Manual labour was the norm, lifting heavy sacks resulted in frequent back injuries and working in dusty conditions damaged the lungs. Wages were insulting, hours were long and holidays short. And above all the farm workers invariably lived in tied cottages from which, in theory at least, they could be evicted at the whim of the farmer.
And for Patrick, finally, the real loss, the loss that had to be made up, was in human and cultural value.
We have deskilled in one generation, lost people who want to work in agriculture. The average age in farming is nearly sixty. Most people think a job in farming is absolutely not cool, with low social, economic and cultural status. But here is something: all my children have got jobs in food or farming. And before that, they have all tried and left London jobs. And that pattern of re-connection, of re-acquiring the cultural, emotional and social skills that come with the growing life, that is what this huge challenge is all about.
So either (the gospel according to Patrick): we have to make the change, we ought to make it and we would like it if we did make it. Sissinghurst is a beacon, somewhere that can signal the virtues of those changes widely in the world.
Or (according to Oliver): we must not make the change, we cannot afford to make it, we must trust that a techno-solution will emerge, and we must accept the cultural and environmental losses which industrial farming imposes as part of necessity itself. Sissinghurst is an irrelevance.
Or maybe there is a third position: we need both. The two attitudes to land and food will continue in tension, mutually evolving, far into the future. Sissinghurst is not the answer to the world food crisis but it is an attempt to redeem some of the losses that have occurred over the last fifty years. It is an answer for itself and in that particularity lies its general significance.
Oliver Walston’s trajectory in East Anglia from 80 farm workers in the 1950s to 2.15 now (including himself) is symptomatic. Ten million European farmers have left the land since the 1950s. Even Sissinghurst’s neighbour farm, Brissenden, which in 2009 was made up of 1,000 arable acres farmed by Robert Lewis with the help of a single employee, had in the recent past been part of fourteen different farms (Bettenham, Brissenden, Catherine Wheel, Church Farm, Beale Farm, Commenden, Hammer Mill Farm, East Ongley, West Ongley, Park Farm in Biddenden, Whitsunden, Buckhurst, Ponds Farm and Street Farm). Nearly all those farmsteads are medieval, some go back to the Dark Ages. None of them now, except Brissenden, is connected to the land. A world that was almost continuous for 1,500 years disappeared in the 1970s and ’80s. The fate of Sissinghurst, described in these pages, was common.
Robert Lewis told me something of the Brissenden story. He is a strong, bluff man, although a little shy, with a way of looking at you from a distance, not a seeker of the limelight, but direct, without side, happy to plough his own furrow and to work hard for the goals he identified long ago: a planned approach, a systematic outcome, efficiency, self-reliance. ‘I have always got on with things quietly. It has served me better.’ He came to Brissenden from Essex in 1974, as farm manager for the landowners, Thomas and Marjorie James. Professor James was a lawyer at King’s College London and Marjorie had been a botanist at Kew. They had in mind, from the 1960s onwards, to make a landholding in Kent which would be viable in the modern world.
Gradually, from the ’60s through to the ’80s, the Jameses expanded their farm, always folding the profit into new acquisitions. It had begun with Bettenham and Brissenden, the two farms my father sold them in 1963. When Robert arrived, it was still a bundle of small, ill-drained fields, nothing but ‘cow pats and water grass,’ he says, ‘derelict dairy farms which we were welding together to make a single unit.’ It was a challenge he relished. He was twenty-seven then, away from his own county, surrounded by farming neighbours who were ‘difficult’ with him. ‘Some were better than others. But the point is we were doing something and most of them were sitting on their hands. There was a fair bit of jealousy.’ Perhaps they were waiting for the whole enterprise ‘to go tits up’, as stock farmers say. But it didn’t and Robert rationalised the stretch of country that increasingly fell into his hands. He took out hedges, made some enormous fields, one of them nearly half a mile long, put in drainage, demolished and moved many buildings, laid a lot of concrete, got rid of any animals in what had been almost entirely cattle and meadow country, and started turning in rich and rewarding yields of wheat, barley, oats, rape and beans. In those corners too wet to drain, with grants and advice from the nature authorities, he planted thousands of trees, plantations in which his beloved nightingales, mistle thrushes, nuthatches, wrens and woodpeckers, tree creepers and grey wagtails all now gather.
