In a cartoon version of these things, Boots, as he asked me to call him, would be a gnarled old oak-bole of a man, solitary as hedgers are meant to be, reluctant to make much of a speech out of things, more articulate with his hands than his words. Not Boots, despite the nickname. He is a words man, endlessly weaving talk into the practicalities of what he is doing, about his life as a smallholder and now a teacher at an agricultural college at the other end of Sussex, where he tells students how to drive tractors, use chainsaws, keep bees, grow vines, lay hedges.
He is one version, anyway, of the modern countryside: for many years before joining the college he lived off a 6-acre smallholding (net income £10,000 p.a.) raising calves, growing courgettes for the Brighton wholesale market, producing the parsley whose final destination was alongside the sandwiches prepared at Gatwick Airport for first-class passengers. He used to harvest the parsley with an electric hedge-trimmer.
What a wonderful man! The day I spent with him laying a stretch of one of our hedges here was one of the best I have ever had. It was a frozen, exhausting day in the bitterest of east winds, with two coats on, two thick shirts, two T-shirts, hats down over our ears and Boots talking and talking away about the hedge and the plants and the way to do it and not to do it and the way other people did it and the way to put a point on a stake so that it enters the ground and is not split in the process. Over to the east the distant prospect of the fields towards Rye was a stepped succession of bleached-out greys. Above it, the crows from the wood tossed themselves up in the wind.
The hedge we chose was a length of overgrown blackthorn with a couple of hawthorns in it, full of mess and old grasses in the foot, threaded with the ropy cables of honeysuckle and and a big old briar poking up through the middle. ‘That’ll do,’ Boots said, businesslike, with an air of straightforward competence. The whole day flowed like that. It is a gift that good teachers have, to make the arcane seem obvious, the delicate accessible and the skilled no more than a matter of carefully looking and then carefully doing what you have understood needs to be done. Surely the greatest pleasure in life is the process, simply, of getting to know, the sense that your mind, even the whole of your life, is in a small way at that very moment enlarging, like an amoeba putting out a foot and flowing its whole body into and through that extension of itself. Here now with Boots, on the edge of the little field where we had grown our potatoes the previous summer, I felt myself getting to know how to lay a hedge. It was a ratchet clicking up, a stage which, once passed, could never be abandoned. We chose first some thick-stubbed hazels for the stakes and some thin whippy ones for the binders. There was nothing precious about the way he did it. Chainsaw in, sticks on to the field, sawn to a length, tied in a bundle. ‘I’m not a traditionalist,’ he said. ‘I just want to get the thing done, get the light into the hedge, get it growing again at the bottom, make it a living stockproof barrier. If it’s easier to use modern tools that’s what I’ll do and that’s what I’ll teach you. If it’s done right, it’ll look right. You want to get it looking right. People always have. In the old days, that was nearly all they had. You could look at what you’d done and say, “Yes, that’s well done.” It was a way of preserving your dignity when there wasn’t very much else that was very dignified in a poor man’s life.’
A neglected hedge is a chaos of competing plantlife, a tangle of thorn and deadwood whose energy and focus is at the top end. These are imprisoned trees. Their trunks are stretching out, aiming for the treehood their genes are demanding of them, but leaving the hedge gappy at ground level. A lamb could push between the little trunks and so that genetic destiny is what the hedger has to subvert. A laid hedge is nature slapped back into use.
It is a ruthless business, the precise opposite of the disengaged view that sees a hedged landscape as a comfortable duvet of rural contentment. Laying a hedge is, in vegetable terms, a form of organized savagery. ‘You take two-thirds of the hedge out,’ Boots said, and so we started to do exactly that, him cutting, me pulling the thorny, twisted shapes that emerged from the tangle. What had looked a reasonable and substantial thing in the early morning by lunchtime was thin and hopeless, neat enough but spindly. Then we started to attack what was left, cutting three-quarters of the way through each of the remaining stems. ‘Leave just the bark and a little bit more,’ Boots said, and one by one the blackthorns were folded over, laid low, constrained and contained. We staked them, each stake the distance from elbow to fingertip apart, and bound their tops with the hazel wands so that, in the end, in the Siberian cold of the early evening, what was left was a neat, twiggy basket line of living plants, stockproof, resilient and with a future.
