to work long hours at a loss, they’re also supposed to find secondary sources of income – side hustles – to prop themselves up. And this is food production we’re talking about, essential to human life. We’re expected to be environmentally protective stewards of the land but we’re not being paid properly to do that.”

At the end of the visit, we go for a 30-minute walk uphill and across dale. The Rebankses farm 280 hectares (700 acres) – they own 80, rent 200. They host farming conferences and win a pleasing number of farmers around to their way of doing things. At my request, I am given a short lesson about their methods in a field in which sheep were nibbling yesterday. I learn how they have replanted hedgerows and saplings: hazel, alder, oak, blackthorn. I learn how they move their animals, every three days, into new fields so the grass is never bitten down to the point where its roots are damaged. It is a way of “looking after soil and stock simultaneously”.

Helen holds up a blade of grass, “its own solar panel”. She does not have much leisure time in which to stand and stare but the beauty of this landscape enfolds her and she walks her dogs in it every day. The goodness of such a life, if you are able to lead it, is clear: the unwritten proof is all around us and in the grey-green curve of the hills, even on this overcast day. Helen confirms it with her every word: “It wasn’t until I started writing that I knew what was there,” she says.

• The Farmer’s Wife by Helen Rebanks will be published on 31 August by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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