It was the field itself which was the zone of heaven that day. Its slippy soil meant that it had never been reseeded with commercial grass mixtures and so here, between the garlic and the bluebell woods, hidden from the world but open to the sun, was our field of flowers. There were sheets and sheets of the yellow vetch with blood-red tips called eggs and bacon. Here the common blue butterflies flitted in pairs, their blue backs just greying to silver along the outer margins of the wing. Curiously, those precise colours, and their relationship, a silvery lining to an eye-blue wing, was exactly repeated in the speedwells that grew in mats among the yellow vetches. Beyond these beds of eggs and bacon, with a scatter of blue among and above them, where the dog and I were both warmly lying, the buttercups and the daisies, with pink fringes to their flowers, spread out to the margins of the woods where the pyramidal bugles clustered a darker blue against the one or two bluebells that had leaked out into the field. The dyer’s greenweed was not yet in flower and only some tiny forget-me-nots and the taller spiky speedwells added to the picture. A holly tree on the edge of the wood had turned pale with its clusters of white flowers.
A slight wind started the field nodding and other butterflies cruised and flickered in. A pale tortoiseshell hung for a minute on the vetches, followed by a bumblebee which pushed its entire body inside the blooms. A big cabbage white flirted with the nettles at the top of the field and then two brown moths, each the size of a fingernail, came dancing in a woven spiral across the hillside, as close in with each other, as bound to and as mobile with each other as the different parts of a guttering flame. The whole wood was needled with birdsong, a clustered shrieking sharpness, interrupted only by the jays’ coarse squawking, the sudden dropping-off dwaark of pheasants and, behind it all, the continuous, laid-back strumming of the woodland bassists, the pigeons in their five-part, broken-backed rhythm, two rising, a pause, two falling, doo-doo, doo, doo-doo, the only soundtrack you need for an English summer.
I was sinking into sleep. The dog already had, and his nostrils were twitching as he snored. There was a drone of light planes. One of Ken Weekes’s grandchildren must have been playing football up by the cottage and that snatched-at, childish shouting came in scraps and patches across the fields. A thin but unending river of feathery willow-seeds was blowing from out of the wood, on past me and down towards Bateman’s and Burwash. Here and there a thistle standing in the field was covered in the willow fluff it had picked from the passing air.
All this was nothing compared to the soporific warmth of the sun, on the field and on my back. My shirt itself felt hot from the warmth it had absorbed. Even the hot dog next to me smelled nice, but then perhaps I only thought that because he was my dog and I thought him wonderful anyway. I rolled over, turned my face away and down into the grass, buried my nose in the sun-warmed turf, breathed it in, smelled how good it was, its hot vegetable dryness, and knew that coming to live here was the best thing I had ever done.
Peaches on the Cow-Shed Wall
NOTHING IS more calculated to turn one into a pork pie than the arrival of a poet on the doorstep. We had one staying that August and the experience changed me into a no-nonsense member of the Rother Weald Branch of the NFU. ‘Don’t you realize,’ I heard myself saying towards the end of his time, ‘that the country is where food is produced?’ Jason, who was twenty-two, looked back at me with the comfortless gaze of a man who had yet to suffer. He was the son of some people from whom I had shamelessly cadged accommodation and food a decade previously when touring the western half of the United States. Reasonably enough, they had now sent Jason over to do the same to me. We had 10 days of him and then he went off walking somewhere in southern Spain.
Jason was into haiku. It was quite charming to start with and I encouraged him to produce some pieces about the farm here. He gave me his first little Japanese creation on the second day at breakfast:
Hawk
twitch of long grass –
elegance of ambush.
‘Thank you, Jason,’ I said and felt, at least, that here was someone who was on my wavelength. But I wasn’t totally at ease. Jason’s wanness, his silences, the way he never said anything unless it came out perfectly rolled and made like a sushi – that was difficult. I longed for him to burp or knock something over or spill gravy on his shirt. Surely a little lack of control might be considered Zen too, mightn’t it?
