It was a wonderful sight – in the mind’s eye as much as anything else – Peter moulding the wood in the way other people might pick up a lump of clay and shape a pot from it. He was a gentle and not especially gregarious or socially confident man. If there were other people about, he would often decide not to come in for a cup of tea or for lunch. Wooding is a private business, done in private, the results remaining virtually private, the whole event without a public face. And it was there, in that self-contained world, that he excelled. ‘Do you like wooding?’ I asked him and he replied in the way you might expect. ‘It’s a job,’ he said and lifted his eyebrows into a smile.
We have four patches of woodland on the farm. One, the Way Shaw, is a field that was let go before the war and was now a thicket of bracken and wind-twisted birches. Ken said the remains of a V-1 doodlebug lay somewhere in there, but nobody knew where. Two of the others, Toyland Shaw and Middle Shaw, are old hornbeam coppices with some big oaks in them. The fourth, the Ashwood Shaw, is a wonderful old ash coppice, with giant stools growing on a steep bank between Great Flemings and Hollow Flemings, some of the stools twelve and fifteen feet across, with four or five 60-foot-high trees growing from each divided base.
This, in miniature, is a rich inheritance, an ash wood and a hornbeam wood providing the two necessary materials: one light but strong, making perfect poles for the handles of tools, for rakes and hay forks, the other tough and resistant. Mill cogs were always made of hornbeam wood and whenever I look at them I think of that, the iron hardness lurking under the oddly snake-like bark, the trunks not making good clean poles like the ash but twisted, fixed in a frozen and rather ugly writhing. The ash and the hornbeam, the calm and the perplexed, the classic and the romantic of an English woodland.
I was feeling my way with the wood. Clearing up was obviously the first stage of what to do here, but it wouldn’t be enough. That autumn a couple of enormous ash trunks crashed out of the wood and into Hollow Flemings, the field below the shaw. There had been no great winds, nor anything else to disturb them. They had simply grown too big for their foundations. The leverage of the 60-foot trees became too much and they snapped out of their fixings at ground level, leaving a torn stump and exacerbating a weakness which meant that other stems from the same stool would soon go. The only way to save the plants was to cut them down. New growth would spring from the shorn stubs and the interrupted cycle of coppicing, which, judging from the size of the stools, must be many centuries old on that bank, undoubtedly a medieval landscape, would be resumed.
I talked to a local timber man, Zak Soudain, about the wood and he was keen to have it. The bottom end of an ash trunk, where it moves slightly out from the stool and then up towards the light, a shape which preserves even in old age the first directions taken by the new stem in the first spring after coppicing, is the most valuable part of all. It is used to make lacrosse sticks. Nothing else will do. The rest, the straight clean lightness of the ash, goes into furniture.
So far, so profitable. But there was a hazard. We were overrun with deer. As we looked out of the bedroom window soon after seven in the morning, there would be eight or ten deer grazing in the field. The fawns in September were still playing with each other in a puppyish, skittish way. There was a stag with a single antler left, walking around lopsided like a car with one headlight out. Deer eat young trees. If we cut the ash down, they would chew off all the new shoots, the stools would die and I would have destroyed a small sliver of the late medieval landscape. But if we didn’t cut the ash trees down they would probably collapse in the next big storm and the wood would be destroyed anyway. Deer-fencing was prohibitively expensive and ugly. I wasn’t quite sure what to do about this and so I dithered while Peter easily and confidently moved through the fallen mess of things. I asked him one day what he would do. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s not for me to say. You’ve got to decide, Adam. It’s your wood.’ I didn’t tell him that, as far as I could see, the wood felt more like his.
That autumn I bought our first sheep: 20 Border Leicester ewes, which had already been through one year’s lambing. They were advertised in the local free-sheet, £600 for the lot. I knew we had to plunge into livestock and this was a way of doing it. Will Clark and I drove over to look at them. Will said he knew about sheep and did quite a bit of squeezing of the back end of the animals in question. I certainly knew nothing. The woman selling them, wearing a fetching pair of buckskin chaps, said they were marvellous. So I bought them.
