The chubby auctioneer, in shirt and tie, began. ‘Look at that view,’ he said. ‘That’s worth £50.’ There was a buzz around him, a swarming so thick that only if you pushed in could you see him conducting the sale, lot by lot. These redundant objects were stripped of their dignity by the appetite for them. A group of three rather corroded old spring balances, used I suppose to weigh sacks of grain, lay on the grass in the centre of the clustering swarm. The usual rigmarole. ‘What will you give me? Let’s have a hundred. Eighty. Give me fifty. Fifty. I have fifty. Fifty-five. Sixty.’ And so it went up. These things, neglected for twenty, thirty years, who could say how long, sold to someone with some kind of farm museum for £80. A hay-knife went for £40. Nostalgic money, or at least money that intended to make money out of nostalgic money – there were thought to be at least 15 dealers here – poured out into the sunshine.
At the end of the row, we came to something else. It was a large Massey-Ferguson seed drill, in good shape, capable of sowing 15 rows of seed at a time, a relatively hitech tool even if not of the most modern air-pressurized kind. It was a so-called combine drill which can inject nitrogen-based artificial fertilizer into the soil at the same time as the seed. It had obviously been kept in a shed and there was no rust on it.
‘A fine Massey combine drill,’ the auctioneer said. ‘What will we have? Three hundred? Two? A hundred pounds? Fifty? Any bids? Any bids at all?’ The crowd was silent around him. Some of them were clutching the bygones they had bought already, the cracked buckets, the unidentifiable implements, the blades from a rootcutter, the wormy hay rakes, the paring spade and the trenching gouge. Nobody wanted a tractor-drawn combine drill. Somebody offered a fiver and there was a little flurry, £7, £10, £12, £15, and there it stuck. £15 for a £3,000 seed drill of some real use if you were a cereal farmer but rather too big, at 12 feet by 8, for a mantelpiece.
‘They would have got more if they had taken the wheels off and sold them separately,’ a farmer said to me. But why did no one want it? ‘Because you’d have to disc-harrow the field before you could use it. No one can be bothered with that.’ Some tractors went for a couple of thousand and some mowers for a few hundred. The ewes averaged less than £40 a piece and the cattle under £300 a head, less than they had been bought for in the spring. It was all upside down: the decrepit was treasured, the useful and the healthy scarcely required.
I went to see the Keeley twins the next day. We sat and talked in their garden. They had never been apart for sixty-four years. Even when they did their national service, they had been together as radar operators in Fighter Command. ‘He’ll come on to say something,’ John said, ‘and I’ll come out with it,’ Peter said. They both sat on the edges of their chairs, both picking with their fingers at the other hand.
They were disappointed with the livestock but pleased at how the dead stock had gone. ‘We were amazed at some of those prices,’ Peter said. ‘We couldn’t believe some of it,’ John said.
‘A pig trow, cracked, for £50 …’
‘Those horse harrows …’
‘… we didn’t even know we had half of it.’
‘Those were the harrows Father used.’
‘During the war …’
‘… three hitched together.’
‘The best one went for £25, was it?’
‘£30, wasn’t it?’ They looked only at me throughout the duet. This was the end of something. They had never sprayed their pastures ‘because Father says it kills all the vetches …’
‘… all the herbs.’
‘We just run the mower over it.’
What Father says remains in the present tense. The sale had been ‘a terrible day, a terrible emotional day’.
‘My stomach was churning over all day …’
‘… turning over and over.’
‘A terrible emotional day.’
John was staying in a bungalow in Dallington. Peter was moving to a house in Ninfield because he couldn’t afford one in the ‘village on the hill’, as he described the place he had always lived. ‘That’s what I’m most sorry about,’ he said, ‘leaving the district. It won’t be the same.’ Ninfield was just over six miles away. Something had come to an end.
