These were people we had come to know and rely on now. You could tell from their names that they were all what they called themselves, ‘Old Sussex’. On the farm, each of them would tell me what to do and how to do it, how not to and what I had done wrong so far. There was a form of decorous, reticent generosity about the advice these men and women gave. They didn’t want to tread on toes, but what they said always came with a slight and joshing twist on the end of it.
In one of these conversations with Ken Weekes that winter – it was about whether to put nitrogen on the grass – Ken turned to me and said, ‘You know, Adam, it’s very nice that you’ve come to live here.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Why’s that, Ken?’
‘Because it looks like you’ve got money to burn.’
For all that, Ken was a stalwart, helping us out time and time and time again. Neighbourliness is central to the way he is. Remembering his deep and social generosity of spirit, you turned to the cold picture of the dead calf buried in the garden, the anti-neighbourliness, the grief in it, and Bateman’s no longer seemed to belong to the country in which it was set. It had become a disconnected anomaly. ‘England is a wonderful land,’ Kipling wrote to a friend just after arriving at Bateman’s. ‘It is the most marvellous of all foreign countries I have ever been in.’ That remained true of his place in Sussex: never at home, in the way the Weekeses are, but consciously and repeatedly searching for a home, for a feeling of embeddedness in the place. The very search set him apart. Perhaps he was no more than an early forerunner of all those of us who have left cities to find a rural place.
As a boy at Sissinghurst I had known a wonderful rural province to explore and roam through, but it had been disengaged. I had never come close to animals or work on the land. Since then, in the world of books and newspapers, I had lived an urban or at least an urbanized life. So for me this was more than a return to the source: it was an attempt to dive into the source at a deeper level than I had ever known.
But there is a problem with this pastoral drive. Pastoral – the idea that a rural existence can somehow regenerate those who give themselves over to it – carries the seeds of its own failure. It is, by definition, a sophisticated attitude. Only those who have abandoned the idyll, or have had the idyll withdrawn from them, are in search of it. The fact that they are searching means that they cannot find what they are looking for.
Even in the knowledge of its inadequacy, though, pastoral seems to me not a worthless but a necessary myth. It provides a sanctuary in which a bruised mind can rest. It puts a torque on the material concerns of the everyday, twisting them towards something else, some better state.
With Ken Weekes one day, as the whole Kipling phase was nearing its end, the neighbourliness between us took a step forward. He had a gun for sale and I bought it, on an impulse. It was a 12-bore Silver Sabel De Luxe Side Lock Ejector made by a Spanish gunsmith called Gorosabel. ‘That’s £1,800 new,’ Ken said. ‘You can have it for £540, seeing as you don’t know what you’re doing.’ I’m not sure why it was £540 but I’m putty in Ken’s hands and so I said yes and for the first time in about twenty years I had a gun of my own.
Guns smell delicious: mineral, acrid, serious, not pretty, not part of any cocktail-party scene. The smell of a gun is uncompromised. There isn’t a soft edge to it. Someone should think of marketing gunsmell as an aftershave.
My Sabel De Luxe was a beautiful thing for the few days that I had it – chased on the silver plate that covers the side lock mechanism, the stock polished, dense, rich, reliable, the opening mechanism sharp, the pleasure of cameras in the precision of its click open and its snap shut. It combined the best of furniture and jewellery, intricacy and solidity, designed for a purpose, moulded to the body, made for me. Of course a gun is a glamorous thing.
I went out with it early one morning, late that February. It was strangely warm and the grass was growing as though it were May. Custard’s snout was dripping from the dew bath, like a boxer with his sweat up. Every time he shook his face, the wet flew off it in a halo.
Noises in the distance are more audible first thing in the morning. There was the traffic on the Burwash–Heathfield road along the ridge; jets into Gatwick; pheasants over in Leggett’s Wood, a cousin noise to our own stupid chickens clucking; the hollow knocking of a sledgehammer on a chestnut fence post down near Bateman’s; the Coxes’ tractor at Sheepshaw Farm, grumbling and farting into life; the spatter of something falling in High Wood on to the leaf floor below the trees.