One morning when I came down to breakfast, he said ‘Hi, Adam. How are you?’
‘Fine, thanks.’
‘Good, well done,’ Jason said. ‘I think it’s a great thing for someone to be able to say that about themselves.’
Just as exasperation was setting in, he would come out with something beautiful. I took him to see our sheep. Roger the ram was still in a field of his own, with a couple of ram lambs for company, and the ewes and ewe lambs were all together on the other side of the lane. The mothers were wearing the sheep bells I had bought for them in Majorca. Peter Clark had said the bells were stupid and cruel. ‘How would you like it?’ had been his unanswerable question.
All the same, as I explained to Jason, I loved listening to them. If you heard them from a field or two away, they sounded like snatches of a conversation which you couldn’t quite pick up. I don’t know how many times I have sat on a mountain in southern Europe, listening to their hollow, half-carried half-notes. Jason said nothing but that evening he gave me this:
Sheep bells:
toc toc –
olives in the oakwood.
Ken Weekes came to lunch and told his stories all the way through it, beaming away at the gnomic Jason, and Jason played his part to the full, economical in his courtesies and self-contained in his stillness. Ken’s performance culminated in his favourite story about the hunt – the one that ends with ‘Why don’t you fucking well bugger off out of there?’ Jason’s silence was a little black hole at one end of the table. That evening he gave me this:
Farmers:
tang
of horseradish.
Even though I have since learned that those three lines are a fairly direct adaptation of a famous haiku about samurai, that was the high point of the 10 days. For some reason, Jason’s offerings became increasingly dark and more obscurely critical, as though we, and by extension this place, somehow embodied everything he most hated. Sarah and I would sit up after the others had gone to bed, wondering what were the implications of one or two of them:
Perfected garden:
the end
of youth.
which did nothing but fill us with gloom. Or there was:
August sunshine:
old brocade
hanging from the trees.
That sort of thing was alarmingly exact, identifying precisely the upholstered, claustral thickness that gathers around this time of year, a sort of outdoor stuffiness, which on the worst of days affects everyone’s mood. I came to think that a general air of discontent was being spread through the entire household by this man. He came to seem more and more like a parasite, indifferent to the difficulties of getting on in the world and with one’s life. And there he was, eating my food and drinking my drink. I saw in him, I now realise, what some of the serious farmers round here have said they see in me: an exaggerated aestheticism, an ignorance and even arrogance about the facts of life. He was the kind of fantasist who is so bound up in his fantasy that he doesn’t know that it is one.
But he couldn’t be so casually dismissed. What he said did have an odd and unnerving access to the truth.
The morning he left, he gave me his final verdict:
Sheep bells:
toc toc –
empty gestures.
I folded the piece of paper twice, into a little square, and put it in the bin, feeling hollow and old.
After he had gone and for years afterwards, what he had said, or more what he had suggested, often came back to me. Where really did I stand? Was I just an aesthete, interested in no more than prettiness? Was I really just
an empty-gesture merchant?
I don’t think so. And I pin my justification to this: increasingly when people arrived at Perch Hill they responded in a way I came to recognize. They saw, first, that they weren’t coming to ‘a country house’ in that gravel-and-Labrador style. This was not a place in a tweed suit. Its ragged edges seemed like the signs of vitality, not neglect. Just as a busy workshop or a sculptor’s studio or a writer’s workroom always has an air, at least around the edges, of near chaos, the tidelines of past projects laid one on top of another, as if the meaning of the place is not in its finished effect but in the making itself, in sparks flying when live wires are joined, or that wonderful hiss as the iron is quenched in the deep black water tank in a farrier’s workshop – maybe these analogies are too strong but Perch Hill seemed to these people to be beautiful in the same busy, intent way.
