It was not entirely right as a house: no very good rooms, unusable in parts, over-large in others. We tried our best to make it better, moving the kitchen from its original site to the 1980s addition. Jake Farman, Lou’s husband and an old friend, made a big fitted sideboard with giant drawers and over-thick shelves, like a child’s idea of a dresser, stretching the length of the new kitchen. A cheap version of an Aga, called a Nobel, was installed at one end. Ken Weekes built a copy of a fireplace I had seen in an Italian kitchen at the other end, with a big plastered brick hood over a flagstone hearth raised about 3 feet off the floor so that you could sit on it, next to the fire, and cook over the glowing embers.
This looked good but it smoked and so we had to install an extractor fan on the top of the chimney, which whirred away like a toy helicopter trying to take off. Within a day or two of putting this up there, an old basket we were burning on the fire wafted itself up into the chimney and set the whole shaft alight. The firemen from Burwash – it was a Sunday lunchtime – put it out with a wet towel on the fire, the steam of which went up the chimney and dampened the flames. Nobody died and we all drank beer afterwards while the sun poured in through the windows.
The interiors of Perch Hill were frankly neglected. The loo upstairs had no lid. We hadn’t replaced the old, grey and grubby carpets. Mr Ventnor’s 1976 gilt downlighters and pine-louvred cupboards remained where we had found them. From the beginning Sarah and I concentrated on the outside and left the house till last. Why was that? Perhaps because the inside of a house is not quite of the essence. It is too changeable, too often changed, to have anything to do with the nature of a place. Interior decoration is pure imposition, while the reason Sarah and I came to live here was not to impose us on here, but here on us. And getting the outside in shape seemed like an attempt to bring out the virtues of somewhere like this: its vitality, depth and rootedness, its optimism and life. Wallpaper never flowers or fruits, does it?
Only in my workroom did I make it very different. I had lumps of the natural world littering my desk. Along with the computer discs, the Post-its and the unanswered mail lay a hunk of ironstone from the ground in one of our gateways, the iron clotted in the ginger-coloured stone like fat in pâté; a slice of limestone picked up on a beach in Ithaca; a pitted volcanic pebble from the Azores; and another from the same islands, a drop of lava thrown out by a volcano that erupted in September 1957, the month I was born. It sits here now in front of me like a blackened bun, smooth on one side as if with a crust, rough on the other like torn-off dough. There’s a flanged iron gate-pintle, made from Wealden iron and found burnt in a bonfire so that its surface is blotched an oxidized red, as though its skin were diseased; a flint from Dungeness, near Derek Jarman’s garden; a basalt cobble from an island in the Hebrides; and a clay pot, made out of clay dug from the orchard here, fired in the oven and then washed by mistake in the washing-up machine so that it looks as if it has been recently excavated from an Iron Age hut.
I use most of these things as paperweights, when the wind blows in from the open door, but they are also more than that. They are, quite literally, touchstones, elemental souvenirs, carried back from trips abroad or walks in the fields. They are good for many things but above all for their lack of domesticity, their out-of-placeness in the tamed world inside. Their surfaces are cruder or more basic than their surroundings. They flake and chip. They are, on the whole, much heavier or at least denser than most of the things you find in a house and both their holdable weight and their retained cold on a hot day seem to stand as evidence of their worth. They belong to a serious world outside the light conveniences of a domestic existence. The keyboard and the PC, the telephone and answering machine, the printer, the modem, the pens, the drifts of paper: none of these could outlast the talismans alongside them. They are the ballast.