‘The locals complained a lot,’ he says, ‘but it has been an unqualified success. The farm is in better heart than when it was found.’ It had been heavily infested with black grass and wild oats. That has been largely dealt with. Over 100 acres is now in an environmental scheme of one kind or another. ‘It is all you could do with it. The soil is silty, better than the sand up at Sissinghurst, but you couldn’t begin to farm it organically. It is not easy ground. It is not even girls’ ground. Everybody says they have the worst land in England, but this is hungry, low in potash and phosphate. You would be very pushed to do anything different here.’
The modern Brissenden is a monument to the age in which it was created. There is of course no doubting the good intentions of Robert Lewis or the Jameses. They were pursuing a goal of ‘improvement’ when confronted with a place that looked as if it had failed. And it is heavily locked into patterns of world distribution. Robert told me how the soft wheat he now grows here gets trucked in lorries to the big container port at Tilbury, pumped into the holds of giant bulk carriers and shipped to Dubai and other parts further east to make chapatis. No sense of local provenance, nor of local habits has survived the great transformation. The landscape of his vast fields is, despite the green corners and edges, fiercely denuded. He farms with extreme care, there is almost no sign of herbicide spray drifting beyond the farmed area. The whole place is neat beyond belief. In the springtime, there are plenty of wildflowers, buttons of primroses, cuckoo-pint and wood anemones on the farm. But the vast fields might be anywhere. No sense of the past has survived the rationalisation. Any idea of it being a place with a history and memories has been suppressed. Its past is no longer legible and the form of the land does not speak. When walking on one of the footpaths that still crisscross it (and which Robert meticulously clears and signposts) I only want to leave, to find myself in the country I know. From every yard you can read only distant markets, global supplies. No one is here. Nothing comes from here and nothing is destined for here. There is no cycle, only inputs and outputs. Compared with the meadows and hedges, the small fields and intimate landscapes, the cherry orchards and field ponds of those few Low Weald farms which have survived largely unchanged, this is lacking in almost everything except its productive capacity.
Why does the Brissenden approach seem wrong? In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker, now a professor of psychology at Harvard, very carefully describes how language is rich in redundancy. We don’t need to say half the things we do. We consistently say a great deal more than need requires. The most obvious wastage, as Pinker points out, is in the vowels. We can leave vowels out of the picture and still make our meaning clear. Yxx mxy fxnd thxs sxrprxsxng, bxt yxx cxn rxxd thxs sxntxncx xnd xndxrstxnd xt, cxn’t yxx? Sntcs lk ths cld stll, n fct, b ndrstd, lthgh ths s rthr mr dffclt nd slghtl slwr thn th sntnc wth th xs whr th vwls shld b.
You can read it but it’s not English, and tht tght-lppd, clppd wy f tlkng sounds a little mad. It’s not human. The natural human manner is voluble, assertive, open-mouthed, vowelly and over-supplied with signals. That communicative generosity is a sign of humanity itself, a form of biophilia, the love of vitality itself. The ever-present but strictly unnecessary vowels are, it turns out, symptoms of a much more general phenomenon. We surround ourselves with a thick meaning blanket, a pelt of significance.
We don’t spit sharp little pellets of pre-digested information at each other like sharp-beaked owls. We lounge together in the same meaning bath. Redundancy, an over supply of meaning, and a certain inefficiency, are the defining qualities of a humane life.
This is an intriguing idea. For something of human and cultural value to be communicated, something more than that has to be cultivated at the same time. The stripped-down meaning, the thing made efficient, the thing reduced to essentials, has lost something essential in the process. Fuzz is more accurate than core. There is no such thing as a core meaning and a précis always lies because meaning is spread throughout whatever appears contingent or nearly irrelevant. Imprecision is the first requirement of understanding. Clarity obscures the nature of what it hopes to clarify.