Carolyn Fieldwick, Will Clark’s daughter and wife of Dave Fieldwick, the shepherd, had a ram to sell us. I bought him for £100. He was a big, stumbling, black-faced Suffolk and we called him Roger. He arrived on 5 November and started to mosey around our field full of ewes. If a ewe conceives on Guy Fawkes’ Day, Ken Weekes told me, the lamb will be born on April Fool’s Day. Roger seemed, it must be said, quite cheap at £100, and looked a little seedy. I could see him in a Dennis Potter play, snuffling around the ewes’ rear ends like a tramp going through the dustbins at the back of a restaurant. They didn’t much like the look of him or his intentions and used to move off to eat more grass in some other, less interfered with part of the field.
It brought back memories of 18-year-old parties, in which all the girls were pristine, self-sufficient and adult and I was a grubby, grasping bundle of unattraction, trotting around about 2 yards behind them. At least I didn’t have to wear the sort of thing we put on Roger, a harness that Helmut Newton would have been proud of, holding a large yellow block of crayon wax in the middle of his chest. Whenever Roger managed to corner a ewe, he rubbed this, as a side-effect so to speak, all over her bottom so that we would know she’d been done. After the best part of a week, his score was two yellowed bottoms and one ewe that seemed to have an intensively crayoned left shoulder. Radical misfire or poor sense of geography: whichever it was, nothing could have been more familiar.
What an agony for poor Roger! So many requests, so much rejection. I caught him in successful action only once: a desperate five seconds of up-ended quiver and then down on all fours again, that look of hopelessness flooding back in, a sense of everything being over, a look on his poor, crumpled-ear face of utter bemusement. Why, I said to him, can’t we all procreate like the trees?
Winter came sidling up on us. By mid-December, the darkness had lowered over the whole place, that terrible lightlessness when all you can do is remember the long lit summer, the after-hay evenings when the fields had a purified cleanness to them, patterned with an odd and unplanned-for regularity in the bales waiting to be collected, each of them throwing its shadow to the next, like a dabbed mark with a broad-bladed pen, while the dog is manically teasing some left-out wisps of hay and the children are playing man-hunt among the bales. What a sudden inrush of lost time that is.
My daughter Rosie, who was two that year, thought the trees were dead. ‘The trees are dead,’ she said one morning after breakfast, as one might announce that the war in Bosnia was over or Arsenal were third in the Premiership.
‘Not dead,’ I said, ‘just resting.’
‘Are they sleepy?’
‘Yes, they are, I suppose.’
‘Why aren’t they lying down then?’
Anyone who doesn’t believe in the reality of Seasonal Affective Disorder might learn a thing or two if they took a trip to the Sussex Weald in winter. Our own immediate surroundings that December represented the English winter in excelsis: a sapless, shrunken sump. I stayed inside as much as I could and averted my eyes from the windows as I passed. The mud lapping at the walls of the house on two sides had become a glutinated bog decorated with grey-eyed puddles and the semi-mangled remains of the rubbish which something was tearing open at night and distributing among the earth-heaps and trench systems. You could hardly blame the creature; no one could tell that scattering half-consumed, half-rotten rice-puddings and stock bones over what used to be the garden wasn’t precisely what we had in mind.
The chickens we h
ad foolishly acquired roamed delightedly among the old-food-encrusted earthwork-play zone where we let them out every day. They redistributed the mess. None of it ever seemed to disappear.
I had come to hate our chickens. They lurked about in the same murky province as unwritten thank-you letters and work that’s late, the guilt zone you’d rather didn’t exist. One is meant to love chickens, I know: their fluffy puffball existence, the warm rounded sound of their voices, a slow chortling, the aural equivalent of new-laid eggs, and of course the eggs themselves, gathered as the first of the morning sun breaks into the hen house and the dear loving mothers that have created them cluster around your feet for their morning scatter of corn.
