From admiration to contempt, from exploitation to at least local extermination, the historical attitude to wild plants covered the full range. Po-faced piety about the natural order didn’t get a look in. So, I said to Ken Weekes one morning, what shall I do about the thistles? ‘Hammer them,’ he said. ‘Hammer them as hard as you like.’ So that’s exactly what we did. Will Clark drove the tractor, I bought a giant flail topper with a 9-foot cut and Will, in sweep after sweep, beheaded every one in every field. He let me have a go, standing on the side of the field with his hands on his hips and shouting up as I passed about the throttle or the straightness of the line which the topper was leaving. The satisfaction of this: looking back, one hand on the wheel, one on the back of the tractor seat, a swept wake of grassland emerging behind you, the blades of grass laid low by the topper as it passed and now sheeny in the sunlight, orderliness, a place which has been worked.
One morning that summer a man knocked on the back door. He wore a sort of yellowish canvas coat with a corduroy collar and took his muddy shoes off with deliberation before coming to sit down in the kitchen. He had something of an ex-naval air: affable, polite, attentive.
He too, he told us, looking at the half-wreck of the oast-house outside, had gone in for building works. Oh, the headaches! He had discovered terrible subsidence and had been forced to pour money into a hole in the ground, far more money than he had. That was the reason he was now working for Orange, for Hutchison Telecom. Eyebrows up. His job was to find sites for the masts that would give the Orange network the coverage it had to provide. Would we be interested?
‘Tell me about it,’ I said, thinking, ‘No, not here, never.’ He showed us a series of photos of the masts, 50 feet high, surrounded by things that look like giant chest freezers around the base, enclosed within a chain-link anti-vandal fence and surmounted by the aerials: big, dominant and ugly.
The poor man made no attempt to pretend they were anything other than dreadful. His word, in fact, was ‘beastly’. He was charming, disarming even. I wondered, but didn’t ask, if this was the trained technique: spit the worst out early on, show them you understand what they are frightened of and then offer the blandishments. So what would the deal be?
‘We’d make an agreement for ten years,’ he said. ‘We’d rent a patch of ground 10 metres by 10 metres from you, and we usually offer £1,250 a year for that.’ My face looked like a slot machine as the dollar signs rolled. £12,500 for a patch of Beech Meadow 30 feet square? Oh yes.
‘We had the Mercury man round here last year,’ I said, lying, repeating something someone else had said to me about a visit to their farm months ago. ‘He offered £2,000 a year.’ ‘I thought that might be the case,’ our Orange rep said, ‘and obviously, as an annual tariff, we’d have to match that. Yup. And we could say that it should rise with inflation.’ Already £20,000. And he might go up a little more if I dug my heels in. But I was mucking him about. I never had the slightest intention of having such a monstrosity looming over our fields. It would be like putting callipers on the leg of a child.
‘Now this is the bit I don’t like,’ the rep said, smiling like an old friend. ‘It always sounds threatening but it’s not meant to be. If you don’t agree to have the base station on your land, I’ll have to go to your neighbours and see what they make of it. And obviously, if they think it’s a good idea, I’ll be going ahead with it with them. You do understand, don’t you?’
Oh Jesus. There is a thin sliver of land that runs through the middle of the farm which we don’t own. Its owner lives miles away. The prospect lurched up of a 50-foot hideosity on the bank above the farm and no compensation.
We both allowed the talk to burble on around this aching pothole. He mentioned ‘statutory obligation to establish a national network’. I mentioned that this was statutorily an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. He knew that and said about planning applications being granted on appeal by the Secretary of State. I said that if we didn’t want it, we’d do everything in our power to stop it happening, and I meant everything. He said he understood and I said, smiling, shaking hands, opening the door, that I’d be in touch.
I wasn’t. He rang, but I wasn’t in. He wrote, offering ‘to sugar the pill with some modest improvement on the annual fee of £2,000 I suggested and possibly throw in an Orange, with a year’s basic tariff (15 free minutes a month). At least it should work well!’ I didn’t reply but I guessed that his other options were somehow closing and that waiting was working. Then, months later, the letter we wanted. The radio engineers, with their ‘computer modelling tools’ had decided that somewhere ‘further west’ would better suit their purposes. Cheers at breakfast. The future’s bright? The future’s Orange? Not here it wasn’t.
