**Our next meeting will be on January 13th at 10am at Kathy's house (she's kindly offered to host it as the room at the children's centre is booked out on this date, and there aren't very many of us around on the 6th). Directions to Kathy's house are in the box full of "Can Any Mother Help Me" ; our reading selection for January. Thanks to Kathy for the offer!****

Running for the Hills is Horatio Clare’s memoir of growing up in the 1970s and 80s on a sheep farm in the Black Mountains in Wales. The farm had been bought by his parents before he was born, so the memoir actually contains some re-imagining of the early days using information collated from his parents’ diaries and also from what his parents told himself and his younger brother, and includes extensive quotations from his mother’s diaries.

The reaction to the book by our readers was mixed, varying from enjoyment to real hatred! I was particularly vehement in my dislike of Clare’s memoir and have found this blog difficult to write as I want to give in to the temptation to rant, and nobody wants to hear me rant (not if they’ve any choice in the matter). I did feel relieved however at the fact that I wasn’t alone in my criticism of the book, as all the reviews I had read online were glowing, leaving me to question why this should be so.

In a nutshell, one reader enjoyed the book as she had first hand experience of growing up on a mountainy sheep farm in Wales, and felt that Horatio Clare was spot-on with his descriptions, particularly of lambing time and haymaking, such vital elements in a sheep farmer’s calendar. As such she did not focus on the characters of the protagonists involved, as for her the story was in the description.

While I will grant that Clare writes some beautiful prose and certainly brought the nitty gritty of farming to life, this was very overshadowed for myself and another reader by the way he presented his parents to us, and in particular his mother. There’s no law of reading that says that you have to like or identify with characters in order to enjoy a story, but it was hard to escape the fact that Clare wrote about his mother for example with a deal of affection and that he made excuses for her behaviour in a way that the author of a novel would not feel obliged to do. And so, with this subjectivity in mind, it was very difficult not to give in to our own subjective feelings of dislike for a woman who comes across as needy and manipulative, and I could go on but I won’t because that would be ranting.

One reader found that Clare’s recounting of conversations between, for example, Jenny (the mother) and Robert (the father) were unbelievable, for their high content of ‘oh darlings’ and ‘dearie me’s’, especially when they took place in a lambing field at two o clock in the morning; she felt they sounded like the utterances of a woman from two generations ago. Clare’s presentation of his father as a man who ‘relished competition with other men’, also seemed dated, and his parents came across on the pages as a pair who would have been comfortable striding across the pages of a Nancy Mitford novel.

Their class backgrounds are inescapable, unfortunately, as their actions reeked of the confidence and arrogance of those who are born and bred to succeed; from the harebrained scheme of buying a farm in Wales and only farming initially at weekends and on holidays to the later instances of shunning local schools and considering themselves ‘above ‘ their neighbours in every way. This might seem unfair as they were decidedly anti-Tory and anti-hunting, but their shrill responses to both came across as plausibly as those of a disaffected teenager’s. Jenny still made sure that her sons Horatio and Alexander (names which really didn’t help them to fit in at the local primary school, though it’s to be hoped that they managed to keep their nicknames Pim and Twinkie under their hats) knew the finer points of etiquette and later it was without question that they should go as boarders to public school, despite the scant preparation for such of life on an impoverished isolated farm and no prep school.

I’m all for people following their dreams and I don’t think that people should spend their lives trying to fit in either, but I also believe that you should be honest about the true cost of your dream and try not to step on too many toes in the process. The farm would never have been managed if it weren’t for a retired septuagenarian local man who basically ran the place for them. They also relied on their neighbours for help, as any small farm does, but there is no indication of remittances or of help going the other way. This of course doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It was galling though to get the impression in this account of farming in Wales that Welsh farmers starve their animals while lovely English farmers make pets of all their sheep. Of course the starvation of the animals could be accounted for by the fact that most of their neighbours were portrayed as mad. I hope that names were changed in this account, but I could see no indication of this. I come from a small community myself and know how long people’s memories are…some of the stories told indicated real financial difficulties and also isolation and loneliness; it might have been more sensitive to have left them untold or to have told them in another format.

As I have already indicated, I could go on, but that of course would be ranting, and Babe in Arms is not a forum for my rants!! If anyone has anything they would like to add, or to challenge me on any of the above by leaving a comment, I’d be delighted to read it.

In the meantime, have a happy Christmas, enjoy Can Any Mother Help Me and see you on January 13th at Kathy’s!!