One day that summer, a minibus full of semi-antique ladies from Bexhill, most of them wearing the kind of maroon felt hats that look as if they should be the central structural element in one of Delia’s Light Afternoon Sponges, pulled up outside our farm gate. The bus had parked just opposite the chaos of our building site. The job was now many, many weeks late. Mess lay everywhere. No one was at work.
The tour leader on the bus, microphone in hand, pointed out of the window at our building and said, ‘There you have one of the old oast-houses of Sussex and Kent in which, in the old days, they used to dry the old hops. Lovely things; you could always smell the drying hops for miles away downwind.’ The bus aahed. ‘But many farmers,’ he went on, ‘are now finding oast-houses rather inconvenient and, as you can see here, are dismantling them to make way for more suitable buildings. It’s a shame but many farmers are struggling to make a living in this part of the country and after all it is a free world.’
I stood there in my gumboots, listening to this open-mouthed. The Fruit Compôtes in the bus in front of me all turned their attention from the building – which was costing as much as a Ferrari Testarossa to put up, entirely funded by some particularly acute investments I had made in the 1980s, the farsightedness of Barclays Bank, Hammersmith and the blessed generosity of my own father – and, in a single, coordinated gesture of patronizing benevolence, directed fourteen pairs of twinkling glacé cherry eyes on me. I had to turn away.
What was done of the building was, on the whole, beautifully done. If you could ignore the fact that, six months after it was due to be complete, it was still unfinished, that the pointing of the new brickwork seemed to have been done by someone who had only ever previously worked with play-dough, that there were no doors, that the windows had no catches, that there was no floor upstairs, that four of the seven lights they installed one week were not working the next and that my brother-in-law thought the whole pitch of the roof was wrong, it was really very good indeed.
There was the slight problem that the two men who were meant to be the main contractors on the job, and whom we engaged only because they were so attractive (one in a rather saturnine, agonized, Übermensch-under-strain way, one a fresh-faced male version of the freckled English rose), had fallen out with each other so badly that they were on the brink of a vicious legalo-financio-emotional-hurt-and-betrayal dispute which might or might not end up in court. The saturnine one of the pair, who had a Heathcliff-goes-clubbing look to him, and wore a sort of silver anorak that seemed to have been cut from the fuselage of a 1952 USAF strato-cruiser, had arrived on site with a new black eye on two different eyes in two consecutive weeks and had said both times that he had walked into his car door the previous evening.
All that aside, the job went rather well. The blips and hiccups, the overruns and punch-ups, the walkings-off the job, the mysteri ous disappearance of a septic tank one night and the discovery that the oak floorboards we had already paid for were so wet that if they had been nailed down in that condition they would all have buckled into a model of the North Dakota badlands within a couple of months, all that was nothing more than what you might expect. That was what life should be like – a little spurty, free enough to go wrong.
No one else could understand this point of view, particularly Sarah and the bank manager. Mainly to satisfy them, I did, on a couple of occasions, lose my temper with Heathcliff-inclubland. It was cynically done. I was at the end of my tether anyway and it seemed to me that screaming at the poor man down the phone was better than kicking the dogs/cats/sheep/ ducks/chickens/walls/children and would go down well with the wife. It didn’t have the right effect at all. Heathcliff came round, explained the problem away perfectly and looked hunkier than ever. Sarah ended up admiring him more than me and I thought for an alienated minute they were going to go out together that evening to a fantastic place he knew in Croydon – ‘brilliant, it’s a warehouse which has been lined inside with the façade of a Renaissance château’. The job continued to progress at an inch a week.
There was one little thing about the building which remained a niggle, which ran against the lovely freedom-is-beauty gospel to which the whole of the farm had become dedicated. The new building had two bathrooms in it, one upstairs and one down. Both had large windows opening on to a view of a grassy bank and, over to one side, the chicken slum where the three survivors out of our original flock of twenty hens and one cockerel were scratching out their tragic lives. Both these windows opened fully. This is one of the breeziest places in Sussex and there is never any shortage of fresh air. If you had your priorities upside down, and if things ever turned financially disastrous, this would be a prime spot for a wind farm.
