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 ha
y 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 litt
le 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.
Smell of Summer Grass Page 6