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 fo
r 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 Nescafé 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
The Darting of Life
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 combin
g 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.
Smell of Summer Grass Page 5