The curious aspect of these gathered but still naked objects is the way they are more significant here than where you found them. When you put them in a room, they summon, without effort, wide acreages of other worlds and previous times. I can look at the battered clay pot and bring to mind the summer night I dug its clay, with a friend, a potter, from the orchard pit, and our intermittent, half-embarrassed conversation. The volcanic Azorean bun still has about it the air of warm, soaking mid-Atlantic rain the morning I picked it up on the volcano’s ashy slopes, while the blackback gulls hawked and wheeled around me and the swell ate away at the shore. The Dungeness flint still comes from an early summer morning, with the light reflecting off the Channel, so that the whole sky was lit up as if in a studio. The sea-cabbage was in flower and the valerian and viper’s bugloss swung in coloured drifts across the successive ridges of the shingle. Unlike everything else, from which memory and detail fades, it is almost as if the longer you hold on to these things, the more the associations and the sharper the recollections that gather about them. They are tangible memories, objects to deny time simply because they collect and store memories like filings around a magnet.
Why do we like these fragments of the landscape in our rooms? Perhaps having them is an intuitive recognition of our distance from the natural, a pitiable piece of magpieism, collecting flakes of the unadorned with which to re-balance the electronic, the centrally heated and the chronically tense state of modern life.
In the other rooms bits and pieces of furniture from Sissinghurst and from Sarah’s mother’s house stood around. We bought some rugs. An old bit of tapestry that had belonged to my grandmother hung in the little sitting room beside a French faux tortoiseshell cabinet that must once have been at Knole, the great Sackville house in Kent where my grandmother had been brought up. It was a ragbag but I only had to go outside, see the beginnings of Sarah’s garden, help her paint the stripy gondola poles with which she was decorating it or lie down in the buttercup and sorrel salad of our incomparable summer fields, to understand why we were here, why this world of mess and inadequate money was the choice we had made. Mess and sweetness; the immediate life; tenderness; the joint enterprise; Rosie in our wake; those fields; the deer out of the window in the early morning; the dog playing with the sleeves of my jersey on the kitchen floor: these were enough.
That is why we stayed, because this place for all its failings represented what we had between us. Perch Hill was what we were. It was jointness, the embodiment of our first person plural. If we had left it, we would, it seemed then, have been leaving ourselves behind. Anyway, nothing was so visibly unfinished, raw and unachieved, a project still to be addressed. To have left then, before we had even engaged with the realities of the struggle to make it good, would have brought on a shrivelling of the spirit from which neither of us, I think, would have ever recovered. Mess, if you look at it right, is stimulus, chaos an invitation to make good, jointness the lifeblood we needed.
Patrolling the Boundaries
I BECAME obsessed by Kipling that winter. Bateman’s, his house, a mile from ours across the fields, now belongs to the National Trust and I asked them if I could write the text to a new guidebook they wanted there. They agreed. I didn’t tell them how much I had come to see Kipling’s own position as parallel to mine: he was almost exactly my age, thirty-six, when he came here, in retreat from the world, and we were both in grief over lost children – his six-year-old daughter Josephine dead from pneumonia, my sons severed from me, or part-severed anyway, by divorce – and looking for the sustenance an ancient landscape can provide.
The boys came here often, regularly, and I longed for them to think of this as home. But I was under no illusion: some gap, like the cracks that open in drying clay, had appeared between us. My home was no longer their home. Sitting for those weeks in Kipling’s study, at his desk, investigating and exploring his books, handling his objects, walking his land that all but bordered mine, reading into it the moral and emotional structure of his stories, I was wrapping myself in this Sussex Kipling, not the drum-banging imperialist but the haunted man in whom so much of my own predicament seemed to be prefigured.
Morning after morning, I walked over the hill to Bateman’s. It is down in the valley, away from the road, away from the village, surrounded by hedges and high walls. Even though the Kiplings knew it to be a gloomy house, already with the air of sadness it still has in its rooms even on a sunny day, it looked in 1902 like the haven they needed, almost a fortress, stony-faced, protective, and they jumped at it. It was a house in which they could pull up a drawbridge behind them.
