The Groombridges brought their trailer, and we hitched it on to my Land Rover, loaded up the old things and drove them into Hailsham. The sun dabbed at the green tunnelled lanes. I drove at 40, with gradual stops and cautious starts, conscious of the animals packed in behind me. Margaret filled in the Sheep Movement Declaration Form: Holding number 41/019/0216; total number of animals: 13; identification mark: green ‘A’ on flank.
We unloaded the sheep into holding pens in the market and they were sorted into three lots: half good, not so good and un speakably bad. Other sheep from other trailers were going through the same process and, once sorted, were all then driven through the maze of hurdles and gated corridors into the selling pens.
I have heard that markets put heavy stress on the animals that go through them and that cattle, for example, cannot be expected to grow for a month after they have been to market, but it did not seem too bad for the sheep. All the men who handled them talked to them as they did so – ‘Come on old girl, come on then, this way then’ – and it wasn’t rough.
Even so, to my own surprise, I felt a little cheerless about it all. Some of these old sheep were from the first lot that I’d had, and looking at them now, in these market pens, I couldn’t help but think of that day when they had first arrived here and we had led them all out of the trailer and into the Long Field. Everyone had felt that day to be a step forward here. ‘Well, well,’ Ken Weekes had said, ‘livestock back on Perch Hill Farm.’
Memory summoned other times: lying out one night that summer in their field and in the dark finding, amazingly, that the sheep luminesced – round, moonlit bundles scattered across the grass; this spring’s lambing, the anxiety, the acid cold of the March nights and the strange, casual passion of it; one or two of their sisters dying, for no known reason, in the middle of an otherwise eventless summer day. ‘Animals are the soul of a landscape,’ Rudolf Steiner said, and in Hailsham Market that was the phrase that came to mind.
There were other things there too. I didn’t want these creatures to go for nothing. I wanted a good price. The auctioneer and his cluster of buyers were starting on the fat lambs down at the other end of the market and the rhythmic, lulling-aggressive banter of the auctioneer came drifting up over the pens. The old ewes, the cull ewes, were the last category to be sold and it so happened that my three pens were the last of all.
There were three big buyers there, one a wholesale butcher from Essex who buys 140,000 cull ewes a year for what is called ‘the ethnic trade’ – Muslim retail butchers and Indian restaurants, mostly in London, doner kebabs, mutton curry, that sort of thing – and a couple of Sussex farmers, who will pick the good from the bad and make their profit that way. The three were all physically big men. The Essex butcher was shaven-headed, had two pipes in his back pocket, a mobile phone attached to his waist, and drove a shiny new Discovery. The joshing between them was tough, commercial, competitive, no more than half-funny.
I stood and watched as the noisy cluster came near our pens. ‘Straight off the Downs, they are,’ the auctioneer said of one lot, the ends of his tie tucked in between the buttons of his shirt. ‘Real good sort of big things, they are. Don’t be stupid. Has she got teeth? She’s got more teeth than Hannibal Lecter.’ The sheep-dogs were nosing about the alleyways. The auctioneer described one of the buyers as ‘the onl fifty-five-year-old bachelor in Sussex still living with his Mum. Aaaaah.’ The man flicked him a V sign and everyone laughed. Prices were running high. There was a sort of savage buoyancy in the air.
The group arrived at our pens. ‘From Brightling,’ the auctioneer said curiously, ‘Mr Nicolson.’ I put my hand in the air and the small group turned to look. ‘Some big Suffolks,’ the auctioneer said and the serious buyers, with their sleeves rolled up over hairy arms, climbed into the pen and felt the backs of my sheep. A muddle of protective-defensive thoughts went through my head. ‘Twenty-eight, eight-fifty, nine, nine-fifty, thirty I have.’ The price climbed, quickly, dispassionately. ‘Are you bidding or are you having an itch?’ He was bidding and the sheep went in the end to the Essex butcher for £35 each. The second-best three also went to him for £33 each. We came to the remaining seven, the truly bad, end-of-their-lives animals, and the Essex butcher turned away. They were not worth the bother, and he pulled some tobacco from his pocket. The auctioneer squeezed a bid of £12 out of one of the Sussex farmers. There was no energy in it, the lot was an embarrassment but somehow, still, the price crept up and these old scrags were finally knocked down for £18.50 each. ‘Stupid,’ Fred Groombridge said. ‘I wouldn’t give a fiver for one of them.’ So it had been a great morning: £333.50 (minus commission) for thirteen end-of-the-road sheep, all thanks to BSE and the flight from beef. Watching them walk up with the others into the big red, multi-tiered Essex lorry, the green As still there on their sides, I felt as if my children had done well at school. The money would pay for something; not much, but something.
