Poor man. He was trying as hard as he could, but there was a structural problem here. It was toff up/peasant down, a spatial metaphor of everything you most resent. It was a medieval moment. Endless hours spent reading about bastard feudalism and town charters could teach you less about the Middle Ages than this simple confrontation. The horse creates an appetite for democracy and whatever the facts, the feel of hunting on horses is not democratic. Few people have felt the same sort of loathing for fishing or shooting – those crucially horseless versions of rural killing. The horse is to blame for the condition in which hunting finds itself. Everyone hates being talked down to.
One day soon afterwards I was summoned to London for lunch with a man who wanted to convince me that hunting was not what I imagined it to be at all. Rules, the delicious restaurant in Covent Garden which is usually full of fat red men in suits drinking claret, makes something of a cult out of eating wild animals. A little brochure sits on each of the tables to tell you why this is a good idea. Its basic sermon is this: wild animals are good for you because they spend most of their lives in the gym, migrating here and there, running this way and that, lean, not fatty like your lazy old farm slobs. Wild animals are more admirable than that, always on the go, never taking time for a proper lunch, lean achievers, career creatures who make Elle Macpherson look like a pig that has junked out on pork scratchings.
‘Wild salmon will have swum the Atlantic,’ it says exhaustingly, ‘and so will have firm muscles, less fat and a varied natural diet.’ No spare tyre on a wild salmon. All nature is a workout, with the best possible organic niblets as the reward. Wild duck are ‘truly free-range birds’, sea trout eat only the finest pink shrimps, grouse taste of heather and snipe of bog or, as this brochure put it, ‘sweetly rotting wild mushrooms’.
These animals are what they eat, you are what you eat too and so if you eat them, in a sort of apostolic succession, you will become an elk. Magic. There is no need to think of anything as disruptive as actually taking any exercise yourself. You can stay in Rules, you can go red in the face, you can tuck into a capercaillie on fried bread, larded with strips of woodcock freshly braised in goose fat, and you will still be as slinky as a well-hung fox. It’s a religious event, like communion: eat me, I am your lunch.
I did, and it was delicious too: potted shrimps, a tiny little teal with excellent muscle tone, scarcely cooked, oozing blood as though it were gravy, and half a bottle of claret. The other half, the other teal and the other shrimps were eaten by Robin Hanbury-Tenison, who was paying. He was Chief Executive of the British Field Sports Society. They could not have had a more charming advocate and we ranged happily all over the environment, society, ethics and politics as though we were old friends. It is a curious fact that animal killers are usually nice and Mr Hanbury-Tenison was obviously one of those people who have a certain ease because they are able to countenance hunting and killing. Always trust a huntsman.
We talked about cruelty. Didn’t he mind the suffering of the fox as it was chased? Wasn’t that unkind? There were two things about that, he said. A fox, or a hare come to that, either escaped a hunt or was killed. A hunt never wounded an animal which then crept away to die in pain. In that sense hunting was quite different from, and better than, shooting. Any number of hunts, particularly harrier packs, pick up animals that have been wounded with guns.
Yes, but what about the chase itself? It is the drawn-out threat of death that many people find most difficult to stomach. That, he said, swig of claret, lovely smile, is the second thing, and where they are wrong. He then told a story about a rat in a cage with a snake. His brother kept a snake in the Caribbean. It needed its daily live rat and every morning this is what happened. The snake is lying curled in the corner of the cage. He twirls his hand beside the bread rolls to demonstrate the curled snake. The rat is popped in at the other end of the cage. Other hand pops in and sits neatly next to the bottle of wine. The snake then thinks, ‘Ah, breakfast.’ Snake hand slithers along the table. Rat thinks, ‘Here I am in a cage with a snake. No problem. I can deal with this in a hop and a skip.’ Rat hand hops and skips over the table, easily and delightfully escaping the open mouth of the snake hand arching towards it in its gyrations.