The catastrophe was going on all round us, the ebbing of a tide, leaving a new and denuded geography. The Weald is a place of small farms, 100 acres on average, and more woods than anywhere else in England; of low incomes, intractable soils poor in trace elements and great beauty. The exigencies of the modern market have made this whole way of life virtually untenable now. The impact here falls not on farm-workers but on the small independent tenant farmers who have always been the backbone of the place. This is not a world of large farms with many hired hands. Each success in the past was a family success; each failure now, the failure of a family enterprise. It was always dairy country, but the Weald dairy herd had dropped by 40 percent – 20,000 cows – in a decade. The number of full-time farm-workers had declined by a quarter in the same period.
The District Council made a study of four Wealden parishes which found that, of seventy-five farms in those parishes, not a single one could make enough profit to provide a market return on the land, labour and capital that were needed to run it. Low incomes meant no reinvestment, which meant lower incomes in the future, which meant no investment, which meant decline and collapse. Wealden farmers were already deeply in debt, far more than the national farming average, and there was already a danger that they would not be able to keep up with their interest payments. By the late 1990s many were hanging on, hoping for something better, not wanting to give up the lives and the places that made them what they were. The general farming decline compounded a situation already taut and tense with strain. Failure was being staved off week by week.
Yet these beautiful and unprofitable farms were worth a fortune. A pretty, comfortable farmhouse and 100 acres or so of wood and pasture were selling to the urban rich for anything up to £750,000. ‘Why not let the market take its course?’ a particularly cold-brained city analyst said to me one day at a drinks party where we were leaning against a fireplace together. ‘Let the uneconomic farmers go out of business and realize their one real asset – the place. Send them off to live on the investment income and allow the commodity brokers and merchant bankers the pleasure of owning their place in the country. The real value of the Weald is now effectively as extensive suburbia. Any other outcome would be artificial.’
That was, effectively, what had happened to upstate New York or Connecticut. The farms had been abandoned, driven out of business by the massive cheapness of the prairie, and the trees had reinvaded the pastures. You could drive for miles through derelict landscapes where the old field walls net the scrubby woodland like the ghosts of a life once lived; where clapboarded family residences, occupied by Martha Stewart clones, preside over their own private, wood-hemmed clearings. Why not let the Weald become Connecticut?
I felt a big raging no come up inside me. Why not? Because the essential quality of the place comes from the sort of farmers and woodmen who made it. Lose them and the place would be lost, the people would be lost, the life of the meadows and the coppiced woods would be lost.
A wrinkling realist sneer crossed the lips of the city man. ‘What are you going to do about it, then?’ I made him a speech. The place derived its qualities from being a labour-intensive landscape. Modern farming orthodoxy had seen labour-intensiveness as the great enemy, to be eradicated at all costs. But labour-intensiveness, as some people were now coming to realize, was the essential ingredient of the good landscape. It employed more people; it attended to the needs of the landscape more closely than a system whose priorities were set by the requirements of the machinery and chemicals used to run it; it generated other jobs; and it created places that other people would want to come to, see and stay in.
Didn’t this provide a clear model for the future of any agricultural subsidy? Don’t pay farms to sack people and then ruin the landscape with the
giant labour-saving machines the subsid ies allow them to afford. Pay farmers to employ people and to look after the more close-knit kind of landscape that people love. Hedges need hedgers. Payments should be made not per acre, as they then were, but per man employed. If there was a stimulated demand for farm labour, then farm wages would rise, the rural economy would benefit and so would rural services. Instead of money pouring into the pockets of machinery manufacturers and chemical conglomerates, it would be spent in the village shop. People made places good.
Of course, one can be sentimental about the local, about the old ways of doing things, and all too easily forget what was wrong with it. One day that year in Burwash, someone put up a large placard on his house wall. It said simply: ‘Keep Burwash Clean and White.’ Its author wouldn’t talk to me about it. ‘It was only up there 12 hours,’ he said. ‘To tell you the truth I didn’t know what I was saying and I got so much strife about it. The village, the police, the lot, they were all giving me grief … So I’m sorry but it’s no comment. That’s all I’ve got to say.’