At seven o’clock the following evening, I was feeding the dog when Ken Weekes’s burglar alarm went off. Sarah and I knew what it was: the manic oscillations of the alarm, its unworldly wailings, shrieking and booming across the orchard and the Cottage Field. The early night was already solid black, it was raining slightly and I didn’t think twice. I shouted at the dog to come, grabbed our giant Dragon torch, a sort of portable headlamp, and ran out of the door.
I had to hurry. Ken had been burgled in the daytime a few weeks previously and on that occasion I was up at his house within about five minutes of the alarm going off, to find the front door kicked in, the jambs smashed to pieces and a drawer in a bedroom upstairs hanging half open and rifled, like the lolling tongue on an exhausted dog. I then crept around the house, banging open the door of each room as I came to it – this felt absurd, cop showy – anxious not to find a person inside, but the burglar had gone. Later that day, Ken’s wife, Brenda, found one or two of her things scattered along the lane to Burwash: an old bundle of tissues, a pendant, treasured but not valuable, thrown from the burglar’s car window like the discarded wrappers from a box of chocolates.
So I knew I had to hurry if I was going to find anything more substantial this time than a broken pane of glass and an empty house. The beam from the torch was jagging and veering all over the lane and the wood as I ran uphill. I had passed the gate into the Cottage Field and was opposite the entrance to Blackbrooks Wood when I saw the man coming down the road towards me. His whole body was white in the beam of the torch. The white drops of rain were flicking everywhere around him. He was coming definitely and deliberately towards me.
That was frightening; there was no fear or reluctance in his movement, just a steady walk down the lane towards me. I had stopped as soon as I saw him and, as he kept moving towards me, my own fear grew. I kept the bright beam of the torch on his face, still 80 yards away, and screamed, ‘Who are you? Who are you?’ He didn’t answer but kept on towards me. I shouted at the dog to get near me and began involuntarily to walk backwards, the torch still on the man, keeping the distance between us unchanged. He was holding something in his right hand. ‘What’s that in your hand?’ I screamed at him. ‘A bottle,’ he said. ‘A water bottle. I know this looks bad.’
I felt tight in my neck. This stupid situation, this chance of a fight in the lane at night in the rain. I heard my own voice coming out desperate and violent. ‘What the hell are you doing here? Don’t get any nearer me. Stay there. Stay there. Stay where you are, will you?’ This is simply how fear makes one talk.
All he was getting was the beam of the torch and the strangulated, wildly aggressive voice in the dark. He was now 20 yards away. He had an empty plastic Evian bottle in his hand and he was holding his head away from the light in his eyes. He had trainers on and an anorak. ‘I know this looks bad,’ he said again.
‘Get down there,’ I said. ‘Walk in front of me. Get down the fucking lane.’
I let him pass me on the far side of the lane and we started walking back down towards our hous
e. I kept 10 yards behind him and as he walked in the beam of the torch in front of me, he put his hands in the air, surrendering, his right hand still holding the empty water bottle, dangling up there in the light of the torch like a lit and rather blurry lantern. I hadn’t asked him to do this. He was treating the torch as though it were a gun and I can only suppose that my own terrified voice had in some way terrified him.
Of course, I hadn’t worked out what would happen next. What if this man had been violent? What if he had been armed? What if he had tried to knife me? Not a single moment’s reflection or calculation had been given to those questions.