‘You should be able to go on from there,’ Boots said, packing up. ‘I’ll come next year and see how you’ve done.’ So that’s the challenge, deliberately and carefully thrown down: get the work done and do it right. The ancient folds over into a possible future.
Part Three
SETTLING
Spring Births, Felled Oaks
AT THE petrol station in the village one day, just as that long first winter felt, perhaps, that it might be on the verge of turning into spring, I happened to look up at a mirror on the wall. It was a moment of self-revelation. A slightly unshaven man in his late 30s was standing beside the pumps, a rather old young man who, in common with many men of his age, was both a little bald and in need of a haircut. The hair that he had was so dirty that it stood up in peaks like whipped egg whites. He imagined, I suppose, that it looked romantically informal, a little wind-swept, perhaps even Byronic. It didn’t.
He was wearing a pair of Argyll gumboots, which were muddy around the tops. The trousers of a baggy green corduroy suit were tucked into them. He seemed to be holding them up by putting his hands in his pockets. Under the jacket was what looked like a thick blue workman’s shirt. He was putting diesel in a large green Land Rover, which did not, thank goodness, have a bull-bar encrusted with rally-lamps across the radiator but was coated in the splashed mud of which he was obviously proud and had not washed off since he had first bought the thing eight months previously. Pitiable. In the front passenger seat was a nice-looking but rather fat yellow Labrador staring out of the window like a son watching his daddy going off to war.
As a result of the weekly column I had been writing about our life at Perch Hill, a woman from Radio 4’s On Your Farm programme rang up. I was, she told me, ‘part of a general phenomenon’. The words she in fact used were: ‘what sounds like the pantomimic quality of life at Perch Hill’. She claimed that our form of rural self-delusion was something that was happening all over the country, ‘at least in the pretty parts’.
She threatened to come down and interview us here about our style of farming. I tried to put her off. ‘We’re not really farmers at all,’ I told her, knowing that to be the truth. She took it for the most charming sort of false modesty. ‘Oh, come on,’ she said, burbling slightly as only producers can. ‘Why don’t you simply let us come down, have a chat, look around a little and take it from there?’
‘I don’t think there’ll really be enough to talk about for half an hour,’ I said desperately, thinking in fact of the dreadful mess everywhere, the chickens in their slum conditions, the ducks in their state of permanent fox-induced anxiety, the ewe that was hobbling about with a bad foot that we couldn’t clear up, the chaos of most of the woods, the mud, the mud, the mud. Did I want Radio 4 to see all this? No. It would be like an entire crew of inspecting mothers-in-law coming to stay for a week. Her laugh in response was the nearest to an aural tea-cosy that I have ever heard. ‘Oh, really Adam, don’t be silly.’
So she was coming. I felt sick and bogus. Sarah was furious. ‘I’m not cooking them breakfast,’ she said when I gave her the news. ‘But they need breakfast for the background sound effects. It’s got to sound like a farmhouse kitchen at 6.30 in the morning.’ She snorted and left the room. I had the dreadful premonition that when the day came, Sarah would remain sulking in bed whi
le I was interviewed by Oliver Walston, On Your Farms’ resident interviewer. I’d have to hiss and spit during his questions so that it would sound as if the bacon was cooking in the background. It was going to be hell.
I was in a quandary. What was my own view of what we were doing? Part of the time, I knew we were here to recreate a beautiful, traditional landscape, rich with the polycultural detail of orchard, coppice wood, hop garden, pasture and hay meadow that it would have had, say, in the 1870s. And part of the time I realized that was somehow absurd, a meaningless gesture towards a bogus historical accuracy. Why not do what you want to do? Why not make it what you want it to be?
Take, for example, our latest innovation, which had been met with hilarity and disbelief among the neighbouring farmers: sheep bells for the sheep. I found them in a perfectly straightforward agricultural supplies shop in the suburbs of Palma in Majorca, where they form an everyday part of a sheep farmer’s equipment. We got three different sizes for three different notes and could now listen to our small flock as they prepared to lamb at the end of March, their bells rocking gently at the far end of the Target Field. It was beautiful but absurd, Petit Trianon for the 1990s. Carolyn Fieldwick, the shepherd, looked at the sky when I mentioned them. I had yet to tell her that we were also thinking of dyeing the sheep multi-colours so that they would make a broken rainbow across the pastures, pointillist dots on the spread of green. Pretty country, not very 1870s.