While dreading the irruption of Orange into our lives, seeing wherever I went the spectacular unregulated ugliness of the mobile phone towers (and enjoying for the first time all the pleasure of having a mobile phone myself), I had been looking forward to something else, not the disruption of the local by the national but in many ways its opposite: the 49th Annual Heathfield and District Agricultural Show. I had been asked to be one of the judges. The invitation had arrived months before from the charming Mrs Berger, Hon. Trade Stand Secretary, and as soon as I opened the envelope, I knew that, as far as the Weald of Sussex was concerned, I had arrived. A Heathfield Show Judge!
For weeks, I was modest about it at parties but privately triumphant. The badge, a hexagon of stiff, burgundy-coloured cardboard with the word ‘judge’ stamped on it in gold, came through the post and I tried it out in front of the long bathroom mirror with a variety of different suits and ties. Dark blue was obviously wrong. Hairy Harris tweed was absurd for early summer. It could only be the cowpat-green corduroy. Come the day, I immediately realized that my fellow judges were more impressive – I want to say realistic-looking – than me. John Bines Esq. was once a government expert on the feeding of dairy cattle and then Chief Executive and Secretary of Newbury and District Agricultural Society. Mrs Valerie Chidson was Chairman of the Wealden District Council. She had, of course, unrivalled local knowledge and wore a great badge around her neck like a mayor, with a long flamboyant apricot and orange silk scarf floating above it. I was described in the programme as ‘A. Nicolson Esq., Journalist’ which looked disreputable. Why not ‘landowner, landscape theorist and visionary’? That word ‘journalist’, it’s no good. I was told by an insurance agent once that I should never, ever mention what I do. Only ‘fairground booth operator’, he told me, was considered a more dangerous risk.
Anyway, Mr Bines, Mrs Chidson and I, in a couple of hours, were walked around the two hundred-odd stands of the show. They were laid out in broad, muddy streets across a hillside outside Heathfield. The setting-up day had been rainy and the trucks had turned the field into a quagmire. But now the sun was shining on the stands and tents; on the enormously fat horses being trotted up and down by enormously fat men in suits; on the Side Saddle Concours d’Elégance where double chins wobbled beneath antique veils; and on the Heavyweight Hunter class, capable of carrying fourteen stone and over, which Miss S. Waddilove had come down from Newmarket to judge, along with the other Ridden Hunters.
In the cattle rings, the junior handlers, the boys and girls, were struggling with their recalcitrant calves. ‘Will you bloody well come on!’ one tiny boy in his pristine white coat said out of the corner of his mouth to his even tinier black and white Friesian calf, which was going all sideways in the way that calves will. Mr Vick, the cattle judge and famous breeder from Steyning in West Sussex, gave the tiny calf’s tiny bottom a tiny pat, it walked on and all was well. ‘There we are then,’ he said, and pulled his cap at an even sharper angle to the horizontal. Wonderful Heathfield Show!
We trade-stand judges were shepherded around by Peter Salter, an elegant man and our steward. He wore a pin-striped suit, a bowler hat and gumboots. For years, he had run the South of England Show at Ardingly. To begin with, we were exaggeratedly cour
teous about each other’s likes and dislikes. Mr Bines liked the way one agricultural equipment merchant had managed to get a combine harvester on to his stand. ‘Always some plus marks for a combine,’ he said. I said nothing. I liked the way a tent full of little food stalls had the air of 1948 about it, one step up from a village fête. It had that delicious smell of a field inside a canvas hall but Mr Bines did not comment. Mrs Chidson liked the verve of the Sussex Express stand, its honest vulgarity, but neither Mr Bines nor I said very much about that either.
