At least the fields were good and tight. This year we had, for the first time, managed them in the right way: grazed them hard over the winter, right down to the bones of clay and mud, let the best of them grow away to a big hay crop which we took in mid-July and topped them twice after that. They looked as grassland should and I didn’t mind taking people round. ‘This field looks nice,’ they said. What better feeling could there be than that, a well-made, well-kept piece of landscape for which all the people here who had helped over the year were responsible. Will and Peter Clark, Dave and Carolyn Fieldwick, Ken Weekes, Fred and Margaret Groombridge, Ray Bowley: they all had a share in how ready the place now looked.
We had sold our ram lambs and got good prices. We had sold our old ewes and old Roger. The remaining sheep were now with the new ram, a big young Kent, and would be lambing with his progeny in April. We had remade the driveway and redug the pond, putting it back where it was marked on maps before the war. An old man came by one day and said, ‘I’m glad to see the pond back.’ That was good. The oast-house had been finished. The trees planted in the orchard last winter seemed to be growing all right, although one or two had died and needed replacing. The financial crisis of the autumn had been weathered, eased away. I had signed a contract to write a book, some money was coming in, our heads were above water. We could look forward again. There were hedges to go back on the old lines from where they had been torn out over the last 50 years or so. I was thinking of planting a new wood to divide up our biggest field, Great Flemings, and to give us chestnut poles for future fencing and hazel for the wattle windbreaks without which gardening up here was nearly impossible.
Sarah wanted to grow organic vegetables on a commercial scale and we drew out the plot on Beech Meadow, the most fertile of the land here. (Although we never made it.) As the year closed down, and as the dark began to colonize the beginning and the end of each day, the tightness which that brought seemed enabling not debilitating. Hibernation was clarifying the purpose of being here at all. The rush and tumble of the more open times of year tended to obscure the point, which now, in the growing dark, emerged quite clearly. It was this: simply to get it right, to do it properly, to make something good that integrated all the virtues of a good landscape, a good place for people to be and work in, and a good way of farming and gardening. For the first time, on these cold and sodden mornings, I was starting to think we might one day get there.
I started sowing yellow rattle seed in Beech Meadow. Because days were short and I was too busy, I had been doing it just in the dark of the evening, as the frost was coming on and the grass began to crunch underfoot.
Yellow rattle is a slight and unimportant plant, which grows in hay meadows that have not been improved with new thick grasses and clovers. It is a sign of infertility, and infertility is, on the whole, what wild flowers like. At the end of summer, in the hay, the yellow rattle develops little round dry pods, which is why the plant is known, at least round here, as yellow bollocks or rattle bollocks, the loose seeds inside the pods still rattling even when the hay has been baled up.
But there’s something else about yellow rattle, which was the reason I was walking slowly up and down our fields with a bag full of the crusty seed those winter evenings. It was more than just a means of escaping from an overheated house. Yellow rattle is semi-parasitic on grass. If you can manage to establish it in the sward, it will begin to drain away some of the vigour with which the dominant grasses grow. It’s a way of reducing their dominance, of beginning to provide the conditions for some kind of herbaceous democracy in which all those other flowers we want here, the dyer’s greenweed, the vetches and the orchids, might begin to decorate this landscape again.
It was only a trial patch of three acres. I bought three pounds of the seed, a pound an acre, for £60. It had been collected the previous summer as part of a pilot project to restore floweriness to the meadows of the High Weald. No one was quite sure yet whether it would work, but the large plastic bags in which the seed came looked like the promise of a diverse and beautiful future.
I walked up and down in the cold of the evening, on the grass grazed tight now by the sheep. We would keep them in there until the end of February and then shut the fields up and let everything in them grow on until the hay was cut, late in the summer. I took handfuls of the seed out of the bag as I walked along, letting it dribble out between the fingers of my hand. I didn’t scatter it as I might have been tempted to, like Millet’s Sower, flinging handfuls of the precious stuff into the last of the evening light. You need a far more even, as if windblown, distribution to get the maximum effect.