The rat is not, as we might imagine it would be, because we ourselves might be, in terrified paralysis in the corner waiting for death to come. Not at all. This situation is only a slightly heightened version of everyday life for the rat. The rat is always in ‘dynamic tension’ with its environment. It is always thinking either ‘Oh heavens, that’s going to kill me’ or ‘Oh good, I think I can kill that.’ That is the substance of rat life and its busy little brightness is a product of it.
So the snake stays slithering and the rat keeps hopping while this explanation of its psychology is made. Rat is happy; snake is hungry. Then, suddenly, the snake hand, somehow fused at this point with the hugely open-eyed face of Mr HanburyTenison the other side of a table which I hadn’t realized was quite this small until now, rises up in a surge of hunter-gatherer energy and – glup – swallows the rat whole.
A quivering little pause as the disaster sinks in. ‘That’, he said, his hands human again now and back on the knife and fork, cutting another slice from the breast of teal, ‘is exactly what it is like for the fox.’ Such was the realism of the enactment, and the passionate conviction of the mise-en-scène, that anything I might have said in response became immediately redundant. Hunting was nothing to do with red-faced men on big-bottomed horses farting their way across the English countryside. It was the far more charming sight of Robin Hanbury-Tenison’s left hand suddenly swallowing his right hand whole, the laws of nature in action.
Back home, away from the sluicing of claret and teal-blood, I retreated, as ever, into the privacy of a quiet and secret relationship with the place. I shrugged my Kipling coat on. I was coming to know this valley in the way a man knows the feel of his own palms, blindfold, easily, without drama. I trespassed everywhere, ignoring paths, climbing every fence, pushing across hedges, finding the ways through that the deer had made. There’s nothing like trespass. I’ve done it all my life, invariably alone and most excitingly at night. I’ve climbed into the garden of a great house in the early hours of the morning, sidling past the Renaissance pavilions, brushing past borders where the moonlight has turned the dahlias blood-purple and the lawns into Caribbean-coloured ponds. I have climbed the outside walls of a castle further south in Sussex, late one evening, thinking it an empty ruin and only found, as I topped the parapet, hauling myself over the lichened stones, that they held inside them a beautiful, tile-hung farmhouse, with a rose garden wrapped around it. The Iceberg roses, filling the bailey with their huge white flowers, were unreal in the moonlight at the farthest, darkest corners, and apricot and peachy where the light from the windows fell on them. No daylight garden, no allowed-in garden, could have matched it.
Trespass is an aesthetic experience, exciting, addictive even, because it is the most revealing way of being in a place that I know. It makes you slight, careful and attentive. You cannot stroll as a trespasser; it is not a breezing-about, hands-in-pockets way of being in a place. Trespass strips comfort from the mind.
I have never poached other people’s game but I imagine poaching as an even tighter sharpening of the senses, screwing you into the details of the moment and the place, restoring an alertness and exposure to your presence in the landscape which centuries of pastoral urbanity – the smooth attitude to general rural effects – has clogged and obscured. To feel the immediate pulse of things, to be forced to shove yourself into a hedge when a stranger comes around the corner, the spikes of the hawthorn dug into your shoulder, the leaves against the face – that is what trespass is good for, the tangibility of the trespassed-on world.
Needless to say, being caught and ejected is horrible enough. I have had a Welsh farmer standing in front of me, arms crossed, resting his weight on the back foot in the way that Michelangelo’s David does, his grey pork
-pie hat tipped up off the brow, his cardigan waistcoat pouched around the stomach, while his three, circling, agile, grey-eyed dogs roared and screamed at me as I tried to make my way back off his private land on to a public path. Whenever I think of the word ‘property’, that is the picture that comes to mind.
The night-time wanderings here came to grip my imagination. Now and again, as it turned midnight and everyone else was going to bed, I would drink a glass of whisky, pull on a coat and go out of the back door. A moonlit night, the light so bright that it looked like a cold blue day. The sheep were coughing in the barn, kicking out their innards, hack, hack, hack, as if they’d smoked forty cigarettes since breakfast. It was dust in the hay that did it.