Still shaking, I marched him into the kitchen and told him to sit down. I saw then that he was shaking too. Sarah called the police. I offered him a cup of tea, which he refused, and I then wrote down his name and address. He said he’d been out jogging. He had a whole string of emotional and financial crises in his life at home. He knew this looked bad. It was the last thing he needed. He looked at the floor and rubbed his head and eyes. I didn’t ask him any questions, I didn’t search him and I didn’t feel, once he was sitting here at the kitchen table, that he was any threat.
The police arrived, in two cars, a policewoman and two men. They had taken 20 minutes from Hastings, fifteen miles away on small country roads. Two of them searched Ken’s house for signs of break-in and one sat in our kitchen talking to my man. ‘You look nervous,’ the policeman said. ‘Frightened of what they’re going to find?’ He said he wasn’t, and he was right. The searching police returned: no hint of a break-in. It was a false alarm. ‘There has never been a false alarm with that system in two years,’ I said. ‘Must have been freak weather conditions,’ the policewoman said. They drove the man home and I comforted Rosie, who had been crying with the commotion. Next morning Ken came over and told me that the detectors on the windows were sensitively set. ‘You’ve only got to tap the glass and they’ll go off,’ he said.
Sometimes in the summer Sarah and I have lain awake at three or four in the morning listening to the poachers in Blackbrooks Wood, on the other side of the lane from our house. The stinging smack of a rifle shot in the middle of the night is a strange thing. You feel as alert as the deer for which it is intended. You listen, entirely awake, for the sound of movement or even voices over there in the wood. There is silence and you wonder … That silence lasts and then, from nowhere, the noise of an engine pulls out into the night, the headlights stream across the dark, the smoke of the diesel exhaust is picked up in their beam, and then the van turns away, its lights throwing the hedgerow trees into silhouette, and you listen as it moves off towards the village.
It is the sort of thing that makes you wary, much warier than either of us would like to be. Ours was the only house in the lane that was not burgled in the first two years of our being there. In the past, this has been classic thieving ground. As Roger Wells quotes in Victorian Village, his study of nineteenth century Burwash, it was said of this parish in the early years of the century that the ‘labouring Class had become very dissatisfied, disrespectful and insolent to their superiors, riotous and turbulent, ready for extreme acts of depredation, prone to Robbery, violence, and lawlessness’.
Only the truly rabid would think of describing Burwash now in quite such fruity terms. There is no more than a little burglary here and there. Nevertheless, there is no need to be starry-eyed about the facts. Despite the apparent slosh of money, we live on the edge of an area of high unemployment (eleven percent, compared with 6 percent further north and west around Tunbridge Wells or East Grinstead), which has been given special economic status as a Rural Development Area. Poverty is an everyday reality. So, here on the boundary of rich and poor, with what looks like disposable wealth lying about unprotected outside, theft seems an inevitability.
There is one form of wealth readily to hand and it is regularly taken: roofs. Roof theft is one of the signs of our attachment to a hand-made past. You are driving along a lane. It’s one you know well. Just around the corner, as you come to a rise from which you get a sudden view over the Weald, there is an old farmhouse with a huge pitched tent of a roof.
The roof is a wonderfully crinkled micro-landscape of its own, covered in clay peg-tiles, many of them crusted in yellow lichen. Some of the tiles are bowed slightly out of true so that the tiny shadows thrown by their lips vary as your eye runs along the length of them. These Wealden roofs are beautiful things, pegging the houses down into the landscape. They are often, in this steep up-and-down country, the first part you see of a house or its assembled barns.
But one day you turn the corner and the roof isn’t there. Or at least the roof structure is, the timbers, the felting and the laths for the tiles, but the tiles themselves have gone, ripped off and removed. The house looks odd, top-light, so to speak, like a guardsman with his bearskin off. Usually the tile thieves don’t manage to get every last tile and the roof is left with quadrants of its old surface in the uppermost corners. The arc of what remains is a measure of the thief’s final reach as he stood on the roof-battens before a car in the lane panicked him or his co-burglar thought they’d got enough and to risk any more would be dumb.
