Smell of Summer Grass: Pursuing Happiness at Perch Hill

Smell of Summer Grass: Pursuing Happiness at Perch Hill Adam Nicolson The Smell of Summer Grass is based partly on the long out of print 'Perch Hill'. It is the story of the years spent in finding and building a personal Arcadia, sometimes a dream, sometimes a nightmare, by writer Adam Nicolson and his wife, cook and gardener, Sarah Raven.Adam Nicolson was determined to leave metropolitan life but the rundown farm in the Sussex Weald was not quite what he bargained for. The scenery was breathtaking and the rural neighbours charming but the hard end of real farming life was another matter - mud, cold, planning regulations and unco-operative livestock.But for the reader the whole enterprise is full of delight thanks to Adam Nicolson's writing: frank, witty and touching, it is a testament to the importance of holding on to your dreams and turning them into reality. The Smell of Summer Grass Pursuing Happiness at Perch Hill ADAM NICOLSON Copyright (#ud24d535c-97c0-5253-9c65-9a0a7ce85551) William Collins An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London, SE1 9GF WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com) First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2011 Copyright © Adam Nicolson 2011 Parts of this book were previously published in PERCH HILL (Robinson Publishing, 1999) Adam Nicolson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780007335572 Ebook Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007335589 Version: 2015-02-26 Dedication (#ud24d535c-97c0-5253-9c65-9a0a7ce85551) In memory of Simon Bishop 1958–2009 Acknowledgements (#ud24d535c-97c0-5253-9c65-9a0a7ce85551) The following images are reproduced with many thanks: Large parts of this book first appeared in the Sunday Telegraph Magazine between 1995 and 2000 and two-thirds of it between hard covers in Perch Hill: a new life, published by Constable Robinson in 1999. I would very much like to thank Charles Moore, Alexander Chancellor, Aurea Carpenter and Nick Robinson, my various editors in those places, for all their help and guidance. This book takes the Perch Hill story on another full decade and looks again, with a slightly longer perspective, at those early days on the farm. This time I would again like to thank my editor Susan Watt, who has stood by me through thick and thin over many years, and my dearly valued agent Georgina Capel. Nothing at Perch Hill could ever have happened without the people who work there and I would like to acknowledge with enormous and deeply felt thanks the difference which Tessa Bishop, Colin Pilbeam, Bea Burke, Angie Wilkins and Ben Cole have all made to our lives. Nothing, in my experience, can match the feeling which a joint and shared attachment to a place can give. Almost needless to say – as anyone who reads these pages will discover it soon enough for themselves – the part of Sarah Raven in this story is not far short of the role played by gravity in the universe. Adam Nicolson Contents Cover (#udfa5b1d1-7734-597b-ac2b-a459a1130cbe) Title Page (#u5aad5bbc-2a5a-53e2-bb41-383a283efbf9) Copyright Dedication Acknowledgements Part One BREAKING The Bright Field Green Fading into Blue Part Two MENDING The Darting of Life Patrolling the Boundaries Neighbours with the Dead Part Three SETTLING Spring Births, Felled Oaks In Deepest Arcadia Peaches on the Cow-Shed Wall A World in Transition Part Four GROWING Divorcing from the Past The Very Opposite of Poisonous Transformations A Thick Pelt of Green Feeding the Sensuous Memory Picture Section About the Author By the same author About the Publisher Part One BREAKING (#ud24d535c-97c0-5253-9c65-9a0a7ce85551) The Bright Field (#ud24d535c-97c0-5253-9c65-9a0a7ce85551) IF I think of the time when we decided to come here in 1992, it is a backward glance into the dark. A summer night. I am walking home from Mayfair, from dinner with a man I fear and distrust. He is my stepfather and I burp his food into the night air. It is sole and gooseberry mousse. His dining-room is lined in Chinese silk on which parakeets and birds of paradise were painted in Macao some years ago. The birds have kept their colours, they are the colour of flames, but the branches on which they once sat have faded back into the grey silk of the sky. On the table are silver swans, whose wings open to reveal the salt. The Madeiran linen, the polished mahogany, the dumb waiter: it’s alien country. My stepfather and I do not communicate. ‘It’s only worth reading one book a year,’ he says. ‘The trouble with this country is the over-education of the young.’ ‘Calling a parcels service “Red Star” is a sign of the depth of communist influence, even now, in England.’ Nothing is given. I leave the house to walk across London to somewhere on the edges of Hammersmith, where I am living with Sarah Raven, the woman for whom, a few months previously, I have left my wife. That is a phrase which leaves me raw. Sarah has gone somewhere else this evening, to have dinner with friends, and won’t be back until midnight or later. I have left as early as I can from the Mayfair house and think ‘Why not?’ A warm night. A walk through London and its glitter in the dark, to expunge that padded house and all its upholstered hostilities. There are whores in the street outside, bending down like mannequins to the windows of the slowing cars. Some of the women are so tall and so sweetly spoken they can only be men, with long, stockinged calves and a slow flitter to their eyes. One fixes me straight. ‘Looking for company?’ she asks. ‘Thank you, not tonight, thanks,’ and we move on. I walk down Park Lane, where the cars are thick and the night heavy. The lights from the cars blip, blip, blip through the dark. Life is hurried. I pass the Dorchester and the Hilton, down to the corner where the subway drops into ungraffitied neon. Down and up and down again to the upper parts of Knightsbridge. Along there the windows gleam. A friend of mine has opened a shop in Beauchamp Place. It is lacquered scarlet inside and beautiful, with black Japanese furniture standing on the hard-wood floor. On and out, increasingly out, away from the polish of the glimmer-zone, made shinier at night, to the open-late businesses of South Ken, where Frascati and champagne stand cooled in ranks behind glass and the Indian at the till leaves a cigarette always smoking on the ledge beside him. On, out, westwards, where occasional restaurants are all that interrupt the domestic streets now tailing into dark. The pubs have shut. It is nearing midnight. For a stretch the street lights are broken, perhaps two in a row, and it is darker here. I think nothing of it. My mind is on other things. On what? I was thinking of a place where I have been happy, some kind of mind-cinema of it flicking through my brain: sitting back on the oars in the sunshine in a small boat off the coast of some islands in the Hebrides, where black cliffs drop into a sea the colour of green ink and the sea caves at their feet drive 50 yards or more into pink, coralline depths. That night I was thinking of these things, of hauling crabs from the sea, scrambling among the hissing shags and peering down the dark slum tunnels where the puffins live, lying down in the long grass while the ravens honked and flicked above me and the buzzards cruised. My mind was away there that night. I must fight a reluctance to describe what followed. I am wearing a suit, an Italian suit I have had for years, with turn-ups to the trousers and pointed tips to the lapels. It is a sharkish, double-breasted thing. The Mayfair whores had seen a businessman inside it and so, I suppose, did the three youths, late teenagers, in the Lillie Road. The heels of my shoes were striking the pavement too hard, like flints. I tried to soften them by treading on the balls of my feet. Two of the boys were on the inside of the pavement next to the wall. I did not look at them. The other was on the kerb. I walked between the three as though through an alley and adrenalin shocked into me as I saw their eyes go white in the unlit street. I saw the kerbside boy nod at the others. I thought how contemptible was my Daily Mail fear of these people. I was already beyond them, and relieved, when my eyes and mouth stung and burned and there were hurried hands under my armpits pulling and pushing me into the mouth of a passageway leading off the road. My body had hunched over as the ammonia came into my face – bleach squirted from a lemon squeezer – and they knelt me on the gritty pavement, as though I were being unpacked, a bale of stuff, my body and suit a pocketed rucksack, all hurry and hard fingers against my ribs. I said nothing. I tried to get up but they rubbed the bleach into my eyes, oddly without violence, in the way you would pull back on the chain of a dog, simply a control. I was not a person but a suit with pockets. I was being fleeced, in the way a shepherd might fleece a sheep. My assets were being stripped. I knelt with the grit of the pavement pricking in my cheek while they looked for money and objects in the suit that was no longer mine. They were robbing the suit. The bleach had emptied it of a person, I could not help but regard from a distance this odd, disembodied theft. I was in pain but the burning in my eyes and mouth seemed unrelated to this professional going-over of my clothes, not my clothes, the clothes, some clothes. They left, up the passageway. I lay for a moment on the concrete slabs, excited by the reality of what had happened. My eyes were blurry and my tongue was ulcered and raw. I can taste and smell the ammonia now, years afterwards, a chemical thickness to it, a fog of fumes rising from my mouth into my nose. I got up. I dusted the suit off; it was torn. I walked down to the North End Road. There was a fish-and-chip shop open there. I went in and asked the man behind the counter if I could wash my face in his basin. He looked at me. His apron was up around his armpits. ‘We’ve been messing about a bit, have we?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve just been fucking attacked.’ He showed me a room which had a basin and a towel in it. I washed there, deep in the water, holding the water to my face and eyes, wanting to wash the pain away, and the taste of the bleach, and the furry, clogged thickness on my tongue, but feeling, more than anything, broken, hopeless, at the end of a long and hopeless trajectory which, for many months and even years, had curved only down. I walked to the house. It wasn’t far. I sat down on the doorstep. I said to myself I was fine. But I knew I wasn’t and eventually ended up in hospital where, at three in the morning, a doctor hosed the ammonia from my eyes, holding them open with his rubber-gloved fingers one by one, so that the water would sluice around the recesses of the eye. By pure chance, the doctor told me, precisely the same thing had happened to him the year before. Some Spurs fans had set upon him, squirted his eyes with bleach, robbed him and left him feeling blurry like this on the pavement. It was his way of consoling me, I suppose. Only later, in Sarah’s bed, deep in the night, with the grey-yellow wash of the London street lights leaking around the edges of the curtains, did I allow myself to cry, to sob out all the held-back reservoir of humiliation and failure whose dam the mugging had broken. It was not the attack itself for which I wept and sweated that night but everything of which it seemed, however irrationally, a culmination: the failure of my first marriage the year before, my guilt at my own part in that failure, the effect my leaving would have on my three sons by that marriage, the failure or near-failure of a business I had been involved with for five years, which I had also abandoned, unable to work properly any longer, leaving it in the hands of my cousin and co-director at the one moment he most needed my help. On top of that, a book I had been trying and failing to write had finally collapsed in exhaustion and uncertainty. If I had been a horse I would have been shot. I should have been shot. I had broken down. The mugging was a catalyst not of change, but of paralysis. I scarcely moved for three months. I lay in bed. Sarah went alone to work and to parties. I saw in her face a terror of what she had allowed into her life. I let everything about me – my own work, my sense of self-esteem, any idea of care or responsibility for others – fall away. Nothing meant anything to me. I could make no decisions. When I met people I knew, they looked into my face as though something were missing there. I woke up tired. I spoke more slowly than before. I saw a psychotherapist and told him that I felt like a sooted chimney, nothing but a dusty black hollow cylinder inside my skin. I felt that my breath polluted the air around me. I dreamed of my children. One night we were walking in a rocky place like Crete. ‘I am sorry,’ I told them. ‘I must leave you behind,’ and without waiting for an answer set off up the side of a mountain which reminded me of Mount Ida, its dry, limestone bulk, its sterility, its demand to be climbed. I arrived at the chapel on the summit, a place of bare rock, and slumped down beside the walls, my face in my hands, my body with every muscle slackened, every limb like a bone in a bag. When I looked up, I saw the three boys coming towards me, easily moving up on to the final rise, a bobbing movement, alive, lightened, untaxed by the journey on which I had deserted them. ‘Why do divorced men become obsessed by their children?’ I heard a woman ask. I could have told her: because they watch them from what seems like the far side of death. In the face of all that, Sarah was life itself. I had met her on holiday together with a few friends. She knew my sister Rebecca and I still remember every minute of those first mornings with her. She was strong and fearless. She took control. She arranged things. I told jokes to make her laugh and she laughed with her whole head thrown back and her throat open. She didn’t take any nonsense. She raced me downhill – we were skiing – and smoked on the lifts back up. She loved the west coast of Scotland and a half-abandoned house in chestnut woods in the valley of the Tarn. She was a doctor. She always voted Labour. She wore glamorous printed silk shirts from a company called English Eccentrics. She played with her long red-brown hair while talking to me. She was the natural focus of everyone around her. There was no side or twist to her: she was what she seemed to be. She could drink for England. She seemed to like me. She loved wild flowers. She never read a book. As she pointed out to me, she had beautiful long legs, very good for walking. She was in love with the cooking of the Veneto, which she had learned as a girl. Above all she had an appetite for living. She did not seem defeated. She looked not exactly like the future but like someone with whom and alongside whom the future was full of glow and richness. Life was full for her, not as an abstract idea – nothing intellectualized here – but as a reality which involved things, food, work, happiness, children, nature, gardens, beauty. She was the substance of life. And so we fell in love – weeks and months of looking forward to seeing her and being with her, of being enlivened by her teasing, warm, loving presence. And with that, folded in with it, my own grief and despair at what had happened. I have never known things at the same time be so beautiful and so dark. From her house in London, Sarah and I began to search for a refuge, however na?vely and hopelessly that idea was conceived. It stemmed from no more than a belief in the pastoral. ‘Are not these woods more free from peril than the envious court?’ a figure in As You Like It asks the surrounding company. I knew in the past I had been happy in rural places. I knew, or thought I knew, that a rural place would soothe this crisis. I knew, as I walked out in the streets of London, that there was no solace there. Every surface was dead in my eyes. My mind returned constantly to those islands in Scotland which I had been thinking of on the night of the attack. For 15 years I had owned them. My father had bought them 50 years before for ?1,200 and he gave them to me when I was 21, as I was to give them to my son Tom when he was 18. Cynics have said that all this was for tax reasons, but it wasn’t. I think my father gave them to me because, as a very young man, he had felt enlarged and excited by the ownership of a place like that, by the experience of being there alone or with friends, away from the thing that Auden called ‘the great bat-shadow of home’, the enclosing, claustrophobic, involuntary oppression of a parental place, which makes a bawling, complaining infant of you. He wanted, I think, to give that same enlargement to me, as I do to my own children. It worked and the gift was this: memories of weeks there, storm-battered, sun-stilled, on which I continue to draw every day of my life. I know those islands yard by yard, I know the places to clamber up and slither down, I know the particular corners where the pair of black guillemots always nests or where the bull seal hauls himself out on the seaweedy rock, I know where the fish congregate in the tidal streams or where the eddies riffle off a nose of lichened basalt and throw your dinghy out in a sudden curving arc towards the Lewis shore. I know the natural arch where the seals swim and where the kelp gathers in an almost Ecuadorian sun-barred forest beneath your coasting hull. I was essentially shaped by those island times. Almost everything else feels less dense and less intense than those moments of exposure. The social world, the political world, the world of getting on with work and a career, all those were for ever cast in a shadow by the raging scale and seriousness of my moments of island life. That intimacy with the natural makes the human seem vacuous. This may be straight Wordsworthianism and I would want to disown it in favour of a less monolithically obvious thing, a glitteringly complex attitude to nature which shimmered like an opal compared with my all-too-single basalt slab. But I can’t. I know nothing bigger or finer than the feeling that all barriers are down and a full-blown flood is running to and fro between you and the rest of the world. I know all these things and treat them as my touchstones and my yardstick. Is this life, I always ask, as good as that? Does this place measure up to that? That is the fixture; everything else can only eddy around it. We began to search for somewhere that might be the equivalent of all that, a place which in its own terms could be an island, around which the cord could be drawn, and where life could in some ways be hidden, or even innocent. It was the search for an Arcadian simplicity in which crisis and breakdown did not and could not occur. Fantasia you might say, but it had then an urgency and reality stronger and more concrete than anything else in the world around us. There was no sense, it seemed to me, of ‘getting away’. There was no desire to enter a capsule or satellite suspended above the earth. It felt, if anything, the very opposite of that, a burrowing in, a search for a bed in which the covers could be drawn up and over us. It was, I now see, these many years later, a search for a womb, a place in which you could be protected from damage. It was an infantile need and ferociously demanding because of that. We roamed England with the template in our minds. It seems curious now that this search might have landed almost anywhere, that anywhere might have provided the bucket into which the love could have been poured. Dorset, Devon, Somerset, Shropshire, Herefordshire, Oxfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, east Kent: all for a time became the zone in which safety might be found. It looks pathetic now, the two of us, in the white 2CV we had at the time, poking about like moles for a burrow, living with a private intensity the common stuff of rural estate agents’ offices. I had no perspective on what we were doing, or at least suspended any perspective I might have had. We were the first to do this. Of course we weren’t – we were the last, the heirs and successors of a line that goes back at least to the Roman love affair with the suburban villa, perhaps beyond that to the first urban civilizations of the Near East, where the concentrated demands and sophistication of city life produced, even at the beginning, a dream image of the garden place, the paradise, in which the realities did not impinge, where the commercial and competitive structures of the city were absent. Is Genesis itself, I now wonder, a symptom of a disenchanted urbanity? I had no desire to delineate, let alone puncture, the bubble. I needed its insulation and a belief in its power and reality. For years I had kept in my mind, as a sort of mantra, a poem by R.S. Thomas: I have seen the sun break through to illuminate a small field for a while, and gone my way and forgotten it. But that was the pearl of great price, the one field that had the treasure in it. I realize now that I must give all that I have to possess it. Life is not hurrying on to a receding future, nor hankering after an imagined past. It is the turning aside like Moses to the miracle of the lit bush, to a brightness that seemed as transitory as your youth once, but is the eternity that awaits you. (‘The Bright Field’, 1975) Thomas, a parish priest in the Lleyn peninsula in Gwynedd, in the north-west corner of Wales, is playing a fugue on the words of both Exodus and the Gospels. The Authorised Version does indeed speak of Moses ‘turning aside’ to the burning bush; Christ, talking to the Apostles, describes the Kingdom of Heaven both as the field with the treasure in it and as the pearl of great price. Both, curiously perhaps to us who dissociate so firmly the religious from the financial, use the language of money and merchants. The conditions of paradise, in Christ’s own words, can be bought. If only estate agents had cottoned on to this! Sell all that you have, money for paradise, the pearl of great price, life is neither hurrying nor hankering: turn aside to the eternity that awaits you. Heaven is waiting, the paradise womb; only look for it and you will see the bush alight beside you. The brightness of youth can be once again to hand. I look at myself then, nearly twenty years ago, and scarcely recognize the man I was: driven by a hunger for authenticity, for a place in the world that did not seem compromised but was somehow, in reality, almost heavenly. And I feel both nostalgia for that man – for the simplicity of his proposition – and utterly removed from him, as if he were some remote cousin, sharing a few common traits, and with something of a shared history, but with an attitude to the world that seems to know about almost nothing but himself. His need for happiness was so powerful that it erased nearly everything around him. It was as if he were walking through the world surrounded by a halo of need. My own financial state was catastrophic. I was scarcely in a condition to work, or to look for work. A kind of vertigo gripped me whenever I tried to write anything. I was producing occasional pieces for the Sunday Times but they were ground out like dust from a mortar. All fluency had gone. I wrote a book of captions to photographs of beauty spots. I ghosted another on how to take landscape photographs. I researched the illustrations for a book on evolution. Apart from the islands in Scotland, which I would sell only if death were the other choice, I owned nothing. I had given my house and its contents to my first wife. I was paying her virtually everything I earned. At times I didn’t earn enough in the month to pay her what I had promised and Sarah, from her earnings as a doctor, made up the difference. Sarah, who had inherited a little money, at least owned her house in London, all save a small mortgage, and that was the lifeboat. That house in west London, with its three bedrooms and a sliver of a garden, would take us where we needed to go. In that search for a place, nothing much was working. House after house was wrong, wrong in feeling, wrong in its situation, wrong in its price. The more the vision glowed, the less the places we saw came up to it. There were houses drowning in carpets and improvement, their souls erased. There were others in which the road was too near. Others too dour, many too far from Cambridge where my sons were living with their mother. Both Sarah and I felt an instinctive aversion to arable parts of England. We needed grass and wood, the Arcadian savannah, the lit bush, the field illuminated for a while. I knew that when we found the place it would say ‘I am here and I am yours. I am the place.’ It was a dark time. Only at the edges, like jottings and little coloured drawings in the margins of a text, were there any points of light: the finding of wild daffodils one day in a Dorset wood; swimming one warm and languorous evening off Chesil Beach where the swell rolled in like a lion’s stretch and yawn, over and over, a long slow growling from the shingle; a weekend on the Lizard in a sea of thrift; dawn on the Helford River, anchored in a boat between the woods, where the night rain dropped off the outstretched leaves into water as still as oil. These were bright fields too, illuminations in their way. Why should it be that beauty can for an instant make sense of a world in which nothing else does? I am not sure. It is something I believe in without knowing why. Maybe it is simply a recognition of pattern, a concordance between you and the world. Here in a chance beautiful thing is something given, neither engineered nor sought, neither curiously made nor elaborately framed, but dropping as a bead of meaning out of a meaningless sky. Its value, its weight, is in your own recognition of its beauty. There is something naturally there which you naturally recognize as good. The ability to see that beauty is a sign that the world is not an anarchy of violence and destruction. You belong to it and it belongs to you. That was as near as I could come to understanding why I wanted to live and be in a place that seemed beautiful. The world around you in such a place would constantly touch you and speak to you. It would become an existence thick with understanding and that sense of crowding intelligibility might be almost social in its effect, as though you were actually joining the community of the natural. This, in my loneliness and guilt, became a kind of consolation too and I held on to it as a kind of flag of hope, a thought with which I could identify and salvage what remained of my self. There’s a sentence in one of Coleridge’s notebooks for 1807, when, also with a broken marriage and a career in ruins, he was staying on a farm in Somerset. A ragged peacock walked the yard: ‘The molting Peacock with only two of his long tail feathers remaining, & those sadly in tatters, yet proudly as ever spreading out his ruined fan in the Sun & Breeze.’ That was me with my faith in redemption by beauty, like the battle-shot colours of a regiment held up to the last. I was at work in London – I say at work; I was sitting at my desk, looking at the screen, drinking a cup of coffee, considering from a dead mind the identity of the next possible word – and the phone rang. Sarah, in a coinbox, in a pub, breathless: ‘You must come. This is the place. I’m not sure. It might be. It’s a valley. An incredible valley. It’s like the Auvergne. It’s like an English Auvergne. Come on, sweetheart. You’ve got to have a look. It might be all right. It might be. I’m not sure. You’ve got to come though. Please come.’ She was in Sussex, having gone to look at a house that we both knew was too small – it was a converted observatory – and in the wrong place, on the top of a hill where nothing would ever grow, even if its views were to the Downs and the sea and a vast dome of observable sky. It was her second visit. She asked the man living there where he usually went for a walk. He mentioned a lane that dropped from this observatory down through the woods to the valley of a little river. She had gone down the lane, curling between the hedgerows, under the branches of the overhanging trees. It was springtime and the anemones were starry in the wood. Primroses were tucked into the shade of the hedge banks. Catkins hung off the hazels over the lane. And then, at a corner, where to one side the trees opened out to a view down the valley, and from where the pleats of the valley sides folded in one after another into the blue distance of other woods and other farms, 4 or 5 miles away, there was a sign hanging out into the lane: ‘for sale’. She took me back there the next day. Slowly the car went down the lane. The flowers in the verges, the sunlight in blobs and patches on the surface of the road. The knitted detail of this wood-and-field place. If anywhere were ever to look like nurture, privacy, withdrawal, sustenance, love, permanence and embeddedness, this was it. Sarah had found it. Even then, at the first instinct-driven look, this felt as if it might be the place. Why was that? And how can the mind, in a series of fugitive impressions, never analysed and perhaps not consciously registered, make its mind up so fast? First, maybe, it was because Perch Hill was hidden. It was neither exposed to the world nor making a display to it. It was clearly living in its own nest of field and wood, a refuge which could find and supply richness from inside its own boundaries. Second, I think, it reminded me a little of all the ingredients of the landscape I had known as a boy at Sissinghurst, 15 miles away in Kent: the coppice woods and the slightly rough pastures, the streams cutting down into the clay underbase, the woodland flora along their banks, that deep sensuous structure of light and shadow in a wooded country, where as you drop down a lane you are blinded first by the dazzle of the light and then by the depth of the shade, a flickering mobility in the world around you. Even at that subliminal level, here was somewhere that promised complexity and richness, secrets to be searched for and found. And third, it was just the time of year, the first part of May, when England looks as if it has been newly made and the stitch-wort and campion are sparkling in the lane banks and not a single leaf on a single tree has yet gone leathery or dark or lost that bright, edible, salad greenness with which leaves first emerge into the world; and when even though the sun is shining the air is still cold and you can feel the fingers of the wind making its way between your shirt and your skin, a sensation somewhere on the boundary of uncomfortable and perfect, as if nearly perfect, as if courting perfection. I can make this analysis only now. Twenty years ago, we were driving blind. We turned the corner, saw the agent’s board, the sign on a little brick building saying ‘Perch Hill Farm’, and drove in. Almost everything about the place was as bad, in our eyes, as you could imagine it to be. The buildings were a horrible mixture of the improved and the wrecked: yards and yards of concrete; a plastic corrugated roof to the disintegrating barn; an oast-house whose upper storey had been removed during the war; a 1980s extension to the farmhouse, in the style of a garage attempting to look like a granary, paid for, I later learned, by selling off the milk quota. The farmhouse itself was dark and dingy downstairs. In most of the ground-floor rooms I was unable to stand up. Upstairs there was grey cheap carpet, gilded light fittings, down-lighters and pine-louvred cupboards. A 1940s brick cow shed had been enlarged with an extension made of telegraph poles and more corrugated sheeting. Three other sheds – for calves, logs and rubbish, I was told – lay scattered around the site looking as if they were waiting to be tidied up. Various bits of grass were carefully mown. There was a decorative fish pond the size of a dining-room table in front of the granary-sitting room. The truncated oast-house had become a cart shed but was now in use as an art gallery. There were places for customers to park. None of this was quite what had been imagined. The smiles remained hanging on our lips. The buildings were raw-edged. Their arrangement was not quite what you would have hoped for, not quite a clustered yard, but a little strung out along the hill. The geese by the farm pond were angry. And a wind blew from the west. Turn aside, turn aside. I have seen the sun break through … The Bright Field murmurings were no more than faint. Was it that time we walked around the farm or another? I don’t quite remember. We left again, slowly, back up the Dudwell lane, along others. We had lunch