In part I felt, secretly, without saying so, that I was being unreasonable. Why not allow these people to make their own runway across your land? But in another way I felt, symbolically, that over this I had to dig my toes in. What else were we here for but to nurture precisely the wrinkliness in the landscape which that lane represented?
The poetry is in the particularity, and the particularities of particular places are not single elements dropped on a desert floor, but webbed, interfolded with each other, making a multidimensional grid over the extent of place and the depth of time. Anything with clarity will be clumsy in the face of that and, when dealing with webs, clumsiness is the one thing that has to be avoided.
But we could come to no agreement. The untended lane remained there for months on end, rutty, their cars lurching down it, the fifty yards or so of tarmac at one end pristine, the rest in decay.
The situation was made worse by another problem. Our water system was arranged so that I had to pay Shirley’s water bill and she would reimburse me for it. This became entangled with the lane issue. She refused to pay her share of the bill. We threatened to take her to court. Only months later did we discover that there was a leak in the pipe between her meter and her house. She had never seen the bulk of the water the meter said she was using. These were the ingredients of a bitter relationship between us. We passed each other in our cars on the way to and from the village: stiff smiles or bleak indifference through the wind-screens. Occasional curt phone calls. I started to exclude her presence from my own picture of the place.
It was not as though the rest of Perch Hill was in a very good state that winter. Sarah and I, as people do in these situations, had embarked on radical reconstruction of house and garden. As if deep in analysis, things at the farm were still on the downward slide. We were still deconstructing its personality, aiming steadily for the black chaotic pit from which, and only from which, the rebuilding could begin. If there were mental hospitals for landscapes, Perch Hill would have been sectioned that February. Poor, broken, misused, fragile thing.
When people, usually of the older generation, came to lunch here on a Sunday there was always a moment of awkwardness, a rather uncomfortable hiatus in the social flow, when they would usually have said how beautiful the house/garden/surroundings were, how exquisitely lucky/clever we were to have found such a perfect hideaway and how on earth did we ever stumble on it in the first place?
I started getting used to the approach of this pre-lunch crisis and could see our guests silently struggling with the problem. I pushed peanuts and cheese straws at them but it wouldn’t go away. What possible compliment could they make when half of one of the kitchen walls was missing, awaiting a replacement fireplace and held up by a rusty old acro prop? When the terrace outside the kitchen was a mixture of a trench dug by mistake for a wall we would never build, incipient weeds and a zigzag brick pattern which looked nice from an upstairs window but twisted your ankle if you walked on it? When, on the other side of the building, the groundworks for a new septic tank and reed-bed sewage system – very green, very Highgrove – had made what used to be a perfectly acceptable lawn into a mud stew. My sons described it as sad. (‘What does sad mean, William?’ ‘Sad is a punky word for stupid.’) When what was laughably called the scullery was a muddy mixture of plastic tree guards, sheep’s veterinary equipment, unmended hoovers and put-it-there-for-the-moment junk?
What could they say? ‘I see you’ve taken quite a bit on,’ was the usual version. ‘How long have you been here?’ was another, a little more sly – or perhaps shy. Only the brave could admit that ‘Every time I come to this house it seems to get less built.’ And only they were right.
But Sarah and I had something in mind. If we were thinking of becoming high-profile management gurus, we would have called it ‘The Knowledge’. The Knowledge was what kept us going through the mud, like the differential lock on a Land Rover. The Knowledge was what, with time, and the drip drip of in-dripping finances, we would make of this place. It would be whole and it would be good. It would have the air of what might be called inherent coherence.
Inherent coherence: it is something you recognize every time you come across it by chance, driving down a lane or turning a corner to a small group of buildings and trees, or often in an unmetalled track, where a sense of well-made purpose suffuses the little patch of landscape. These are places where the essentials are what give them character, where the meaning or the style of the place is not pasted on from the outside but emerges from within, where there is no sense of hypocrisy, no lying, smiling front to a cold and cynical core.