I set off into the fields. The open back of the hillside was washed in blue light. The further corners of the fields, where they dropped towards the creases of the streams, were bathed in deep blue-black shadow. It was the place I knew, transformed in the way that a fall of snow can rearrange the geography. But here it was time, rather than space, that seemed oddly altered. The moonlight created what looked like a form of summer. Its light cast the same sort of shadowy patches under the trees that you get in the summer sunshine. The moon was at the same height and at the same place in the sky as the sun had been during our lunchtime picnics in June. The pattern of light was the same; only the colour had changed. It was a strange and ghostly re-enactment.
And these winter nights it wasn’t warmth and chatter but cold and quiet. A car on the Burwash road spread ripples of engine noise through the night. You could hear its gears changing as it came out down the long straight towards Burwash Weald and then moaned its way on up the hill towards Broad Oak and beyond. The silence pooled back in behind it, leaving only the sound of my walking, my breathing, the crunching of my feet on the frost.
Sometimes, and I don’t know why, I began to feel frightened. Once, I thought I saw the shadow of two deer grazing in the Slip Field and I went down to get a closer look but they turned out to be nothing but clumps of rushes, masquerading in this single-tone light, this bleached ultra-violet black-and-white, blue-and-white light, as animals poised over the grasses. There was a slight creeping at the back of the neck, a crawling alertness in those vestigial hackles, raised by an ancient fear.
The frost made a crust on the grass under my feet, frozen on the surface and soft underneath. Where the moon reflected off it, the ice made pinpricks of light as sharp as stars in the grey-blue grass. The whole field was the colour of eyes but spangled with these lights. I didn’t want to go into the wood. If I hadn’t wanted to find out what it was like in the wood in the middle of the night, I wouldn’t have gone in. I looked in at the deep black shadows in there and thought, no, I won’t. But that was giving up too easily. I had to know what it was like and I went in. I hated it. The inside of a wood at night is a darkened, complex, crabby place, full of the flick and twist of shadow, a place of misinterpretation, of reading the neutral and the innocent as strange and threatening. All those trees look so human. They look too like living things for comfort, they surround you and they outnumber you. There is a sense that they are all at the back of you, those outstretched arms, those leaning limbs, that overarching command of the place they have. That is the sort of idea which, once it has made a bridgehead in your mind, won’t be dislodged. The fear moves in and colonizes you. Even as it was happening, I could not believe it was happening. Never would I have believed that these woods, our woods, could have scared me, but they did. What is it, this deep, black fear of an uncontrollable landscape? Modern neurosis or ancient genetic memory? Is it basic or is it acquired, something essential to our own natures or a symptom of distance from the natural world?
I wanted to be out the far side of it and I ran crouched through the moon-shadows, through the snatching brambles, snapping the twiggy elder branches as I passed, until I was out again in the wide, grassy, controllable ease of our far big field called Great Flemings. Panic at shadows? Surely I should be beyond that now? After-twinges gripped the back of my neck and a dog yapped somewhere down at the bottom of King’s Hill, a mile away, a persistent, repetitive, dreadful barking as I caught my breath.
I sat down in the field and looked out at the farms on the far side of the valley. I knew from the hedge shapes, the dark lines of the hedgerows laid across the grey of the fields, where the farmhouses should have been, but they had merged into the dark. There were no lights on over there. A long way over to the west a jet was making its way into Gatwick and there was a sprinkling of lights further north, fewer lights on the earth than stars in the sky. It seemed as if everything local had dissolved away, leaving nothing but the dark and the calling of ewe to ewe, from points up and down the valley.
And then into that, the wholeness of that, tore the one sound in the English night which slashes bigger holes than any other: a fox, the scream-howling of the fox in the wood, a noise gash in the rest of it: yeaow, yeaow, yeaow, a ripping of cloth with claws, yeaow, yeaow, yeaow, as screamingly basic a sound as England makes.
Neighbours with the Dead
THERE IS a small lane that runs over our land. It is, as I see it anyway, a beautiful place, with a hard stony surface where the wheels go and a grass strip between them, hedges 8 feet high on either side which, at the far end, lean over to meet at the top, so that in summer it is a green and sun-splashed tunnel, full of broken shadow and leopard-skin light. Some 200 yards after it has left the road, it finally curls round a little into the wood like the warping of a plank that has been left out in the rain.
