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
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 t
he 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 sli
ghtly 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.
Smell of Summer Grass Page 3