It would be good. It would have to be good. One week, later that winter, I saw a picture of what Perch Hill might one day become. I was in the University Library in Cambridge. Falling asleep over what I was meant to be reading, I decided to see if Perch Hill Farm featured in that building’s vast subconscious depths. There was nothing in the computer catalogue, but that was probably too much to expect, so I went to the Map Room. Here on giant green tables a serious man, writing the history of Bechuanaland in the late 1890s, was poring over garish maps of mineral deposits and catchment areas; a woman in an Inca-style cardigan was analysing the tide streams in Scapa Flow. I asked for Perch Hill Farm. ‘Certainly,’ the map librarian said. ‘Just fill in the form.’ She disappeared for a minute or two while I kicked my heels and she returned with one heavily and precisely folded piece of paper.
She left me to it and carefully I unfolded the sheet. It was large, perhaps 3 feet by 2, and had a clean and precise air to it, as if freshly laundered. There was even the smell, in its inner sections, of newness and ink. But it was far from new. This map was part of the great twenty-five inches to the mile series made in the second half of the nineteeth century. This particular sheet was produced in 1898. I don’t think anyone had looked at it since it was made.
At my own giant green table, I pored over the map of home. The farm just about filled the sheet. The other people may have been thinking about, or analysing, or drawing conclusions from the maps in front of them. I was not. I was in bed with my map, loving every inch of it, drinking it up, reading the reality of hedge-bend, gateway, wood-corner and stream-turn, surveyed so exactly, drawn so carefully, displayed so perfectly in front of me. This map series, which marks individual trees in hedges and names every field, which, if laid out for the whole country, would stretch 200 yards from the Lizard to the Cheviots, scarcely less from Southwold to St David’s, is probably the greatest map ever made.
I looked at my sheet, one tessera of a stadium-size mosaic, and in it saw the state of perfection, described in a fortnight’s work in the spring of 1898: the hop garden in Hollow Flemings, no longer there; the small wood that cut in two the big field known as Great Flemings, no longer there; the three hedges that made small compartments of the other big hay meadow, the Way Field, none of them now there; the little wood dividing Target from Cottage Field, marked now only by a bank and a single oak; the orchard in the Cottage Field, of which one fruitless plum tree remains.
Here, in the Map Room, surrounded by the nearly audible sound of the collective Cambridge brain ticking, I saw something else: our farm in its rich, divided wholeness, the picture a century ago, the agenda for the next 40 years. A wide destructive gash lay between me and the moment the map had been made. The small-scale agriculture of the Weald, dominated by 90–100-acre mixed farms cut out of the wood, was still more or less intact in the 1890s. It was not a world any longer of self-sufficient yeomanry. That had long gone. And the presence on nearly every farm of the hop garden and the oast-house in which the hops were dried was a sign that the tendrils of the London market, and its thirst for beer, had already reached deep into this stretch of country via the railways. There were already London commuters in late Victorian Sussex. Just down the road was the first battery chicken farm in this part of the world. This was no prelapsarian paradise. But the shape of the farm then, with its closely divided fields, its well-maintained cop
pices, its imposition of order but application of care, were all signs that like other poorish Wealden farms this one would only sustain a family if maintained like a properly screw-tightened, lubricated engine.
Much of that had gone in the intervening years. Hedges were taken out, fields enlarged, woods abandoned, grassland re-sown and dosed with weedkiller and nitrogen from a bag, big old oak trees felled to make way for bigger sheds and barns with railway sleeper walls and asbestos roofs so that a larger herd could be kept here, more money made and the land driven down essentially unsustainable paths. The very market-based thinking that was doing this to Perch Hill would mean in the end that commercial farming here could not survive. In the 1940s a hideous new cow shed was made out of the cheapest and nastiest of bricks (from Bedfordshire); a bull pen was constructed out of crudely poured concrete. In the drive for productivity, almost any sense of here was nearly abandoned in the 20th century. It survived only in those remote corners where the spirit of enterprise couldn’t quite reach. It is a strange fact that Perch Hill Farm, like England or Europe, had its core and its periphery, its busy, transforming centre and its outlying limbs where a longer, calmer rhythm continued to be at work. Those remoter parts of the farm became the reservoir of the past, and even of value, from which we could draw for the future. That was why this map was so beautiful to me. It showed Perch Hill before any of the destructions occurred. It was a picture of the place as I hoped it would one day become. Here it was as it might yet be.