There had been a plan to set up an Indian takeaway in an empty shop – it was, by chance, the building in which my neighbour Shirley Ellman had once had her accountancy business – down at one end of the High Street. It had been met with a general burbling discontent, at least from those who lived at that end of the village. Only the author of the sign had come out quite so blankly with the racial purity line. The other arguments had focused on the traffic hazard of having a takeaway on that difficult corner, the lack of car parking and the possibility of litter. They pointed out that an application for a fish-and-chip shop a couple of years previously had met exactly the same objections and that one of the pubs had had a huge success with a Thai evening not long before, which was more than welcome. So the problem with the Indians was nothing to do with their race or colour. When you mentioned the poster, there was a slight, smiling turning away, ‘disgraceful’, not the right way to go about this at all. Only at the margins did the objectors move off on to hazier ground. They began with the idea that a place should be able to decide what it wants for itself. It was all about ‘keeping Burwash a village, with a village atmosphere’. After a little downwind drift, this argument started to talk about ‘a nice village’ and then perhaps ‘a nice English village, with a traditional English atmosphere’ and then, if you began to ask what it was that might erode that atmosphere, the smell of the rejected alien began to waft across the Sussex fields.
Once I was attuned to the presence of this thought-chute in the ways of rural England, I started to detect it everywhere. By chance, after seeing the white supremacist poster in Burwash, I happened to be talking on the phone to a local lady. We were discussing the most insistent pressures on the rural landscape, roads perhaps, housing certainly, when without any warning she took a swerve into dangerous territory: ‘Let’s be honest about it, Adam,’ she said confidingly, ‘we don’t want fuzzy-wuzzies and nignogs, do we, and you’re bound to get them unless you’re careful.’
Perhaps this is everywhere, virtually unstated, or stated only in private, the hidden but governing motivation of rural England. It brought back to mind a charming and wonderful man I knew once in Somerset. He was an eel fisherman. He knew everything about those secret and magical creatures, their lying-up places in the rhynes and ditches of the Levels, the way to catch the elvers as they came in off the Atlantic, smelling their way to the sweet fresh water of the moorlands, and the excitement of the silver eel harvest when, on a stormy and moonlit night late in the year, with a big spring tide licking its way deep inland, the adult eels, their backs silvered in maturity, make a sudden rush for the ocean, in places teeming across the fields like a disease or an infestation, rustling in the night past your feet in the grasses. Everything about this man and his intimacy with the place where he lived was to be admired. But then I asked him what he did with the eels that he caught. ‘I send them up to London,’ he said. ‘We put them in boxes with holes in so they can breathe, and when they get there it’s the Jews that eat them. We don’t eat them. It’s only the Jews in London that eat that sort of thing.’ No description of anything could have seemed more alien to him than ‘the Jews in London’. The phrase was shorthand for everything that was not his and not known, not down there with him in the wet, private world of the Somerset Levels.
I wonder now, in the light of this, if my own liberal attitude is not in something of a muddle. There is little I value more than the kind of local distinctiveness which oozed from the eel-man’s pores. He was the human version of the place he lived in. He drew his sustenance from the almost purely local and as a result had a kind of integrity which had its roots in the closeness with which he was moulded to the place. But it was precisely those same qualities which led him to think about the Jews in London in the way he did.
Can you have one without the other? Does the fluidity and acceptance of the strange, which is central to a liberal view of the world, always eat away at the sense of the local which is so valuable a part of the rural landscape? Is local distinctiveness necessarily intolerant of the foreign?
Part Four
GROWING
Divorcing from the Past
THE INTENSE colours with which Sarah has planted her garden, a kind of beautiful smoky richness that sharpens in places into the brazen and the garish, have, I hear, drawn adverse comments. The garden doesn’t go with the landscape. Its colours are much too strong. It’s nothing like neat enough. It’s untrammelled, unconfined. No one has ever done such a thing before and that is a good enough reason why no one ever should.
