Pete the Sheep

A story

Pete came by this morning with a trailer full of wood.

Between us we unloaded it all into my wood store, chucking the logs a couple at a time until the pile was up to my knee.

I met Pete the first morning I was here. My landlord owns the sheep who occupy the fields around Daisy Barn, Pete tends to them. My neighbour opposite, a couple of weeks after I moved in, asked me if I had met ‘Pete the Sheep’.

Pete comes by once every morning and once every evening to do whatever a modern-day shepherd does, I guess. Every morning he waves madly at me, and sometimes stops for a chat. ‘Mornin’ Lucy!’ he inevitably hollers through the window of his ancient 4x4, in his broadest-of-broad west country accent.

Pete typically passes by my window early in the morning as I’m making coffee in my jimjams, or as I’m making dinner late in the evening. He is always, always beaming.

I think that when it is said (inevitably by urbanites with longing in their voice) that ‘people in the country are friendly’, Pete is what they mean.

Pete is almost completely deaf. When he asked me yesterday whether I’d like some wood, I said ‘that’s so kind, yes please, thank you so much, that would be wonderful’. Pete said ‘eh?’, and I said ‘THAT’S SO KIND, YES PLEASE, THANK YOU SO MUCH, THAT WOULD BE WONDERFUL’. He nodded and told me that he would get ‘the boys’ to put some in a tote bag for me, and would drop it off by my wood store.

Pete said nothing about the imminence of the delivery. But when he drove by my window this morning, waving madly, he had a trailer hitched to his 4x4. In the trailer was an enormous sack. He waved me over and asked if I would help him unload it.

At that moment, I realised that he had perhaps not said “tote bag” but perhaps “tow bag”. As the penny was dropping I also realised that Pete has probably never in his life had cause to say ‘tote bag’.

I was overwhelmed by Pete’s kindness and generosity. I tried to say so. I’m never sure whether he can hear me.

He asked me what I write about (he calls me “the scribe”). Gardens, I said.

‘Oh do you?’ he asked, ‘for a magazine?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘online’.

‘Wha’ on a computer?’ he said.

‘Yes’ I said.

Pete told me he doesn’t use computers, but that his family had given him an iPad so he can press one button and see ‘the markets’ and another to read the news.

We kept picking up and chucking the logs.

‘How many children to you have?’ I asked. One of Pete’s sons helps him tend to the sheep.

‘Well,’ he said.

Peter told me that he has a son and a daughter. His daughter, he said, is a ‘bad one, seriously’. His daughter had had a baby, he said. When the baby was 6 months old, she and her partner (the child’s father) took it to a hospital with an injury. Social services intervened. They wanted to place the baby in foster care.

‘Me and my wife said we’d raise him’, he said.

The matter went to court, and Pete and his wife secured court orders to have their grandchild live with them.

Pete went on to tell me about his daughter’s life (his version, of course, and she will surely have her own). She had two more children with a partner who was a drug addict. When that partner died, she married a neighbour.

Then, Pete said, she wanted her eldest child back.

‘She took us to court every year for seven years’, Pete said.

I felt like I had lost my breath.

‘I used to do that,’ I said.

‘Eh?’ said Pete.

‘I used to be a lawyer. I worked in family law.’

‘I don’t know whether Pete heard me.

What happened to the grandchild? I asked.

He went to Durham University and studied law. Now he’s a lawyer. With the shine of pride in his eye, Pete said ‘his firm just made him an associate’.

We had finished unloading the wood into the wood store. I didn’t know what to say. To be given such a generous supply of fuel, ‘to keep you warm in the winter’ as Pete said. To hear a story that I have heard so many times before, in stuffy, coffee-stained conference rooms, dressed in a black suit, hair tight back in a bun, making notes. I felt confronted by a ghost of my former self, and simultaneously startled by the generosity of a man who took in a grandchild from an infant and raised him to be a lawyer, and delivered a truckload of chopped wood to a new neighbour for nothing in return. As I stood in my grubby dungarees, wooly socks and garden clogs I felt completely unprepared to hear Pete’s story.

It felt raw. No court niceties, no laptop between us, no advice I could give. All that - those conferences rooms and court rooms - were in our past. Between us, years spent in family litigation, Pete fighting for his grandson, and me fighting for a thousand Petes, a thousand women like Pete’s daughter, thousands of children in the middle.

I helped Pete reverse out of the gate. What could I do for Pete, I wondered, that could repay this generosity. Something to think on.

Post script: I don’t know if it is the right thing to write about Pete and his family here. He once told me that he doesn’t use a computer (only an iPad to read the news) and that he ‘doesn’t know how to use a pen, only a penknife’ (broad smile and laughter). I may have a crisis of confidence and delete this post, but I felt compelled - almost compulsively - to write this.