Up and down, up and down across my fields, I felt like a draught-horse at work, not really considering what I was doing but in a removed and contemplative frame of mind. The clear plastic bag in which the seed came was identical to the clear plastic bag – albeit inside a small copper urn – in which I and my sisters had taken our mother’s ashes a few years ago to a place in Switzerland she knew, a flowery meadow above Wengen in the Bernese Oberland, where, before she died, she had asked for them to be scattered.
This sowing of gritty mixed seed was rather like that strange, half-sad, half-gauche moment. I didn’t dribble my mother’s ashes through my hands. I simply tipped them slowly on to the grass straight out of the bag as we walked along. The wind took the lighter stuff away but the bulk of it fell on to the Alpine meadow like a top-dressing of some kind. I wondered then what the effect would be on the plants, what the biochemistry was of human ashes on Alpine flowers. Should I aim to spread them more widely? Would too much in one place be too rich for whatever was living there, too many trace elements in one helping? I started to swing the mouth of the bag to and fro, scattering the ashes more widely and thinly in the way that the nozzle at the back of a lorry salting the road scatters the salt in even swathes across the whole width of it.
At the very end of that bag, as of this one with the yellow rattle in it, the same moment came. Some specks of grit remained stuck in the corners, somehow held there by the plastic, so that only by holding the bag upside down and tautening and snapping it along its base would those few flecks of human ash, or, now, of yellow rattle seed, drop out on to the grass.
Why was it so important to leave these bags pristine and empty? Why must even the slightest speck be distributed on to the ground? Because ash and seed are not to be wasted? Surely not. There was no practical consideration here. But the idea, then, of putting even a microscopic fragment of my mother’s body in the waste-paper basket in a hotel room in Grindelwald – which is where the plastic bag went eventually, along with the urn, so flimsy that it bent like a Coke tin – was unconscionable. And perhaps, with this seed, the memory was too strong and the parallels too close to treat the yellow rattle in any other way. One bag and one sowing felt, however odd this might sound, like a continuation of the other. And when I saw Beech Meadow washed with the pale flowers of yellow rattle the following summer, I thought of the hillside above Wengen, from which the hay had recently been cut and raked, and where the tourists on the mountain railway were looking out through their passing carriage windows, wondering what my sisters and I were doing with that bag of something, halfway through a rather sultry morning one weekday in July. And of course, in part at least, we were wondering the same thing too.
A World in Transition
EVERYWHERE AROUND us there were signs of a world in transition. One evening I went to a meeting at the Horseshoe Inn in Windmill Hill. Farmers and their wives, perhaps 200 of them, had come here – from the High Weald, from the Pevensey Levels and from the Downs. Here were the Sussex farmers, not rich men, nor in your tailored tweeds, but in heavy jerseys drawn tight over the shoulders, rough, kitchen haircuts, faces in which the wind had broken the veins, and a certain tense reticence, a lack of ease in the public forum, overlying a sense of unfairness, of an injustice being done to them.
They were all stock men, cattle and sheep farmers, and they all used Hailsham Mar
ket to buy and sell. I’d seen some of them there before. It was a necessary part of their business, to realize some cash when they needed it, to sell at high prices and buy at low. The nearest other markets, apart from Rye, which was small, were at Ashford in east Kent or Guildford in Surrey, both possible on a big occasion but too far on a regular basis, taking up most of a day to get there and back. These small farmers needed Hailsham Market if their businesses were to work.
But Hailsham Market, like nearly everything else in their lives, was under threat. The government had banned the building of out-of-town supermarkets and so the livestock market’s location, within the confines of Hailsham itself, made it an ideal candidate for development. No one was sure who wanted it, but the name on everyone’s lips was Sainsbury’s.