on the grass outside the Ash Tree at Ashburnham. I drank a pint of Harvey’s bitter and the bees hummed. We were not sure. We went back on other days, again and yet again, taking friends with us. They all thought not. The place was trammelled. Whatever it might once have had was now gone. We heard somehow that the actor and com edian John Wells had looked at the place and rejected it: too much to do. We too should look elsewhere. So we did: a large fruit farm near Canterbury, other places, Brown Oak Farm, Burned Oak Farm, Five Oaks Farm, which I occasionally pass in the car nowadays, now the focus of other lives, diverged from ours like atoms that collide for an instant and then bounce on to other paths, and never to connect with ours again. The Perch Hill valley would not go away. It had taken up residence in my mind. I bought the largest-scale map of it that I could find and kept it on my desk. I read it at night before going to sleep, walking the dream place: the extraordinary absence of roads, the isolated farms down at the end of long tracks, the lobes of wood and fingers of meadow, the streams incised into creases in the contours, the enclosed world away from the brutalizing openness which I felt had reduced me to the condition I was now in. It is a hungry business, map-reading. It only feeds the appetite for the real. I had drawn in red biro a line around the fields and woods that went with Perch Hill Farm: 90 acres in all, draped across a shoulder of hill that ran down to the valley of the River Dudwell, and entirely surrounded by the remains of Dallington Forest. The red line around these acres made an island of significance. The more I looked at the map the more real my possession of those fields became, the more that red biro line described the island reality for which we were both longing. ‘Let’s go again,’ I said to Sarah. It would be the last time, the last throw, and then I would push this map away and the place would mean nothing to us and we could move on to other places and other obsessions. It was a summer evening, four months after Sarah had first wandered down the lane. We went not to the house but to the fields. We had brought some bread and cheese with us. We walked around and the light was pouring honey on the woods. At the end we lay down in the big hay meadow known as the Way Field and looked across the valley to the net of hedgy woods and pastures beyond it, the terracotta tile-hung farmhouses pimpled among them, the air of unfiddled-with completeness, the haze of the hay. Owls hooted; two deer and their fawns came out of the wood into the bottom of the field to graze and look, graze and look in the pausing, anxious way they do. Graze and look, graze and look: it was what we had been doing for too long. We decided there and then: for the sort of money that could have bought you an extremely nice house in west London (double-fronted, courteous neighbours, Rosemary Vereyfied garden, a frieze of parked German cars, chocolate-coloured Labradors in pairs on red leashes) we would buy a cramped, dark old farmhouse, a collection of decrepit outbuildings and some fields that would never in a thousand years produce any income worth having. Was this wise? Yes. This was wise, the right thing to do, plumping for the lit bush. What else could money be for? John Ventnor, the art dealer who owned the place, wanted what seemed like an outrageous amount for it: ?480,000. We could afford, we thought, after the endless shuffling of portfolios, the sale of heirlooms and the accommodating of ‘certain grave reservations’ of financial advisers, no more than ?375,000 and that was what we offered. Not enough. We offered ?20,000 more. Not enough. What would be enough? He was prepared to countenance a 10 percent discount on the asking price: ?432,000. Too much. What about ?410,000? Not enough. And there it stuck for months. We began again to look at other places but none was right. The vision in the evening field had its hooks in us. We waited, hoping that the delay would get to work on him, but it didn’t. It became clear that he shared the freehold with a stepdaughter who no longer lived there. She wanted him to sell up but he didn’t want to leave. He had no incentive to lower his price any further. We were in an impasse. Sarah sold her house in London, our daughter Rosie was born and we all moved together into a rented basement flat of profound sterility and gloominess. I got a job on a newspaper and we borrowed money on that rather slender foundation. On winter evenings I drew plans and projections on my computer of how we might change Perch Hill, what kind of garden we might make, how we might take the land and farm it in a way that would be more generous towards it. The sliced-off oast-house became whole again on my night-time screen. I took to sitting in front of it with no other light in the room, a silvery brightness emanating from the dark, a possible future set against a present reality. Plantings and vistas criss-crossed the spaces between the buildings on my computer plans. One after another of these schemes I drew up, ever more elaborate, and they all shared the same title: ‘Arcadia for ?432,000.’ Give everything you have. One winter day I went down there again. I had never seen Perch Hill outside its springtime freshness or its hay-encompassed summer glory. This day was different. I was alone; Sarah remained with Rosie in London. A wind was cutting in from the east and for days southern England had remained below zero. All colour had drained out of the landscape. In the valley, the woods were black and the fields a silky grey as in my night-time visions of the place. The stones on the track into the farm were frozen and they made no sound as I drove over them. The geese were huddled in the lee of a bank, fingers of wind lifting the feathers on their backs. Even they couldn’t bring themselves to run out and attack me. Frost-filled gusts blew across the frozen pond. The buildings were besieged by cold. I was there to persuade Ventnor that he should sell his farm to us for something less than the ?432,000 at which he had stuck for so long. I had no real tools or levers with which to achieve this, only the suggestion that a lower price might be fair. Smilingly, over a cup of coffee, he refused. We sat first in the kitchen and then by the fire. He was polite but adamant. The oak logs burned slowly. To my own surprise, I felt no resentment. I sat there agreeing with every word he said. Why should he leave the embrace of this? Why should the poor man go out into the cold if he did not want to? He left the room to see a man who had come to the door and as I sat there I began to be embraced by the warmth of the house. I felt it wrap its own fingers around me. If a house could speak, that was the day it spoke, the day I learned this wasn’t simply a place where we could come and impose our preconceptions. We couldn’t simply land the Bright Field fantasy here and take that as the reality in which we were now ensconced. There was some kind of dignity of place to be respected here. It had a self-sufficiency which went beyond the demands and obsessions of its current occupants. There was a pattern to it, a private rhythm, the deep, slow music to which it had been moving for the four or five centuries that people had lived in it. The two of us men sitting here now in front of the fire, what were we in the light of that? Transient parasites. I left and we had failed to agree on price but in some other, quite unstated way, I had succumbed. The buildings might be a mishmash of what we wanted and what we didn’t. They might confront us with a list of things to do that stretched 10, 20 years into the future. The price that was required might be unreasonably high. But all of that was translated that frosty day, or perhaps started to be translated that frosty day, with the hot oak fire glowing as the only point of colour in a colourless world, into something quite different: a commitment to the place as it actually was, with all the wrinkles of its history and its habits, all its failings and imperfections, all its human muddle. Stop fussing, it said. Give yourself over to what seems good. Here – after catastrophe and culpable failure in my own life, after I had witnessed Sarah, now my wife, tending to me as I collapsed – was some kind of signpost towards coherence. Don’t look for the perfect; don’t be dissatisfied if the reality does not match the vision. Don’t insist on your own way. Feed yourself into patterns that others have made and draw your sustenance from them. Accept the other. ‘You mean pay him what he wants?’ Sarah asked that evening as I put this to her. ‘Yes,’ I said. And we did. If a son or daughter of mine said to me nowadays that they were thinking of doing what we did then, selling everything, taking on deep debts, putting their families on the verge of penury for years to come and acquiring a place that needed more sorting out than they knew how to pay for, a rambling collection of half-coherent buildings and raggedy fields, I would say, ‘Are you sure? Are you sure you want to shackle yourself with all this? Do you know what it is you are so hungry for that this seems a price worth paying?’ Just now, faintly, as ghosts from the past, I remember people saying those things to us at the time and thinking, ‘Ah, so they don’t understand either. They haven’t understood what it is to be really and properly alive.’ And knowing for sure what that meant myself: that when faced with a steep slope or a rough sea, you should not quiver on the brink, or spend your life pacing up and down on the sand looking at the surf. You should plunge off down it or into it, trusting that when you arrive at the bottom or the far shore, you will know at least that the world’s terrors are not quite as terrifying as they sometimes seem. Do I believe that now? Nelson told his captains that the boldest moves were the safest, but Nelson was happy to lose everyone and everything in pursuit of victory. I can’t forget the decades of debt and anxiety which lay ahead of us then, the years of work in trying to reduce the mountain of borrowings, article after article, the alarm clocks in the dark, the working late on into the night to try to balance the books. But would I now exchange the life we have had for one in which we had never taken that risk or made that step? No, not at all. I am as happy that Sarah and I married ourselves to Perch Hill as I am about the existence and beauty of my own children. Green Fading into Blue (#ud24d535c-97c0-5253-9c65-9a0a7ce85551) A CLOUD was down over the hill and the air was damp like a cloth that had just been wrung out. The buildings came like tankers out of the mist. Had we made a mistake? ‘Is it a sea fog?’ Sarah asked Ventnor. ‘Oh no,’ he said languidly, ‘it’s always like this here.’ Somehow his grief smeared us. He was unshaven; he had been unable to find a razor after he had packed everything. His mind was moving from one thing to another. This and that he talked about, these keys again, the oil delivery again, his own untidied odds and ends, a sort of humility in front of us as ‘the owners’ which grated as it reached us, as it must have grated as he said it. His eyes had black rings under them, wide panda-zones of unhappiness. Anyone, I suppose, would have been grieving at the loss of this place. It looked like an amputation. Even so, I felt nothing but impatience, as though it were already ours and he no more than an interloper here. He said nothing about that. What a curious business, this buying and selling of the things we love. It’s like a slave trade. Go, go, I said to him in silence. His mother-in-law was there with him. She was less restrained. She showed us pictures of their dogs cavorting in the wood. I felt like saying ‘our wood’. She was still possessive. ‘I’d hate to think of anyone making a mess in there after what I’ve done,’ she said. I could see her primping the back of her hair and looking at me as though I were a piece of dog mess myself. And I suppose I was, in their eyes, the agent of eviction. Go on, away with you. I was edged by it all. The house seemed ugly, stark and poky. I hardly fitted through a single door. Would it ever be redeemable? I was still standing off, waiting for the mooring line, but Sarah was sublime, confident, already arrived. ‘Why do starlings look so greasy?’ I heard myself asking Ventnor. ‘Like a head of hair that hasn’t been washed for weeks. They look like bookies.’ He went at last, his sadness bottled up inside the great length of his long, thin body. We waited for the furniture van. The house seemed inadequate for our lives. I picked some flowers, I looked at the view from the top field, our summit, and we waited and waited for the van. At last they called, about midday. They were in Brightling, lost. Sarah went to guide them in, while Rosie slept upstairs. The van came. It was too big to fit around the corner of the track past the oast-house and so everything had to be carried from the other side, 100 yards further. All afternoon our possessions rolled out and into the buildings, this clothing of the bones. Come on, faster, faster. The place started to become ours. It was as though the house were trying on new clothes. Sarah was worried by the sight of a staked lilac. Was the wind really that bad? The removal men went. The oast looked like a jumble sale and the various rooms of the house half OK with our furniture. ‘Change that window, pull down that extension, put the cowl of the oast back.’ I could have spent ?100,000 here that day. Sarah and Rosie went off shopping. Ventnor returned to collect a few more things. I didn’t want to have to deal with him again. ‘I see they’ve done some damage there,’ he said, pointing at the place where the lorry’s wheels had cut into the turf, trying to get around the sharp corner by the oast-house. I hadn’t even noticed. I listened to his engine as he drove off towards somewhere else in England, the gears changing uphill to Brightling Needle, and then down more easily the far side, the sound, like a boat’s wake, slowly folding back into the trees. We never saw him again. He had gone, it was quiet and I was alone for the first time in Perch Hill. I could feel the silence between my fingertips, the extraordinary substance of this new place, this new-old place, new-bought but ancient, ours and not ours, seeping and creeping around me. It was as though I had learned sub-aqua and for the first time had lowered myself gingerly into the body of the pool, to sense this new dimension thickly present around me as somewhere in which life might be lived and movements made. Until now all I had seen was the surface of the water, its tremors and eddies. Now, like a pike, I could hang inside it. I could feel the water starting to flow and ripple between my fingers. That evening, as the sun dropped into the wood, I walked the boundaries, the shores of the island, the places where the woodland trees reached their arms out over the pastures. Here and there, the bluebells crept out into the grass like a painted shadow. Wild garlic was growing at the bottom of the Slip Field. I lay down in the Way Field, the field where we had decided to come here all those months before, a place and a decision which were now seared into my life like a brand, and as I lay there felt the earth under my back, its deep solidity, as Richard Jefferies had done 100 years before on the Wiltshire Downs. The hand of the rock itself was holding me up, presenting me to the sky, my body and self moulded to the contours and matched to the irreducibility of this hill on this farm at this moment. ‘You cannot fall through a field,’ I said aloud. I took stock. What was this place to which we were now wedded? It had cost ?432,000, plus all the fees. We had borrowed ?160,000 to make that up, on top of the sale of the London house. My father was lending us ?25,000. Our position was strung out and I had ricked my back. I felt as weak and as impotent as at any time in my life. It was an intuitive understanding, an act of faith, that the deep substance of this little fragment of landscape would mend that lack and make me whole. It was a farm of 90 acres in the Sussex Weald, about two hours south of London in the usual traffic, but no more than an hour from Westminster Bridge at five on a summer’s morning. It was down a little lane, as obscure as one could feel in the