Despite the natural gush of air past our fully opening windows, despite the fact that we would probably like to open those windows to enjoy the sort of air that we had come here for, we were obliged to install in each bathroom an electric extractor fan. They are ugly little things, plastic, louvred squares which turn on when the light turns on. I hated everything about these fans: the look of them, their noise, their enforced presence, their waste of money – £40 each – their attitude, above all, of tidying up our lives for us. I could imagine lying in the bath in the future looking up at the fan whirring its little whir above me and thinking, ‘Go away, I hate you.’
It was the 1991 Building Regulations (1995 Edition) Part F (i) which required me to install these little things. It was all to do with ‘interstitial condensation’ – or damp in the rafters. I couldn’t, first of all, be trusted to open the windows myself, which was irritating in itself. But from talking to the Rother District Council Building Control Officer, it became clear that this little plastic imposition was symptomatic of a much larger phenomenon. Houses used to breathe. Surfaces and materials were in some ways permeable to the wet; there was more of a flow between inside and outside. Then came central heating, then the requirement to preserve more of the heat so expensively created, then thick insulating materials, then what the RDCBCO called ‘the house like a kettle’, all the hot wetness from kitchens and bathrooms held within this sealed container. Then came the requirement for the electric fans because people could no longer be trusted to open their windows and break the precious seal.
It was the classic example of the way in which people had removed themselves from their natural environment. Every step follows logically from the one before until you suddenly look round and find you are halfway up a cliff and don’t like the feeling at all.
It is not that it is ugly; a light switch or a plug is ugly and I don’t mind them. The fan was horrible because it was the mark of alienation, of a sterilized, cut-off tightness, of a ludicrously unnatural way of regulating your life, of over-prescription, of denying yourself the feeling, that wonderful summer feeling, of the breeze against the skin, which is one of the reasons you are alive in the first place. So once the fans were in, I took them out and I felt the building, the beautiful, creaking, appallingly expensive, debt-creating, naturally sweet-smelling, oaky heaven of a building, sigh with relief.
It is in that fan-free place that I have written this book. I live with the wood day by day. The timber dries and as it dries it shifts. As it shifts it splits and as it splits it creaks, as though the whole thing were springing apart. From time to time, unexpectedly, at a quiet moment, the whole frame creaks, not in an old or easy way but with a sudden, high-pitched jerking under stress, a shriek of wood, a spasmodic movement, in the way that earthquakes happen. Over many months or even years, the tension builds and then, bang, catastrophe theory at work, it becomes too much. The pieces move not with an easy, oiled constancy, but in a little convulsion, a twitch.
That moment sounds not wooden at all, but polystyrene. You might hear in that agonized squeal the sound of all the torture that preceded it, a final, desperate outburst of the wood under strain, its elasticity stretched quite literally to breaking. Every time it happens, I look up at the jowl-posts and tie-beams, at the scissor brace in the
apex of each truss, and see nothing. The building, an invisibly clenched and tense thing, where the fibres in the timbers are tightening and stretching against the pegs that hold them together, remains inscrutable. It looks stiff, solid, immobile, as reliable as buildings are meant to be. ‘What, me?’ those impassive beams ask, as I interrogate them about the noise they’ve just made. ‘Can’t you see, we are what we always were?’
In Deepest Arcadia
AS SPRING thickened into summer, and both the hay and the corn started to coat the country in a deep green pelt, a kind of sexiness began to seep out into the fields and their hidden corners. The height of early summer turned into the most lustful moment of the year. Driving down Willingford Lane in those lush green weeks, dropping from Burwash Weald to the bridge over the Dudwell and then up through the outer patches of Dallington Forest, moving from sun to shade and back again, past our farm and on towards Brightling, you would find cars parked in the evening in the tucked-in gateways, reversed half out of sight among the cow parsley, an air of privacy and closure about them.
