Then there were the sheep. They were due to lamb in a couple of weeks but some were bound to be early. Luckily they were unable to say when they were having an ‘I think it’s coming’ crisis. Or if that was what they meant by their bleating and shuffling at six in the morning, I just ignored it, gave them some more hay and told them to shut up.
It was vital that no hint of pregnant sheep came anywhere near pregnant wife for fear of disease spreading from one to the other. I have never washed so much in my life. Sitting in the kitchen, I had lessons from Carolyn Fieldwick, the shepherdess in boiler suit and woolly socks, telling me in precise and careful detail what I had to do. There would be the three-hourly, twenty-four-hour-a-day inspections of the ewes from the beginning of March until mid-April. If I found one whose womb was prolapsing (‘You’ll see a very red, pinkish blob the size of a fist coming out’), I had to turn the ewe over, wind baler twine round her middle, ‘push everything back in’ and then tie it there with a special bit of kit I had to buy.
What if the lambs were coming out head but not feet first? Reach in to get the feet out but check that the feet belong to the lamb whose head you can see. Twins get muddled up together. Didn’t Ted Hughes write a poem about pulling on a lamb so hard that its head came off in the womb? What if it was coming out backwards? What if the second lamb was all muddled up with the ‘bag’? What do you do about the navel? What about triplets? How do you get triplets all to suckle? What if the mother dies? I was in a state of tense, exhausted paralysis.
The weather made it worse. March, it has to be said, is the most vindictive month. There is a catty, cold-blooded compassionlessness about the way it promises you everything and never delivers. March, in fact, is a liar. It lets you pretend for a while that England is a northern limb of that benign southern Europe where apricots coat the walls and life is lush and generous. But March comes back, old and deceiving, turns the heat and benignity off, replacing Provence with Spitzbergen, and prunes away at the loose-limbed hopes the warmth had engendered. Spring had come, with its usual severity.
Three in the morning, two weeks later. I’m in the cow shed to see that the sheep are all right. The night in as dark as it will ever be. The south-east wind is cruising in like a shark off the English Channel, ten miles away. It’s coming in through the spaces at the top of the barn doors and out the far side. The water is frozen in the buckets.
The ewes are in here, nineteen of them, as pregnant as a fleet of East Indiamen, laden to the gunwales, bulging with themselves. Some of them look as though they had a pair of saddlebags strapped around their middles and when they lie down, as they are now, their vast, filled midriffs pool out on either side in an ocean of motherhood and fecundity.
Their time is due. Roger, our Suffolk ram, now grazing with two young ram lambs in the field on the far side of the road, did well in the autumn. Only one old black ewe, well past her prime and possibly barren, is not in lamb. She’s in the bull pen now and she looks out past the hurdle at the door with an air of abandonment and age. Her black wool is grizzled; she won’t last the spring.
That’s not what it’s like in here. Despite the cold, despite their laden condition, the ewes are lying out across their thick bed of straw in pure horizontal contentment. We’ve fed them well, for weeks now, on quantities of ewe nuts. Half a ton has disappeared down their gullets, not to speak of 2 acres-worth of the hay we made last July in Beech Meadow, good ‘blue’ hay, meaning there is still a certain greenness to it even at the tail end of the winter. The sheep have had nothing but the best and they look marvellous on it. There is something about them which reminds me of a plateful of gnocchi, a rounded warmness, comfort made flesh. Their chins are lifted in the attitude of sheep at ease and a low snorting sort of snoring is coming from their nostrils. The expectant mothers are happy.
One has already done what she needs to do and is over the other side in an individual pen with her lamb. It was Sunday lunchtime. She had been shuffling about all morning, looking, as Peter Clark so precisely described it, ‘a little sheepish’, and then during lunch must have delivered.
We found her with the lamb still smeary with the membranes at her feet and the afterbirth still hanging from her. It was all so normal, so griefless, so prosaic in its way, so without agony that it now seems absurd that I should have gone in for so much apprehension. This was as it should be: ewes in good condition deliver easily and have the appearance afterwards of nothing having happened.
I picked up the lamb to put her in the pen. The little thing felt just as if someone had broken eggs all over the wool. The ewe followed us. They licked and nosed each other. A lamb is a survival machine: a big head, a big mouth and four stocky black legs out of proportion to the sack of a body which joins these standing and eating parts together. The ewe had a full udder, and the lamb soon found its way to suck, wriggling its tail, the instinctive drive at work, the vital colostrum running into the gut. Survival.
A sheep has no face, no screen on which its mental state can be read as ours can in such detail and with such immediacy. You look at a sheep and see a certain blankness: no pleasure, no pain, no grief, no anger, no delight, no regret. But if there’s no face, you can at least read its body and, unlike the sisters still waiting for their birthing moment so relaxedly in their communal pre-crèche, the mother with its lamb was obviously in a state of acute anxiety. For twenty-four hours after the birth, whenever I came in to see how the lamb was doing – my own anxiety, needing this thing to survive, not to die on me, not this first one – I found the mother standing alert, eyes big, defensive, stamping her front feet as I approached the pen or picked up the lamb to look at the navel and the shrivelling cord or to feel its, gratifyingly, filling belly. The ewe is tensed to protect her own. She is a servant of her genetic destiny. Her life can only be dedicated to these fragile, transitional moments on which so much hinges. So this instant, in the pen with the hours-old lamb, with the tautened presence of the protective mother, this is one of those moments when you come close to ‘the blood of the world’, to the essential juices running under the everyday surface of things, when the curtain is drawn back and you find yourself face to face with how things are.