There I was, standing in the middle of this near-silence, with the sunshine breaking in bars on to the grass of the Slip Field, the warming, smooth-skinned gun in my hand and the dog, obedient, wet and bored at my feet. I stood in the shadow of an ash tree and waited for the rabbits to emerge. I had seen them here before and throughout the grass of this little wood-lined sliver called Hollow Flemings are the nibbled patches and the scattered droppings they had left behind. If there was going to be a Perch Hill killing field, this was the one.
When I was a boy I had a series of guns at home in Sissinghurst: a BSA air rifle, with which I shot out the windows of the granary next to the barn and killed a robin at three yards on Christmas Day; a .410 shotgun; and then a Holland and Holland 16-bore, a beautiful, slim and elegant thing, more like a walking cane than a shotgun, with which I felt completely at home. I stalked about the fields of my stepfather’s farm in Hampshire with my pockets full of cartridges and my heart full of bloodlust, popping off at this and that for the hell of it, enjoying the jolt into the shoulder and the ding in one’s ears afterwards. It might be a rabbit one day, some pheasants or pigeons or squirrels the next. I wasn’t much interested in the bodies or the eating of them. It was the shooting that counted.
This was the time we were all having to read Les Caves du Vatican for French O-level, with Gide’s thrilling idea of the acte gratuit – one never translated the phrase – an entirely gratuitous action, for some reason always violent and nasty, to show that you were one of the cool gang, les subtils, not subject to the dreary rigidities of conventional moral life under which the others, les crustacés, suffocated. In the book the subtils shoved strangers out of train doors at 80 miles an hour; I murdered animals. My mother thought I was learning country lore and the Ways of Nature; I knew I was living out the fantasies of a gay French intellectual half a century earlier. Life in the Home Counties had never been so authentic. If I’d been born to different parents in a different class, I would have been sent to Borstal.
The last thing I shot on my teenage grumblings around the Hampshire fields was a hare. It sprang up 15 yards away, out of the footings of a hedge, one December morning. I swung round on to it and shot it once. The shot had no effect and the hare went tearing on across the wide spaces of the field. I watched it for a while and then turned away, to put a new cartridge in the gun. Just as I did that, I saw or thought I saw the hare stutter and tumble over, as though a wire had tripped it. I walked over to the far side of the field and there it was lying on the grass. I touched its eye. The hare was dead. When we came to eat it, there wasn’t a single pellet in its body. I’d missed it, but the noise of the gun going off had been enough. The hare had died of shock. I don’t remember taking the gun out of my stepfather’s cupboard again.
All that was 20 years before. In the meantime, I had shot a single stag, out of curiosity and after a long and beautiful stalk through the hills near Rannoch Moor, but that ended in absurdity too. It was a warm day and the herd of deer was sitting calmly on the cheek of hillside below the stalker and me, 100 yards away. Whispering, he told me that the stag I was to shoot was the one in the middle, ‘the hummel’. A hummel is a eunuch, with no antlers. It had never been like this in John Buchan. Not only was my stag a castrato: it was fast asleep, dozing in the autumn sunshine. The stalker began by whistling softly to make it stand up. No good. A light clap of the hands – nothing. Finally, after some banging and shouting, the other deer got up and walked away but my chose
n hummel, my sweet fat little eunuch, continued his afternoon dreaming. ‘Ach, there’s nothing for it,’ the stalker said. ‘Shoot it where it is.’ So I did, through the neck, severing the vertebral column. The hummel never woke for his death; his head slumped forward on to his chest and from a distance there was no telling he had died.
These were the scenes running through my mind that morning as I stood in the fringes of the wood with Ken’s gun in my hand. The sun climbed higher, the rabbits came out into the field but I didn’t raise the gun to meet them. ‘What is the point?’ I said to the dog and we walked back up to Ken’s to return the gun. ‘I know what you mean,’ he said. ‘I only shoot clay pigeons myself nowadays. I don’t know why, but I don’t like the other any more.’
