the times | Saturday April 9 2022 saturday review 13
fancied the wethers, the castrated males”.
The book is structured around the
farming year, starting with lambing time in
the spring, and the writing is vivid, lyrical
and seductive. “A yolky alien pod is
emitted. I rub it, blow up its nose. Is the
lamb alive? A tremble in its chest. I put the
lamb to the mother’s head. In her too
the will to live comes. Ewe and lamb
convulse alike, electric-shock-started...
Within minutes my little lamb is up on its
preposterous stilts.”
In the summer we come to clipping
time, and this was where I realised that the
author is no hobby farmer. He has about
90 sheep, I reckon, going by an endearing
account he gives of clipping them. To clip
sheep, you set them on their rumps, keep-
ing them off balance, but it is backbreaking
work. After clipping 30 of his flock, Lewis-
Stempel was shattered, so much so that he
parked his tractor on the track so that no
visitors would surprise him and then
sheared the rest of the flock with the sheep
standing up, a halter around their heads,
tied to a gate. “I sit down to do it. But I can
never tell anyone about it because it is
seriously uncool.”
We then come to autumn and tupping
time. His favourite tup (ram) was called
Robin Hood. “I adored him for his cuddli-
ness. I admired his presence, eccentricity
and sheer interest in the world around
him. He bumbled through life, bumbled
through sex. He would climb on the ewe’s
rear bemusedly, before falling off. He took
at least three mounts before ejaculation,
the ewe beneath stoical.” The author
cried the day Robin Hood died of anaemia.
He tackles some of the false stereotypes
about sheep, such as them being cowardly
(lambs to the slaughter and so on). And, it’s
true, they are brave. Ewes — “yows” as we
called them in Wensleydale, where I
farmed as a young man before becoming a
gentleman hack — stamp their feet and
stand their ground when you go near theirWhy does Scott presume Thorpe will
pay for his welfare stamps? If the lack of
national insurance cards is such a disaster
for him, why does he not apply to the
authorities for replacements? How, during
his long spells of idleness, does he earn his
money? One moment he is so poor that he
is pinching stale bread from people’s duck
houses. The next he is receiving private
care at the London Clinic or dandying
about in shoes from Sid’s of Sloane Street
or cavorting in black tie at Bayreuth with
some new lover. Of these, male and fe-
male, there are several, including Francis
Bacon and a former lord mayor of Dublin.
Scott buys a house in Wales and then
“gives it up”. Just like that. The story has
more holes than a string vest. And yet it is
strangely gripping, particularly when we
reach the alleged plot to bump him off and
thus silence an embarrasment to the Lib-
eral leader. The hitman, Andrew “Gino”
Newton, is a moustachioed, pipe-sucking
villain in sunglasses, worthy of ’Allo ’Allo!.
On hearing that Scott is in Barnstaple, he
goes initially to Dunstable.
The book becomes a bloodbath of repu-
tations. Three Liberal grandees, David
Steel, Emlyn Hooson and Lord Byers, ac-
cuse Scott of being a common blackmailer.
They turn white when Scott shows them
documentary evidence to support his
claims about Thorpe. Among the editors
who try to stitch up Scott is, oops, the saint-
ed Harold Evans of The Sunday Times. The
prosecution lawyer at the Thorpe trial,
Peter Taylor, is written off as little more
than an incurious stooge. He later rose to
become a generally admired lord chief
justice. Nor do the book’s editors quite es-
cape the curse of Norman. Among several
errors is a claim on page 305, just as Scott
is accusing others of inaccuracies, that
Auberon Waugh once edited Private Eye.
This book will no doubt make money
but Scott is a disaster magnet, a forcefield
of ill fate. Alongside Listowel the horse
and Rinka the doomed Great Dane, a tor-
toise is dropped on the floor and has
its shell broken after young Norman
catches his mother in flagrante with a tele-
phone engineer. Mrs Tish the Jack Russell
is executed for killing some ducks. Ac-
quaintances lose their businesses and their
marbles. Scott is one of those scroungers
who keep being sick in guest rooms.
Each time another kindly soul offers
him shelter, you want to shout: “Don’t have
anything to do with him!” A Welsh widow
who shows him affection is so driven
off the rails that she commits suicide.
Scott leads police to the cottage where her
body has been rotting for two hot weeks.
The description of her bedroom windows
becoming black with flies is a rare moment
when bleak horror cuts through the
nostalgic japery.
Did Thorpe and Scott have a love affair?
On Thorpe’s part, at least, the term
seems unsatisfactory. “Arrangement”
would be more accurate. Thorpe found
physical release but showed almost no
affection. It ended for good in early 1975
after Scott, drink having been taken, drove
to see Thorpe in Devon and contrived
to bash into the house. Thorpe’s wife
refused to let him through the front door
and Scott heard her shouting to her hus-
band: “It’s your nut!” Scott would later
conclude that Thorpe was behind the
attempted murder. He writes: “I failed to
bring Jeremy to justice.”
Flock and awe: why
sheep deserve respect
I
groaned inwardly when, a few pages
into this book, I read that the author
named his sheep. Silly names such as
Maid Marian, Shortbread and Tiddly-
wink. No proper farmer would do that.