I love this lane, for the roses and honeysuckle that hedge it in early summer, for its privacy, its following of an old line off our hill through the wood and on down to the valley at Bateman’s. If I were designing a landscape, it would be full of tracks like this that can’t be seen from the outside, trenched inside their own hedges, eventually curving away into apparent nothings. Landscape beauty, you might even say, consists of slight disappearances like this, not abrupt corners or sudden conclusions but turnings in as subtle as the spin on a ping-pong ball as it crosses the net. That slow, slight curve appears again and again in descriptions of landscape that are intended to catch the moment of perfection. In Philip Larkin’s poem ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, he describes a train journey from Hull to London, and the air of warm, early summer completeness in it is set up by that one resonant word: ‘A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept’.
There is a taut balance in a shallow curve which other shapes could never match. When Ben Nicholson was persuaded to discuss his own painting, he would do so, if at all, not in terms of the influences on him or the meaning of what he was doing, but of spin and dancing, the perfect execution of a turning step, the alert, controlled, coherent energy of it. Or there is Edward Thomas dedicating his book The Icknield Way to his friend Harry Hooton, saying that as far as walking is concerned, or even being, if it comes to that, ‘the end is in the means – in the sight of that beautiful long straight line of the Downs in which a curve is latent …’
From the beginning I loved our lane because it was an unconsciously beautiful thing, in its shape and in the materials of which it was made. But there was a problem. The lane belonged to us but was the only means of access to another house. We owned the lane but we hardly used it. Dave Fieldwick, who had his sheep on some of our fields that winter – I was charging him 30p a week a ewe for the winter grass – used the lane once a day to check if they were all right. Otherwise the only users were our neighbour, Shirley Ellman, the postman delivering her mail, the electricity man reading her meter, her friends coming for a dinner party or her children on a visit at the weekend, and so on.
Things became tense between us. The potholes grew steadily worse. One particularly big one filled up with water and the children and I spent a happy afternoon trying to sail plank-and-hankie boats across it but it wasn’t quite deep enough and they kept grounding. This Perch Hill Round Pond was not seen as an amenity by Shirley and she decided to do somethin
g about it. The first thing I knew, going for a walk one afternoon, was the sight of a large yellow lorry, two men and a rolling machine laying out shiny new tarmac on the surface of the lane. By the time I got there, they had covered 50 yards of the lane with the smart new blackstuff. ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no,’ I shouted.
The tarmac looked – was – horrible, a suburban slick, removing meaning from the place it coated, making the lane banal and ugly, no longer a place but a passageway. I had rather surprised myself by the intensity of my reaction. Could such things really matter so much?
The following evening I had a very civilized meeting with Shirley. I explained it was my lane and she shouldn’t do things like that to something that wasn’t hers. She said the ruts were atrocious and the suspensions of their various cars were suffering and that’s why they had put the tarmac on. I said the tarmac destroyed the meaning of the place. She said what on earth did I mean. I did not mention Philip Larkin, Ben Nicholson, Edward Thomas or ‘straight lines in which a curve is latent’ but I did use the word ‘suburbanization’. She said she thought she was improving the lane and that I as the landlord should be grateful. I said I wasn’t grateful to have what I owned altered by someone else without even so much as a by-your-leave, and that some people in my position would have had the tarmac dug up and the bill sent to her. Surely, I then said, calming, calming, we could come to some mutually satisfactory arrangement? She agreed, surely we could, but what was I proposing? I proposed that we should pay for the upkeep of the lane in proportion to the amount we used it, which we should work out, that I would get a quote from someone to bring it up to a beautiful, untarmacky, usable condition and we should go from there. She thought that sounded OK and that was how we left it.
It could only be an interim position. There were two irreconcilables in conflict here. I wanted the lane to look and be rural, of the place, not alien to it. My neighbours wanted it to be usable, reliable and undestructive of their cars. I wanted a stone track, which would inevitably be eroded by the sort of traffic a modern household generates; they wanted a tarmac drive, which would not. What could be done?
Smell of Summer Grass Page 10