End of an Era
Richard Benson on the sad conclusion to his family's farming life

My family came from the West Riding of Yorkshire, and for as long as anyone knew of all the men had worked in farming or in coal-mining. My father and mother had a small, mixed farm and my younger brother and sister and I spent our childhoods working on it with them. Against expectation I turned out to be a clumsy, daydreamy, accident-prone sort of kid, and ended up going into higher education and then journalism while my brother Guy, who is considerably more practical than me, stayed at home working on the farm.

It became difficult to run small family farms at a profit. He and my father struggled and eventually, fifteen years after I left, they had to sell up. I went back to help them organize the animals, tackle and yard for the sale. During that time, and during the time I spent at home in the months afterwards, I started writing down stuff about my family, and about the way the countryside was changing, and about growing up in a house in which it was considered normal to warm sick piglets in the oven and in which we liked to express our love for each other by rowing about my sister's vegetarianism, the miners' strike, and my mum's opposition to fox-hunting. That writing is how The Farm came about.

I ended up writing quite a lot about myself and my father and my brother. To a stranger they would seem like the sort of comedy-stoical northerners you see on television, but because I knew them, because they always seemed so much harder and more practical than me, it was hard to watch Guy and my father deal with losing what had always defined them. Talking to them about it taught me a lot about them, myself, my mother and, in a weird way, about the way that people in Britain have changed in the last fifty or so years.

The Yorkshire countryside can be a confusing place. Just when you're thinking it's still a place where folklore and a sort of one-ness with nature are still everywhere, my brother tells me about farms using satellites to monitor their ploughing, and villages inhabited almost entirely by urban commuters. And then, just as you get the last bit of arcadian idyll out of my head, you meet an old bloke who tells you an old story about wild flowers, and you look to see if he's having you on, and you realize he isn't. The fact is that today, bits of the old oral traditions, superstitions and husbandry somehow live on amid the satellites and high-speed internet links and commuting. You can't really define it, any more than you can define people. You can just try to record the stories about it, and them, which is why I suppose I began writing stuff down in the first place.

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