Insights and Inspirations

Quick-Fire Q&A with Helen Percy

If you could spend a day in anyone’s shoes, who would it be?

Donald Trump. It would be totally perverse. I would revoke everything, every decision I've made before breakfast. And when I had a minute left to midnight, I'd resign.

What job would you be terrible at?

Oh, any job involving paperwork, or especially money or figures because I can't add up to save myself. And if somebody starts quoting numbers my brain just closes down. I hate telling other people what to do, so I wouldn't want to be a boss. But equally, I don't like being told what to do. So that doesn't leave very many alternatives, except for self-employment. I have always said I could be a nun – poverty and chastity wouldn't be a problem, but obedience would have me seriously stuck.

Who is your favourite author?

Arundhati Roy. I admire the fact that in a few words she can conjure up a whole picture. She also has the ability to convey human emotion through unusual but very simple imagery. For example, in The God of Small Things, she speaks about the knot of anxiety in the little boy who has been abused as being like a moth inside him that just lifts its hairy foot.

Do you feel that Arundhati Roy's work has influenced your approach to writing?

Yes – that essence of humanity, and that honesty and incisiveness. I hope I can emulate it.

If you could be any character from any book, who would you be?

I would like to be Tiffany Aching from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Or any of his witches, they’re just fantastic. But Tiffany is sassy, intuitive, down-to-earth and completely fearless. And her granny's a shepherd. And she's learned so much about the world from her granny. My friend sent me the first book, The Wee Free Men, because she thought I was already quite like Tiffany Aching. So maybe that's why I like her, because I already lead a life quite like hers, without the magic.

What’s the most difficult thing about being an author?

Finding unbroken periods of time to write. Because I can't settle if I just have an hour or a couple of hours and I know something else is going to happen in the day. And that's why I end up writing in the middle of the night when I'm really tired.

Is there a book that changed your life?

Linked.

I was going to say Tony Anderson's Bread and Ashes because it inspired me to explore the Caucasian mountains with a pack pony, and in that exploration I came close to death. I came to a point where I had to decide which route to take, and I had nothing but a hand-drawn map with me and really thought there was a strong possibility that I would die on that journey. Which made me accept the inevitability of death, but also helped me to grasp life with both hands.

How long was the book in the works for?

Only 12 years. I'm not prolific.

It started 12 years ago as a lambing diary. It was at a time when Lambing Live was very popular on television and I realised that the presenters and the farmers on that series never swore, never wore dirty clothes, always had immaculate buildings with clean straw. Nothing ever escaped or broke through a fence. Everything behaved the way it should. And I thought people really need to see how it really is.

So I started writing about the dirty side of lambing, but also the beautiful things that happened. I hoped that it conveyed my love of my charges. That grew into something that was also nature writing and probably much funnier than I had intended it to be.

How did you get into shepherding?

I didn't grow up on a farm. I grew up in a farming community. There was a cattle farm next door and I spent a lot of time feeding handfuls of grass to the cows and sitting on the gate talking to them. But I didn't really know anything about sheep. And it's quite hard to get into farming if you're not from farming stock.

I did a theology degree, and I was ordained, and it was only 7 or 8 years after ordination that I saw the light and quit and became a shepherd. One of my parishioners taught me much of what I know about sheep, but to start with I was just filling buckets and helping out, feeding lambs. And I'm still learning. I'll be learning until I die.

How would you summarise the book in five words?

‘My employers and other animals.’

Who is the book written for?

It’s not intended as a manual, but if people wanted to learn about sheep and lambing I hope that they would learn something.

But it is essentially nature writing and it's humorous and it's a feel good book. I think the world is so desperate at the moment that people need books that remind them of beauty and tenderness without denying that there's also death and loss and cruelty.

Is the book what you expected it be when you started writing it?

When I started writing it, I didn't know what the end would be, and at that point I was writing one book.

This book is the more humorous of the two although second book which will come out next year does contain humour, but it is much more heartrending than this one.

How do you plan to celebrate the book’s release?

This summer I'm going to explore the Carpathian Mountains on horseback!