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 12½ 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.
Smell of Summer Grass Page 4