Book Review - by Richard Benson

"Vainly Chasing a Golden Fleece"

There is a moment in David Kennard's second, dour-but-delightful account of his life as a Devon shepherd that will make many readers put the book down and think for a minute.

It comes just over halfway through, when he is recounting his and his wife Debbie's nervous attempt to hold sheepdog displays as a means of supplementing their decreasing income from sheep farming.

Against their modest expectations, a small crowd of locals and tourists turns up. Their interest in David's work with his sheepdogs indicates that this could well be a sideline that saves the farm.

It's heart-warming but it also serves to illustrate a chilling fact of life in the modern British countryside - that a farmer can now make far more money from charging people to watch him working the he can from the actual work itself.

We are told, of course, that this is just the reality of the market and that families like the Kennard's must adapt. But how 'real' is this market?

As this book shows trade is distorted by over-complex regulation, and if Mr Kennard's audience tries to buy lamb like his in the supermarket, they could end up with meat flown halfway round the world, yet flagged a s British and sold for a premium.

The 'reality' is that both farmer and customer are being swindled, and the countryside is losing out as a result.

The Dogs of Windcutter Down is the follow-up to 2004's A Shepherd's Watch, the best selling record of a year in the life of a countryman.

Again we follow life on the farm through the seasons, but this time there is a greater sense of problems affecting the farm, from foot-and-mouth disease to 4x4s and motorbikes tearing up the countryside. The real story now is of the struggle to make a living from the land.

The great thing about Mr Kennard's writing is that he imparts an understanding of these issues with nary a preach or a moan.

Instead he has a lovely way with small detail: in church on Christmas morning, he hears someone say 'Let's hope the New Year brings some better luck and reflects that 'there had probably been many a prayer murmured along those lines this morning'.

It's an image with far more impact than any rant or statistic.

As someone who grew up on a farm and watched my family endure the slow, painful slide out of business, I found this book and its predecessor perhaps the most honest and restrained first hand accounts of modern farming that I know of.

All the memories are here: the awful, limb-numbing slogs in lousy weather, the incredible variety of unpleasant smells, the rural characters who, despite myths about down-to-earth country folk, are as odd as anyone you will find in cities.

The account of the endless struggle against disease is particularly well done. It takes an extraordinary writer to make sheep scab and mastitis interesting but this author has the rare ability to adopt an outsider point of view without being patronising.

"The idea that sheep suffer stress may be difficult for many people to accept - after all, they are for the most part, not the most intelligent and sensitive of creatures - but it is a very real problem," he explains, sounding like a sort of bedside vet, as he tries to rid his sheep of the pasturella bug.

Set against all this, though, is the relationship with his family and his dogs - which are more or less the same thing really. I always thought that living on a farm with animals is less about being in harmony with nature than it is about trying to stop yourself being submerged in its unpredictable, muddy, feathery, noisy, multi-legged chaos, and I now know I was not alone in that.

However, amid all this, the warm togetherness of the family radiates off the page like heat from an Aga, and the detailed descriptions of his work with the dogs pushes this beyond straightforward memoir.

The writing is more ambitious than Kennard's first book, and some of the passages reminded me of The Goshawk, T.H.White's wonderful, classic account of training a bird of prey.

It seems churlish to criticise a book which succeeds so well in what it sets out to do, but I found myself wanting to know a bit more about David Kennard and his wife Debbie. What really drives them? How do you make such a partnership work? How did they get to where they are now?

I suspect that Mr K is too modest to assume that we would like to know him better, but perhaps in the future we will. I'm sure I am not alone in eagerly anticipating the follow-up.

THE FARM by Richard Benson is published by Hamish Hamilton at £15.99