It snowed the following night and in the morning the east wind blew thick drifts of it off the field and into the trench of Willingford Lane, blocking it. Sarah was due to give birth at home any day and in these conditions no doctor or midwife could reach her. I drove up the lane in the Land Rover with a spade and shovel and for four hours dug a way through the snow, cutting the route which an emergency would make necessary. It was the opposite of digging a grave, cutting a life-path through the snow, a car wide, three or four feet deep for about 50 yards along the lane, just on the crest where it was open to the wind and where the snow had swelled into bulbous goitres and growths between the hedges.
The next day Sarah gave birth to our second daughter. The contractions began the evening before. I half-slept, waking, stoking the fire, sleeping again, refilling the pool with warm water, and Sarah bathed there throughout the night, calm and easy. Sarah’s sister Jane was staying and while I slept, she looked after Sarah. An old friend, Patricia Howie, was here too, to look after us all. The midwife came at about six. By nine in the morning the whole process had steepened and deepened. In quite a sudden way, with the growing contractions, it reached a huge and passionate intensity. Sarah looked in this extremis like one of the sibyls on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, a vast being in pain. I could hardly recognize her. I was amazed by it. The sheer hurt of the delivery seemed at times to balloon out from her to fill the whole room, the whole house, the whole of here. She was shouting louder than I had heard anyone shout before. Human birth, when seen at home, when suffered by someone you know and love, when not dulled or interfered with by the dislocations of hospital and its comprehensive anaesthesia, is a vast and violent thing. A husband, an observer, can do little but stand and watch, gormless in his irrelevance, awed by the sort of instinctive courage this moment
summons, bewildered by the sheer scale of an experience which little else in life can match and finally swept away and dissolved in the relief of its ending, its happy ending in a daughter who was well and who would survive. Sarah and Molly were well. But why should it be like this? Why should human birth take such a toll? Why can’t a woman give birth like a ewe? At just after ten in the morning, Molly was born into the water of the pool, scooped up and out on to Sarah’s breast and I wept with the relief of it. An hour later they were both in our bed and I put flowers all round them and tall branches of hazel cut from the wood with the tops of the hazel fronds bent down by our bedroom ceiling, so that all round the bed the catkins hung down over them both, a bower for my family.
This of course was how it should be, an unbroken transition from womb to life, and as I looked at Molly that morning, still blinking in the shock of her extra-uterine existence, I realized that in some ways she was still being born.
Only one Molly, but endless lambs. By the time she was a week old, 10 of the ewes had given birth and they had delivered 18 lambs. Most had been twins, but there had been a set of triplets and one or two singletons. Only one lamb, one of a pair of black twins, had died, a week after Molly’s birthday, at breakfast. It had been born the afternoon before and looked all right to start with, if very small, and I didn’t notice anything the matter when I checked at about midnight and again at five the next morning. But at eight o’clock I found the poor black thing suddenly crashed out and hopeless, lying all wrong on the straw, its body too heavy for itself. When I picked it up, the head hung down at the end of a muscleless neck and its body slumped in my arms like a little pietà.
We brought it into the kitchen to warm it up and bottle-feed it. The milk went in and it seemed to be swallowing but that can only have been an involuntary impulse; the animal was already virtually dead. It had probably gone too far by the time I found it, for some reason neglected by its mother overnight, even though it had been feeding well enough in the evening. Its heart was still fluttering when I first picked it up in the morning but within half an hour the pulse had gone and its whole body had moved across the unnoticed line between ‘ill’ and ‘dead’. We buried it near a ewe that had died the previous autumn. The dribbled bottle-milk was still coating its chin in a veined white slick as the lumps of clay fell and bounced on the body.
Death at lambing is only to be expected. In fact, we got away lightly. The ewes were all fine and the rest of the lambs well and lusty. The Fieldwicks, with 400 ewes, which were not meant to have started lambing until April, had already lost four of them. They had been found dead in the field. The year before, for no reason they could tell, they had 60 barren out of the 400 and trailerloads of dead lambs carted away to the tip. This for them was the anxious time. The week before, a ewe had been delivered of triplets prematurely. One of them had died almost straight away. The second needed bottle-feeding, the third was sucking well from its mother. Two nights later Carolyn found the ewe herself dead in the field. She had rolled over and crushed the one lamb that was making a go of it. The prospect of exhaustion and failure hung around the whole business. I could only thank God that this was not the way I earned my living. I knew young farmers around here, struggling in the grip of this, man and wife working all hours, crucified on the cost of the grass keep, with a quota only for a small proportion of their flock, their young teenage children dragooned into helping when they would otherwise be at school, the strain telling on everyone’s face. I was always amazed at how young these old-looking people were. People I thought of as much older than me turned out to be far younger. I felt coddled by comparison, padded by the softness of a sort of life which their whole life’s work might in the end bring them. And only then if it went well, if they stuck at it, if disaster did not pick away at their sliver-thin margins.
