Meanwhile, as the farm and the fields and the stock and I all looked increasingly decrepit and, at times, beyond redemption, Sarah’s garden was entering its glory phase. There was a time when, unkindly, I had referred to that 80- by 40-foot patch of walled, hedged, pathed, manured, sanded, worked-over, reworked-over, planted, replanted, deplanted, weedkilled and cosseted piece of ground simply as ‘The Expensive Garden’. I realized now that was a tautology; gardens were £20 notes on stalks.
Even so, the garden had become, in its first real moment of completion, an incredibly beautiful thing, floating free of all that had gone into making it. It was brimming with intense colour, as concentrated as flowers in a vase. It was so full you had to push your way through its paths, getting a soaking in the early morning from the dew, brushing up against things which the sheer height and thickness of the other plants had obscured until you were on top of them, a small colony of sunflowers in one corner, wafting drifts of white and pink cosmos in another, like a hillside in Bhutan.
All week long a stream of garden photographers had been trooping in and out of it for their various magazines. A lady from Gardeners’ World came to video Sarah talking about the propagation of annuals. Intense tidying up had gone on between each of these visits, but the process had been dogged by something which came to symbolize the difference between garden and farm, Sarah and me.
There was a rogue chicken. It would not go back in the run but instead, just as Sarah had finished her last sweep and survey before Andrew Lawson or Howard Sooley arrived, would wander into the garden and begin to shuffle its way messily through the applied mulch. That was the pattern of the week: chicken, Lawson, chicken, Sooley, chicken, BBC, like some monstrous club sandwich. ‘What is it with your animals?’ Sarah asked. ‘Can’t you get anything organized?’
That’s when we hit our big sheep crisis. But when wasn’t there a sheep crisis? Sheep are crisis. The ewes had been having their problems. One of them had somehow cut a tendon in her back leg. It would not mend and so she had to be put down and buried. Then another ewe started to behave in a way that was most unsheeplike. She would wander off to be on her own, often choosing a place in the field just on the brow of the hill, from which in a dreamy and rather poetic way she would gaze at the radiant colours of the life-burgeoning Weald. This was exciting: a Romantic sheep, evidence of the appreciation of beauty in the lower orders of creation. One evening, the sheep and I even spent some moments together, side by side, looking at the folded view of wood and valley before us.
But I was mistaken. The ewe was growing mad, not wise. I described the symptoms to Carolyn Fieldwick. ‘No, Adam,’ she said. ‘I don’t think the ewe is gazing at the Sussex landscape.’ The ewe’s problem, it turned out, was magnesium deficiency, which brings on a state of dignified but eventually fatal calm. She, too, had to be put down and buried in the corner of a field.
Sheep, contrary to what one might expect, are choosy eaters. They won’t touch nettles, thistles, ragwort or dock. What is more difficult to accept is that they will not eat grass – perfectly good, organic, herb-rich, Sussex meadow grass – if it’s even slightly too long. This is frustrating. You put them in a field of what looks like the most delicious of salads, and they stand about disconsolately, staring at you with wrinkled contempt, like an aunt who has just stepped in some dog mess. The whole flock reminded me of the faces one sees through the rain-smeared windows of a bus tour of the Scottish Highlands. We didn’t have enough sheep to keep the grass short. We needed more sheep.
This was when the crisis began. Our neighbour, Shirley, who had the cottage and a couple of acres on the edge of the Big Wood, was an accountant who worked in the village. She had a few sheep of her own, but they were eating her grass to nothing and one or two had broken out and got into our hay. We wanted more sheep, she wanted to be rid of hers. It was obvious that they should become ours. Here the waters started to become a little murky. I maintained that we had been unable to agree a price; she maintained that we did agree a price, £35 a ewe. Anyway, the sheep were transferred to our fields. The money business, as I thought anyway, was left pending, but we were in dispute about that.
Three of the sheep weren’t happy about the transfer. They had been fed ewe nuts at home and, unenthused about the grass-only diet we were offering, decided to go back, breaking their way through our slightly gappy fencing in their bid for freedom. We took them back but they broke for home again and we left them to it.