Roof-thievery is profitable enough. You can’t exactly lock a roof up, and for a thief it will represent a good night’s haul. A fair to middling roof might have 12,000 tiles on it. If you were to buy them from a builders’ merchant, they would cost 70p each or more. The merchant puts on a hefty mark-up; anyone selling tiles (‘from a little barn this friend of mine in Hampshire wanted getting rid of – he wanted to put a nice garage up’) will be lucky to sell them at 45p each, £450 a thousand, which would be £5,400 for the load.
I am told that if there were a pair of you, and if you really went for it, you could get 1,000 off in half an hour, that’s six hours for the roof, in the depth of the night, 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., and then you are away, the yield as anonymous as you like. One tile looks pretty much like another. There are, of course, colour variations between tiles made within a few miles of each other, depending on the clay, but that makes passing the goods on even easier. Identifying the area from which tiles have come is nearly impossible. It’s a sure-fire theft. Someone somewhere will, soon enough, be happy to pay the owner of an antique architectural materials showroom something like £8,000 for your night’s harvest.
So the wheel goes round: demand for old-looking roofs means, inevitably, the destruction of old-looking roofs. I know one new roof on a building a few miles from here that was completed on a Friday and had disappeared by the Monday. Everyone around here now has insurance against tile theft and you could look on the whole business as quite a contribution to the local economy. I’ve heard it said that roofers, short of work, have stolen the tiles, sold them, advertised their services to the recently deroofed and then been paid to replace the tiles they had so recently lifted.
At the approach of winter when the world prepares for closure and withdrawal into itself, you come to appreciate the enclosure of a house, its protective envelope. This was the time for shutting down, for the dumping of excess and the reduction of risk. Old leaves padded the sides of the lane so that you found yourself driving down a brown leaf runnel. The sodden bark of the trees and their twigs were leather-jacketed against the outside. The ponds were full to overbrimming. No insects moved, except one morning a lost butterfly, flittering inside my workroom and dying there, so that it came to lie stiff and dusty on my desk like a fragment of an old dress too fragile to wear. The hops I had hung up in the autumn turned crisp with the heating. A bee, drunk with winter, crawled hopelessly across the window, all wrong, bemused in a nectarless world.
At night with the torch, that November, I could catch the amber eyes of the deer, grazing out in the field beyond the wood now that the leaves had fallen. The grass was the only food to be had and the deer were dining on it in secret. In the early morning, when the light was still hesitant, half there, with the arms of mist pulling back into the wood, you could see the deer’s dark bodies,
still grazing, the last of the night shift before they too faded back between the trees, present one minute, absent the next, as the owls hooted for the last time and the day came on hard, if somehow still dark for all the light it brought.
All day long the fox would cruise up and down the fields between us and Coombe Wood. He was furtive and cat-like, a sneak among the grass, so that at times he disappeared behind a higher tuft, a slink of reddish brown in the dew-soaked field, low-slung, white-eared, padding through his territory. It was the time to worry for our ducks and chickens, which had been wandering about all summer and autumn as though no threat existed in their lives. At least the ducks had an island in the pond. We were making a new ark for the chickens around which, no doubt, the fox would taunt them at night, round and round with the smell of fear, the brilliant killer and his stupid prey. But what would happen when the hard frosts came? What would happen to the ducks then? The pond would be no moat for them. I would have to shut them up for days on end. It was not the time for openness.
I felt some hibernating impulse at work in us too. I found myself wanting everything tidied away, as though all the looseness and excrescence of the growing time of year were inappropriate now. We had been messy all year. Old cement sacks went wafting around the yard. Piles of semi-dealt-with stones, old paving slabs, some hardcore which never went into the trench it was intended to fill, bricks for a retaining wall which had yet to be built, steaming piles of manure, bean-sticks pulled out once the beans had been picked – all this lay around like the remains of a party no one had bothered to clear up. Urns from some flower arrangement Sarah had done in July were still where she had dumped them out of the Land Rover one warm summer evening. The lobster pot I had brought back from the Hebrides in early September was still stuffed into a corner of the cow shed. None of it looked fitting any more.
Smell of Summer Grass Page 19