We were, it seemed, in the realm of the
dreaded “hobby farmer”.
I made a mental note not to pass The
Sheep’s Tale on to my father, a retired sheep
and dairy farmer. The last time I did that,
for a book called The Secret Life of Cows by
Rosamund Young, he dismissed it with the
words: “It was all a bit daft.” The author
had named her cows.
If you can name your cows, or sheep, I
should explain, it means you have only a
handful to look after. And your anthropo-
morphic sentimentality will only make the
business of slaughtering the animals in
due season that much harder.
You don’t have to slaughter them, of
course, you can let them die of old age like
a pet, as Paul McCartney used to do on his
hobby farms in Sussex and the Mull of
Kintyre. But he did not need to live off his
income from farming, one imagines. Per-
haps John Lewis-Stempel doesn’t either.
This is, after all, his 19th book. They tend to
be slim volumes on country themes, with
elegant, pastel-coloured drawings on the
covers, and they sell well.
I pressed on, because the literary
editor of The Times is a persuasive fellow,
and I’m glad I did because I learnt a lot. Did
you know that the fleeces of the earliest
sheep were prominently dull brown
and that they evolved to become off-
white and that nowadays off-white sheep,
like the ubiquitous Texel, will become ill
from eating buckwheat, whereas dark-
woolled sheep, like a Herdwick, do not?
And did you know that sheep can see
in colour?
Here’s another fun fact I learnt from
the book: 8 per cent of sheep are gay.
Lewis-Stempel made the discovery from
“our gay ram, Vincent, [who] generallylambs. He also sets out to disprove the old
saw that sheep are imbeciles, as suggested
by the expression to “follow like sheep”.
They have excellent face recognition
and can remember as many as 50 human
faces for more than two years. In an aca-
demic study, sheep were taught to distin-
guish between photographs of celebrities.
Fiona Bruce, curiously enough, had the
most memorable face, with 65 per cent of
sheep recognising her. They can also navi-
gate complex mazes. The author had some
that would outwit his electric fence by
backing through it, because their fleeces
were thickest on their rumps and so insu-
lated them against the shock.
But I was not entirely convinced by his
argument that sheep are the smartest
animals in the farmyards. They are way
behind pigs on the IQ front. I think the in-
telligence of sheep is more to do with their
finely attuned instincts, the way they “im-
print” on a landscape over several genera-
tions — become hefted — and follow one
another on a single track so as not to tram-
ple and waste the grass they want to eat.
This subject can’t have been an easy
pitch to the publishers compared with, say,
the secret life of the horse or dog, because
in my experience, though clearly not in the
experience of Lewis-Stempel, sheep are
hard to empathise with. They are enig-
matic. Unknowable. But it is topical
because sheep have lately become the tar-
get of environmentalists such as George
Monbiot who accuse them of “sheep-
wrecking” the upland landscape.
Lewis-Stempel gives a sound counter-
argument that sheep are essential to coun-
tryside biodiversity. It’s all about proper
management. What you don’t want is
monocultures, be it of sheep, or trees or
anything. “Poor sheep,” he writes. “Over-
looked in our history and now accused of
abetting climate change through their
‘gaseous emissions’ and destroying the
landscape with their hoofs and mouths.”
I found this book not only pleasingly
escapist but also nostalgic. I was reminded
of the shivering pet lambs we would revive
by putting them in the lowest door of our
Aga, and of watching my father skin a dead
lamb to put its coat on a live one, so that it
would be adopted by the mother of the
dead lamb. Lewis-Stempel says: “It re-
quires a sharp knife and a strong stomach.”
He prefers to spray foster lamb and mother
with Yves St Laurent’s Pour Homme eau
de toilette to confuse both into accepting
each other.
There’s a romance to shepherding that is
entirely absent from pig and poultry farm-
ing, he contends, and if he is referring to
industrial pig and poultry farming, he
is right. He sometimes sleeps outdoors
with his flock “on the dry nights, the sheep
lying down around me. I’m not sure on
those nights who is protecting whom.”
And when breaking open a bale of hay
he will sometimes stand by the rack for a
few minutes, with the sheep tight around
him, enjoying their company. “The scent
of the hay and the scent of the warm
wool filled the frosted air, as it had done
for centuries.”
If you can get past the cringey names he
gives his sheep, there is much to enjoy
here. I rang my father and said I would
send my copy on to him. It turns out he has
already read and enjoyed two books by
Lewis-Stempel — Meadowland: The
Private Life of an English Field and Still
Water: The Deep Life of the Pond.
We talked sheep for a while and then
my father reminded me that he had
once named a tup, or rather he had taken
to referring to the tup by the name of the
dealer he had bought it off, as identified by
the animal’s ear tag. Our tup was called
Mrs Thompson.JOHN EVESON/ALAMYThe Sheep’s Tale
The Story of Our
Most Misunderstood
Farmyard Animal
by John Lewis-StempelDoubleday, 192pp; £12.99They are brave and clever but are sheep really the smartest
animals on the farmyard? Baa humbug, says Nigel Farndale
There is a mesmeric
impetus as Scott
staggers from one
mishap to the next
They have
excellent face
recognition
and can
remember as
many as 50
human faces
for more than
two years