We realized, I think, that we were interested in rather different things and by the time we arrived back at the judges’ tent we all, I am sure, had a pretty good idea where the others stood. We sat down at a small round table in the tent, Peter Salter got us each a drink and the horse-trading began. There was the E. Watson & Sons Trophy for agricultural stands of 40 feet and over. No problem there. We all agreed the Young Farmers were outstanding, Agrifactors (Southern) Ltd had made a charming effort and Harper & Eede, who had parked their tractors very smartly in front of their tent, deserved a Highly Commended. We proceeded smoothly to the Percy Meakins Perpetual Challenge Trophy for small agricultural stands. Wealden Smallholdings won hands down, manfully overcoming the local outbreak of fowl pest which had meant they had to replace their poultry display with a Wealden cottage garden at the very last minute. Plumpton Agricultural College came a well-deserved second after they had given us a welcome glass of wine on the way round. Peasridge Livestock Equipment, with a fine display of Equine Dental Chisels, One Step Sheep Shampoo and The Original Bull Shine, enjoyed a Highly Commended in the Percy Meakins.
The judges then turned their attention to the John Harper Memorial Trophy for non-agricultural stands. Some awkwardness set in. Mr Bines was in favour of Parker Building Supplies, which had a small self-contained sewage treatment unit in operation on its stand. I was keen on the food tent that had such a charmingly ad hoc 1948 quality to it. Mrs Chidson liked the Hugo Oliver sausages stand. Peter Salter, the steward, asked us, at least, to exclude some from the long list. We did, cutting out both Shell Oil and a man who turned bowls. There we reached an impasse. All we could agree on was the excellence of Hailsham Roadstone’s driveway display. I couldn’t even remember the sewage unit Mr Bines liked so much and he didn’t like my food tent suggestion at all. A slight crackle entered the air. Peter Salter suggested Mrs Chidson and I should have another look at the sewage works. We walked to the other side of the show, had a good look and on the way back to the judges’ tent agreed: we couldn’t possibly call that the winning stand. The food tent, on the other hand, was precisely the sort of small local enterprise that should be encouraged. Absolutely not, Mr Bines still thought on our return. The impasse remained. ‘We’re not having Parker Building Supplies,’ I said, looking at Mrs Chidson. ‘Well, I’m not having Taste of the South-East,’ Mr Bines said. We all looked at the tablecloth while onlookers took another drag at the B&H. It was time for statesmanship.
What about, I suggested, giving the prize to Hailsham Roadstone, second to Hugo Oliver sausages and Highly Commended to both Parker Building Supplies and Taste of the South-East? Two Highly Commendeds? Highly unorthodox but in the circumstances the only option. Judicious nods all round. Thank God for that. We could all, at last, get stuck into the G&Ts and the white wines, safe in the knowledge that compromise is always best.
Things were not so well regulated at home. While I was away at the Heathfield show, crisis was erupting at the farm. The handsome-attractive builders we had got in to make the oast-house had run out of money before they had finished the job. We had paid them for the windows, which had been delivered to the site, but they hadn’t paid the joiners who had made them. Sarah was at home that afternoon with Rosie, tiny Molly in her arms and Patricia Howie, who had come to help while Molly was still so young.
They were all sitting in the garden on the sunny afternoon when a van pulled into the yard. Two burly men Sarah had never seen before got out, walked over to the oast-house and started loading the window frames, which were stacked against the half-made wall, into the back of their van.
Sarah went over with Molly in her arms, horrified at what was going on. ‘Hang on a minute,’ she said, ‘those are our windows. What are you doing? We have paid for them.’
‘Well, dear,’ one of the joiners said, – he was Irish, ‘you might have paid for them but we haven’t been,’ and carried on loading them up. ‘We don’t like doing this to a lady. But we haven’t got a choice.’
Sarah started crying.
Patricia then whispered in her ear, ‘I’ll distract them. You get the keys.’
‘Keys?’
‘You get the keys of their van,’ Patricia hissed. Then, to the Irishmen, twinkling a little, ‘A cup of tea, everybody? Why don’t you come in for a moment?’ They went inside, and sat down for some tea, while Sarah found an excuse to go out again, took the keys out of the ignition and hid them in a drawer in our bedroom. After the tea, and after they had finished loading the van with the windows, they said goodbye nicely and apologetically, and got in to drive away. No keys.
