Running for the Hills: Growing Up on My Mother's Sheep Farm in Wales

In this memoir, Clare, a Welsh former barman and BBC radio producer, narrates how his parents came to own a sheep farm. Robert and Jenny were young, ambitious and, at first, in love; he had been raised internationally and was a rising war correspondent and news journalist, she was an assistant literary editor. Nevertheless, they decided to leave London and buy a farm in Wales. Within three years of their marriage in the early 1970s, Robert, "the icy rationalist," had retreated to the city and a BBC post. But Jenny, "the mad romantic," stayed behind on the mountaintop sheep farm. With the assistance of her journals, Clare recounts his mother's daily rituals: encumbered by two small boys and a loan, Jenny slogged through the yearly rituals of lambing, feeding and marketing, all the while braving vile weather and putting her children in the local school. The valley villagers marveled at "her strangeness, her prettiness, pigheadedness and determination to survive" without a man at her side; the local men sniffed around. Nearly two decades later, the family moved to the village and into a house with a working TV. Beautifully written, with enormous affection, this is a memoir of an unusual childhood, but also a careful analysis of a "perfectly, heroically mismatched" marriage. (Aug.)