The company that owned the market was getting £24,000 a year from the site. If they could sell it, with planning permission for a supermarket, it might be worth £1.5 to £2 million. In other words, the current return was 1 percent of the site’s potential value. If the market could be closed, the site could be sold, the shareholders would realize a huge amount of money, the supermarket chain would be happy … and East Sussex would have lost its only cattle and sheep market.
In a back room of the Horseshoe Inn, a grey, functional, modern space for company dinners and anniversary dances, the farmers were crammed in, standing against the walls when the chairs were full. The local press sat at a table on the side. We were addressed by the chairman of an action group and then by a solicitor who described the threat to the market and the way to lobby against it.
Already Wadhurst, Lewes, Heathfield and Haywards Heath had lost their livestock markets to the same pressures: a growth in direct sales from farm to abattoir and an increase in the value of the market sites for other purposes, such as supermarkets or housing.
The solicitor, in his beard and grey suit, his fingers interlaced on the desk in front of him, dispassionately described what was obviously felt as an emotional issue in the room. Although his purpose was to motivate the farmers, he scarcely roused them. They listened to his description of the arcane processes by which Parliament works and of the methods they could adopt to address those processes, but the very way in which he talked made it all seem unapproachably foreign, as if this were not something an ordinary farmer could have anything to do with. At one moment he said, ‘There are lies, damned lies and developers’ promises.’ The room shifted at that, but its scarcely articulated anger did not emerge.
It then turned out that sitting there, in the front row but at one side, was the developers’ own representative, Martin Robeson, Chartered Surveyor, of Littman and Robeson, acting on behalf of Carter Commercial Development. In the strangely theatrical way of these things, he looked exactly as a developers’ agent should, with the sort of suede and black fur car-coat a developer in a TV drama would wear, a fairish goatee beard and a soft cow-lick of hair across his forehead. Questions began to drift away from the platform and towards him. He smoothly answered anything that was thrown at him, about the viability of the market and the ultimate purpose of his involvement here. ‘Just because we intend to suspend the obligation to have a market here,’ he said, ‘does not mean to say that we will close the market.’ There were jeers at that. A farmer from Punnett’s Town – I could see his fields across the valley from Perch Hill – said, ‘As I see it, big money and vested interests are overriding the interests of local people and that is a disgrace.’ There was applause for that and Robeson took on the role of bogeyman for the meeting, so that whenever he stood up to speak a grumble of resentment accompanied his words.
I spoke to him afterwards. He was in a hurry, he had to get back to Oxfordshire, but he smiled and said they had received ‘a lot of quite expensive advice about this, so we feel pretty confident we’ve got a good case. On a long-term trend, the market isn’t viable. The graph goes down.’ He angled his hand towards the floor. ‘We can prove that. And if the market is not viable, then something else has got to happen to that land. OK?’
As we went out to the car park, I spoke to Buster Davis, a sheep farmer from Great Worge just up the lane. ‘What do you think, Buster?’ I said. He smiled. ‘They’ve got all the money, haven’t they? That’s the problem. How do you fight that kind of thing? How do you fight it?’
As it happened, there was a stay of execution for Hailsham Market. The whole of the local community gathered against the predators: the council, the NFU, 235 farmers, scores of butchers, market traders, shopkeepers, peers of the realm, vicars. Together they orchestrated resistance to the supermarket and in the summer of 1997 the Bill to allow the destruction of the market, which had been moved by the developers in the House of Lords, was thrown out. Nothing was more effective than the speech by John Wrenbury, the non-stipendiary minister at Dallington, a bagpipe-playing Old Etonian ex-solicitor and hereditary peer. ‘A market is a friendly place,’ he said.
You meet your friends there. You chew the cud. You have a drink – at least you do if the market is in Hailsham. A drink is important. You enjoy bangers and mash in the refreshment booths. You catch up on prices and are able to see what you are buying and what you could get if you were thinking of selling. Local gossip is exchanged. Old friends meet one another. Problems and complaints are aired. Know-how is exchanged. Crop performance and cattle prices are discussed.