The landscape is also a language. If you don’t want change to involve loss of meaning, the key question is: what about the vowels? What about the soft, subtle, pervasive and evasive, apparently inessential things which make so much of what is important but which can’t be measured, or not easily? What about the darkness of the sky at night, the bendiness of the lanes, the nature and form of the hedges, the precise form of the latches with which the gates open and close, the ways in which the orchard trees are pruned, the habits and colours of the local cows, the hereness of any particular here?
There is a difference between Sssnghrst or even Sxssxnghxrst, locations whose meaning can be understood but which read like components of a formula or marks on a despatch docket, and Sissinghurst, a rounded being, which I have always thought of as entirely female, like a sister turned into a place, a fully syllabled, generous description of home.
If we only attend to the consonants, and reduce a place to its obvious functions, if we make the operation of a stretch of country financially and technologically efficient, if we make it singular and pointed, rather than multiple and rounded, a good environment – that is a good place in which to live – will have been damaged. You might even say that the more unimportant something seems, the more important it is. Redundancy is all. Compare a place you love with somewhere no one could possibly love, perhaps one of those stretches of mown grass on the outside of an intersection, a curved region which looked good on the road engineer’s plan but which in reality is a piece of curved vacuity. One seems like a place and the other no more than a place where a place should be. And the difference between them lies in a certain unnecessary complexity, a bobbled scurf of things, the trace of the past, the embedded quirk, the wrinkle in a face, the burble of a particular family’s or a particular person’s lack of clarity.
It is the distinction between a landscape and a place. Landscape is an idea but place is a sense. Landscape requires a prospect, a surveying eye, even a controlling and appropriating eye, place an embeddedness, a skin experience, a kind of fleshy, sense-rich thickness. The only way to enjoy summer in England, according to Horace Walpole, was ‘to have it framed and glazed in a comfortable room.’ That is the landscape view. Coleridge in 1802 saw the Cumbrian waterfall called Moss Force in full spate, churning though its
prison of rock, as if it turned the corners not from mechanic force, but with foreknowledge, like a fierce and skilful driver. Great masses of water, one after another, that in twilight one might have feelingly compared them to a vast crowd of huge white bears, rushing one over the other against the wind – their long white hair shattering abroad in the wind.
That is an understanding of place. A landscape is seen; a place is experienced and known. And so the key qualities of place may perhaps be complexity, multifariousness, hidden corners, both closeness and closedness. A place rather than a landscape allows the folding of individual energies and passions into its forms. It must in other words be full of the potential for change and development, for a sense that its potential might be fulfilled.
There are a thousand ways in which this idea of connectedness can make its presence felt in the real world. Take for example, as a barometer of intent, the place of the hedgehog, as a symbol of the sort of landscape this book is arguing for.
Nobody knows very much about the hedgehogs – how many there are, where they are, how many are needed for a viable population, how they cope with modern life, or, in a country teeming with foxes and badgers, their natural predators. But one thing now is certain: the hedgehogs of Britain are dying out at a rate of about a fifth of the population every four years. By 2025, they will be gone.
Does it matter? I think so. The hedgehog has always been the embodiment of something subtle and tender in the landscape. It is not a flamboyant creature, but quiet, nocturnal and discreet. They doze in long summer grass where strimmers chop them up. They get tangled up in tennis nets. The hedgehog smells something delicious left in the bottom of a cup, pushes its snout in to lick up the remains and then finds the cup stuck to its prickles.
They have been protected from hunting since 1981, but they are dying now in a less obvious way. The prospect of their loss seems dreadful, partly, I think, because the hedgehog should be seen as the symbol of a kind of world, or even of a certain frame of mind: self-absorbed, private, snuffling through the landscape, self-protective, neither very dynamic nor sharp but dignified and curiously important.
This discretion of the hedgehog is not just literary or sentimental: a kind of patient unobtrusiveness is its central characteristic. What the biologists call the hedgehog’s ‘generalism’, its lack of slick speciality, the way it noses for beetles, caterpillars, earwigs and worms, sometimes eating frogs, baby mice, eggs and chicks, its happy existence at the bottom of hedges and in people’s back gardens, its inability to cope with very large, chemically denuded arable fields – in other words its fondness for the private, the scruffy and the marginal – all make it a measure of the state of the landscape’s health as a whole.