Well, I hated them. Before the chickens arrived, I loved them. I sweated for days, building their run with six-foot-high netting, buried at the base so that the fox couldn’t dig in to get them, with additional electric fencing just outside the main wire as another fox deterrent. I made a charming wooden, weather-boarded house for them, the inside of which I fitted out as though for a page in Country Living. There were some elegant nesting boxes, with balconies outside them so that the hens could walk without discomfort to their accouchements, ramps towards those balconies from the deeply straw-bedded ground, a row of roosting poles so that at night they could feel they were safe in the branches of the forest trees which the Ur-memories of their origins in the forests of south-east Asia required for peace of mind.
When it was finished, I sat down on the rich-smelling barley straw and smoked a cigarette, thinking that this was the sort of world I would like to inhabit.
We should have left it at that, but we didn’t. We actually bought some chickens. And a cockerel. He came in a potato sack and when I tipped him out on to the grass and dandelions of the new run, he stood there, blinking a little, surrounded by his harem, and I couldn’t believe we had acquired for £8 such a shockingly beautiful creature. He was a Maran, his white body feathers flecked black in bold, slight marks as if made with the brush of a Japanese painter. His eye was bright and his comb and long wattles the deep dark red of Venetian glass. He seemed huge, standing a good 2 feet high, and this fabulous, porcelain-figure colouring made a superb and alien presence in our brick and weatherboarded yard. His chickens, which he cornered and had with a ruthlessness and vigour we could only admire, were dumpy little brown English bundles next to him, heavy-laying Warrens, dish-mops to his Byron. For two days after his ignominious sack-borne arrival, he remained quiet but then he began to crow, his cry disturbingly loud if you were near by but, like the bagpipes, beautiful when heard in the distance, down in the wood or with the sheep two fields away.
Within a couple of weeks it was going wrong. I was collecting eggs with my son Ben, who was seven. It was early evening and the chickens were still out. We didn’t realize it but the cock was already in the house and with only the warning of a couple of pecks on my feet, which I didn’t recognize for what they were, he suddenly attacked Ben, banging and flapping against his trouser legs in a terrifying explosion of feathers and movement and noise. Ben and I scrambled out of the hen house, him in tears, me shaken.
It worsened over the next few weeks. We were all attacked in turn until one Sunday morning found the entire family cowering behind the glass of the back door, checking to see if Terminator, or Killer Cock as he was also called, was out on the prowl. He had come, I am sure, to sense our fear and was now certain of his place as Cock of the Walk. He had to go. Of course, there was no way I could bring myself to capture him and so we hired a professional to take him away. We thought there might be the most horrifying execution scene in a corner of the yard. What actually happened was a lesson in the psychology of dominance. Alf Hoad is a man with enormously hairy arms. He lives in the village and shoots deer. He was our chosen executioner. Alf arrived in his Land Rover, stepped out of it carrying a sack, walked up to the cock and put him in it. My manliness rating dropped like a stone. The children now look on Alf as something of a god. He took the cock away alive and used him as a guard dog to protect his pheasant chicks against foxes.
It was a relief when Killer went. We could walk about again outside without fear of a rake up the back of the legs, but, without their man, our ugly little brown chickens suffered a drop in status. I looked at them and saw only the slum conditions in which they lived – my fault, they didn’t have enough room – and their scrawny appearance – nature’s fault, as they were going through the moult – and I blamed them for both. They stopped laying with the days shortening, and so we didn’t even have any eggs. In fact, we were quite pleased about that because we had come to think eggs disgusting.
People, I now understood, had got the wrong idea about chickens: they are not the soft, burbly things they always appear to be in pictures and advertisements. They are utterly and profoundly manic. This whole short history had taught me an important lesson. There is something about the chicken which invites maltreatment. No one, I think, would ever have tolerated the idea of battery ducks, even if that were possible. People have caged billions of chickens in the most intolerable conditions because everything about them tells you that they have no soul. This is not to condone it, but it does perhaps explain it.
