Hard times down on the farm provide ideal setting for novel

Everywhere is mud and the price of fat lambs has dropped through the floor. It is the winter of 2005-2006 and scraping through is getting harder and harder for the Hartle family, raising sheep and a bit of fodder to get the animals through the winter on the North York Moors.

Then a barnful of hay catches fire and everything takes a turn for the worse. One of farmer Joe Hartle’s sons has stayed on the farm but finds it hard to love it like his dad does and falls into drink – and the arms of a predatory pub landlady. His younger brother has moved “down south” to run a flower nursery and still resents his dad referring to his “little project” and telling him: “Nothing wrong in ladies tending pansies in hanging baskets. But it’s not a living for a man.”

But he comes home for the auction of stock and machinery which is the end of the struggle.

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This is the setting for Homecoming, a first novel by Londoner Susie Steiner, newly-published to good reviews, and bound to get real moors farmers guessing about where and who is based on what. The author, formerly a Guardian journalist, got to know Yorkshire while at York University and then married a man whose family owned a cottage at Hutton-le-Hole.

They spend a lot of time there and it was during the hard times described in the book that Susie, now 41 and a mother-of-two, decided a moors farm in crisis was the right setting for a family drama.

In pursuit of detail, she went to sheep auctions at Fadmoor, near Kirkbymoorside, and talked at length to regional EBLEX manager Steve Dunkley, who comes from a family which gave up a tenancy in the Dales in 1999.

“I thought he might be upset to read the book but he just said ‘Aye, it was all right’, in that typical Yorkshire way,” said Susie this week.

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Her book underlines the difference between farmers who have land they can sell and tenants, like the Hartles, living off moorland and a bit of in-bye rented from the water board, who depend entirely on what they can earn. A contrast is also made between the sharp operators who pick up on every new political whim and subsidy and those who refuse to become “park-keepers”.

Joe Hartle’s best friend sold a farm but can still afford to spend his days drinking beer in the Conservative Club at “Lipton” – the nearest town, based loosely on Kirkbymoorside and Pickering. The farm at the heart of the book is on the edge of a village called Marpleton, which could be any one of a dozen off the A170. Helmsley, Malton, Leeds and other real places have bit parts. A villainous feed dealer is “entirely made up”, the author insists. “It’s not literally about farming,” she says. “It’s about land as emotional territory, about one generation giving up territory to another.

“Some children follow their parents, others go in a totally different direction. An incredible percentage of family businesses fail at the point of succession. On a farm, the question of which way you are going to go is always an elephant in the room.”

Her next project is a thriller set in the Cambridgeshire fens, which she is researching as diligently as the first.

Homecoming is published by Faber and Faber priced £12.99.

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