They were always young men’s cars, the sets of wheels that could be afforded rather than desired: a rusting Escort estate, a brown Capri, and never anyone visible in them. Each one was a strange prefiguring of the way those old men’s cars, the brown Granada, the ‘Autumn Gold’ Austin Vanden Plas with walnut trim, were always parked on similarly beautiful evenings, not in the quiet corners but at the viewpoints, on the Downs and the higher places in the Weald, the bonnets aimed at the landscape, the old man and his wife sitting calmly in the two front seats watching Sussex as though it were an intermission in Thursday night TV. They pass the thermos, the wife worries about the children, the dog farts silently on the back seat and the husband thinks his lustful thoughts about his youth and all those never-confessed-to lovers. ‘Men are April when they woo, December when they wed: maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.’ As You Like It, the route-map to the pastoral idea.
June is the month for outdoor lust, now as it always has been. The famous song sung by the two pages in As You Like It is a precise description of the sexual habits of the rural working class in early modern England:
It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o’er the green cornfield did pass …
Between the acres of the rye,
With a hey and a ho, and a hey nonino,
These pretty country folks would lie.
Everything about this is accurate: they make their way right to the other side of the growing cornfield, away from the invigilating police state of the 16th-century village, and there find the privacy they crave. You hardly ever see rye growing in England now, but it is the lovers’ crop par excellence, six feet tall by the middle of June, a wall of protective green. ‘With a hey and a ho, and a hey nonino’ sounds innocent but it isn’t. ‘Nonino’ is 16th-century for ‘a bit of the other’ and even ‘hey’ has a lustful tinge to it. In Shakespeare, the word ‘country’ is always enriched by the pun it contains. The whole movement of the song, through the fluffy acres of the fields and on into the safe and private lying place, is sexual. It is a hymn to sex as summer heaven.
It is easy to forget how thick with all this the landscape still is. I was looking that year into the history of the woods that surround our farm, the woods that formed the rich and numin ous background to all Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill stories. That was my idea of them, the source of a psychic magic in which Kipling revelled, until I began to ask in the village about what the woods had been like before the war. The old men I spoke to would begin politely enough, mention their work in the wood, the trees that had once grown there, but their eyes would light up, narrowing and brightening at the same time, when they talked about ‘going courting’ in High Wood: no better place in the summer than High Wood or Leggett’s Wood, the mossy banks in the old sunk roads, the open ground beneath the beeches where you could spread your coat on a bed of bracken, the beech mast being too crinkly and spiky if it’s under a person’s back, and you don’t want them to feel uncomfortable, do you, you don’t want them distracted by the prickles …
Those beech trees remain the poignant memorials, standing huge and isolated among the twiggy birches. One of the beech trees, in particular, is an incredible being, a balloon, in the newness of summer, of fresh lime-juice-green leaves, with two tennis courts of shade beneath its branches. The muscled limbs are clothed in elephant hide and the dress of windblown leaves acts the feminine to that massive masculinity. Of course it is the place for seduction.
The trunk is carved with the initials of forgotten lovers. The bark is cracked and pitted inside the rough-cut serifs and the places where an O or a C have thickened with time. Here and there, moss inhabits the carved-in words. Hearts enclosing girls’ initials have been stretched so wide by the swelling of the tree that they look like one of those gurning grimaces made by five-year-olds, fingers hooked in the corners of the mouth and dragged out sideways across the width of the face. Inside that gruesome cartouche, the initials are now illegible, pulled beyond understanding, no more than a smeared-out mark which the tree has done its best to erase.
It all brought back memories of outdoor love affairs decades ago, that odd sensation of the breeze in unexpected places, the disaster with my first-ever girlfriend, on a hillside in northern Spain. She was an Argentine; I hardly knew her. She had no English to speak of and so we scarcely spoke except in inadequate French. ‘Don’t hurt me,’ she said that afternoon as I was looking over at the view and I thought she meant I must not treat her badly, as all the signs were surely pointing in that way. ‘I won’t,’ I said solicitously. ‘No, don’t hurt me,’ she said with a little more emphasis and I equally fiercely said I wouldn’t, of course. ‘No, NOW,’ she screamed in my ear and pushed me away. It turned out that the way I was leaning on her was pressing her far shoulder into a small, invisible but obviously rather prickly thistle.