This would have been all right, but disaster struck. Our neigh-bour’s boyfriend, Dick, a director of a national car business of immense standing, decided to store a luxurious car – a bottle-green Lexus worth £35,000 – at her house to prevent it being vandalized in Heathfield. What safer place could one think of than out here in the Arcadian idyll?
Only days later the poor man arrived at the back door, his face as long as a Blue Leicester tup’s. ‘Your sheep,’ he said, ‘have been headbutting my car. They were spotted attacking the doors.’
Have you ever had a phone call mid-morning from your children’s headmaster, telling you that there has been an incident at break and do you think you could come over and talk to the parties involved because it is best to sort these things out straight away? Sick in the stomach, I went to inspect the damage. The four doors of the Lexus’ were indeed neatly dented at about sheep-head height. The paintwork was buffed up and dust-free at that level too, as if by a fleece still attached to its owner. I thought of suggesting that he might like to keep a sheep in his showroom in Heathfield to maintain his cars in a perfectly shiny condition. I refrained. It was not the right time.
I had no insurance against any damage any sheep on my land might do to anyone else’s property. That extra clause to our insurance policy would have cost £30.50 a year. I had thought the idea ridiculous. What would any sheep living here do to anyone else’s property? Go and attack it? A night raid on their ewe nuts? It was just another insurance scam. But I pay that premium now.
The sheep/neighbour/limousine/solicitor/insurance company crisis dogged our lives for years. Shirley’s son, Jonny, had seen ‘my’ sheep (whose they actually were remained in dispute for month after month, the meter ticking away in various well-appointed legal offices) attacking the car from an upper window. He wrote a graphic account of how the sheep, in an orchestrated manoeuvre, approached the flanks of the limousine. The synchronized animals attacked the car. They kicked and head-butted both sides, Jonny told the insurance company. Nothing if not systematic. You had to laugh. But then the bill came in. It was £2,300 for repairing the damage to the doors and another £2,000-odd for the loss of income Dick would have had from hiring out the car in the meantime.
Shirley had been away when the incident occurred. Only Jonny had witnessed it, although Dick did admit to having moved some sheep into an ungated field not long before it was said to have happened. We maintained that ewes didn’t do that kind of thing. We even paid a professor of animal behaviour from Cambridge University to trawl through the literature on sheep. There was not a single example in the long annals of biological science of ewes attacking cars. Rams have, but never ewes. And ewes have never been seen to kick anything at all.
Despite the power of that evidence, there was no movement on the other side. Their solicitor came down here in his red Audi estate. I walked him around the fields. We followed the presumed route the sheep must have taken. I referred at one point while talking to him, charmingly, smilingly, the sun on our backs, not to ‘the sheep’ but to ‘our sheep’. It was a slip of the tongue. I should have said “our sheep”, making that little sign with fingers in the air to show quote marks in the way of American academics discussing “perception” or “reality”. But I didn’t and the solicitor, with the keys to his Audi bulging in his pocket, and his meter ticking, said, all bright and sharp, ‘“Our sheep”? You mean they were your sheep, were they? You consider that you owned these sheep at the time, do you?’ For God’s sake, I thought. Imagine living your life like
that.
On it rolled. Relations with Shirley were not good but our lives were painfully enmeshed. We were already in dispute about her water supply and the track to her house. We were like a pair of sumo wrestlers, podgily shoving and clutching at each other. Attempts at settlement and compromise never seemed to work. She became ill. Just when I hoped one of the issues might have faded away, another solicitor’s letter or another angry note or dark remark about the track or the water would appear. I offered to pay a third of the track repair costs. That got nowhere. There was some mutual berating. The place where we lived was beautiful but it felt as though it had an abscess in its gum.