Another killing question loomed: the hunt. Kipling had banned it from his land and we did too. It was casually done. They asked if they could and we said they couldn’t. I wonder now, years later, if this was too thoughtless on our part. I didn’t think carefully enough about it, the casual disruption to other people’s lives which our casual refusal involved. Dislike of the hunt was largely a gut reaction, founded, absurd as it might sound, on a dislike of horses. There is something in particular about a horse’s bottom which makes it difficult to take the horse world seriously. Horses are not alone in this. Different styles of bottom will always colour the way in which you see different parts of the animal kingdom: the encrusted chaos at the back end of a sheep, usually the farmer’s fault, too rich a diet, but essentially sheepy nonetheless; the pert neatness with which the rear of the cat meets the outside world; and the way dogs divert one’s attention from the bottom itself with the wonderful flag-waving gesture of the tail, leading one’s eye up and away to the tip-of-the-wag point of delight. That is the difference between a cat and a dog: one is a take-it-or-leave-it, I’m-no-one-to-make-any-form-of-social-compromise sort of animal, the other nothing but love and diversionary tactics.
Horses, though, are the apotheosis of the bottom. I cannot help thinking of them as mainly bottoms with a head stuck on the front. And what heroically enormous bottoms they are! That pair of huge round buttocks, a couple of Brobdingnag conkers, sheened by their owners like a schoolboy with his cherished, oven-hardened seventy-sevener, so full, so fleshy, so bottomy, even when at rest: that is the essence of the horse.
Prizes are awarded on racecourses to the stable lads who devise the most elaborate chequer pattern in the coat of the horses’ bottoms – called ‘quarters’ in this context – and that, I think, is some recognition of the importance of the bottom to the whole being of the horse. But it is when they set off on their first trot of the morning that the horse bottom comes into its own. This is the rhythmic, stomach-easing, first stretching out after the gases have been accumulating all night and it is then that the massive bums, the most buttocky buttocks in the animal world, like a chorus of podgy ballerinas performing to a loving audience in front of them, breathe a series of little synchronized farty kisses into the morning air. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, fart, fart, fart: it’s the flagship gesture of the horse’s existence. And the farts, of course, are only the preliminary to another synchronized movement, the flopping out of those steaming piles of Loden-green dung, flop flop, flop, one after another. How the horse manages to make them look as if they have been created by some kind of internal ice-cream scoop, I have no idea. It is one of the miracles of nature.
Riders, I think, know this instinctively about the horse and the bottom. It is why, in their manner, they attempt somehow to compensate for the inherent absurdity of their position. The sillier the bum, the more serious the person on top of it. The pretence doesn’t work. To anyone not on a horse, anyone on a horse looks stupid. And the more they try to look dignified, modelling themselves on the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius that used to stand in the Campidoglio or whatever it might be, the more you see some idiot looking like the cherry on a Bakewell tart. And if the horse then goes into its early morning intestinal exercises, the effect is worse.
This, I think, may have been at the heart of the difficulties that hunting was going through in those years leading up to the ban in 2004. It is nearly impossible to take someone who is up on a horse seriously, and if you can’t take them seriously you can’t really accept the idea that they should be horrible to foxes, even when foxes have been as horrible to your ducks and chickens as they had to ours.
That January, the fox had already nabbed a couple of ducks and a day or two later had got at the chickens. In the morning we had eleven, poking around the mist-sodden winter fields and looking happier than they had for a long time. Freedom suited them, to a degree anyway. By the afternoon, I could only see seven. Quite often in the cold, they used to go into the barn and shuffle about in the mad Burmese jungle-fowl style their genes instruct them to adopt, flicking at the hay and pretending they are deep in the tropical rainforest. I did find two in there but two were still missing.
Up in Jim’s Field, our best and biggest hayfield, I found the other two dead in the grass. Dave Fieldwick’s sheep, with his hideous, expensive, Tyson-lookalike Texel rams, were ignoring the two dead animals in their midst. I don’t know if a fox had done it. Perhaps a dog had taken and dropped the chickens here. The grass had been pulled at and tufted by the sheep so that it had the look of hair first thing in the morning, a chaotically mussed pelt. Only spring would restore a sleekness to it.