And that is only half the story. The wife is happy. She is taken into town to do her shopping. The local traders are delighted to see her and she meets her friends. Indeed, for some wives it is the only form of outing they get. One farmer wrote to me saying that being a farmer these days is a very lonely occupation because he has had to dispense with his farm hands. There is a great deal more to a market than an accountant ever realizes. It throbs with life and interest. Yet these are the very things that the Bill will do away with.
Lord Wrenbury and his friends won, a triumph for East Sussex. As Guildford market closed in 2000 and as Hampshire lost all of its markets, Hailsham became the only stockmarket between Ashford in Kent and Salisbury in Wiltshire or Thame in Oxfordshire. Even then, safety was not assured. In 2006, another supermarket, Aldi, bought the land on which the market was held. Two years later, the multi-national company which had bought the market company itself collapsed. Only in January 2009 did a consortium of local farmers, the Hailsham Market Action Group, manage to buy the market company from the administrators. Now something strange started to happen. According to Janet Dann, secretary of the Action Group, the market which had been preserved as an important part of Old Sussex, the place where the small farmers of the Weald, the Marsh and the Downs could all meet and chat, started to grow and burgeon. It was not, on the whole, because large-scale farmers were starting to use it again but because the new type of farmer – small-scale, the urban escapee, with a few head of cattle and a small flock of sheep – found it to be exactly what they wanted and needed, just as their predecessers had done since the thirteenth century when this market began. Miraculously, it seemed that this social organism had just, by a whisker, been saved from destruction. As I write this in the spring of 2010, they are not yet out of the woods, however. The lease on the market site will run out in two years’ time and if it is to survive the market will have to move, probably to the outskirts of Hailsham. In a recession, money is short and grants are becoming thin on the ground. No one yet feels secure.
That was one small stand against the flood. Otherwise, the local integrity of local places, sustaining local ways of doing things and local economic networks, out of which grow local social habits and a sense of locality in its richest forms – all that was draining away in front of my eyes like the suds in a soapy basin from which the plug has been pulled.
The farm sales were the worst. They were all, in their different ways, the same. Prinkle Farm, over at Dallington, went one sunny day. The tenant farmers had reached retiring age and their children had no wish to take it on. The 90 acres of heavy, steep clayland, even if run together in one unit with t
he neighbouring Carrick’s Farm on the hill above it, could scarcely support a viable business. Closure was the most rational outcome: the tenants would go, the farmhouse would be sold or let to some ex-urban incomer, who could afford the rent or sale price, and the land would be absorbed in some larger enterprise. That was what usually happened. There had been a steady stream of farm sales around us. At each one, the life and belongings of the old farmers were sold away and the new money came in, nostalgic and acquisitive in equal measure.
At the sale itself, the crowds expressed nothing but delight as they picked over the remains of an existence whose time was now up. Hay knives, brass scales, horse harrows, implements whose use few could now recognize, cast-iron pig troughs, even cast-iron foot protectors, once strapped to their boots by men digging potatoes for too many hours at a stretch, had been dragged out of the back ends of sheds and half-abandoned barns and paraded here as ‘mantelpiece stuff’, ‘bygones’, ‘collectables’. That was what got people excited and there was something vulturine about the excitement, a ravening for the carrion.
It was on a beautiful morning. The sun shone on the thousands of acres of Dallington Forest, arrayed before us around the flanks of the Dudwell valley. From the one or two farms scattered among the trees you could hear in the distance the heifers bellowing.
In the banky field opposite the farmhouse, three or four hundred cars and Land Rovers, some with trailers, were parked in ragged, shiny rows. And in the other banky field, the far side of the house, those innards of the farm were on show, long ribbons of intestine streaked across the field. All week the identical twin brothers, John and Peter Keeley, now sixty-four (Peter 10 minutes the elder), who had farmed here for the last thirty-seven years, had laid out everything they could find. The auctioneers had brought other lots in from other farms. Over 1,000 people had come to the sale, some from as far as the eastern end of Kent.
Smell of Summer Grass Page 20