There was more to it than simple anti-sociability. A passage in Something of Myself, Kipling’s late autobiography, provides the key. He is describing his own magical practices as a lonely boy, suffering in a boarding house in Southsea, separated from his parents and his beloved ayah, still in India:
When my father sent me a Robinson Crusoe … I set up in business alone as a trader with savages … in a mildewy basement room … My apparatus was a coconut shell strung on a red cord, a tin trunk, and a piece of packing case which kept off any other world … If the bit of board fell, I had to begin the magic all over again. I have learned since from children who play much alone that this rule of ‘beginning again in a pretended game’ is not uncommon. The magic, you see, lies in a ring or fence that you take refuge in.
That last sentence could be a description of Bateman’s itself, of the place of this valley in Kipling’s imagination and of what it meant to me too. It is the magical zone into which others do not intrude and whose power and secret relies on a vigilant patrolling of the boundaries, on a perceived isolation in which the richness of privacy can flower. His American wife, Carrie (‘a hard, capable little person’, Henry James called her), was the Keeper of the Gate and there is a story remembered in Burwash, and told to me by Graham Jarvis, the butcher there, from the Kiplings’ later years which dramatizes particularly sharply that exclusion of the world.
One of the Bateman’s calves was to be slaughtered not for its meat but for its thymus gland. This gland is at its largest in young animals and is still thought by some to contain life-enhancing, vitality-inducing juices. After John Kipling went missing at the Battle of Loos in 1915, his father suffered repeated and acute gastric pain. The calf’s thymus may have been intended to alleviate this. After the gland had been extracted from the animal, Carrie insisted that the rest of the body should not be used for meat. It was to be buried not on the farm but inside the garden, and the ground over it raked to a fine tilth which would show any disturbance. After that tilth had been prepared, she signed the raked ground with her own name.
This is an odd and disturbing image: the life-giving calf, dead and signed for in the garden, locked away from the rest of the world by a mother who had seen the death of two of her three children and shown no public pain. It seems like an unconsciously magical and demonic act, a sacrifice in a Sussex garden, a thousand miles from the world of Burwash and the straightforward use of animals for meat but rather near to the world of Kipling’s own poetry and its sense of the enigmatic undercurrents flowing everywhere beneath the surface of the ordinary.
The more I read, the more it became clear that Carrie’s protectiveness was also obsessive. In the later years she would not let a single piece of Kipling’s handwriting leave the house; everything he wrote had to be typed out by the secretary. When she found the manuscript of The Irish Guards in the Great War, Kipling’s long, careful testament to the men in whose company his son was killed, about to be sent to the publisher with some last-minute handwritten alterations by the author, she insisted that the entire text be retyped. Kipling himself had to apologize to the secretary.
But Carrie’s ferocity was an act of love. It allowed Kipling, among many other things, to explore, in private and in all its ramifications, the place where they lived. The landscape and those who were bound to it became the heroes of the stories he wrote at Bateman’s, at the long walnut desk where I sat reading them. Stone mullioned windows look out on two sides: one eastwards along the pastures of the valley where this author-landowner would have seen his two herds of conker-red Sussex beef cattle and the Guernsey dairy cows; the other, to the right, over the woods that clothe the sides of the valley, the woods from which Puck emerges in the stories like an earthman-impresario to conjure magic for the children, and into which, at the end of each story, he melts wordlessly away.
The figure of Hobden, the hedger and ditcher, the archetypal Sussex man, whose generations have been there for ever, and who knows everything there is to know about the place, is Puck’s human equivalent. He is Sussex made flesh, the ancestor of all the Clarks, Groombridges and Weekeses who were also peopling my world. Kipling, as he wrote in a poem, may claim to be the proprietor of a wide stretch of the Dudwell valley, he may hold the deeds, but Hobden, even Hobden the poacher, possesses it:
I have rights of chase and warren, as my dignity requires. I can fish – but Hobden tickles. I can shoot – but Hobden wires …
Shall I summons him to judgment? I would sooner summons Pan.
