He himself had been a drover three times from the age of fourteen. The first couple of times he had been filled with excitement as he had followed his father and his neighbours on horseback over the fells, looking for the ewes and lambs. The third time had been a disaster. The weather was bad, he had got horribly drunk in the rest hut on the last night, and his father had shouted at him for not pulling his weight on the drive.
Two weeks later he had left home to go to Reykjavik. Music, drugs and alcohol, and later London and more drugs and alcohol. His father’s disappointment in him was deep and unyielding. Which wasn’t quite fair. At twenty, Sindri had been the charismatic lead singer of the band Devastation, whose jumbled anarchic screams had reached number two in the UK charts. He was a sensation in his home country and in Europe.
But it lasted less than a year. The money meant the drugs were endlessly on tap. The songs lost any semblance of tune, and Sindri returned to Reykjavik.
He lost a decade of his life. Eventually he managed to pull himself together and got a steady job in a fish factory. He channelled the urge to rebel, tamed it and gave it focus. He joined environmental groups in Iceland opposed to the exploitation of the Icelandic landscape for economic gain. He wrote a book,
The book was big in Germany, and Sindri earned a bit more money. His father disapproved and Sindri very rarely came home. The truth was that Sindri was as distant from the farm of his childhood as the urban capitalists he ranted against.
Sindri scanned the familiar hills, resplendent in their golds and browns glistening in the September sunshine. The sky was a soft pale blue, dotted with jaunty puffs of white. Horses and dogs were fanning out around the giant flock of sheep, channelling them towards the communal pens. He saw his youngest niece, ten-year-old Frida, jumping up and down in anticipation of seeing her own pet lamb again.
It was nice to see the little girl so happy. She had had a tough year.
Sindri sighed. Frida might not be reunited with her pet lamb for very long.
It turned out that the financial difficulties that his younger brother was suffering over Christmas were not the result of a banker-induced squeeze on agricultural incomes as Sindri had supposed. It was worse than that, although it was still the fault of the bankers. Matti had taken over the family farm when their father had died. For three years, he had been investing in the stock market. With astonishing success, at least initially. He had trebled his money. It was easy.
He had borrowed from the bank against the farm and invested more. And doubled his money. He had bought a new Land Cruiser and taken the whole family on safari to Africa. And invested more. With his new-found expertise, Matti had identified Odinsbanki as the most promising of the banks. He had first invested two years before. As prices had dipped Matti had recognized a buying opportunity, and ploughed all his profits into the bank stock.
Then of course, it all went horribly wrong.
Matti had never told his wife, Freyja. Oh, she knew that he had invested some of their savings in the stock market, and she knew he was worried about how tight money was, but she had no idea how dire the situation had really become, until one morning in March she had woken up early to find the other side of her bed empty. She was unable to get to sleep herself, and had gone looking for her husband. She had found the back door open and footprints in the snow.
She pulled on boots and a coat and followed the footprints out into the darkness, until she found her husband at his favourite spot at the bottom of the slope down from the home meadow where the brook tumbled over the rocks into a pool.
She hadn’t heard the shot. Or maybe she had. Maybe that was what had woken her up.
She was devastated. But she was a strong woman, a farmer’s daughter from a neighbouring dale, and determined not to let Matti down, despite what he had done to her. Blow after blow fell on the family. The bank threatened foreclosure unless its loans were repaid. The kids were a mess. And there was still a farm to run.
Sindri had felt terrible. He liked Freyja, a blonde woman now in her forties with a strong jaw and a bright eye. He had been fond of his little brother Matti, who had done his duty and taken over the farm from their parents. Matti was the strong, hard-working, slightly unimaginative farmer that over the years Sindri had begun to idolize as the real hero of Iceland.
But perhaps it was Freyja who was the real hero.
As he watched the sheep squeeze into the network of communal pens on the valley floor, Sindri thought again of Bjartur. The man was never far from his thoughts. He had always admired Bjartur, but over the last twelve months the tough crofter had become an obsession.
Bjartur wasn’t real: he was a fictional character, the hero of Nobel Prize winning writer Halldor Laxness’s book
But Bjartur of Summerhouses never gave up. The First World War came, the ‘Blessed War’ that brought high prices and prosperity to Iceland’s sheep farmers. Improvements were made, the old turf-walled crofts gave way to modern concrete farmhouses.
At first Bjartur resisted, but eventually he too took out a loan from the local Cooperative Society run by Ingolfur Arnarson, a neighbour’s son named after the famous first settler of Iceland, and built himself a house.
The bust followed the boom, as night follows day. Money was scarce. Farmers defaulted. Ingolfur Arnarson left the area for Reykjavik where he soon became Governor of the National Bank and later Prime Minister. Bjartur’s new concrete house was cold, draughty and almost uninhabitable. In the end, he couldn’t keep up with the payments either. The house and the land at Summerhouses was sold off at auction, and Bjartur trudged off over the heath to start all over again, carrying his sick daughter in his arms.
But even at the end, when he had not a krona to his name, he still had his pride, his independence.
In the aftermath of the
Unfortunately, it had turned out that Matti wasn’t Bjartur. Matti had succumbed to the bankers, the borrowing, the easy money. Like the rest of Icelandic society, they had destroyed him.
‘Sindri! Will you give us a hand sorting the sheep?’ Freyja was walking rapidly towards him. ‘If you remember how.’
‘I’ll remember,’ said Sindri, and followed her towards the pen.
Once the sheep had been corralled into the communal pens, each farmer’s family went in to sort out their own animals. They were clearly identified by tags, but of course the farmers recognized many of their own animals and had given them names. Frida soon found her Hyrna, much bigger and stronger after the summer in the hills. Sindri was amazed how they could do it; he could dimly remember in his youth that one sheep looked very different from another, but now they all looked pretty much the same. Apart from the odd black one, of course. Sindri had always preferred the black ones.
‘Come on!’ Freyja called to him. Sindri entered the fray. He got butted a couple of times early on, but the technique of straddling the sheep, avoiding their horns, and dragging them off to the correct pen soon came back to him. It was hard work, but there was an air of exhilaration among the farmers of the dale. They were happy to have their sheep back. The animals would graze the home meadows for a month or so, before many of them would go off to slaughter. The rest would spend the winter indoors, pampered by their masters.
After two hours it was all done.
‘Thanks, Sindri,’ said Freyja. ‘That was a great help. The
‘No,’ said Sindri, wiping his brow. ‘I need to get back to Reykjavik.’
‘Why don’t you stay the night with us?’ Freyja asked.
Sindri smiled. ‘I’d like to. But I have some things I have to do tomorrow.’
Freyja looked at him oddly. She clearly didn’t believe that Sindri ever had anything to do that was genuinely important. Which, until recently, was probably true.
‘Well, it was nice to see you. Thank you for your help. And if you ever do have some time and want to stay with