This book is perhaps an argument and plea for the virtues of idiosyncrasy of which the hedgehog is the emblem. At its roots, idiosyncrasy means a ‘private–co-mixture’, a coming together of qualities which are characteristic of that thing alone and which are in that way the reservoirs of value.
Last night with some friends, I went out into the fields and we listened to a single nightingale in the scurfy wood, beginning its song again and again, each time a new variant on what had come before, as if nothing inherited or borrowed was worth considering. Every snatch of its song was unfinished, an experiment in gurgle-beauty. You wanted him to go on but he didn’t, always stopping when the song was half-made. We listened, standing in the warm wind, waiting for the next raid on inventiveness. Every part of that bird’s mind was restless, on and on, never settling on a known formula, an unending, self-renewing addiction to the new, to another way of doing it, and then another, all in the service of a listening mate and the survival of genes. That is the nightingale’s irony: his brilliantly variable song is indistinguishable from his father’s or his son’s. Invention is nothing but the badge of his race. It is as if new and old in him were indistinguishable. That is the nightingale lesson: inventing the new is his form of repeating the past.
Is that the model here? Is that how we should do it too? I have been making some radio programmes about Homer and his landscapes. Reading the Odyssey now, at the end of this Sissinghurst story, brings something home to me. People think of it as the great poem of adventure and mystery, of a man travelling to strange worlds beyond the horizon, of the threat and challenge of the sea. That is true but it is only half of it. The second part, as long as the other, is devoted to something else: Odysseus’s home-coming to Ithaca and his ferocious desire, in the middle of his life, after twenty years away, to reform the place he finds, to steer it back on to a path it abandoned many years before. Homer certainly knew about homecoming. Odysseus thinks that all he need do is re-create the order he remembers from his youth, to cleanse the place of everything wrong that has grown up in the meantime and re-establish a kind of purity and simplicity over which he can preside. I hear the echoes of what I have done. ‘Nowhere is sweeter’, Home
r says, as Odysseus bends to kiss the green turf of Ithaca, ‘than a man’s own country.’ That is what we might like to think, but the truth is harder. Nowhere is the desire for sweetness stronger than in a man’s own country and nowhere is it more difficult to achieve.
Odysseus soon realises that home is not safe or steady. If he is to re-establish the order he remembers, he has to use all sorts of cunning and persuasion, and in the end even that is not enough. His longed-for sweetness clashes with the realities of imposing it on a place that has changed. The resolution the poem comes to is terrifying: Odysseus slaughters every one of the young men who have been living in his house and corrupting it. He leaves the palace littered with their bodies and his own skin slobbered with their guts – his thighs, Homer says at the end of the killing, are ‘shining’ with their blood – and then, with the help of his son, strings up the girls those men have been sleeping with, their legs kicking out, the poem says, like little birds which have been looking for a roost but have found themselves caught in a hidden snare. Odysseus thinks of it as a cleansing, a return to goodness, but the poem knows that the desire for sweetness has ended only in horror and mayhem. He thinks that order can be imposed by will; the poem knows that the vision of perfection brings war into a house and leaves it broken and bloodied.
It is a sobering drama, an anti-Arcadia, with a deep lesson: singular visions do not work; only by consensus and accommodation can the good world be made; returning wanderers do not have all the answers; and anything which is to be done in your own Ithaca can only be done by understanding other people’s needs and their unfamiliar desires. Complexity, multiplicity, is all and clarified solutions come at a brutal price.
So the nightingale has it. Newness is not a new quality. Ingenuity and inventiveness are central parts of life, human and non-human. Stay loose, it says; don’t rigidify; accept that you have inherited from the past many beautiful and varied ways of being. And once you know that, sing your song, which attends to the present, and is even a hymn to the present, to the long sense of possibility which has the past buried inside it. Elegy, which is a longing for an abandoned past, is not enough. Elegy, in fact, may do terrible Odyssean damage. It feeds off regret, and even though regret is beautiful and moving, it gives nothing to the future. Regret is a curmudgeon with a way of stringing up the innocent girls. This story, then, is a lyric, a song to what might be, not a longing for what has been.
Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History Page 29