The place, then, was almost a side-effect of the life that was lived in it. When people came here, they noticed not a place but a life, something under way, with all the chance of failure and raggedness and a mismatch of resources to ambition which that involves. Off-chance visitors tended to stay a little longer than they had meant to; they came back with their friends; they walked around the garden and farm with the sort of look on their faces which they might have when tasting a new kind of pudding or wine: curious, quiet, silently delighted, wondering what it was they had stumbled into here. I feel sure the reaction came from an understanding that in doing what we have done here, we have allowed it to breathe. So much was there before we came and we have given that new expression. We have recognized that we are dependent, not dominant here. And that look on the curious, bemused visitor’s face is what I would show anyone who said I was a dilettante, a poseur or an empty-gesture merchant. Like millions of people all over the world since human beings first gave up hunter-gathering and made for themselves a place they liked to think of as their own, we have pursued and nurtured something good here, which is about settlement, sustenance and steadiness shot through with vitality, beauty and delight. And what is trivial about that?
There were some strangely late peaches that September growing against our cow-shed wall. By the middle of the month most of them were ripe, if still rather small, the size of apricots. Those autumn mornings, their skins were wet with dew. One day, Rosie and I ate them for an autumn breakfast, standing in the cold morning sun just after eight o’clock, me with two jerseys on and her in her school uniform, side by side in the vegetable garden. The sun was coming over Coombe Wood and the juice dribbled down our chins. It reminded me of the story of James Thompson, the luxurious 18th-century poet of The Seasons, who was found one morning in the fruit garden of some large country house, nibbling at a peach that was still hanging from the tree. He had his hands in his pockets. What a sight: those lips and teeth gobbling to catch the mousy skin, the fat poet, his unbuttoned stance, his casual acceptance of paradise dangled by his nose. It was like a little model of what Perch Hill was giving us: nothing huge, nothing lush, but almost unbearably sweet.
The autumn storms came bulling into our lives. One night in mid-September, I felt as if the house had been at sea all night, the frame of the wooden roof above our bed adrift in a wrestling wind. I thought I must have been dreaming it, this manhandling of the building by the air, but I wasn’t. In the morning, the frame had clearly shifted. Hairline cracks in the plaster had opened a hair or two wider. Everywhere you looked you saw them: dark, roughly drawn graphs up in the corners of the rooms or where the roof met the walls, little jagged longitudinal lips that had opened and only half closed, like the caulked seams of a ship that had worked in a storm. If you put your cheek next to one of them in the bathroom, you could feel the air whistling in. This was what these wooden houses did. All our rooms upstairs had the marks of old cracks that had opened and been sealed, opened and been sealed, over and over again ever since the frame was put up 400 years or so before. Ken Weekes said it was in the wood. ‘That’s one thing you can be sure of,’ he told me. ‘Oak never dies.’
The wind was still careering around the farm. I was dealing with my agonized tax affairs and no weather could have been better suited than those equinoctial gales. It went without saying, of course, that the staff of the Inland Revenue South East office in Cavendish House, Castle St, Hastings were some of the most charming and helpful on the planet, and were preternaturally understanding about cash-flow difficulties and revenue-stream bottle-necks (my ref: 057 d 58979/ncp). Nevertheless, those ‘Dear Mr Nicolson’ letters did have something of the reality dose about them. It was all the oast-house’s fault, its massive budget overrun, knocking out cold any chance we might have had of staying out of a debt even deeper than the one we were in already. I was working for newspapers at the time, writing anything for which they would pay me, columns, features, interviews, op-ed pieces, straightforward reporting, thousands of words pouring out week after week and the income sluicing down the sinkhole called Perch Hill Farm. At the time Sarah, looking after our little daughters, was working mostly in the garden and not earning much. The whole edifice was teetering on the rather narrow basis of the computer on my desk.
The tax demand sitting on the desk in front of me that morning was a fat, slapping, smacking squall of reality coming snorting into our lives. All those balmy midsummer ideas for this and that change, this fencing and hedging scheme, that alteration to the back of the house, the new roof to the barn, the new tractor and cart shed: the whole lot was blown heedlessly away. I could stand at the window of the oast-house and watch our plans being tumbled and driven far out to the other side of the millennium, those distant, sunny, cash-filled fields, from which the burden of backlog tax, a pernicious weed, would at last have been removed.