The survival rate of lambs, the cost of rations for the pregnant mothers, the condition of ewes after lambing: these things are the determining factors in what their lives would be like this year, next year and for ever. To be so dependent on the uterine workings of another species! I said to one of them one day, his face taut with exhaustion, what hell the life of a small, under-capitalized sheep farmer must be. It was a mistake. He sat up, flicked his head half sideways in the way a cockerel might, and said, ‘Why? What’s wrong with it? I like my life. I like it a damn sight more than I’d like yours.’ We are all tender.
For us, though, it was the sweetest of times. Rosie played among the lambs. They danced and pranced together in the orchard outside the house. Molly peeked like a mouse from her swaddling. Tom, William and Ben cradled their sister in turn and the lemon-yellow sun shone on our lives.
A few weeks before Molly and all those first lambs were coming to life, I had forty oak trees cut down. We wanted them for a building, to restore the oast, the other side of the yard from the house. Forty oak trees! I could imagine them growing in the sort of open circular grove the Greeks would have admired, gradually filling out over the course of this century, swept by the wind, a grassy lawn beneath them. And I had them cut down.
In fact, I never saw them standing. They had been growing in a wood at Ashburnham, a few miles south of here, and I could imagine the rawness their removal left, a stretch of land looking as a gum feels after a tooth has been drawn: the awful, shocked absence at the site, a ragged-edged nothing where something should be, a place whose gruesome softnesses your tongue can only tentatively explore.
I first saw our trees in the timber yard belonging to Zak Soudain a few miles away from here near Broad Oak. The wood was still wet and very green, as the word is, although the real colour of sodden, recently felled oak is an orangey yellow that verges on pink. Where a chisel hacks at it, flaking the fibres of the wood, the nearest thing to green oak that I’ve ever seen is the raw flesh of a salmon. The lichen was still growing on the bark of the enormous, horizontal trees as they lay in Zak’s yard, so you could still tell which had been the sunny southern side and which the northern when they had been standing in the wood. Despite that, though, the oaks had already moved over from one side of the equation – the handsome shape of the living tree – to the other, a dignified after-life as timber.
I didn’t feel a trace of regret about having the trees felled at the time, and still don’t, only excitement at what was to become of them. The new building was to have a green oak frame and be clothed in oak weatherboards. The structural techniques, the joints used and the material of which the building was made were all identical to those used to put up the farmhouse 400 years ago, the hay barn about 180 years ago and the original oast-house about 130 years ago. Every one of these buildings has used the local oaks for their main structural members. Our new building would be the fourth time in four centuries that someone at Perch Hill Farm would have had a fair stand of oak trees felled and put to use. And each time the woodland was not lost but cropped.
There is rationale to those time intervals. They are governed by the market. Each of the moments that one of these buildings was put up marks a period of optimism and expansion in the farms of the Sussex Weald. In the sixteenth century, as prices rose under population pressure, it became profitable to farm even the more marginal lands like our wet, woody clays: time for a new farmhouse at Perch Hill. In the Napoleonic Wars, blockades created shortages and shortages created cash for suppliers: time for a new barn. In the 1860s, booming populations demanded oceans of beer, railways allowed national distribution and hops became the new cash crop: time for an oast-house at Perch Hill.
And now? The market is no longer in such obvious commodities. Hops, corn and milk can now only be produced commercially on a scale to which this landscape has been unable to adapt. Ten years ago there were five active dairy farms on our lane. Now there is none. Every farmhouse is occupied by one urban professional or another. The farming is done by people renting the grazing from elsewhere. The City, land agency, the media, old folks’ homes, fashion, the law: that is where the money is now and that is what now ow
ns Willingford Lane. The only crop this landscape can viably produce is beauty and the only thing it can sell is itself. It is doing that very well. New money from the cities has arrived and once again, in a green-oak building, Perch Hill is getting the reward it deserves. Ever since this farm was first cut from the forest, the market for its produce has been urban. There is no radical break with the past in what we are doing. This is the Perch Hill way: an influx of urban money means green-oak buildings, built to last for centuries. The 1590s, the 1810s, the 1860s, the 1990s: these are the steps in the graph, the moments Perch Hill takes another step forward.
To begin with – doesn’t everybody begin the story of a building project with that phrase? – all was marvellous. The trees were cut into the shapes required for the giant frame. Others were sliced by a cheese-paring saw into the long, feather-edged weather boards that were to clad the walls. The money we had would be enough. We saw the building changing day by day, the holes for windows opened, the brickwork growing for the new upper storey to the roundel. But then, creepingly, apparently unawares, delays began to appear. People wouldn’t turn up. Alterations turned out to cost much more than expected. An air of catastrophe hung above the scheme. Its noise and disturbance began to eat at our sense of well-being.
Smell of Summer Grass Page 14