There was a paradox I found it difficult to accommodate here. The recreated landscape, the landscape which in some ways seems truest to the place, was in a sense the most bogus of all options, the biggest lie. And the most flippant and superficial of games, the parti-coloured sheep and their bell music from the Mediterranean, were most honestly representative of our own place here now, of our distant, disengaged and in some ways voyeuristic relationship to the land. How honest was I going to be with the people from the radio?
The day came. Oliver Walston, the most famous farmer in England, arrived in his enormous grey Mercedes. The jeans-and-tweed-jacketed, rumbustious, Old Etonian controversialist, who stood with his shoulders back and his chest out like a model of John Bull in a pub, treated Sarah and me gently, even sweetly. It was captivating. His trick was a sort of faux-aggressive manner which allowed him to get away with murder. Where most people say charming things full of buried hate, he said things that should have been hateful but were overflowing with care and attention. Sarah and I both thought him wonderful.
‘What are you?’ he asked me over the radio breakfast. The usual packet of Tesco’s muesli had been hidden out of sight and plates of agricultural plenty lay there between us. ‘A lily-livered, namby-pamby, dilettante aesthete floating about in a violet-tinted world of your own where you want your sheep to be pretty colours and your hedges fluffy? What have I got here, Marie Antoinette?’
‘Yes,’ I said and went off on to a long blague about the beauty of beauty, how this farm’s main crop now was what it looked like, that there was nothing ignoble or contemptible in that, that if this society were not interested in the making or saving of beautiful places, then there was little hope for it. The picture that emerged was of Sarah and me as ignorant amateurs bumbling around 90 acres of the Sussex Weald pontificating about what should and shouldn’t be done to the landscape. In other words, a highly accurate portrayal.
Were we consistently inane? Probably. There was a bad moment when I embarked on a lecture discussing the rights and wrongs of nitrogen applied to grassland and all the virtues of no-input management systems. Did I know about soil structure? No. Did I know about the calorie intake required by a grazing cow? No. The biochemical relationship of clover and rye-grass under conditions of climatic stress? No. Nevertheless, I decided to inform a million Radio 4 listeners about those highly fascinating topics. It was the radio equivalent of an undrained bog.
Walston was like the helmsman of an ocean-going yacht watching someone repeatedly capsizing in a dinghy far below. The more I drowned, the more benign his face became. You had to admire the man. After he had gone, the late winter drear seemed even drearier than before: our moment of exposure and then the privacy folding back in.
‘It’s eight months of winter here,’ Will Clark said to me on a dreadful day that February as we stood staring out of a window together at a garden that looked as if it belonged in the outskirts of Chernobyl. ‘Yep,’ he went on, when he saw from my face that I agreed too much. ‘But it won’t be long before we’re making hay!’ He said it smiling, knowing that neither he nor I believed a word of it.
It was March before the sun shone. When it appeared, I felt like shouting hello at it, slapping it on the back and shoving a large glass of sherry into its hand, saying, ‘Come on, make yourself at home! Where the hell have you been all this time?’ The first days of spring turn one into a brigadier in the East Sussex Yeomanry.
There’s a story I always think of in the springtime that comes from one of the deep beech-lined valleys of the Béarnais Pyrenees. A young farmer lived right in the pit of the valley where, all winter long, the mountains above him cast their shadow. It was a place of mist and frost. One autumn he married his sweetheart from another village in another valley and brought her to his cold and shadowed house. They were poor and they struggled through the winter, seeing almost no one and eating no meat. Then, one March day, as he was pulling on his coat in the morning to go out to work, he told her to kill one of their rabbits and cook it, because a good friend was coming to dinner. She duly killed it and cooked it but was surprised to see him coming home at midday alone. ‘Where is your friend, then?’ she asked rather shortly. He took her by the arm, and showed her the sunlight which at that moment was touching their threshold for the first time since the autumn before.