On one particularly bad corner in the lane, Anna Cheney collided with a car coming the other way, driven by Shirley. Anna, who looks after our children, had both our daughters in the back of her car. I had a phone call from the woman who lives in the nearest farm and rushed down there. No one was hurt but the girls were in tears, the cars looked mangled and everyone was feeling fluttery and shaken. Except for one of the policemen, who was all smiles and hands-in-pockets, seen-it-all-before, get-this-every-day-ofthe-week, what’s-the-fuss. I very nearly had a row with him until Anna restrained me, telling me I would get arrested. I realize now it was Shirley I was boilingly angry with.
Two events finally propelled our relationship into the strangest realms. Sarah and I were sitting at home after dinner on a Friday night. The children were all in bed and the dog was lying in front of the fire. Then, as mothers do, even through the chat, Sarah heard Molly crying. ‘Sssh,’ she said, listening. We heard the sound again, but it wasn’t Molly. It was a siren coming up the lane. First one and then another fire engine came up to our garden gate, paused and then went on towards Ken Weekes’s house, paused there, saw nothing, and then on again, up towards Barn Farm and Mount Farm, up at the top of the lane.
We sat down again. Some poor family or other had obviously set fire to a chimney. We had done it once a couple of years before. But on that Friday night the fire engines weren’t for us. The sirens faded away. After a few minutes, though, we heard them coming back. I went out. ‘Where do you want?’ I shouted. The first driver shouted the name of a house. It was Shirley’s. I told them how to get there, found a torch and ran over there myself.
It was about eleven at night. A west wind which had been blowing all day was still spitting the rain horizontally on to the back of my head. I was only a few minutes behind the fire engines but by the time I got to the house the fire brigade’s whole system was up and running: arc lights providing a wash of white light like a film set; hoses unreeled around the house, charged with water and with a junior fireman on the end of each one; a white-board on a tripod where a fireman with a black marker was recording the sequence of events. Two teams with breathing apparatus had gone straight into the building and were fighting the fire in the kitchen. Shirley, still in her nightdress but with a blue anorak over it, was sitting in one of the fire engines, shocked and shaky. She had been watching TV in bed when the electricity had suddenly gone off. She had opened the door to go downstairs to the fusebox, only to be met by a solid wall of smoke, poisonous-tasting, gagging in her throat. The phone was still working and, even though she had to dial in the dark, she had called 999 and then got herself out of the building into the wet night.
The worry was her animals. She had three dogs and three cats. The cats could probably look after themselves but two of the dogs had slipped back inside the house after she had got out herself. They were now trapped in the scullery, between the fire and the locked back door, and she couldn’t get at them. She was terrified that they would be burnt or were suffocating in the black smoke.
The first thing the firemen did was to break open a pane in the back door, unlock it, release the animals, all unharmed, and shut them in the stable. The boiler had burst into flames and was still burning in the kitchen. Within a few minutes, though, the crisis was already over and the tension winding down. One crew was coming out of the house, tearing off their oxygen masks, their heads and faces running with sweat. The seat of the fire was out. The other crew was still in there, checking for flames in other parts.
Suddenly, from between the tiles of the roof, and snatched away by the wind, smoke poured into the night air. Firemen shone their torches up at the gables and ran extra hoses round the downwind side of the house. Smoke was crowding out of the roof. The firemen had opened a hatch to the attic, air had poured in there and fire had suddenly erupted, soon taking hold. New urgency gripped the firemen. The fire controller got on the radio and the men in breathing apparatus went back in. Shirley sat in the fire engine. I watched aghast.
The conventional wisdom is that once a fire takes hold in the roof space of a building, it is extremely difficult to prevent the whole roof going or, in some cases, to save the building itself. If no one had been at home that evening, or if it had been a little later and Shirley had been asleep and not noticed the electricity going off, then the chances are that the house would have burned down. For a while no one was sure if this roof fire was going to be contained. There was talk of calling in extra tenders. For perhaps 10 minutes there was uncertainty until, quite abruptly, the smoke pouring from between the tiles diminished. They had extinguished it. It was ‘a good stop’.
I took Shirley and her three dogs home with me that night. We drank most of a bottle of whisky in our kitchen, waiting for the firemen to finish clearing up, checking no embers remained. At about one o’clock in the morning I went back up there. Half the contents of the attic, old suitcases, boxes of books, the sort of baggage we all have stuck away in the uninspected corners of our lives, had been hauled out on to the drive in front of the house. It was all now scorched and sodden. The boiler itself looked as if it had been bombed, the kitchen black, wrecked, unusable.