(‘The Land’, 1917)
Kipling, the valley and I clustered together. We became each other’s. He put his mark on it, in field after field, at the corners of woods and the twisting of the river, at farms and at cottages now already in ruins and mossed over. In return, the valley shaped his imagination. I trudged after them both. More and more that winter I walked in Kipling’s world. The words he used to describe his relationship to it were ‘wonder and desire’, twin attitudes, one distant and admiring, the other distant and longing. Those were mine too. Working it out with map and text in hand, I found where Hobden’s cottage and his forge had been. An alder carr now grows over what must always have been their sludgy, boggy site. At ‘the sadder darker end’ of the wood, further along the valley, I found what he had described in Puck of Pook’s Hill: ‘an old marlpit full of black water, where weepy, hairy moss hangs round the stumps of the willows and alders. But the birds come to perch on the dead branches, and Hobden says that the bitter willow-water is a sort of medicine for sick animals.’ I, too, found myself there, suddenly surprised one day by this: ‘ “Hst!” he whispered. He stood still, for not twenty paces away a magnificent dog-fox sat on his haunches and looked at the children as though he were an old friend of theirs.’
For the whole Kipling performance here, Puck, the little brown pointy-eared earth god, is the master of ceremonies. He acts as the compère, smoothly and coolly emerging from the leafy wings, presenting the children with the astonishingly immediate and real past, and then just as deftly slipping back into invisibility. In his hands, the boundaries between the real and the imagined are dissolved; the strange and the alien are slickly wafted into concrete existence and with equal panache swept away. Each story ends with that quiver of closure and each new one begins with a sudden unapologized appearance of the strange.
There were multiple layers in this valley for Kipling and he provided another for me. It became for him, as it had for me, a sort of reservoir of the English spirit which can emerge from the leafy shadows for an hour or two and then slide back into them, a place where the gates are down between the landscape, the idea of history and the sense of other lives and other spirits inhabiting the world we call ours. I have walked the abandoned roads with Kipling’s most famous lyric in my mind:
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.
Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate …
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet
And the swish of a skirt in the dew …
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods
…
But there is no road through the woods.
(‘The Way through the Woods’, 1910)
That is still there too: the numinous haze above the leaf-litter on the wood floor; the moss-walled trenches of the old lanes dropping to the river where the shallow gravel turns it into fords; the black pools over which the willows and alders curve their long, flexed limbs like the struts of a tented dome; the knowledge of something having just passed, its scent hanging there in the way the smell of fox stays on in a sheltered hollow; and that fearful sensation when you find yourself flicking your head around behind you, knowing you are alone but sensing something else, a crack of a twig, a movement in the trees unexplained by the wind, the moaning creak of one trunk against another. All that is there, in fragments, and never more than at those marginal times, the early, dewy winter mornings and the ever-earlier evenings, as the sun comes in low and pale, its colour diluted by the damp in the air, washing the inside of the wood with sunlight it hasn’t seen all year.
I relished all that privacy, the protectiveness, secrecy and subtle explorations of ‘the things that are beyond the frontier’, but I wondered too if the shut-awayness, the closure, the brusqueness of the Kiplings’ dealing with the rest of the local world, whether that was really enough. The story of the buried calf, lurking in my mind for the weeks after I heard it, changed the way I saw that part of the valley. It coloured the landscape like a stain. It somehow drained it of blood. It denied one of the best and richest things about living here: the neighbourliness of it, the net of people we had already become connected to, a net which existed like a map overlying the physical map. Ken and Brenda Weekes, who lived in the neighbouring cottage and who told us how things had been before we even knew Perch Hill existed; Fred and Margaret Groombridge, who knew in their bones what this farm needed and just how we should set out on the task; Will and Peter Clark, who arrived in our lives virtually attached to Perch Hill; Nipper and Kitty Keeley, who both bred the dogs we loved and ran the great oak timberyard just south of Dallington on the way to Brown Bread Street, from where we got our wood; the Wrenns, who had suffered such a grievous loss in the death of their son Stephen; and the Fieldwicks, who were steering us towards looking after sheep more properly.
Smell of Summer Grass Page 8