The chickens somehow made the winter worse, its awful unshaven stubbliness. The whole of Sussex looked as if it had been in bed with flu for a week. Its skin was ill and a sort of blackness had entered the picture, as if it had been over-inked. No modern descriptions of winter ever put this clodden, damp mulishness at the centre of things. People always talk about ice and frost and glitter and hardness and crispness and freshness and brightness and sparkle and brilliance and tingle. It’s all nonsense. England is at sea and has sea-weather, a mediated dampness. That winter it entered our souls.
In a sea of unglittery mud and damp prospects, with things unfinished, never unpacked or never started all round us, we huddled over our fires. Visiting friends were amazed at the mess. Our first year had come to an end. Was it, I still wondered silently, a mistake? Did we belong here? What were we doing here? Were we going to be happy here? Had we swapped one sort of unhappiness for another?
Why did we stay when so many others leave, just at this point? The euphoria, the bursting of energy from the bottle as it was first opened, had popped and fizzed and diminished and sunk, leaving only the still liquid in the glass. We were left with the plain fact. We had our work to do. I was writing for the Sunday Telegraph, columns about our life on the farm and others more generally about the politics of the early 1990s, the end of the Thatcher era, the John Major interval, the coming of New Labour, the political conferences, the disintegration of the Tory world, the expanding levels of hope that seemed to emanate from the Blair camp. I had a coffee cup emblazoned with the slogan, red on black, ‘New Labour, New Hope’. It has been through the dishwasher so often that the words are illegible now. I was writing profiles of the political leaders, spending two or three days ‘up close and personal’, as it said in the paper with Blair, Major and the Liberal leader Paddy Ashdown, while writing a book, my first for several years, on the restoration of Windsor Castle after its fire in 1992 for which I interviewed hundreds of consultants, architects, builders, members of the Royal Household, curtain makers, gilders, wood carvers. It was a busy, engaged time. Life was starting to fruit again.
Sarah was making the garden, writing her book about it, looking after Rosie, doing her best to make the house more habitable. It was not a good building. The core of it was a two-up, two-down, tile-roofed and tile-hung cottage, of an age nobody could quite establish but perhaps built at the end of the 16th century. It had originally been entirely oak-framed but, like many such cottages, laid straight on to the damp clay. The lower limbs of the oak had rotted and been replaced with a mixture of iron-thick sandstone, probably dug from the ridge to the east where the hornbeam coppice now is, and brick from the works at Ashburnham a few miles to the south. Those two rooms downstairs were our dark original kitchen and the tiny sitting room in which a fir
e burned all day long in the winter and where we used to huddle in the evening, close to its flames. The smell of oak smoke filled the whole house as if we were curing bacon. Each room was about ten feet square and six high. I couldn’t stand up in the old kitchen but the floor had been lowered in the sitting room and in there the top of my head just scraped the beams. From some old planking I made seats which fitted into the fireplace, one on each side. If you sat there, the knees of your trousers got singed.
Upstairs, in this oldest part of the house, was our bedroom – taller but with low windows looking out southwards over the garden, the Cottage Field and the wood – and a second bedroom where Rosie slept, which also had a little fireplace in it and a similar window. It could hardly have been simpler.
In the 19th century, this tiny square box of a house had had another bay added to it, with another room upstairs (now a scrawny bathroom) and a room downstairs which had a door out to the garden. Sticking out from this enlarged block was a converted cow byre, which was where the boys slept, and on the other side Mr Ventnor’s 1980s addition, a non-functioning and frankly ugly extra sitting room with a huge and hideous fireplace. We never used it, preferring instead that sheltering core, the old heart which felt like a good and safe place.
Smell of Summer Grass Page 7