It was the sight of the attic that was most alarming: the rafters charred, all the implications there of what might have happened, how near a real catastrophe might have been. A few minutes’ more burning and the end would have been quite different. As it is, or so says Ken Weekes, who had had a fire a few years before, ‘The smell won’t go away. Sometimes you just catch it, just a whiff of it. It brings it back, I can tell you.’
Shirley stayed with us for a few days, the awkward subjects untouched, a sort of grinning distance between us. None of us had any idea what was really going on in her life. There had been whispers but we had ignored them. She went off to stay somewhere else, leaving behind a pair of shoes. By chance, just then, quite suddenly, resolutions: the car insurance company graciously accepted £3,000 to go away. There had been costs of more than £1,000 on top of that. I know that £4,000 may seem like a monstrous amount to get someone off your back but we were dealing with one of the biggest insurance companies, a rich and powerful organization, prepared to go to court and spend who knows how much, to batter us into submission, to extend and amplify the arguments, to explore the niceties of blame and responsibility, knowing that our funds would run out before theirs did. So we paid. Around the same time, Shirley’s ex-husband, a beautifully reasonable man, brokered a deal about the track; and the discovery of the leak in the water pipe explained the many months of problems over the water bills.
Then came the greatest shock of all. A reporter from the local paper turned up. Shirley had been convicted of stealing from her own clients at Lewes Crown Court and sent to jail for nine months. The reporter also said that over the time we had known her she had attempted suicide twice. There had been murmurings but I had understood nothing. What I had seen as awkwardness and recalcitrance were only the surface symptoms of a life in crisis. She had never divulged the reality. Just a quarter of a mile away across the fields had been someone breaking down, and we had not had the faintest idea. Her house was burnt and empty. The ivy began to grow across the windows. Her two fields turned ragged with thistles and docks.
Despite it all, Perch Hill itself was resilient. It provided resilience. It was in its heart what we wanted it to be. One morni
ng in particular that summer (it was 2 June 1996) felt as if it were the day for which the whole of the rest of the year had been a preparation. The long grind of the winter and its sense of enclos ure and endlessness; the seeping way its dankness enters every aspect of your life; the delay of spring, the long poking about looking for spring, many weeks before it has any intention of showing itself – all of the waiting had gone. The day that we had been waiting for was today.
I was up early, having to get some work into the newspaper before people arrived at the office there. As I walked over to my workroom across the yard at a few minutes past five, the tanger ine sun had just cleared the upper tips of the oak trees in the Middle Shaw. The ducks and chickens were scratching about on the compost by the old cow shed, there was a big lamb bleating for no reason I could see down in the Long Field, there was dew in the grass and the whole place was suffused with that orange-grey, cold-warm, utterly private light of sunrise.
By mid-morning, the work was done, I’d had breakfast and I’d got the day free. I don’t understand how sunshine works but everything that morning looked as if it had acquired another dimension. Far to the east, for twelve miles or so to the hills above Rye, it was so clear that I felt I could see individual trees. Westwards I could surely make out the slats in the sails of the Punnett’s Town mill, which is a good hour and a half’s walk from here. Was all this simply the sharpness and clarity of rain-washed air? Whatever it was, the whole place looked as a glass of white wine tastes.
I went down to the Slip Field. It is the one field on the farm that we all love best here, and that day it was wearing its midsummer clothes. It is a south-facing bank of about two and a half acres surrounded on all sides by wood, the oak and hazel of the Middle Shaw to the right, the long frondy arms of the ashes in the Ashwood Shaw to the left and, in front of me, at the foot of the hillside, the 2 acres of garlic flowering then in the hazelwood shade of Coombe Wood, a stinking, lush and frothy garden which squeaked as you walked through it at that time of year with the big, rubberized, smelly leaves rubbing up against your shins.
Smell of Summer Grass Page 17