How a flock of sheep healed my broken heart
THE SHEEP STELL by Janet White (Little Brown £16.99)
ON A hot, clear morning on the remote New Zealand island of Aroa, 25-year-old Janet White nipped out to milk the cow and returned to find a thwarted suitor waving a rifle.
A tough and experienced farm manager with her own flock of 500 sheep, White was not prone to physical fear.
But Jack — a charismatic fellow farmer who had stolen a boat to pursue her to the island — was in a ‘frantic, fiendish mood’. He said he could not live without her.
‘I suggested that he put away the gun and talk. He refused. There was only one thing he wanted and I could not give it.’
Moments later, she was running for a boat, but she heard the splash of Jack’s feet behind her and something cracked down on her head with terrifying force.
‘As I fell, he hit me again and again, until the butt of the rifle broke off and dropped on to the pebbles beside my face.
‘I could feel the blood running down my neck and around my ears. There was a long, taut silence, and I tried not to move so he would think I was dead.
‘Then I heard the crunching of shingle as he walked away.’
Such a crisply relayed account of shocking violence on a sunbaked foreign shore in the Fifties is not what you expect from the pastel- covered memoir of an octogenarian English shepherd.
But Janet White has never delivered the expected.
Born into an urban, intellectual family, White’s parents expected her to follow her older sister to Cambridge. But she was smitten by the countryside while evacuated to the Cotswolds during the war and left school at 16 to work on a Chilterns farm.
If her parents thought the hard labour would cure her romantic ideas, they were wrong. ‘No one could have been more thrilled to become a dairy maid,’ she sighs. ‘I loved the smell of the cows and hay and malty brewer’s grains; the clang of buckets and drum- ming milk and whistling men.’ Graduating from agricultural college at the end of the Forties, White took her first job as a shepherd at a farm on the Scottish side of the Cheviot Hills.
She gives an intense insight into the exhilarations of rural solitude and the invigorations of herding, shearing and lambing through the night. The deaths of culled foxes, errant sheepdogs and abandoned lambs hit her hard.
As a woman in a maledominated profession, she was determined to match the men task for task. Only once did her ‘female weakness’ prevent White from matching the men’s work.
AT
THAT time, young male sheep (wethers) were castrated ‘by a shepherd slicing off the tip of the scrotum with a knife and drawing out the testicles with his teeth. These were dropped in a bucket and taken home at the end of the day, along with the fattest lambs’ tails, to be cooked for supper.
‘Our operator suggested that my strong young teeth would do a more efficient job. I feared I should be sick and insisted I was only fit for holding lambs.’ More ‘frightening’ was the effect she had on the local men. One threatened to shoot himself if she wouldn’t marry him. Another sent her calendars of Scottish scenery for the next 25 years.
But White had fallen in love with a fellow student at college who, sadly, married someone else.
To start afresh, she sailed to the other side of the world to find her island paradise — only to fall victim to the relentless Jack.
After he left her for dead, White made it back to the mainland and finally came home.
Back in England, she finally found the man of her dreams: a poetry-loving civil servant called Jim who, in 1957, renounced suburbia to buy a farm with her in the Sussex Weald.
The couple had four children and their son Robert eventually took over the running of the farm. Jim died in 1998 and, in 2004, White made a trip back to Aroa to celebrate her 75th birthday.
She was delighted to find it little changed: ‘A treasure trove of shells, oysters on rocks, giant flax bushes, shaggy cabbage trees, the haunting song of the grey warbler, the switchback path past the wild bees’ nest to the sand dunes, seabirds calling, vistas of green islets and the sea in all its moods and vivid colours encircling me.’