AND ANOTHER THING
We humans should realise that sheep are not so silly as they seem
PAUL JOHNSON Hearing a Christmas carol about shep- herds watching by night set me thinking about sheep. It is a soothing topic but not a soporific one. In the Quantocks we are sur- rounded by these animals. You cannot look out of a window without seeing them going quietly about their munching business. You are subconsciously aware of them all the time, moving slowly, silently, almost imper- ceptibly. I recall Margaret Thatcher saying that at Chequers, an island in a scattered ocean of sheep, she found their continual gentle movements tranquillising, softly erasing the worries of the week, relieving stress, inducing calm and composure. You are only half-aware of their presence, like the susurrus of foam on the sands, or the soft murmur of a summer zephyr, but it is balm to the wounded spirit.
A sheep is unthreatening. There may be aggressive rams but I have never met one. All the sheep I know are well behaved. They are always industrious, doing exactly what they are meant to do: eat. They do not fight each other like poultry. They are timid but not wild. At your approach they move off, and keep their distance, but then, reas- sured, stand their ground and fix you with an oval, green, unblinking eye, interested in what you propose to do but not idiotically curious like young bullocks. The ewes have a womanly dignity, even serenity. What are they thinking about? I have no idea. But it is not vicious or predatory or scheming. Sheep are surprisingly adept at contriving to do the things they really want to do, like getting through a tiny hole in a hedge. But they are not destructive or anarchic like some animals. They do not want to turn the world upside-down. They are conservative. They like the status quo. They are always being moved on, for one reason or another, but their instinct is to stay put.
They are, indeed, domesticated animals. They love their home, their patch or heaf as the farmers used to call it, whether it be lush downland or scraggy mountainside. Between their two middle toes there is a glandular bag, with an orifice that secretes an unctu- ous and odorous substance. This lays a trail by which they can trace and recognise their kind, for their sense of smell is highly devel- oped. When I was a boy I got to know the Westmorland sheep, the Herdwicks, and noted the pertinacity with which they clung to their native ground. Farmers told me that you might transport them 20 miles or more, but if they escaped they would infallibly find their way back to the hillside spot where they were born. These small, wiry, tough lit- tle creatures, whose wool is poor but whose meat — alas, alas! — is delicious, relish their mountain life in the most appalling condi- tions. Snowed under, they will live off their wool. Cragfast by greed, following a line of sweet grass on to a cliff, they will baa away piteously for a bit, then, finding no one comes, will wriggle their way back. They creep up on you silently in the most inhos- pitable places and then give you the shock of your life by emitting a friendly bleat. How they survive at all in the savage long winters is a mystery. As the Irish say, That one would live where another would die.' Moun- tain-climbers love them, recognising in their sturdy ability to deal with rock and height the spirit of a fellow-adventurer. They are tiny specks of vibrant life in the vast, stony wilderness, making the unhuman, empty spaces seem tolerable. Where there are sheep, life can go on, and humans know they can make a home, if only a rough one.
People foolishly say that sheep are all alike, but they are not. I observe them close- ly in order to draw them. I put them into my landscape paintings to add a bit of activity and provide scale. Their faces vary a lot, from stern nobility to vacant nerd-dom. You get the odd loner, who will not go with the rest. There are buffoons too; not liked, for sheep are serious creatures. They never laugh but they look. They chew in many dif- ferent ways, from what I call long-jaw Texan-style to teenage-sloppy. Their voices repay study. Some never utter. Some go off periodically for no reason, like an irregular minute-gun, rather as Lord North is said to have made his jerky speeches — punctuated by long, nervous pauses — when he was prime minister. They also practise a chorus effect, like a badly trained Welsh choir end- ing a boozy outing. Curiously enough, the noise they make never annoys. It is part of the tranquillising effect. If anything, it evokes sympathy.
The Bible presents sheep as good, goats as bad. God will sort them out when the time comes: 'And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.' Left-handed people like myself — and goats — have always objected to this pas- sage from St Matthew. Actually, God may have some difficulty sorting, for experts say that sheep and goats fade almost impercep-
tibly into each other in mountain regions where they run wild. Some sheep have beards. Some goats look silly. But perhaps God is making a more subtle point than we realise, a post-Freudian one. Who can say? Certainly the sheep on the Quantocks are not at all goat-like. They are Devon Long- wools and the like, well-bred, sensible, not prone to wandering. They chew like elderly gentlemen in clubs such as Brooks's or Boodle's. Their worst fault, when they are put at large on the tops, is to lie on the nar- row road, climbing slowly to their feet with affronted dignity, after much hooting.
I like the names of the sheep, those not yet banned by Brussels. There is the Lonk, which we had on the hills near my school in north Lancashire, with its long tail and sometimes formidable horns. The Cheviots are woollier but not so sturdy. The Shropshires have round, funny faces. So do the Southdowns, reputed to be the best to keep. But Leices- ters and Lincoln Longwoods and Blue-faced Wensleydales appear silly, too, but are not. The Romney Marches are sly, the Cotswolds supercilious, living where they do. The Rye- lands I don't know about. Welsh Mountains are tough like the Herdwicics, but less dependable. The Irish are mostly Rosscom- mons, but internally divided as you'd expect. We have Dartmoors in our parts but I can't tell them from the Devons. Nearly all have a touch of Merino. The most difficult are the Scotch Blackfaces. When Sydney Smith was a clerical farmer in Yorkshire he experiment- ed with this breed. He claimed they all escaped and made their way back to Scot- land, and in 1819 he wrote a funny and indig- nant letter to the Farmer's Magazine, denouncing them root and branch.
But there is no point in getting angry with sheep, even on the rare occasions they behave badly. They are set in their ways. They will not change. They have been around much longer than we have, older than any civilisation, in every climate and terrain and region on earth, suffering and surviving, harassed by wolves and foxes and eagles, exploited by farmers, bullied by their dogs, insulted by poets, badly painted by Claude and Turner, served up with vinegary mint sauce and other horrors, but somehow putting up with it all. They are the immor- tal, indestructible, incomparable stoics of nature. In these dreadful times in which we live, unlikely to get better in the new millen- nium, we could learn a lot from them.
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