It is the light that does it, that flood of light, as bleached in reality as the appearance of a midsummer landscape when you’ve been lying asleep with the sun on your closed lids and you open them to an oddly washed-out world, like a photograph that has been sitting too long on a windowsill. Even in its weakness, spring sunshine is so greedily drunk up. Why is that? I can’t quite believe the craving for spring we all feel, so animal an instinct! Nor do I understand how it is that each year the winter seems to grow longer and deeper, the spring more hungered for and, when it comes, richer, more interesting, more of a stimulus, more dominant in the way one feels than it has ever been in your life before. It’s as though, as you approach middle age, you become more seasonal, more wafted to and fro on these annual rhythms, less continuous in your life, more susceptible than ever to the conflicting claims of memory and desire. Can that really be the case?
For weeks we had been hunting about, looking for signs of spring. I found a primrose leaf in February the size of a fingernail but crinkled like a Savoy cabbage still half-underground. The grains of soil had folded the tip a little backwards. The hard emergent dagger leaves of the bluebells were pushing through the leaf-litter as if from individual silos. The cow parsley was already there in low, soft-edged pouffes about the size of a dinner plate at the foot of the hedges. Dog’s mercury was everywhere in the woods, as well as lords and ladies, and the wild garlic already smelled culinary in the edge of Coombe Wood. One or two of its leaves, bright green, striped dark green, were up and out above the brown wood floor like the blades of soft-bodied assegais.
‘That bloody garlic,’ Ken Weekes called it. One year, after a winter like this one, when there was no grass left on the fields, the cows had pushed their way out of Target Field and into Coombe Wood, where they saw the alluring bright green of the garlic in the shadows. For half a day the cattle had grazed on the stinking shoots and had then come in to be milked. ‘You couldn’t even put your face in a churn,’ Ken said. ‘Phwaw. We had to chuck the lot for three days in a row.’
Apart from that, nothing. There were some leaves out on the honeysuckles and one or two on the elders, but the other trees remained tight and bound in. The hazels and the alders had their catkins dangling
in the sunlight and as the breeze blew across them you could see the pollen stream against the light blowing away downwind. But the leaf buds were still hard and inscrutable, genetically wary of late frosts.
Each has its different manner. An oak bud is a heavily armoured thing, protected behind layer on layer of scales like a pangolin’s tail. If you flake them off one by one, they come away dry and brown. Only in the very centre do you find the living green, smelling sappy, the minuscule point of protected life. A hornbeam bud surrenders more easily. A couple of flicks at the protective shell, it falls apart and inside you find the cluster of leaves each no more than a 16th of an inch long and covered in silky white hairs like a Labrador’s ear. The shape of the future leaf is there. All that is missing is the material. Style precedes substance.
It is the ash, still months away from revealing itself, that is the most defended of all. Its black buds are shielded in points like a deer’s hoofs. The outer scales are thick, pointed, firmly anchored and leathery. Pull them away and you find a little capsule of brown fluffy fuzz inside, exactly like rock wool. It is an insulation blanket wrapped around the growing point. Pull that off and you will reach an ash-frond in miniature, the whole frond half the size of a single in-bud hornbeam leaf, still clogged with bits of the rock wool. It is tentacled like a sea-anemone and looks as if it should belong on a coral reef. Such care, such details! Perhaps amazement isn’t really enough of a reaction. But if not sufficient, it is at least necessary. That is what springtime is: gratitude married to amazement.
A double crisis, long predicted, and even longed for, started to close around our lives. That March, Sarah and the sheep were all, in a miraculous piece of synchronicity, on the point of giving birth at home. I was waking up with my teeth clenched. I was yo-yoing between cow shed and sitting room, sitting room and cow shed, in a stew of vastly enlarged paternal concern. Twenty mothers in my care! Sarah and I had erected a 6-foot-wide, 4-foot-deep swimming pool in front of the fire in the sitting room. All furniture had been pushed to the walls as though for a dance. By 1 March, Sarah had already had two full-blown ‘It’s coming’ crises and those were somehow worse than the real thing. I felt in those Phoney War days as though I were a Battle of Britain pilot sitting on an armchair arranged next to the runway, my Mae West around my neck, nonchalantly smoking, while my insides were doing the can-can. Rosie, our two-year-old daughter, woke me up one morning to ask if I minded if she cut off my head with a carving knife. I said that would be fine.
Smell of Summer Grass Page 13