The Shepherd's Life by James Rebanks

was dead. And he glowed in those stories, like some great dead king.

 
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    One school night I was walking with my dad across one of the meadows to check on our ewes before it rained. He stopped suddenly. Told me, “Be quiet.” Then crawled forward for twenty yards, and kind of pounced like a fox, with his cap in his hands. He smiled me across. He’d caught a leveret, a baby hare. It was nestled gently in his flat cap in the grass. One of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. It looked up at us with deep glassy eyes and screamed. We let it go, and it sloped off to get out of sight. Towering dark cotton-wool clouds were gathering all about us, and away to the Pennines thunder and flashes of lightning. We ran back to the Land Rover with big fat raindrops soaking us.

 
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    I dreaded the thought of going to secondary school. Our little village school was full of kids like me, their fathers were friends with my father, and often their grandfathers too, all the way back. There was a scattering of nonfarm kids amongst us, but they played games I had no interest in, like Dungeons and Dragons, and they were fashionable with new trainers and stuff. But secondary school was ten miles away in the local town. It might as well have been another universe.
    I remember asking a kid on the first day what his dad did, and being told, “Fuck off and mind your own business.” I was now in a place with different rules. Where being me was a liability. Being a farm kid here was something that got you hassled, or labelled a yokel. Even getting to school was a pain in the ass. The lads from the village where the bus departed from used to steal your schoolbag and throw your things out of the window. This escalated for weeks until I grabbed the smallest of them and punched him a few times on the floor between two seats. Because of that, some of the others decided I was “all right.” I could pick on other people with them instead of being bullied. One day the school bus had to be stopped because a dart was thrown down the bus and cracked the windscreen. When we got to town, I was liable to get a smack from someone else from town because I was in the bus gang. The whole school had a brutal Lord of the Flies gang thing going on.
    History lessons at school didn’t really go like I hoped they would. We never did any kind of history of us or our landscape. I think the teachers might have been surprised at the idea that people like us had a history of any interest. Instead, we studied the history of Native Americans. This was, I’m now sure, potentially very interesting, but then it left me confused and disappointed; and I’m not sure our history teacher actually knew anything about the subject. We also briefly studied World War II and the Cold War, but in such a tedious way I quickly lost interest. I remember being given a sheet of paper that was a cartoon showing the difference between capitalism, fascism, and communism. It was hard to tell what was wrong with communism or why they might be pointing atomic bombs at our house, or why we had a hand-turned air-raid siren in our back kitchen.
    When I remember the 1980s, I think of how shit that school was. It tested past the breaking point all the well-meaning stuff they tell you when you are young, like “stand up to bullies” or “report them to the teachers.” Brilliant idea—if you want a good hiding from some big lads from uptown. The lads two years above us were mean fuckers. Some were rumoured to be in the National Front and were “known to the police.” They lorded it over us and some of the teachers by intimidation and by ganging up on anyone dumb or brave enough to annoy them. There was no goddamn way I was going to get on the wrong side of them.

 
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    One afternoon when they pushed through the bus queues (just because they could), everyone stepped back to let them through except some kid next to me called John. He