I rushed home. I shrugged on this place like an old duffle-coat: an arm in each sleeve, a quick flick of the shoulders and the thing thudded on, into place, as if it had been hanging on the coat-hook pre-formed. I rolled outside, coat on, boots on, hands in pockets against the finger-nipping wind. The ducks were beside the old cow shed on the pond, whose level had risen higher than at any time since we’d been here. They remained fearful, but that was as it should be, their own fox-proofing. The chickens ignored me, another sign of health, busy in the hay beside the barn door.
But all this was part of our still-to-be-sorted farmyard. What I wanted was the fields, the eiderdown expanse of the bed of home. I could feel myself wriggling down into it as I entered the first of them, the yellow-green of the sheep-nibbled grass as welcoming as any nursery ever could have been. Was this what the fox felt when he entered his earth, that surrounding of yourself with a place that seems to be an extension of yourself, so that there is no sharp transition at the skin?
As I went down through the fields, looking at the beautiful reduced colours of the winter wood – the blackberry purple of the hazel fronds when seen against the sky, the yellowness of the willow in bud, the chocolate blackness of the dead bracken where it lay sodden and rotting at the field margins, the grey-eyed green of the lichen spots on the birch trunks, curling up at the edges into a sort of lettucey thickness – I could sense this whole farm webbed with the different overlying territories of the creatures that inhabit it.
It took going away to notice this, to look beyond the details of daily business. The multiple, interlocking mesh of this place became apparent. I realized that my own sensation of rooted, inner belonging could only be akin to the territorial sense of the foxes, the badgers, the deer, the wrens, the robins, the kestrels, the pheasants, even the bees or wasps or those chalky blue butterflies that had flickered above the surface of the summer grasses on the limy lower ground of the Slip Field, whose descendants must now be holed up somewhere near by, waiting for the warmth to return.
There is so much said and written about biological community, but never before had I felt myself to be part of one. Nor had I recognized that what I had always thought of as a higher human faculty, this identification of self with place, was nothing more than an animal faculty for location, a means of placing oneself with precision and care in the landscape, an essential adaptive tool for survival. I couldn’t actually see the other animals doing it, but I knew they were there. I sometimes caught a badger in the headlights on the lane, so much fatter and piggier than you might expect, trotting up into the brackeny laneside banks. We buried a large vixen that was lying dead and fresh on the side of the road just before Christmas, the wind ruffling up the white hairs on her throat as she lay on the grass while I dug the hole. The deer would melt in and out of the wood in the first hours of daylight.
Seen only by chance, these animals were a constant presence. I felt no strangeness from them. They left their marks. On a dewy morning, the fields were criss-crossed with their tracks, where their bellies had dragged through the wet grass. Where the deer jumped the fences, the earth was punched away. In the Way Shaw, down on the edge of our land where the ground falls sharply towards the river, the deer had pushed out nests for themselves among the birches and bracken of the heathy woodland. The owl that sat in the giant beech at the corner of the shaw I had often looked for and often heard but never seen. It was as moulded to the place as cheese melted into the crust of a pie. But I now think, perhaps, that to want to see it, to get a visual grab on it, would only be trophy-hunting. The truer knowledge of it is to hear its unseen presence in the trees. You don’t have to open up someone’s chest to know they have a heart.