One summer at Perch Hill, we had a party and it felt like a prefiguring, in an almost ritual, ceremonial way, of the future. We had the party in Great Flemings, overlooking the valley of the River Dudwell, with the stepped and wooded ridges of the Weald folding back one after another to the north and east. The field had been mown for hay and the new grass was thick with clover like a flowery lawn. One open-sided tent for supper was at the top of the hill, another smaller one for dancing halfway down it. Simon Barden, who at that time drove the tractor here, had made a giant wigwam of a bonfire twelve feet high, from a pile of well-seasoned oak, cut two years previously from a tree that had begun dropping its boughs in the drought, just at the time that Stephen Wrenn had died. A few splashes of diesel in the foot of it and the thing burnt like a torch for six long hours, still there when I last saw it at three o’clock in the morning, a hot glowing ring like a fire-disc in the grass.
About fifty people came, and we drank and drank and danced and danced, untrammelled, unconfined, and the place itself, so soft and inviting in the last greying light of the evening, played its part. Deep in the night, long after any of us remembered what time it was or should be, the fireworks from the National Trust’s annual party down at Bateman’s in the valley below began to pop and glow in the sky beside us. Our hillside is about 250 feet above the valley floor and the rockets rose to meet us. Their burning trails were left behind them like the stalks of one gorgeous fire-flower after another, a giant night-garden flowering for our benefit. We had planned it like this; we knew it would happen; but this vision of fireworks swimming up towards us seemed then like a purely spontaneous eruption of beauty. We lay on the grass and stared at them, drinking in the booms they made, the old woods and fields reverberating with this sudden, man-made delight, as if the whole lit valley were saying, ‘This is what life can be like, this is what the world can give you, this is how happy you can you be.’
That is a recognition that can come and go, be forgotten and remembered again, but on that party night the brightness seemed to be there for a while, irradiating us all, a ratchet clicked up, a point of optimism from which the whole future could be bathed in light.
By the time the decade and the millennium were coming to an end, Perch Hill and my life with Sarah had begun to have the effect I had longed for. I had become stronger again. I had regained my confidence. I could turn to other things. After writing
the book about the restoration of Windsor Castle, I wrote a history of the ill-fated Millennium Dome, and then, as an escape from the poison of metropolitan politics, I spent much of a year away in the Hebrides, writing Sea Room, a book about the small islands my father had given me when I was twenty-one. That was followed by others which led me down different and intriguing paths: a book about Jacobean England and the making of the King James Bible; a long sailing voyage up the west coast of the British Isles, exploring the small offshore islands on that coast and ending in the Faeroes; another about the officers in Nelson’s fleet at Trafalgar; an exploration of Arcadianism in Renaissance England; and then, on the radio, a series on the land- and seascapes of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Looking back on this now, I can see it as a weaning off the nurturing bosom of Perch Hill. I had slowly grown to the point where I no longer needed it. This deep slow shift in our relationship to the place had taken seven or eight years. And as we were changing, Sussex was changing around us. The idea that we might fold ourselves into this pre-existent world faded away as that world itself started to fade away. In its place, of necessity, came something else: the idea that we could make here not something that mimicked the past but something which could take the best of the past and somehow fold it on into the future.
The result was that what we were doing at Perch Hill and what was happening around us started to diverge. Our little micro-world began to burgeon – with all the difficulties that can accompany growth – as the larger world of the Weald seemed increasingly to be forgetting its past, an implosion that smelled of defeat and failure.
From time to time, that shift became fiercely apparent. One Monday evening we had a meeting in the village hall about the state of our lane. It had become An Issue. It was in a shockingly bad condition; something needed To Be Done. The parish councillors of Brightling were there, about eight of them, sitting around the central table. One or two parish councillors from Burwash, which the lane runs into, were there too, as observers and commentators.
Smell of Summer Grass Page 21