south of England, with no sound of traffic, no hint of a sodium glare in the sky at night and an air of enclosure and privacy. At the edge of the land, by the lane, was the farmyard, with its utterly compromised mixture of bad old and bad new. Beyond the farmyard itself, things improved. It was indeed one Bright Field after another. The buildings were at almost the highest point and in all directions the land fell away in pleats, like the folds of a cloth as it drops from the table to the floor. The creases were filled with little strips of wood under whose branches small trickly streams made their way towards the River Dudwell. The broad rounded backs of the pleats were the fields themselves, eleven of them, little hedged enclosures. They made up the small island block entirely surrounded by wood. That wood was part of the ancient forest of the Weald, whose name itself, cognate with wald, meant forest. The farmland was cut from it perhaps in the 15th or 16th century. The house was built in about 1580 and was probably made of the oaks that once grew where it stood. It was poor land, solid clay, high and windy all year, cold, wet and clammy in the winter, hard, heavy and cloddy in the summer. Because nothing destroys a landscape like money, its poverty had preserved it. We were on the edge of viable agriculture here, one of the last pieces to be cleared from the wood and already in part going back to it. You could see the lines of old hedges, hornbeam and hawthorn, growing as 40-foot trees in the middle of the woods. Those were the boundaries of the ghost fields, abandoned and returning to their natural condition. Because it was so poor, it had never been worth a farmer’s while to drive the land hard. That’s why these fields are as beautiful as any you could find in Europe, or the world come to that. Of course there are many other pockets of beauty in England, at least away from the great slabs of denuded arable land in East Anglia and the Midlands. In my 20s I had walked through many of them, about 3,000 miles on foot when writing a book about English paths, and then as a travel writer for the Sunday Times I had walked a great deal more. In the western counties, from Devon and Dorset, up the Welsh marches to Lancashire and Cumbria, I had fallen in love with a country I hadn’t known until then, as a knitted thing, a visible testament to the long and intimate encounter between England and the English. It is the national autobiography, written every day for 1,500 years, with more life buried in it than any of us will ever know, with little thought ever given to its overall effect and its language often obscure. Maybe that is what we found at Perch Hill, a miracle of retained memory, a depth of time, and the mute, ox-like certainty which comes with that, away from the zigzags of our own chaotic existence. Nature was part of it, not all. This was no wilderness. Nor, though, was it an exclusively man-made place, sheeny and slicked up. Sometimes now I wish Perch Hill – our lives – had happened elsewhere in England, somewhere smarter and sleeker, with an elegant trout stream or smooth chalky views, but Perch Hill, stumbled on by chance, in all its scruffiness and lack of polish, but with its promise of what we always used to call echtness, an authentic, vital beauty that came up from the roots, was the right place for us. Human and natural met there in a rough old encounter and that was the world we needed. There was a line from a poem of Tennyson’s which, from time to time that year, bumped up into my conscious mind, and presumably lurked not far beneath for the rest of it. ‘Green Sussex,’ it said, ‘fading into blue.’ That was this farm in a phrase: the green immediacy, the plunge for the valley, the stepped ridges of the Weald, blueing into the distance 10 and 12 miles away. This wasn’t a little button of perfection, a cherry perched on a cake of the wrecked, but part of a larger world and as I lay in the Way Field that evening all I could think of was the feeling of extent that ran out from there across the lane, down into the field called Toyland, beyond that into the valley of woods running off to the west, to the river down there, the deer nosing in that wood and the sight I had that morning, as we were waiting for the van, of the fox running down through that field, on the wood edge, no more than the tip of its tail visible above the grasses, a dancing point like the tip of a conductor’s baton … I shall not forget that evening. The spring was going haywire around me. It was DNA bedlam, nature’s opening day. The black-thorn was stark white in the dark and shady corners. The willows had turned eau-de-nil. Oaks were the odd springtime mixture of red and formaldehyde yellow, the colour of old flesh preserved in bottles. The wild cherries stood hard and white like pylons in the wood and the crab apples, lower, more crabbed in form, were in full pink flower – an incredible thing a whole tree of that, the most sweetly beautiful flower in England, dolloped and larded all over the branches of a wrinkled, half-decrepit tree. In places nothing was doing better than the nettles and the thistles, but in the wood, there were the wall-to-wall bluebells, pale, almost lilac in the Middle Shaw, that eyeshadow blue: in the half-lit green darkness of the wood, that incredible, glamorous, seductive haze of the bluebell’s blue, a nightclub sheen in the low light, the sexiest colour in the English landscape, hazing my eyes, a pool of colour into which, if I could, I would have dived there and then. There were deer on the top field. The light was catching the ridged knobbles of their spines. I drank it up: this bright sunshine, even late, the bars of it poking into the shadows of the wood; the comfort of the grass; the lane a continuous mass of wood anemones, cuckoo flowers, primroses; and one very creamy anemone up by the gate. Its colour looked to me like the top of the milk. ‘These foam-bells on the hidden currents of being’, Hugh MacDiarmid once called spring flowers, and that attitude, a slightly dismissive superiority, used to be mine too. Geology, the understructure, the creation of circumstances: those were the things that used to matter to me. I preferred the hard and stony parts of the north and west or the higher places in the Alps where, after the snow has gone, the crests and ridges are left as abused and brutalized as any frost-shattered quarry. Walking across those high, dry Alps, I have seen the whole world in every direction desert-like in its austerity, a bleakness beyond either ugliness or beauty, and thought that life could offer me nothing more. I still lusted after that, for all the clean hard-pressure rigour of that alienating landscape, serene precisely because it is so dreadful, because from that point of desiccation there was nowhere lower to fall. But alongside it now, there was this other thing, this undeniable life-spurt in the spring, whose toughness was subtler than the stone’s but whose persistence would outlive it. Genes last longer than rocks. They slip through unbroken while continents collide and are consumed. These plants, I now saw, were the world’s version of eternity, the lit bush. If you wanted to ally yourself with strength, nothing would be more sustaining than the spring flowers. Over the following days, we dressed the house as though preparing it to go out. It was like dressing a father or mother. She sat there mute while coats and ribbons were tried on her. ‘Oh you look nice like that,’ we would say, ‘or that, or maybe that.’ Rooms acquired meaning, another meaning. In the kitchen, painted on the cupboard door, I found a coat of arms: six white feathers on a blue ground and the motto ‘Labore et perseverantia’, By work and perseverance. It looked fairly new. What was it, a kind of d’Urberville story of a noble family collapsed to the poverty of this, to the resolution of that motto against all the odds? It was certainly a failed farm. That was the only reason we were there. We had crept like hermit crabs into a shell that others had vacated. But I guessed the arms and the motto had no great ancestry. Had Ventnor himself painted them here in the last few years? I knew that he had attempted to make a business out of this farm, to continue with the dairy herd that he had bought with it. But he didn’t know what he was doing and had lost a fortune. The last thing he asked me before he left was ‘Are you thinking of farming here?’ to which I had been noncommittal. With something of a glittery eye, he told me not to consider it. That was a sure route to disaster. Soon stories were reaching me of Ventnor sitting in the kitchen here, his unpaid bills laid out on the table in front of him like a kind of Pelmanism from hell, his head in his hands, his prospects hopeless. Every one of these stories ended with the same warning: Don’t do it. The Ventnor experience seemed somehow to stand between us and an earlier past. He was one of us, an urban escapee, a pastoralist, who had turned the old oast-house into an art gallery and put coach-lamp-style lights outside the doors. Where was the contact with the real thing, the real past here? There was a glimmering of discontent in my mind about that gap, still a glass wall between us and the essential nature of Perch Hill. Before Ventnor, I knew, the last farmers here had been called Weekes. Where were they? Had all trace of them disappeared? It wasn’t long before we realized that the very opposite was the case: Ken and Brenda Weekes still lived in the cottage 200 yards away across the fields. A day or two after our arrival, Sarah and I went up to see them and from that moment they became a fixed point in our lives. The boys were here and were shrieking in the new expanse of garden. Tom was ten, Will eight and Ben six. We planned bike routes across the fields and began making a tree house in the Middle Shaw, nailing and binding scaffold boards and half-rotten ladders to the ancient twisting hornbeams. We got a giant trampoline and put it in the barn, where the three of them competed with each other, trying to touch the tie-beams high above them. Sarah and I were anxious and buoyed up in equal measure at what we had taken on. Across the fields, we could hear Ken mowing the lawn around his cottage: the sound of a half-distant mower in early summer, a man in shirtsleeves and sleeveless jersey, his dog on the lawn beside him, the sun slipping in and out of bubbled clouds, and all around us, to east and west, Sussex stepping off into an inviting afternoon. It was, in a way, what we had come here for. We walked up there, not across the fields that first time but up the lane. The hedge was in brilliant new leaf. Ken and Brenda came to their garden gate, asked us in, a cup of tea in the kitchen, Gemma the dog lying by the Rayburn, and a sort of inspecting openness in them both, the welcome mixed with ‘Who are you? What sort of people are you?’ I shall always remember two things Ken said. One with his tang of acid: ‘You know what they always said about this farm, don’t you? They always said this was the poorest farm in the parish.’ The other with the warmth that can spread like butter around him: ‘That’s one thing that’s lovely, children’s voices down at the farm again. That’s a sound we haven’t had for a long time here.’ To a degree I didn’t understand at the time, we had entered Ken Weekes’s world. Perhaps we had bought the farm, perhaps the deeds were in our name, perhaps we were living in the farmhouse, perhaps I was meant to be deciding what should happen to the woods and fields, but none of that could alter the central fact: Perch Hill was Ken’s in a deeper sense than any deed of conveyance could ever accomplish. He had come here in 1942 as a six-year-old boy to live in the house we were now occupying. His father, ‘Old Ron’, was farm manager for a London entrepreneur and ‘a gentleman, one of the real old gentry’, Mr George Wilson-Fox. ‘Old Wilson’ used to come down with his friends on a Saturday. The Weekeses would all put on clean white dairymen’s coats to show the proprietor and his guests the herd of prize pedigree Friesians, spotless animals, their tails washed twice a day every day, the cow shed whitewashed every year, a cow shed so clean ‘you could eat your dinner off that floor’. It was a place dedicated to excellence. Wilson-Fox made sure there was never any shortage of money for the farm and Ron imposed his discipline on it. ‘The cattle always came first,’ Ken remembered. ‘Even if you were dying, you had to look after the cows. I remember Old Ron kicking us out of bed to go and milk the cows one morning when I could hardly move – “Come on, you bugger, get out, there’s work to do” – and it was so cold in there in the cow shed with a north-easterly that the milk was freezing in the milk-line. But we got it done. It all had to be done by eight in the morning if you wanted to sit down to breakfast. You couldn’t have breakfast unless the cattle had been looked after first.’ It is a lost world. Nothing like these small dairy farms exists here any more. They have all gone and Ken has witnessed their disappearance, the total evaporation of the world in which he grew up. About that he seems to feel bleak and accepting in equal measure. Every inch of this farm carries some memory or mark of Ken’s life here: the day the doodlebug crashed in the wood at the bottom of the Way Field; those moments in Beech Meadow where Old Ron, in late June or early July, would pick a bunch of flowers for Dolly, Ken’s mother, the signal for the boys that haymaking was about to begin; the day the earth suddenly slipped after they had ploughed it in the field for ever after known as the Slip Field. A farm is a farmer’s autobiography and this one belongs to Ken. When he married Brenda, in 1959, they moved into the cottage across the fields. His mother and brother stayed in the farmhouse. Wilson-Fox died in 1971, but Ken continued farming for the trustees of the estate for another 15 years until, in 1986, the farm was sold, along with its herd of cattle, to John Ventnor, who wanted to be a farmer. Ken stayed in the cottage, and set the art dealer on his way, helping him for a year or so, but they fell out. ‘We had a misunderstanding,’ Ken said. For several years after that Ken was not even allowed to walk his dog in these fields. There was something of a false cheeriness in both of us as we talked. Each of us was guarded against the other. But the afternoon floated on Ken’s stories. He could remember watching the pilots of the Luftwaffe Messerschmitts, low enough for you to see a figure in the cockpit. ‘Oh yes, you could see them sitting in there all right.’ One evening the Weekeses were all down in the Way Field getting in the hay and there were so many of the German planes that his father said they’d better go in. ‘You could never tell, could you? Bastards.’ Ken’s performance culminated in his favourite story about the hunt. He was out in the Cottage Field, tending to one of the cows which was poorly, when he chanced to look up and see a whole crowd of the hunt come pouring down the trackway that leads off the bridlepath and into the Perch Hill farmyard. ‘“I say,”’ Ken bellowed at them – ‘because they’ll only understand you if you talk to them in a way they do understand – “why don’t you fucking well bugger off out of there?” And,’ Ken says, looking round, all smiles, ‘do you know what? They did!’ Another piece soon dropped into place. Will Clark came up one day from the village. He had been doing some work on the farm for John Ventnor. Peter, his son, had been working in the wood and mowing the grass. Ventnor had said that there was no one he could recommend more highly. And that’s how it turned out. As soon as Will walked into the yard I could see what he meant. His eyes were the colour of old jeans. He swept his hair in a repeated gesture up and over his forehead into a wide long curl that could only be the descendant of a rocker’s quiff, 40 years on. He smiled with his eyes and talked with a laugh in his voice. ‘We’ll be haying soon,’ he said. He cuddled Rosie. His taste in shirts was perfect, lime green and tangerine orange, unchanged, I guess, since he was bike-mad in the fifties, when he used to do a ton down the long straight stretch to Lewes called The Broyle, or burn up and down the High Street in the village to impress the girls. He was the only man in Burwash ever to get to Tunbridge Wells in 12? minutes, or so he told me. He talked broad Sussex: fence posts were ‘spiles’, working in the mud got you ‘all slubbed up’, anything that needed doing always involved ‘stirring it about a bit’, a sickle was ‘a swap’. He had started his working life when he was 14 on a farm at Hawkhurst, just over the border into Kent, looking after the horses. He knew all about machines and wood and wooding and how to get a big ash butt out of a difficult corner. He was the man of the place and he would be the man for us. Will had been ill for years – his kidneys scarcely worked and he had to spend three hours a day at home on a dialysis machine – and he said that Peter would have to do the heavy work. ‘He’s the muscle man.’ And so we plugged in. This other world was closing over us, some version of pastoral folding us in its lap. All the same, I was anxious about it all. The stupidity of what we were doing was brought home, involuntarily or not, when people we knew from London dropped in. There was always a vulture in the party, someone who would unerringly make you sour with a remark. ‘Oh yes,’ one of these people said in the early days, nosing around the ugliness of our horrible buildings, ‘it’s a very nice spot, isn’t it?’ A very nice spot: the silent pinchedness of what is not said. Why do these people wreak destruction? Why do they do such dishonest damage? I couldn’t believe how soured I felt by them. But why should I have been? Why did I even care? Perhaps because the whole point of Perch Hill was to take ourselves out of range of their criticisms, their worldly knowingness. Now, I am sure, nothing they said would come anywhere near me. It is one of the consolations of age that your own self-knowledge allows other people’s criticisms to break around you like little waves. But then, in our tender state, to have their all-too-predictable strictures applied to our precious refuge was like an experience you occasionally get as a writer. You have written something which matters to you and which tries to say something beyond what is ordinarily said, and as a result is likely to be a little rough at the edges. Your reader looks at it, but they don’t read into the heart of it, the point of it, and stay critically on the edge, looking at the punctuation or the length of sentences or, worst of all, the definition of terms. I once wrote a book about a place I loved and which, on its first page, mentioned the ‘branched orchids’ that grew there. A woman told me casually one day that she hadn’t got any further than that first page because ‘There aren’t any branched orchids.’ I have never been able to look at an orchid since without feeling with the ends of my fingers for those tiny branches on which each of its individual flowers sits. Now, though, in retrospect, I get the point: Perch Hill is a nice spot but there was nothing nice about its buildings. The judgement was correct. But Sarah and I were not living in the world of correct judgements. And our visitors from London could never have understood the powerful psychic reality here: the way I wanted to wriggle under the skin of this place so that only my eyes were above the skin of the turf like a hippo in its river and the bed of green comfort around me, the osmotic relation to place so that there was no distinction between me and it, no boundary at the skin. Of course they couldn’t, because that is not something that can be said in polite society. It was that kind of pre-rational understanding that I was after, like a dog rolling in muck. We didn’t know what we were doing. We arrived on this farm as naked as Adam and Eve and we were setting about making it right. We knew what we wanted – a sense of completeness. That sounds so vague now and perhaps it was. But there were real models in our minds. As a boy at Sissinghurst, I had known a kind of completeness in the world that surrounded me, a house and garden, farm, woods, streams and fields, with a sense of that pattern continuing beyond its boundaries in much the same way, to be explored on foot through the woods and hay meadows, by bike down the long sinuous lanes which only decades later did I realize were the drove roads by which the Weald was first settled. That was a memory which seemed to have all the elements of a life – adventure, energy, people, community, love, beauty. And then, more recently, Sarah and I had stayed for a few months in a cottage next to a house belonging to John and Caryl Hubbard in Dorset, at Chilcombe, a tiny settlement with its own tiny church, looking out over a theatre of fields and woods that led down to the shingle bank at Chesil Beach. Here too house and garden and chickens and sheep and cattle and the whole wide view and the sense of Dorset and England – with, miraculously, the strip of shining sea laid above it all – were folded in together in a way that is simply not accessible in any city. This is not an aberrational idea. It appears at the earliest moments of Europe, in Minoan Crete, in the Bronze Age 4,000 years ago, when the priest rulers of that civilization made for themselves small and elegant country houses, surrounded by flower gardens, vineyards, orchards and olives groves, in carefully and beautifully chosen places where the cultivated country and the distant mountains were laid out around them like the background to a Renaissance portrait. This is the vision of the Horatian farm, an easy place because it is at ease with its surroundings; it is the ideal behind the Palladian villas of the late 16th-century Veneto; it is the transformed vision in eighteenth-century England and the English seaboard of America; it lies behind the ideals of Ruskin and Morris, driven by a need for an intimacy with the natural which goes beyond the crude act of buying which is at the root of all cities. That is what completeness meant and means to me: an entirely full and committed engagement with the real world in all the dimensions which the world can offer. We didn’t quite know how to get there. All we could do was stumble off into the dark, hoping and trusting that our instincts were right. That was the point. The whole enterprise was a blunder into truth, wobbling chaotically towards the goal. It was good because it was messy. If it had all been neater, if we had known what we were doing, it wouldn’t have had the juice in it. The whole thing would have flattened out in the drear of expertise. As it was, ignorance was the great enabler and incompetence the condition of life. Or so I would say to myself in my storming rage after the nay-sayers had gone. Sometimes I felt we were surrounded by know-alls. Not the people who lived near us, the Will Clarks, the Ken Weekeses, who approached our efforts with a delicate sense of neither wanting to intrude nor wanting us to come too much of a cropper. No, the real killer know-alls were the partly ruralized urbanites who had acquired the cultural habit of telling other people what to do. It probably stemmed from the prefect system at public schools, compounded by middle-class careers in which the only necessary skill is the ability to disguise bossiness as brains. You could see them heaving into view a mile away. They were struggling with their mission to inform. They knew they shouldn’t. They felt they must. They wished they didn’t have to. But they knew they ought to. One has a duty, after all. It’s a responsibility to the landscape as a whole. And it would be so sad, wouldn’t it, if it all came unstuck in the end for Adam and Sarah? Out came the supercilious smiles. These were the opening, but doomed, attempts at a spirit of generosity. Soon enough they gave way to the barrage of assured, you-really-should-have-asked-me-first, pain-in-the-neck blather. The spirit hit the iceberg and sank. No area of life was immune. I remember, classically, having our stack of firewood analysed by a man who, from what he was saying, was obviously chief firewood analyst for Deutsche Morgan Grenfell. Not much was right with the way we had done things. The shed was wrong; it needed more air holes, its roof was not very nice, the walls were unsatisfactory and it was in the wrong position. We shouldn’t have bothered to put either chestnut or larch logs in the pile because they both spit when they burn and that wasn’t good for the kiddies, was it? The oak was useless; it only burned on a massively hot fire, which we would never achieve because the rest of the wood was such rubbish. The ash had been split far too small and would burn too quickly. Sycamore had no calorific value to speak of and what we had was rotten. It would take more energy to start the fire than would be given out by it. And were we two years ahead with our cutting programme? He looked at me in that generous, hesitating way people use to those whose self-esteem they have just bulldozed into a silage pit. The idea of putting up a building of any kind was a mistake. You would make the windows too small. You would spend too much money on it. You would do something totally out of character. You would create a dreadful ersatz fake (‘Tesco’s’) when people in your position had a responsibility to patronize new architects and architecture. You were living in a retro hell. You would not install the correct insulation/safety features/ heating system. Heating systems! May I never, ever have another discussion about heating systems for the rest of my life. Then there was the chicken question. You were thinking of getting far too many of them. Were you really going to be eating 80 eggs a week? Had you performed the cloacal swab test for salmonella on them yet? You certainly couldn’t think of giving eggs away if they had dirty cloacas. Their housing was disgusting and if an RSPCA man should happen by, he would be appalled. You may have heard someone was prosecuted for just this kind of thing the other day. Anyway, they should have been bedded down on sawdust not straw. It was amazing you hadn’t found that out for yourself. I don’t quite understand why you were going in for these things. Moving quickly on, children should wear clothes made out of only naturally occurring materials, fed only naturally occurring foods and baked beans should be sugar-free. Trees – these two subjects always somehow elide – should be planted without stakes, or tied only loosely to stakes, or planted without tree-guards or only after a comprehensive drainage system has been installed, or only on M25 rootstock, or only from Deacon’s Nursery in the Isle of Wight, or only with local genetic material, gathered from the last of the local orchards, and anyway fruit trees are only a pleasure if you have done all the grafting and training yourself. Have you managed to do that, Adam? Or have you ever thought you might be taking on a little much here? Have you had your dog castrated yet? Aaaaaaaargh. My sons – lovely stage in life – had just then started playing Oasis on their ghetto-blaster at crow-scarer volume. The songs wormed their way into the mind, colonizing whole stretches of it. After one particularly gruesome hour or two with a couple of people who came to lunch and knew every damn thing there was to know about the usual subjects – orchards, firewood, chickens, ducks (‘one says “duck”, doesn’t one, in the plural?’), heating systems, woodland management, grants (‘We’ve found we’ve done quite well out of the whole County Council Heritage Landscape scheme but I’m told, I’m afraid, that they’ve run out of money now and won’t be taking any more applicants at least until fiscal 2000’) – I found myself stacking the dishwasher and singing, much too loudly, ‘Yer gada roll wiv it/ya gorra take yer time/yer garra say wotya say/dern ledd anybuddy gerrin yer waaajy …/There’s nuthin lef for me to saaiy …’ The bravado papered over a pit of anxiety. One morning I woke at four and said, aloud, ‘I’m worried about the fields.’ ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Sarah said without a momentary flicker. She’d heard this sort of thing before and, anyway, was already awake worrying about the garden. We lay there in silence for a moment, travelling through the universe together at 24,000 miles an hour, each in a private little cubicle of hysteria and each thinking the other stupid. ‘The fields are fine.’ ‘They aren’t. What’s wrong with the garden?’ ‘It’s out of control.’ ‘That,’ I told her, ‘is also what’s wrong with the fields.’ ‘I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous. Fields don’t get out of control. That’s one of the good things about them. They just sit there perfectly in control for day after day.’ Gardens didn’t, apparently. Gardens were nature on speed. In fact, you could see them as hyperactive fields. They went mad if you didn’t look after them. Anyway the fields were not going to be photographed on Wednesday, were they? This was true. Sarah had got a job as a junior doctor in the renal unit of the hospital in Brighton. She was sharing it with another young doctor but even half-time, in the days of famously long hours for junior doctors, it often required her to be there 40 hours a week. The hospital was about 45 minutes’ drive each way. Day after day, she had to leave early and return late, missing Rosie, feeling that she had come here to find a new life with us but that her work was taking her away to the point where our lives were hardly shared at all. Even when at home, she was too tired to take much pleasure in what we were doing, or where we had come to. It seemed absurd. We decided together that she couldn’t go on. When she had been pregnant with Rosie and after she was born, Sarah, who is incapable of doing nothing, had taken time off and set up a florist’s business called Garlic & Sapphire with her university friend Lou Farman. As florists do, they had bought their flowers and foliage from wholesale merchants in Covent Garden market. This was fine, but it was not that easy to make any kind of living, and anyway it felt a little tertiary: selling flower arrangements to London clients from boxes of flowers bought at a market and almost entirely shipped in from industrial-scale producers in Holland. We could do better than that. Sarah’s father, a classics don at King’s College, Cambridge, had also been a passionate botanist who with his own father had painted the entire British flora and was the co-author of the New Naturalist volume on mountain flowers. He had taken Sarah as a girl botanizing across bog, heath, mountain, meadow and moor in England, Scotland, Italy and Greece. She had drunk flowers in at his knee and from him had learned the science of flower reproduction and habitat. The Ravens had also made inspirationally beautiful gardens at their house near Cambridge (chalky) and around their holiday house on the west coast of Scotland (acid). So this much was clear: Sarah had gardens in her genes. She had to make a garden. Her life would not be complete unless she did. We had made together a small and lovely garden in London with pebble paths and hazel hurdles and we had talked together about making it more productive. One day I happened to be sitting next to the publisher Frances Lincoln at a wedding party. ‘Do you know what you should publish?’ I said. ‘No,’ she said, a little wary. ‘A book called The Cutting Garden about growing flowers to be cut and brought inside the house.’ ‘Are you going to do it?’ she asked. No, I wasn’t, but I knew someone who could. So this was already in our mind when we came to Perch Hill and it was obvious that when Sarah gave up her job as a doctor, to look after Rosie and to be with us at home, she should embark on making the cutting garden and writing the book. We wrote the proposal together, with plans, plant lists and seasonal successions, and sent it off to Frances, and soon enough it was commissioned. Perch Hill was about to take its first step to new productivity. It was to be a highly and beautifully illustrated book whose working title at home anyway was The Expensive Garden. From time to time in various parts of the house I used to find half-scribbled lists on the back of invoices from garden centres spread across the south of England, working out exactly how much had been spent on dahlia tubers, brick paths, taking up the brick paths because they were in the wrong place, the new, correctly aligned brick paths, the hypocaust system for the first greenhouse, the automatically opening vent system for the second, the underground electric wiring for the heated cold frames (yes, heated cold frames), the woven hazel fencing to give the correct cheap, rustic cottage look (gratifyingly more expensive than any other garden fencing currently on the market) and the extra pyramid box trees needed before Wednesday. The consignment of topiary was delivered, one day early that summer, by an articulated Volvo turbo-cooled truck, whose body stretched 80 feet down the lane – it had caused a slight traffic rumpus on the main road just outside Burwash, attempting to manoeuvre itself like a suppository into the entrance of the lane – and whose driver with a flourish drew aside the long curtain that ran the length of its flank, saying ‘There you are, instant gardening!’ He must have done it before. The inside of the lorry was a sort of tableau illustrating ‘The Riches of Flora’. It contained enough topiary to re-equip the Villa Lante. Species ceanothus, or whatever they were, sported themselves decorously among the aluminium stanchions of the lorry. The rear section was the kind of over-elaborate rose and clematis love-seat-cum-gazebo you sometimes see on stage in As You Like It. Transferred to the perfectly unpretentious vegetable patch maintained by the Weekeses, the disgorged innards of the Volvo turned Perch Hill Farm, instantly, as the man said, into the sort of embowered house-and-garden most people might labour for 20 years to produce. A visitor the following week congratulated Sarah on what he called ‘its marvellous, patinated effect’. Some patina, I said, some cheque book. At that stage, the advance on The Expensive Garden had covered about fifteen percent of the money spent on making it. If even a tenth of that amount had been spent on the farm we would already be one of the showpieces of southern England. ‘That point,’ Sarah was in the habit of saying, for reasons I have never yet got her to explain, ‘which you always make when we have people to supper, is totally inadmissible.’ But I was serious about the fields. I wanted the fields, which were beautiful in the large scale, to be perfect in detail too. I wanted to walk about in them and think, ‘Yes, this is right, this is how things should be. This is complete.’ That is not what I was thinking that summer. In fact, the more I got to know them, the more dissatisfied I became. Hence the 4 a.m. anxieties. The thistles were terrible. Some fields were so thick with thistles that my dear dog, the slightly fearful and profoundly loving Colonel Custard, refused to come for a walk in them. He stopped at the gate, sat down and put on the face which all dog-owners will recognize: ‘Me through that?’ In the early hours, I used to have a sort of internal debate about the fields. It came from an unresolved conflict in my own mind, which could be reduced to this question: was the farm a vastly enlarged garden or was it part of the natural world which happened to be ours for the time being? The idea that it might be a business which could earn us money had never been seriously entertained. We might choose to have sheep, cows, chickens, ducks and pigs wandering about on it, but only in the same way that Sarah might order another five mature tulip trees for a little quincunx she had in mind. I would have animals because they looked nice. To the question of big garden or slice of nature, I veered between one answer and then the other. In part it was like a huge, low-intensity garden. We were here because it was heart-stoppingly beautiful and one of the things that made it beautiful was the interfolding of wood, hedge and field. If the distinctions between them became blurred then a great deal of the beauty would go. The fields must look like fields, shorn, bright and clean, and the woods must look like woods, fluffy, full and dense. Field and wood were, here anyway, the rice and curry of landscape aesthetics. Scurfy fields, as spotty as a week’s stubble on an unshaven chin, looked horrible, untended, a room in a mess. There were other things to think of too. If we simply mowed the fields to keep them bright and green or, horror of horrors, sprayed off the docks and thistles, we would not be attending to other aspects of the grassland which of course are valuable in themselves. There were clumps of dyer’s greenweed here, whole spreads of the vetch here, called eggs and bacon and early purple orchids on the edges of the wood. Sprays would wreck all that and you had to allow those things to set seed and reproduce if they were going to continue. You had to allow them to look messy. What to do? Obviously I had to learn how to manage grassland properly. I was blundering around in my ignorance. I had a meeting one Saturday morning with the Wrenns, Brian and Stephen, father and son, our farming neighbours from Perryman’s, on the other side of the hill. We were all a little shy with each other in the kitchen, too ready to agree with what the other had said. Brian, sliding the conversation sideways, told me there were nightingales in our woods and nightjars and wheatears. I knew nothing about these things. We talked about the way that all the farmhouses here face south, their fronts to the warmth, their backs to the wind. How ingeniously the first people to settle here spied out the land. Stephen talked about the poverty of the Weald, the way there is no topsoil, all the fertility poured away down the streams to the southern rich belt, the champaign country of rich southern Sussex. ‘This is the poorest, the last bit of ground to be taken,’ he said, ‘but that’s what has saved it.’ Then I said, with the Nescaf? in me, we should talk about the real matter in hand. Brian turned businesslike. ‘We would certainly like to have all the grass. But it’s too late this year to get any nitrogen on for the silage. We’ll get some heifers on to graze it later.’ ‘Of course,’ I said, feeling I was about to introduce some urban gaucherie, ‘and anyway, from our side, we would like to manage it in as much of a conservationist way as we can.’ How I hate that word, but to my amazement they lay in happily with it. Even the air between us became somehow emotional at the recognition of shared ideas. Stephen talked about planting some of Perryman’s with willows to provide fuel for a wood-burning power plant. That toboggan feeling developed around the table that we were not such aliens to each other as we might have imagined. The future opened like the curtains of a theatre. We all came to an agreement: they should take some of the grass that year as summer grazing. They would pay ?1,000 for it, which was better than nothing I supposed, about 1.5 percent return on capital. The real question was: were we prepared to forgo the ?3,000-odd we would get from a conventional let for the sake of it looking nice and it being lovely? For saying no to nitrogen and no to high-pressure farming? Were we rich enough for that? With a new bill-hook, I cut hazels in the wood for Sarah’s new cutting patch. The old hazel was growing in stools 8 feet across. The middle of them was a jumble of old fallen sticks. One stick had rotted entirely on the inside but the skin had remained whole as an upright paper tube. There were deer in the wood, their awkward big bodies breaking the trees they hurried past, and around my feet tall purple orchids. I was cutting with slashing blunt incompetence at the hazels, half-tearing them away, but I loved their long swinging creak next to my ear as I carried them home on my shoulder. I felt the sweat run down my side in single, finger-sized trickles and I loved the smell, the woody, sweet, bruised, tannic vegetable reeking of the cut wood. That’s what I was here for, the under-sense, those deeper connections, that core of intimacy. I demolished the fence around the pond, shirt off, sweat and exhaustion. I sold the tractor on Will’s advice and we were for the moment tractorless. Will was looking for another more reliable one. I made teepees out of hazels from the wood and some hurdles out of split chestnut. I tried to buy a mower but my credit card failed. It was the usual humiliation in front of a queue of men who were more interested in that little human drama than anything else. Rachel the shop girl blushed. I laughed it off. I needed to earn more money and I had a feeling we were veering, slowly but quite deliberately, towards a financial crisis. But I loved it here that first spring. I loved the sustenance of the green, the kestrel that came daily and hung above the corners of the barns, moving from station to station. I loved the little seedlings of the oak and aspen sprouting in the grass along the wood edges. I loved the knit of the country, the jersey of it. I loved the sight of the ducks, two wild mallards on the pond, I loved the substance of the place, my new fax machine, the gentleness of Will and Peter, Rosie playing in the garden with her new nanny, Anna Cheney, who only years later would dare tell us exactly how horrified she had been at the chaos in which we were living, but how one thing had convinced her to come: the sight of Rosie’s face as she sat at the kitchen table, so round and so sweet. The garden accumulated. I tended to the house as I had tended no house before, tidying and hoovering. Sarah and I both had the feeling, if we were honest, that we should have waited to buy somewhere with more beautiful buildings but there we were: we couldn’t say that now. This would be lovely in the slow unnoticed growth of the place around us. Forty years later, as we died, we would look at it and say, ‘That was beautiful.’ Life would be over, having been lived. The moments of revelation are all there is. This is all there is. This will be the undernote of my life: the making with a purpose, not the drifting of the survivor. Make, and you will be happy. Part Two MENDING (#ulink_0330c49d-cfac-5485-981c-269b1294e220) The Darting of Life (#ulink_661b9b23-a22c-5c46-89b0-b4be115d9220) THAT SUMMER of 1994 burned. The south of England was bleak with heat. Cars along the lane raised a floury dust in their wake. The cow parsley and the trees in the hedges were coated with it like loaves in a bakery. The streams were dry coming off the hill and the river in the trench of the valley was little more than a gravel bed across which a line of damp had been drawn, connecting the shrunken pools. I spent long days down there in the dark, deep shade of the riverside trees. The valley felt enclosed, a place apart, and secrecy gathered inside it. Rudyard Kipling lived here for the second half of his life – he bought Bateman’s, a large 17th-century iron-master’s house just below the last of our fields, in 1902 – and the whole place remained haunted by his memory. Everywhere you went, he had already described. It was here, among the hidden constrictions of the valley where, in Kipling’s wonderful phrase, ‘wind prowling through woods sounds like exciting things going to happen’, that I felt most in touch with where I had come to live. This was the womb. It was a pathless place, or at least the only paths were the old deeply entrenched roads, never surfaced, which dropped from the ridge to the south, crossed the river at gravelly fords and then climbed through woods again to the ridge on the other side. They were the only intrusion in what felt like an abandoned world. The woods were named – Ware’s Wood, Hook Wood, Limekiln Wood, Stonehole Wood, Great Wood, Green Wood – but it felt as if no one had been here for half a century. Hornbeam, chestnut, ash and even oak had all been coppiced in the past but none had been touched for decades. The marks of the great combing of the 1987 storm were still there: 80-foot-tall ash trees had fallen across the river from one bank to the other. The ivy that once climbed up them now hung in Amazonian curtains from the horizontal trees. Growing from the fallen trunks, small linear woods of young ashes now pushed up towards the light. I stumbled about in here, looking for some kind of inaccessible essence of the place. The deer had broken paths through the undergrowth. The clay was scrabbled away where they had jumped the little side streams. The fields of underwood garlic had turned lemon yellow in the shade. And through it all the river wound, curling back on itself, cutting out promontories and peninsulas in the wooded banks, reaching down to the underlying layer of dark, ribbed, iron-rich sandstone. Where it cut into an iron vein, the metal bled into the stream and the water flowed past it an almost marigold orange. This too was Kipling’s world, virtually unchanged since he had described it, 90 years before, in Puck of Pook’s Hill. Even on the shaded water the air was hot and heavy with drowsy scents, while outside, through breaks in the trees, the sunshine burned the pasture like fire … The trees closing overhead made long tunnels through which the sunshine worked in blobs and patches. Down in the tunnels were bars of sand and gravel, old roots and trunks covered with moss or painted red by the irony water; clumps of fern and thirsty shy flowers who could not live away from moisture and shade. As you pushed up through this wooded, private notch in Sussex, so many miles away from the bungalowed, signposted and estate-agented ridge-top roads, the river shrank still further to inch-deep pools and foot-wide rapids where banks of gravel had dammed the flow. In that clear, shallow water, life was exploding. Midges in Brownian motion were flashing on and off in the rods of sunlight that were rammed through the trees. Across the lazily moving water, insects drifted as slowly as those half-transparent specks that float across the surface of your eye. Far below, an inch away on the floor of the stream, their shadows tracked them, dark, four-petalled flowers easing across the stones. The dog snapped his chops at the passing bronze-backed flies. A 3-inch-long worm, as thin and as white as a cotton thread, snaked through the water and then under a stone. The stream was full of little shrimps, lying immobile on the gravel or wriggling there like rugby players caught in a tackle or, best of all, jetting around above it as fluidly as spaceships in their fluid medium, the darting of life. By the middle of July, in all our hayfields, the grass was crisp and it was already late for the haying. That’s what they call it here. Not haymaking or the hay harvest, but straightforward ‘haying’ on the same principle as lambing or wooding. It’s the climax of the grass year and, as nothing except grass and thistles will grow on this farm, these few days became the point around which everything else revolved. It was high summer. Even as it was happening you could feel the winter nostalgia for it. You won’t get a cattle or sheep farmer to talk starry-eyed about haymaking, but there was no doubt, in one sense anyway, that was how they felt. ‘Look at that,’ one of my neighbours would say to me during the following winter about a bale of his own hay he was trying to sell me. ‘You can smell the summer sunshine in it,’ and he buried his nose in the bale like a wine-taster in the heady, open mouth of his glass. A friend rang up from London as we were about to start. ‘Make hay while the sun shines,’ he said to me on the phone, as if there were something original about the phrase. But it hardly needed to be said. Anxiety hovered over the beautiful fields. They were beautiful. The buttercups and the red tips of the sorrel gave a colour-wash to the uncut grasses, a shifting chromatic shimmer to the browning fields. The enormous old hedges had thickened into little, banky woods so that the hay, even though it wasn’t very thick that year, was cupped in their dark green bowls, a pale soup lapping at the brim. Ken Weekes had been trying to persuade me all year that what was needed was a good dose of chemicals for the thistles and a ton or two of nitrogen to make the grass grow. We were already squabbling like a pair of old spinsters and I was relying on him for everything I did. Ken told me I needed Fred Groombridge, the sheep man from the village. Fred came down. He looked at me with only one eye, as though permanently squinting at the sun. ‘That’s because he’s thinking with the other one,’ Ken said. I sold most of the hay to Fred as standing grass, ?17.50 an acre. I had asked for ?30, Fred suggested ?15. He budged an inch, I moved a mile, but in return for that absurdly low price, Fred would also cut, turn, row up and bale 6 acres for me, 500 bales, which I would then have carted into the barn at my own expense. ‘Perfect,’ Fred said with his left eye, grinning. ‘It’s only money.’ Fred brought down his wife, Margaret – she gave me a cheque before they cut a single blade of grass – and his nephew, Jimmy Gray. Ken helped. Will and Peter Clark helped. Make hay while the sun shines. And for days it did. For the fields, it’s the hair-dressing moment of the year. When first cut, the hay lies flat and shiny on the razored surface. The sun glints along it like a light on those snips of wet hair that lie on a barber’s floor. To dry it, the grass is tossed with the tedder – Margaret’s job, eight hours at a stretch, up and down, up and down in the battered old Ford 4000 tractor, ‘stirring it about’ and mussing it up, the shampoo shuffle. Then it is fluffed back into rows for the baler, the final hairspray and set. What this means is long, long hours at the wheel of a tractor, looking back over one’s shoulder at the machine that’s doing the job, with such concentration that Fred went past me three times before he noticed that I was standing there on the edge of the field waiting to talk to him. Everything went like a dream and the hay lay soft, light and ‘blue’ as Fred called it, a green tinge to the grey of the drying grasses, in the rowed-up lines on the field. Not a drop of rain had touched it. This was some of the best hay anyone had made for years. But then, of course, things changed. The forecast predicted thunderstorms that evening and the baler broke. Fred had bought it from the two old Davis boys who were retiring from the place over the hill. I only heard this late in the day, but it was not surprising Fred had kept the source of the baler a little quiet. That was where, the year before, the BBC had stumbled on a fragment of old England, nettles growing through abandoned horse-drawn hay rakes, fields that looked as if they had just got out of bed, a farmhouse soft in its long slow journey towards dilapidation. They had decided to make their film of Cold Comfort Farm there. God knows how old the baler was. There was something seriously wrong with it, but no one could work out what. The bales it produced were either the size of a handbag or emerged 8 feet long, oozing out with a terrible constipated slowness from the machine’s rear vent. ‘Neither’s any good,’ Fred said, and for 15 hours, while the rain threatened, men from various parts of Sussex pored over its innards. The handbook was out on the field. They drank Ribena. Parts were greased, others rubbed down. ‘If I never see another Case International baler,’ Ken said, ‘I won’t be sorry.’ The weather forecast was getting worse by the hour. In the end, there was nothing for it and the hay was baled in these stupid lengths. As soon as it was done, we stacked it on trailers and carted it into the barn, just as it was, the long and short of it, an acre an hour for six hours of exhausting, dusty, sweaty work. By the time the rain came, my 500 bales were in the barn, perhaps ?1,000 worth. We felt delighted. The hay was saved and the barn, filled to the eaves, smelled sweet and musty. We were all sneezing with the dust and seeds in our hair and nostrils. My forearms were pricked with the stub ends of the stalks. Motes danced in the sun where its light came in through the wide-open doors of the barn. The hay was stacked 15 feet high in two blocks, each 20 feet deep and 20 square, one block on either side of the barn’s central cartway, held there by the diagonal oak braces and the central oak pillars of the barn. Scraps of hay lay on the barn floor, like scattered herbs in a medieval house. The picture of fullness this gave me, a building as tightly stuffed as a pillow, a barn filled with exactly what it was meant to be filled with, was a version of the completeness I had come here for. The hay had been made – baler or no baler – with the techniques people had learned when they first kept animals in this country 5,000 years ago, and the five of us stood around drinking tea, looking at the completed thing as one does when a job is finished, all of us, in a way I can hardly describe now, jointly happy at what we had done. I couldn’t work out why Fred was looking so pleased with himself too. All his hay was still out in the fields, baled in the modern round jumbo bales, which a highly efficient brand-new machine had been creating all afternoon. They were bound to get a soaking. ‘Oh, I don’t worry about that,’ Fred said through his one eye. ‘Rain doesn’t hurt jumbo bales. They can stay out there for weeks.’ So why on earth had we sweated over our ridiculous salami/sliver-sized bales all afternoon? ‘Oh,’ Fred said, with a grin the size of the English Channel, ‘I thought you wanted to do it up here like we did it in the old days. You didn’t want those jumbo bales, did you? You wanted something you could get sweaty picking up and putting down so you could feel what it was like to be a real farmer. You did, didn’t you?’ I looked up at him as he asked me and saw – one of those moments of true recognition – that Fred had both of his eyes, the colour of the sky on a distant, sun-swept horizon, wide open, as the first drops of rain began to fall on the bleached and razored fields. The hay was in, but the trees were suffering. For weeks on end, from midsummer onwards, they looked bruised and battered. A ride on the Northern Line in the evening rush hour would not have revealed a more exhausted set of faces than the trees displayed that summer. Our neighbour from Perryman’s, the young dairy farmer, Stephen Wrenn, who had taken some of the grazing for his bullocks, came over for a drink one evening. ‘I don’t know a farm that’s as lucky as this one with its trees. You’ll look after your oaks, won’t you?’ We had long talks together about what to do with this land. He had persuaded his father to give up the dairy herd, rent out the milk quota and turn Perryman’s over to the new short-rotation willow coppice which can be harvested every couple of years and burned for energy. So the cows were sold and they were trying to sell his milk quota. But it had been such a dry year with so little thick growth in the grass – all top and no bottom, as they say here – that no one was in the market to take on extra capacity because feeding the cattle in the coming winter would cost a fortune. Drought was stalking all of us. Even at the end of July, the leaves on the trees already looked used, dirty, in need of replacement. By early August, some of the hawthorn and hornbeams in the hedges were already largely yellow. By the end of the month, the spindle leaves were spotted black and had dried at the edges into a pair of narrow red curling lips. Elders had gone bald before their time and there were ash trees of which whole sections had been a dead manila brown for weeks. An oak tree 60 feet high and wide may drink about 40,000 gallons of water a year. It is a huge and silent pump, a humidifier of the air, drawing mineral sustenance from these daily lakes of water that pass through it. Where, in a summer like this, could such a tree have got the income it needed? The truth is, at least with some of the oaks here, they had been running on empty, trying to live through a grinding climatic recession. I was fencing between the Cottage and Target Fields – the Wrenns’ bullocks had, as ever, been getting through – and I leant on a low oak branch as I unwound the wire. As I pushed against it, quite unconsciously, without any real effort, the branch, perhaps 15 or 20 feet long, came away from the trunk of the tree and dropped slowly to the ground. It had seemed fully alive, decked with leaves and new acorns as much as any other, but it pulled away as softly, as willingly as the wingbone of a well-cooked chicken. I pushed it into the fence, as an extra deterrent to the cattle. Two days later, at the top of the Slip Field, I found an enormous branch, full of leaves and acorns, lying on the ground beneath its parent, perhaps 40 feet long, the bulk of a small house or a lorry. It too had been neatly severed at the base, as if the branch had been sacked, ruthlessly dropped for the greater good of the whole. These living branches rejected in mid-season made me look at the oaks here in a new light – their scarred bodies, their withered limbs, the usual asymmetry to their outlines, the slightly uneven track taken by each branch as it moved out from the main stem – and started to see each oak not as a thing whole and neatly inevitable in itself, but as the record of its own history of survival and failure, retraction and extension, stress and abundance. Each oak has a visible past. The story it tells is more like the history of a human family than of an individual, forever negotiating hazards, accommodating loss, reshaping its existence. One afternoon we were all in the kitchen together. We were sitting around the table and Ken as ever was regaling us with stories of past triumphs. Suddenly we heard, coming over the wood, from the lane that runs down from Brightling Needle towards the valley and on up to Burwash, the sound of sirens: ambulances, police, fire? We didn’t know. It was a rare noise, more troubling here than in any city street. It marked a real person’s crisis, that of someone you knew. We heard that evening. Stephen Wrenn had been killed. A tractor he had been driving toppled over a little bank, no higher than the back of a chair, and crushed his head. He died instantly. He and his new wife had only just returned from their honeymoon. The entire village went into shock over it. Two or three hundred people attended the funeral and the vicar who, a couple of weeks previously, had married him, helped bury him too. One evening later that summer, when I was taking the children down to the seaside to play on the sands at the mouth of the River Rother, I happened to meet Brian Wrenn, sitting quietly by the river, looking out to sea. I sent the children on down the track and sat down next to him. We talked about Stephen. Brian said he was ‘learning to face a different future’. It was as if his whole being was bruised. There is very little to say to a man who has lost his child. At the edge of our land you could see, across the little side-valley of a stream that runs down to the river, one of the Wrenns’ very banky fields. Before, it had been grazed tight, thistly and docky in patches like every bit of land around here, but with a background of new, bright green grass. Now, with the cows gone, and with Stephen gone, it looked different, the hay long and not cut until late, an air of abandonment to it, or at least of other matters on the mind. I looked across at that field and in it saw what had happened to the Wrenn family, the stupid, trivial, devastating disaster, the slice taken out of their lives. I will always remember Stephen for the grinning optimism of what he said about the trees, the way we were lucky, blessed with the oaks here. ‘Look after your trees,’ he had said to me, and I will, as a memorial to him if nothing else. Isn’t it a habit, in some part of the world, to plant a tree on a person’s grave, to fertilize a cherry or an apple with the body? It seems like a good idea. That, anyway, is the picture I now have of Stephen Wrenn, but it is an oak, not a fruit tree, that is springing from his grave, the big-limbed, dark green, thick-boled, spreading, ancient kind of oak, so solid a part of the country here that it is known as the Sussex weed. In the aftermath of Stephen’s death, we were all rocked back. I took to spending time in the autumn wood. It is, on a quiet day anyway, a pool of calm. All the rush and hurry evaporates in a wood. If you lie down there, nothing happens. There is a sort of blankness, a consoling eventlessness about it. If a pendulum were swinging there, it would be floating as if on the moon, weightlessly falling, weightlessly climbing the far side. A wood distorts and thickens time. Occasionally, a small five- or seven-leaf frond off an ash tree, or a single hornbeam leaf, will spiral towards you. A pigeon, with a chaotic bang-shuffle to its feather noise, will fluster out of the trees. Those are only the headlines; the body-text is absent. There is no busyness here. The extraordinary patience of these vegetable beings is what defines them. The way in which the trees stand and wait, open-armed, their leaves dangled in the air for sunlight, their roots spread hemispherically beneath them, capable of doing no more than accepting the wetness that might come to hand, this is a form of existence that could not be more alien to our own. The leaning patience of the tree, its long game: that’s the beauty and the dignity of it. As I lay in the Middle Shaw one morning that autumn, escaping work, fed up with it, haunted by Stephen’s death, a sudden squall blew through the trees, unfelt at ground level but caught and noisy in the crowns of the oaks. It was a blast from the west and in that sudden wind, the wood began to knock and cannonade around me; the acorns, of which there were more that year than anyone could remember, were being blown and shaken out of their cups. The wood quite literally was noisy with the oak’s seed rain, as the acorns bounced down through the lower branches and spattered on to the leafy floor. This was the seeding moment of the year, the culmination of the year’s life. It was as near as a wood could ever come to breeding, the climax of the year. But all this rattling activity did not represent the reality of the trees. A true film of a tree’s life would be grinding in its slowness, nothing but the great non-event of gradual enlargement. But that slowness is what is beautiful about a tree. Its concurrence with time, its superbly long rhythms, cannot be captured in a way that would make people watch or listen to it. The music of a wood would make Gorecki’s Third Symphony look up-tempo, a sharp little dance-tune. Which makes the real thing so rich and so rooting if you manage to make the time to listen to it. Or so it seemed that autumn. The wood was a balm-bath, a long slow statement, simply, of the trees’ presence and persistence and dignity and life. That is the reason groves are sacred. Great trees stand as a reproach to our business, to our neurotic rush and hurry. But what a price they pay: incapable of defending themselves, as passive as whales under the harpoon. For all their dignity, they are no model for us. Anyone who acted like a tree would be thought mentally deficient. That is the conclusion I came to: we have to be anxious to be human. Passivity, calm and the long view: none of it’s quite enough. I knew I had to start getting a grip on the land we had now acquired. The woods were the place to start. Wooding is a winter job, when the sap is down and trees are not hurt by the saw. A winter-cut stool of ash, hornbeam, hazel or chestnut will sprout again in the spring, and those new fresh sprouts, called ‘spring’ in this part of the world, will re-establish the tree as a living plant. And so I asked Peter Clark if he and I together might begin to get the woods in order. Peter Clark had been wooding for 14 years or so, all his adult life, and he was expert at it. He used his chainsaw like a balloon-whisk. A flick here, a zzzzzz there and order came out of chaos. There was a businesslike air to the way he approached the semi-derelict tangle of bramble and wind-blown tree. He didn’t, as I would have in a half-hearted, uncertain and rather respectful way, nibble at the edges, trimming this, pulling away at that. He waded into the central problem. Confronted with the giant collapsed ash stools, the muddle of elder and bramble and old splintered oak limbs, he attacked them ruthlessly and systematically. The cosmetics were left till later. Meanwhile, the stacks of usable cordwood grew at those points on the edge of the wood where, in a ground-hardening frost, a tractor and trailer would later reach them. His fires consumed the toppings, the useless bits and pieces. Every day that winter they burned in three or four places at once, positioned so that the smoke could chimney out through a gap between the big trees around them. From a field or two away the wood looked like a small leafy settlement, with the smoke climbing out from the three or four separate hearths and the chainsaw whining and relaxing, whining and relaxing as another fallen thorn or overgrown hazel was sliced and readied. It was a wonderful sight – in the mind’s eye as much as anything else – Peter moulding the wood in the way other people might pick up a lump of clay and shape a pot from it. He was a gentle and not especially gregarious or socially confident man. If there were other people about, he would often decide not to come in for a cup of tea or for lunch. Wooding is a private business, done in private, the results remaining virtually private, the whole event without a public face. And it was there, in that self-contained world, that he excelled. ‘Do you like wooding?’ I asked him and he replied in the way you might expect. ‘It’s a job,’ he said and lifted his eyebrows into a smile. We have four patches of woodland on the farm. One, the Way Shaw, is a field that was let go before the war and was now a thicket of bracken and wind-twisted birches. Ken said the remains of a V-1 doodlebug lay somewhere in there, but nobody knew where. Two of the others, Toyland Shaw and Middle Shaw, are old hornbeam coppices with some big oaks in them. The fourth, the Ashwood Shaw, is a wonderful old ash coppice, with giant stools growing on a steep bank between Great Flemings and Hollow Flemings, some of the stools twelve and fifteen feet across, with four or five 60-foot-high trees growing from each divided base. This, in miniature, is a rich inheritance, an ash wood and a hornbeam wood providing the two necessary materials: one light but strong, making perfect poles for the handles of tools, for rakes and hay forks, the other tough and resistant. Mill cogs were always made of hornbeam wood and whenever I look at them I think of that, the iron hardness lurking under the oddly snake-like bark, the trunks not making good clean poles like the ash but twisted, fixed in a frozen and rather ugly writhing. The ash and the hornbeam, the calm and the perplexed, the classic and the romantic of an English woodland. I was feeling my way with the wood. Clearing up was obviously the first stage of what to do here, but it wouldn’t be enough. That autumn a couple of enormous ash trunks crashed out of the wood and into Hollow Flemings, the field below the shaw. There had been no great winds, nor anything else to disturb them. They had simply grown too big for their foundations. The leverage of the 60-foot trees became too much and they snapped out of their fixings at ground level, leaving a torn stump and exacerbating a weakness which meant that other stems from the same stool would soon go. The only way to save the plants was to cut them down. New growth would spring from the shorn stubs and the interrupted cycle of coppicing, which, judging from the size of the stools, must be many centuries old on that bank, undoubtedly a medieval landscape, would be resumed. I talked to a local timber man, Zak Soudain, about the wood and he was keen to have it. The bottom end of an ash trunk, where it moves slightly out from the stool and then up towards the light, a shape which preserves even in old age the first directions taken by the new stem in the first spring after coppicing, is the most valuable part of all. It is used to make lacrosse sticks. Nothing else will do. The rest, the straight clean lightness of the ash, goes into furniture. So far, so profitable. But there was a hazard. We were overrun with deer. As we looked out of the bedroom window soon after seven in the morning, there would be eight or ten deer grazing in the field. The fawns in September were still playing with each other in a puppyish, skittish way. There was a stag with a single antler left, walking around lopsided like a car with one headlight out. Deer eat young trees. If we cut the ash down, they would chew off all the new shoots, the stools would die and I would have destroyed a small sliver of the late medieval landscape. But if we didn’t cut the ash trees down they would probably collapse in the next big storm and the wood would be destroyed anyway. Deer-fencing was prohibitively expensive and ugly. I wasn’t quite sure what to do about this and so I dithered while Peter easily and confidently moved through the fallen mess of things. I asked him one day what he would do. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s not for me to say. You’ve got to decide, Adam. It’s your wood.’ I didn’t tell him that, as far as I could see, the wood felt more like his. That autumn I bought our first sheep: 20 Border Leicester ewes, which had already been through one year’s lambing. They were advertised in the local free-sheet, ?600 for the lot. I knew we had to plunge into livestock and this was a way of doing it. Will Clark and I drove over to look at them. Will said he knew about sheep and did quite a bit of squeezing of the back end of the animals in question. I certainly knew nothing. The woman selling them, wearing a fetching pair of buckskin chaps, said they were marvellous. So I bought them. Carolyn Fieldwick, Will Clark’s daughter and wife of Dave Fieldwick, the shepherd, had a ram to sell us. I bought him for ?100. He was a big, stumbling, black-faced Suffolk and we called him Roger. He arrived on 5 November and started to mosey around our field full of ewes. If a ewe conceives on Guy Fawkes’ Day, Ken Weekes told me, the lamb will be born on April Fool’s Day. Roger seemed, it must be said, quite cheap at ?100, and looked a little seedy. I could see him in a Dennis Potter play, snuffling around the ewes’ rear ends like a tramp going through the dustbins at the back of a restaurant. They didn’t much like the look of him or his intentions and used to move off to eat more grass in some other, less interfered with part of the field. It brought back memories of 18-year-old parties, in which all the girls were pristine, self-sufficient and adult and I was a grubby, grasping bundle of unattraction, trotting around about 2 yards behind them. At least I didn’t have to wear the sort of thing we put on Roger, a harness that Helmut Newton would have been proud of, holding a large yellow block of crayon wax in the middle of his chest. Whenever Roger managed to corner a ewe, he rubbed this, as a side-effect so to speak, all over her bottom so that we would know she’d been done. After the best part of a week, his score was two yellowed bottoms and one ewe that seemed to have an intensively crayoned left shoulder. Radical misfire or poor sense of geography: whichever it was, nothing could have been more familiar. What an agony for poor Roger! So many requests, so much rejection. I caught him in successful action only once: a desperate five seconds of up-ended quiver and then down on all fours again, that look of hopelessness flooding back in, a sense of everything being over, a look on his poor, crumpled-ear face of utter bemusement. Why, I said to him, can’t we all procreate like the trees? Winter came sidling up on us. By mid-December, the darkness had lowered over the whole place, that terrible lightlessness when all you can do is remember the long lit summer, the after-hay evenings when the fields had a purified cleanness to them, patterned with an odd and unplanned-for regularity in the bales waiting to be collected, each of them throwing its shadow to the next, like a dabbed mark with a broad-bladed pen, while the dog is manically teasing some left-out wisps of hay and the children are playing man-hunt among the bales. What a sudden inrush of lost time that is. My daughter Rosie, who was two that year, thought the trees were dead. ‘The trees are dead,’ she said one morning after breakfast, as one might announce that the war in Bosnia was over or Arsenal were third in the Premiership. ‘Not dead,’ I said, ‘just resting.’ ‘Are they sleepy?’ ‘Yes, they are, I suppose.’ ‘Why aren’t they lying down then?’ Anyone who doesn’t believe in the reality of Seasonal Affective Disorder might learn a thing or two if they took a trip to the Sussex Weald in winter. Our own immediate surroundings that December represented the English winter in excelsis: a sapless, shrunken sump. I stayed inside as much as I could and averted my eyes from the windows as I passed. The mud lapping at the walls of the house on two sides had become a glutinated bog decorated with grey-eyed puddles and the semi-mangled remains of the rubbish which something was tearing open at night and distributing among the earth-heaps and trench systems. You could hardly blame the creature; no one could tell that scattering half-consumed, half-rotten rice-puddings and stock bones over what used to be the garden wasn’t precisely what we had in mind. The chickens we had foolishly acquired roamed delightedly among the old-food-encrusted earthwork-play zone where we let them out every day. They redistributed the mess. None of it ever seemed to disappear. I had come to hate our chickens. They lurked about in the same murky province as unwritten thank-you letters and work that’s late, the guilt zone you’d rather didn’t exist. One is meant to love chickens, I know: their fluffy puffball existence, the warm rounded sound of their voices, a slow chortling, the aural equivalent of new-laid eggs, and of course the eggs themselves, gathered as the first of the morning sun breaks into the hen house and the dear loving mothers that have created them cluster around your feet for their morning scatter of corn. Well, I hated them. Before the chickens arrived, I loved them. I sweated for days, building their run with six-foot-high netting, buried at the base so that the fox couldn’t dig in to get them, with additional electric fencing just outside the main wire as another fox deterrent. I made a charming wooden, weather-boarded house for them, the inside of which I fitted out as though for a page in Country Living. There were some elegant nesting boxes, with balconies outside them so that the hens could walk without discomfort to their accouchements, ramps towards those balconies from the deeply straw-bedded ground, a row of roosting poles so that at night they could feel they were safe in the branches of the forest trees which the Ur-memories of their origins in the forests of south-east Asia required for peace of mind. When it was finished, I sat down on the rich-smelling barley straw and smoked a cigarette, thinking that this was the sort of world I would like to inhabit. We should have left it at that, but we didn’t. We actually bought some chickens. And a cockerel. He came in a potato sack and when I tipped him out on to the grass and dandelions of the new run, he stood there, blinking a little, surrounded by his harem, and I couldn’t believe we had acquired for ?8 such a shockingly beautiful creature. He was a Maran, his white body feathers flecked black in bold, slight marks as if made with the brush of a Japanese painter. His eye was bright and his comb and long wattles the deep dark red of Venetian glass. He seemed huge, standing a good 2 feet high, and this fabulous, porcelain-figure colouring made a superb and alien presence in our brick and weatherboarded yard. His chickens, which he cornered and had with a ruthlessness and vigour we could only admire, were dumpy little brown English bundles next to him, heavy-laying Warrens, dish-mops to his Byron. For two days after his ignominious sack-borne arrival, he remained quiet but then he began to crow, his cry disturbingly loud if you were near by but, like the bagpipes, beautiful when heard in the distance, down in the wood or with the sheep two fields away. Within a couple of weeks it was going wrong. I was collecting eggs with my son Ben, who was seven. It was early evening and the chickens were still out. We didn’t realize it but the cock was already in the house and with only the warning of a couple of pecks on my feet, which I didn’t recognize for what they were, he suddenly attacked Ben, banging and flapping against his trouser legs in a terrifying explosion of feathers and movement and noise. Ben and I scrambled out of the hen house, him in tears, me shaken. It worsened over the next few weeks. We were all attacked in turn until one Sunday morning found the entire family cowering behind the glass of the back door, checking to see if Terminator, or Killer Cock as he was also called, was out on the prowl. He had come, I am sure, to sense our fear and was now certain of his place as Cock of the Walk. He had to go. Of course, there was no way I could bring myself to capture him and so we hired a professional to take him away. We thought there might be the most horrifying execution scene in a corner of the yard. What actually happened was a lesson in the psychology of dominance. Alf Hoad is a man with enormously hairy arms. He lives in the village and shoots deer. He was our chosen executioner. Alf arrived in his Land Rover, stepped out of it carrying a sack, walked up to the cock and put him in it. My manliness rating dropped like a stone. The children now look on Alf as something of a god. He took the cock away alive and used him as a guard dog to protect his pheasant chicks against foxes. It was a relief when Killer went. We could walk about again outside without fear of a rake up the back of the legs, but, without their man, our ugly little brown chickens suffered a drop in status. I looked at them and saw only the slum conditions in which they lived – my fault, they didn’t have enough room – and their scrawny appearance – nature’s fault, as they were going through the moult – and I blamed them for both. They stopped laying with the days shortening, and so we didn’t even have any eggs. In fact, we were quite pleased about that because we had come to think eggs disgusting. People, I now understood, had got the wrong idea about chickens: they are not the soft, burbly things they always appear to be in pictures and advertisements. They are utterly and profoundly manic. This whole short history had taught me an important lesson. There is something about the chicken which invites maltreatment. No one, I think, would ever have tolerated the idea of battery ducks, even if that were possible. People have caged billions of chickens in the most intolerable conditions because everything about them tells you that they have no soul. This is not to condone it, but it does perhaps explain it. The chickens somehow made the winter worse, its awful unshaven stubbliness. The whole of Sussex looked as if it had been in bed with flu for a week. Its skin was ill and a sort of blackness had entered the picture, as if it had been over-inked. No modern descriptions of winter ever put this clodden, damp mulishness at the centre of things. People always talk about ice and frost and glitter and hardness and crispness and freshness and brightness and sparkle and brilliance and tingle. It’s all nonsense. England is at sea and has sea-weather, a mediated dampness. That winter it entered our souls. In a sea of unglittery mud and damp prospects, with things unfinished, never unpacked or never started all round us, we huddled over our fires. Visiting friends were amazed at the mess. Our first year had come to an end. Was it, I still wondered silently, a mistake? Did we belong here? What were we doing here? Were we going to be happy here? Had we swapped one sort of unhappiness for another? Why did we stay when so many others leave, just at this point? The euphoria, the bursting of energy from the bottle as it was first opened, had popped and fizzed and diminished and sunk, leaving only the still liquid in the glass. We were left with the plain fact. We had our work to do. I was writing for the Sunday Telegraph, columns about our life on the farm and others more generally about the politics of the early 1990s, the end of the Thatcher era, the John Major interval, the coming of New Labour, the political conferences, the disintegration of the Tory world, the expanding levels of hope that seemed to emanate from the Blair camp. I had a coffee cup emblazoned with the slogan, red on black, ‘New Labour, New Hope’. It has been through the dishwasher so often that the words are illegible now. I was writing profiles of the political leaders, spending two or three days ‘up close and personal’, as it said in the paper with Blair, Major and the Liberal leader Paddy Ashdown, while writing a book, my first for several years, on the restoration of Windsor Castle after its fire in 1992 for which I interviewed hundreds of consultants, architects, builders, members of the Royal Household, curtain makers, gilders, wood carvers. It was a busy, engaged time. 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