‘I’ve hidden them,’ Sarah said. She had already rung Alex Kelsey, the project manager on the job. ‘Get here now,’ she told him. It was a Saturday afternoon but he was there in half an hour. He had summoned the main contractors too, and between them all he then held a meeting in the yard while Rosie stood there gazing up at the huddle of enraged men. By the time I returned from the Heathfield show, Sarah and Patricia were in the kitchen, congratulating themselves on a coup; all dust had settled, money had appeared and been transferred, the men had all left, Patricia was the hero of the hour and the windows which I am now looking out through at the spring sunshine were still there, stacked against the wall.
The week after the show has gone down in memory as Chaos Week. My sister arrived at the end of it. She was wandering into the tail end of a disaster sequence out of hell. First, I am afraid, it was the sheep. In the intense and frozen days of mid-March, perhaps a little romantically, I had decided that our lambs didn’t need their tails docking. Why should they, poor little things? If God had given them a tail, and so on and so on. So all summer long they had been whisking and flicking their tails – increasingly woolly on the outside and increasingly shit-encrusted on the inside – around the pastures. It was a recipe for disaster, as everyone now tells me. They had until recently done quite well. They were almost as big as their mothers, fat and a little lumbering, but they still gambolled about from time to time, which looked ridiculous, as if Nicholas Soames were playing leap-frog in Parliament Square. You expect a degree of dignity from a sheep and doing hop-skips with a final pirouette of the hind leg, when they should, by rights, already be in some-one’s freezer, looks as grotesque as synchronized swimming.
On the other hand, one could perhaps see it as the last gay flicker of childhood before they sank into the morose condition of adult sheepness. Why are grown-up sheep so morose? Why don’t they play with each other? It’s easy to imagine endless games of British Bulldog, up and down, up and down the fields, until they finally collapse in the evening, exhausted but happy. Why weren’t sheep like that?
As it was, at the beginning of that week, four of the lambs suddenly developed the most gruesome condition I have ever seen. It was a case of maggoty bums, and we had to do urgent, heavy remedial work to save the poor things, dressing up in protective gear to administer the dip to their unhappy bottoms, spraying them and anointing them with a pharmacopoeia of sheep treatments.
Sheep are not low-maintenance farming. This has to be understood. You don’t get a flock of perfectly whole and lovely-looking sheep on perfectly lovely short-cropped green grass just by putting one on top of the other. That’s what I imagined, but it’s not true. So, having gone down the wrong track, my sheep now looked as if they’d just come back from a fashion shoot. They all had blue blobs here and there to identify them as mine, except for those which had green blobs to identify them as Peter C
lark’s. Those which were nicked in the shearing had patches of violet wool where we had sprayed them with antiseptic. One which had knocked its horn off against a gate-post had a half-yellow head where I had smeared it with a yellow paint-cream which keeps the flies off. The lambs with sore bottoms were now, from behind, a slightly disorientating mixture of Cadbury’s-chocolate-wrapper violet and vanilla-ice-cream yellow. I looked at them and felt only a sense of guilt and failure. Perhaps the thing to do was to dip them all in shocking pink and pretend it was on purpose. I had to do better.
Against this background of three-o’clock-in-the-morning remorse and anxiety, there had been a burbling stream of other hopelessnesses. British Telecom wanted to put a giant new telegraph pole right at the end of the garden, dominating Sarah’s carefully orchestrated harmonies. So that had to be negotiated away and underground but once it had, I realized the new duct for the telephone wires had been laid wrongly. The reeds in the new sewage system seemed to have died and the smell predicted by Ken Weekes from such a newfangled thing had started to waft up towards the house. A lorry delivering stone had smashed a manhole over the sewage pipe, which didn’t help. Then I found the children playing on the gravel among the dead reeds, popping the little pebbles into their mouths in a game which involved getting as many of the sewage-encrusted stones as possible in their mouths at the same time. ‘Never let me see you doing that again,’ I said, and as I walked away I saw them out of the corner of my eye hunching their shoulders and putting their hands over their mouths in the time-honoured signal of: Uncontrollable Giggles Brought On By Expostulation From Old Fart.
Smell of Summer Grass Page 16