My walk around the fields slowed down. I had started off briskly enough, seeing that this gate was working properly now, that stile needed replacing, checking the sheep were all right, noticing that one was limping, but as the walk went on, the progress was tripped up by the details. A woodcock suddenly flipped up and twisted away in front of me a shadow-bird, part of the wood-floor on the wing. I noticed an oak tree still covered in its brown autumn leaves, a blackthorn still laden with sloes that were burst and crusted as though cooked under a slow grill, the way the red hawthorn berries, seen against the blue blackness of the woodland, merged the two colours so that the landscape itself turned purple. Slower and slower, I noticed the ear-like fungi growing out of the elder trunks quivering in the breeze like blown flesh, the spindle berries the colour of a liquorice allsort, just going over, a wren, incredibly, not hopping but flying through the branches of a hawthorn hedge. Perhaps the slowing down was this: the reassertion in me of animal life, the reading of familiar signals, triangulating the map of the known.
I realized that something of the secret here consisted of burrowing in; and that the unsatisfactoriness of modern life was based on a wrong geometry. We tend to graze, browse, pause and surf, glancing not staring, acquiring the bought article with a card or some numbers typed on to a screen. There is no digging in any of that, no sweat, no engaging with the understorey, the lower strata on which all the bright desirables must rely. The one thing that people in this sliding, gliding, acquiring life all hunger after is depth, the going in, the plunge. Perch Hill for me was exactly that kind of going in, a sounding-bell in which I could feel life not as a thin, two-dimensional grid but as an encompassing universe. Depth and thickness were at the heart of it.
Above all, I poked around our streams, but to call them that is to flatter them. One drops westwards from the house and one east. They are trickly, weedy things, dry all summer, with a proper gush only after heavy rain. You could never have a boat-race with sticks on them. But then, saying that, I’m aware only of disloyalty. They are, in their tiny way, beautiful things. The slight winter flows make small waterfalls where the stream exposes a bed of the underlying stone, followed by small pebbly pools no more than 18 inches or 2 feet across. Hart’s-tongue ferns fringe these places. Come the spring, one stream will be bedded in garlic, the other in bluebells. Both of them are deep in trees, one in the edge of the wood, Dallington Forest, which stretches westwards without a break for 3 miles from here, the other in its own little strip of trees, somewhere between a massively overgrown hedge and a sliver of wood.
There was a hidden aspect to these streams which only stole up on me very slowly. We had been here for months before I realized. They seemed in themselves such inconsiderable things, transitory, unimportant parts of a landscape dominated by field and tree. But as
I realized late that winter, they were, to use the phrase of a French historian, Alfred du Cayla, describing the streams and rivers in the landscape, ‘les lignes maîtresses du terroir’, the mistress lines of the territory. I love that phrase. Our little streams embody it. They are a governing presence. Whenever it was that the boundary between the parishes of Brightling and Burwash was drawn here, certainly before the Norman Conquest, perhaps centuries before that because the first written reference to Brightling was made in ad 732, they used these two streams as their line, climing up their beds from the valley to the high ground where the farmhouse now is and then down the other side dropping steeply to the river, three hundred feet below us.
The hedges that run along them, as you would hope for from a parish boundary, are enormously rich in tree species, 12 of them: crab apple, spindle, hawthorn, hazel, blackthorn, oak, ash, field maple, rose, alder, willow and elder all grow there. There is a widely accepted but slightly unreliable rule that for every woody species you can find in a hedge, you can add a century to its age. The large amount of surrounding wood probably boosts the number of species in all hedges here. Nevertheless, if the rule is at least some indication, then those hedges, that acknowledgement of the tiny stream as a mark in the landscape, are at least a thousand years old, maybe more. The hedge date would just about match the date of the first written record.
The history hunger built inside me. Nothing of any detail could be rescued from the Dark Ages, but later, when this farm was cut from the wood, there should be something there. What was it like, when this place first emerged as a place and what, above all, was the man like who first made it? I looked for hints of what he did, the marks he left, sifting through them in the landscape in a strangely possessive and jealous way. I wanted to know it all, in detail. It felt at times like digging through the waste-paper baskets for someone’s leavings, their inadvertent signs, the give-away gestures.
Smell of Summer Grass Page 11