At Perch Hill, the thistles were well into their wild annual career and I didn’t like it. From my desk, I could look out across the rising bulk of the Cottage Field towards Coombe Wood. The field looked wonderful, a perfect sward, next winter’s hay in the making, as invitingly edible as a plate of rocket and watercress salad. But the appearance was a lie; its reality was a nightmare of weeds. Walk across it and the luxurious softness disappeared. Your boots crunched at each step as if on shingle but what you were treading were thistles, many thousands of them, still little more than horizontal rosettes at this stage, nestling invisibly in the grass but soon to start their growth upwards. Where there were no thistles there were docks, and where there were no docks there were nettles; where there were no nettles there were brambles, and where there were no brambles, there were dandelions.
Before we came here, I had a supremely haughty attitude to grassland. If, walking around England, I came across fields like ours, I would have one of two remarks to pass. It was usually: ‘Poor management, very poor management. They don’t really know what they are doing.’ The fact that I didn’t know what they were doing, or what they were meant to be doing, or what I would have done in the circumstances, or what sort of management history would lead to this sort of weed problem, did not stop me from passing judgement. I now realized why farmers hated people like me.
At other times I would say, ‘Of course a weed is just a frame of mind.’ That saying exists in the same sort of sententious mental lay-by as those notices at the entrances to US National Parks: ‘Take nothing but memories, leave nothing but silence, speak nothing but peace.’ I once picked up a sandstone pebble in the titanic desert emptinesses of the Utah Canyonlands – it was beautiful, with the ripples of a red Jurassic beach on its surface – only to have it confiscated by a National Park Service Ranger, a woman with brown curly hair and a revolver, on the basis that I was ‘disinheriting the generations that come after’. Forget objets trouvés; they have slipped beyond the bounds of the acceptab
le.
There is an idea that at one time, when the people of this country were still at home with the ways of nature, the plants we now see as weeds, of which we know nothing, were seen in their true light, useful as food or medicine. Nettles cured stomach upsets and made excellent cloth; the fruit of the bramble has been found in the stomachs of Stone Age men preserved in Irish bogs; young thistle stems, blanched and peeled, were eaten like the heart of an artichoke and were said in the 16th century to be ‘sovereign for melancholy’.
That is the side you always hear about nowadays, yet another measure of our fall from grace. But it is no more than half of it. Anyone who has read that wonderfully encyclopaedic treasure-house The Englishman’s Flora by Geoffrey Grigson, a work of love and scholarship from which everyone else has always cribbed whatever knowledge they pretend to have, will get the fuller picture. It provides a strange enlightenment.
Every year parts of the Middle Shaw are dominated by the dreary, tiny-flowered, big-leaved plant called dog’s mercury. It looks boring, it’s not useful, it’s a weed and it seems to outcompete bluebells. But what about that elegant, alluring name? Until I read Grigson I always thought I must be missing something about this plant. Not at all. This woodland mercury is a perennial, highly poisonous, both emetic and purgative, one of the lowest of the low, good only for dogs. Dog’s mercury means ‘rubbish mercury’, ‘weed mercury’. What a liberating recognition that is! The name reveals that pre-modern people hated weeds too. Grigson lists 70-odd names of wildflowers which have this dismissive ‘dog’ element in them: dog jobs, dog-cock, dog’s mouth, dog stalk and so on. As for cow parsley, which was then appearing on the banks of the lane and which everyone loves, that too is a historically despised thing, its tauntingly full but useless growth associated with the devil. It’s the devil’s parsley in Cheshire, dog parsley in Hertfordshire, gipsy’s parsley in Somerset, hare’s parsley in Wiltshire.
Smell of Summer Grass Page 15