article_snippet.sent: This wonderful book has filled in most of the gaps in my education, without any 4.30am alarm calls.
article_snippet.sent: It is the enlightening, exquisitely written account, give or take a few autobiographical tangents, of a year in the life of James Rebanks, whose family has been farming in the Lake District for at least six centuries.
article_snippet.sent: And although one teacher talked rhapsodically about the Lakes, it was in terms Rebanks Rebanks simply could not comprehend.
article_snippet.sent: Rebanks loathed school, and left at 15, able to write only in block capitals.
article_snippet.sent: But Rebanks book does not undermine the importance of education — far from his book.
article_snippet.sent: Toiling on the farm, Rebanks found Rebanks at odds with Rebanks decent, hard-working but obstreperous father, and escaped by reading, which Rebanks had resisted so strongly during Rebanks schooldays.
article_snippet.sent: A Shepherd’s Life, written in 1910 by W.H. Hudson, just knowing ‘it was going to be lousy and patronising’.
article_snippet.sent: It was about families like Rebanks, and It inspired Rebanks to read more, learn more.
article_snippet.sent: As Rebanks makes abundantly clear — not least with his effusive praise for a famous children’s author, whom his thinks of not as the creator of Peter Rabbit, nor even as Beatrix Potter, but as Mrs Heelis, doughty champion of Herdwick sheep — there is, between the two, all the difference in the world.