On the grass, whose colour was now halfway between green and tawny, the two dead chickens lay, 10 yards apart. One was whole. I couldn’t see a mark on it. The other had a big deep gash down its chest, a cut that laid back the flesh in the way that a butcher’s knife scoops the raw chicken breast back from the raw chicken bone. Chest or breast? The sight in front of me hovered between the two. It was shocking somehow, and I was surprised to be shocked, that the actual cut body of the dead chicken looked like ‘chicken’, the stuff you see in the supermarket chill cabinets, sitting in its polythene tent on its expanded polystyrene tray, its leaking juices being mopped up by its pinkish poly-something nappy. Of course I knew ‘chicken’ came from chicken, but I had never had the fact pushed in my face before. I eat ‘chicken’ all the time, but the idea of eating these recently murdered things seemed, in a way I can’t quite fathom, impossible.
I picked the bodies up by their smooth and scaly legs, that part of a bird that makes its reptile relatives seem so near to hand, and flung them into the edges of the wood, up over the fringing hawthorns and into the oak and hazel scrub beyond. Let the foxes feed, I said to the corpses arcing outward through the air, and turned for home. The bodies thumped to earth behind me. Their sisters were fluffing up their feathers into powder-puffs against the cold, those little legs sticking out below them like the wire stands on which shoes are sometimes displayed in high-class Bond Street shops. For the first time, I felt sorry for the chickens, victim-creatures, the huddled mothers of children they would never see, not really at home here, their genes pining for the jungle where they belong. Perhaps, I thought, I should take our chickens to some stretch of Javanese wilderness and release them there.
Despite that experience, I had no animus against the fox – of course I preferred foxes to chickens – and no love for the hunt. A week or two later, we had our first slight problem with them. They met just a mile away, next to the nineteeth-century obelisk known as Brightling Needle. It was a cold morning with mist in the valleys and everything was as it should be. Bottoms emerged from boxes, superbly bottomly, farting as they descended the ramps. Men in tweed jackets smoked Benson and Hedges at 7.30 in the morning – a hard drag followed by the classic Terry Thomas teeth-clench – and square-jawed women appeared in bowler hats. These ladies’ heads were perfectly symmetrical about the bowler-hat brim, a living version of those drawings by Rex Whistler which look exactly the same if you turn them upside down.
The traditional two policemen were there in two police cars. Parked on the side of the road was the traditional ageing, navy-blue Austin Maestro, slig
htly rusting on the sills, containing the traditional three antis, one with the traditional part-orange, part-bleached hair, one with the traditional row of earrings up the rim of his ear and one with a slightly innovative Barbour and tweed cap. I crouched down next to the fugged-up driver’s window. It was a sign of the maturity of social life in East Sussex that the man with earrings said that the antis had ‘a very good relationship with the hunt’ and that things had gone ‘very well so far this season’. It sounded positively parliamentary.
One of the policemen took down the number of the car and the occupants sat inside, smiling at him. The riders, some of whom I knew anyway to be nice, generous, open, subtle and supple people, looked stiff and stupid on their horses. Has anyone in the saddle ever managed to address anyone on the ground without exuding the whole ‘my good man’ aura that irritates and alienates so much?
I went home when the field plop-plopped off down the lane, with the hounds effortlessly elegant and dignified in front of them. Mid-morning we had the problem. There was a man on a horse standing next to the farm gate. I stood there looking up at him on his shiny bum and I felt like Wat Tyler at the gates of London with the men of Kent at my back. ‘I am so sorry,’ he said, that ‘so’ quivering with three more syllables in it than usual. ‘We’ve had a great time and some of us seem to have got so overexcited that they just didn’t see the electric fencing you’ve got up for the sheep and I’m afraid they smashed straight through it. I’m so sorry. We’ve put it all back together and it’s fine now, and the sheep of course they’re fine, but God how stupid can you be?’
Smell of Summer Grass Page 9