There was an exhilaration to this moment. At least the thing had been faced and we were still there. I had been walking around the farm that morning, in the wind, the real wind I mean, trying to chew over schemes for generating some money and delaying the payment of bills, but I could hardly concentrate. My whole field of vision was taken up with the excitement of the wind’s sudden, savage blanching of the trees. Summer was over; here was the gateway to a whole new way of seeing things.
I’d never looked at wind the way I saw it that morning. It articulates the landscape it disturbs. All still things are alike in their stillness but every windy thing is windy in its own way. That’s the stripping pleasure of a wind. It breaks the landscape apart; each element becomes itself. Perhaps this was no more than a mechanical thing, the angles at which branches join the trunk, the inherent strength of twig and leaf, but the effect is that the wind makes the landscape talk.
Outside the garden gate the willows were driven by the wind, their bright and glaucous underleaves exposed as the wind blew down on to them. They were like girls with blown hair. I looked at them and saw an actress, a long-haired blonde – is it Julie Christie? – her hair blown hopelessly all over her face. She picks at strands of it but the wind plasters them back across her cheeks and eyes. She shakes her head to free herself from them but they won’t leave her.
In the garden, the Victoria plum was still overladen. We should have unburdened the tree of the fruit but we hadn’t and the top branch had snapped with the weight. Poor old thing, bowed down with her trappings, not Julie Christie but a jewelled duchess, somehow, tragically, or at least pathetically, broken down mid-ball.
There was a general cowering of the trees. The whole roof of the wood, as I looked out across the five miles of the Dudwell valley below us, was glossed and whitened in the wind. The blasts were humpbacked as they arrived at us: a low and slow building to a peak in which the big oaks suddenly seemed much bigger, out of phase with themselves, a broken swell stirring about in their branches, with different winds in different parts of the tree and then, quite suddenly, the gust dropping sharply away and we were waiting for the next.
The clouds cruised past the tiled ridges, a frame a second, and in the distance a deeper grumbling note marked the passage of a gu
st through the big wood. Down in there, sheltered by itself, the wood was still. The upper branches were waving among themselves and it was like standing as a child in a giant football crowd, with a crowd of waving men far above you, that sweeping-dying roar, but hoarser than a roar, almost a whispered roaring, heard far above you where, in manic circular motion, the trees were waving at events you could not see.
Out on the other side of the wood, the blades of new grass, after hay, twitched and flickered, the antennae-whiskers of the meadow. Along the edge of the Way Field, the hollies clicked like the quills of an anxious bird. The seed-cases of the horn-beams beside them made the high, dry chatter of rattled maracas. The ashes were all blown to pieces, their fronds offering no more resistance than a palm in a hurricane. The beeches, hammered by the summer, were now hammered again by the first of the autumn wind. They looked more bruised than anything else but at least the lower, sheltered branches were all right, dark but still fresh. It was up in the windy fringes of the beech that the leaves suffered, blackened in the wind, desiccated and made useless. No tree travels a greater distance from bright to dark in the course of a summer, from maidenly to matronly, the spring’s most brilliant debby green to this heavy darkness, a whole life in a year. Beneath them, on the small birches colonizing High Wood, every little leaf was struggling on its imprisoning stem.
There was a sort of bustling, a boxer’s movement, to all the big trees here, the oaks especially, working at the wind, weaving away from its advances, a knitted, dodging, evasive dislike in the movement. The wind was unkind, the end of summer: we’d had the cheque; here was the bill.
Some money had to be raised and so we decided to take some of the old ewes to market. I went through the flock with Fred and Margaret Groombridge, picking out the ones that were past their best and, as Margaret said, ‘would only be trouble if you kept them’. The ones to go, thirteen of them, were marked with a squirt of green spray paint on the back of their necks.
Smell of Summer Grass Page 18