Neon lights overhead. The hall is painted a slightly tangerine version of magnolia. Framed photographs on the wall: cricket teams from the 1920s, groups of gamekeepers and bellringers from the decade before, the SS Brightling, a helicopter shot of a large merchant ship, labouring in heavy seas. Some residents of the lane, a district councillor and Mr Furness from the County Council Highways Department sit in the outer ring of red stacking chairs. One of the village policemen is here, but not in uniform. There’s hardly a tie or jacket to be seen. It is a cold night but the room is warm, if stark. This is, apparently, the best-attended meeting for years. The atmosphere is slightly lowering.
Although there is other business – planning applications made, planning permissions given, all the usual nitty-gritty – the reason we are all here is the lane and so the chairman brings that to the head of the agenda. The clerk reads out a letter written to the parish council late last year by Mr Furness, the Highway Manager. In it, he describes the root of his problems: money. The funds are no longer there to maintain rural lanes in East Sussex. As part of a £5 million cut the year before, lane maintenance was reduced quite literally to zero. No money, no maintenance. It was as simple as that.
The people in the room don’t, on the whole, like the sound of what they are hearing. A larger symbolism and a fat wedge of significance seem to lie behind this relatively minor point. The lane – and by extension the villages themselves – are being deprived of funds. Is this the beginning of a long, slow strangulation by municipal authorities, which are essentially urban and have lost touch with rural needs and the rural frame of mind?
I’m sitting in the back row feeling guilty. The previous year I canvassed the residents of the lane about its future. I had heard about the budget crisis. I knew that various pressure groups, and even the Department of Transport, were engaged in new thinking about the future of small rural roads. Should the car, it was being asked, continue to have primacy in small lanes, at the expense of people living there, their dogs and children, and anyone who might want to walk or ride or bicycle in the lanes and generally enjoy their quietness and beauty? Why should car drivers be able to insist on universal access, dominating lanes even when they were not there simply by the threat of their presence? Shouldn’t the lanes be a place for multiple use? That was the sort of prejudicial question I put to the residents and, not surprisingly, most of them thought, with one or two quite fierce exceptions, that closing the lane to cars at some mid-point was a good idea – as long as it didn’t mean they would have to pay for it themselves.
That had been the residents’ response. It was not the tone in the village hall that evening. There was a stronger charge to the atmosphere than you might have expected. After Mr Furness had spoken briefly, amplifying his letter, emphasizing that there were no plans to close the lane nor for the council to relinquish the principle of paying for its upkeep when it has the money, first the Brightling and then the Burwash councillors aired their anxieties. Could money not be saved on verge cutting and put towards road maintenance? Didn’t the council realize that the lane was essential for people coming through from Dallington to the station at Stonegate? The alternative route was at least 2 miles longer. (Mr Furness estimated that to go round by the longer way, were the lane to be closed, would take an extra one and a half minutes.) One of the Burwash men spoke of ‘wanting to return us to the age of the horse and cart’. The people of Burwash and Brightling did not want to be returned to the age of the horse and cart. There was talk of weight restriction and width restriction. One councillor had received a letter from a lady who suggested that signs should be put at the top and bottom of the lane saying that neither lorries nor burglars were welcome down it. That got a laugh.
Mr Furness gracefully accepted the points made and returned to his nub. There were no plans to close the lane but no money meant no maintenance. He accepted that in places it was rough. It was, in fact, he admitted, the roughest stretch of public road in the whole of East Sussex, particularly under the wood, where the trees sheltered it and the water lay, the frost penetrated and the surface fell apart. Mr Furness was managing decline.
It was my turn. As I began, I saw a look of long-jawed scepticism descend on the faces of the parish councillors. Oh, please, no, their faces said, not him. One held his head in hand, shaking it slowly. But I was not to be put off. The very roughness of the road, I said, was just what was wanted. It was, I went on, traffic-calming for free. The roughness meant people went slowly and that lorries hardly came down it at all. People could still use it if they really needed to but they couldn’t race through it. Bollocks, the faces said.
I read out Kipling’s description of this very lane in Puck of Pook’s Hill: ‘Puck jerked his head westward, where the valley narrows between wooded hills and steep hop-fields. A road led down there through thick, thick oak-forest, with deer in it, from the Beacon on the top of the hill – a shocking bad road it was …’ That was its historical condition. Brightling and Burwash would actually gain something if it kept a lane in that condition. Think how their families would enjoy it. Think how lovely it would be to walk down in May, with all the flowers on the laneside banks.
None of it cut any ice. I was from a different world. The very instinct which had brought us here in the first place set us apart from the people who already were. Anyone who had lived in Brightling all their lives had no interest in rough lanes, or at least in the price to their convenience which rough lanes would bring. To have taken up that idea would have been to reverse the thinking of a lifetime, a frame of mind which focused on improvement, comfort and ease, not a thickly embedded sense of ‘here’. We were after different things.
Sarah’s and my presence at Perch Hill was yet itself a signal of something having gone. The ways of the past were draining away as we watched. For all our love of cattle and wild flowers, for all our attachment to hedges and woods and grazing made thistle-free again, we were the agents of change. We came from the world which disliked hunting, which made its living from books, newspapers and television, which had a hunger for the rooted and the rural because those things were not natural to us. We were the otherness we dreaded, tourists putting down roots, the toe of the eroding glacier, loving the country we were wearing away.
As it turned out, I lost the argument about the lane. Neighbours of ours driving low-slung Alfa-Romeos didn’t like the roughness of the lane. They persuaded the council to resurface it. A team came to do the job one day, intent on laying a smooth mat of black tarmac on the old rutted and raddled surface. A man with a chainsaw went ahead of them, to lop off the limbs of the oak trees hanging over the lane so that the tarmac-laying lorry could fit underneath. Sarah and I found him as he was about to cut off the long, near-horizontal branch belonging to the oak tree at the corner of our garden, as if a stretch of tarmac could ever be worth twenty feet of oak. We managed to save that but nothing else the length of the lane. Its sides were shorn, the loppings chipped, the surface smoothed. In the month after the new tarmac was laid, there were three accidents in the lane, entirely the result of drivers feeling they could drive faster than before. We could sit in our kitchen and listen to the screech and crunch as the cars collided from the longest and smoothest of slides.
Things were changing here. Our own relationship to Perch Hill was changing. The early tight circle around our lives, the intense and sustaining need for it as an enclosure, which had driven us so fiercely in the early days, was becoming dilute. The urgency of our appetite for it had given way to something more integrated. The cord had loosened and there were sad departures. That spring Fred and Margaret Groombridge decided to retire and from the day they didn’t come I missed them. To our great sadness, Will Clark died and was buried in Burwash churchyard. At his funeral, the sun shone and the traffic roared down the village high street. From his grave you could just make out, a little more than a mile away, the last of our fields, the Way Field, dipping down between the woods towards the river. In the afternoon sunshine,
the field was like a green flag, glossy with new growth, and a beautiful colour like the polished skin of an apple. It was neither browned off like those around it that had been part-abandoned, nor the chemical blue-green of those of some of our neighbours, who were pushing their land hard with nitrogen top-dressings. The colour of our grass was both richer and more natural than either, and for that lovely cared-for green I had only Will to thank. He had spent hour after hour on the tractor, topping the fields, nailing the weeds, bringing the farm back to health. He had been ill a long time. We all loved him.
Ken and Brenda decided to move away. He too had looked after us. A multi-talented man, he built beautiful walls and converted sheds to greenhouses. He could install electricity and was an expert joiner. He dug trenches and designed duck-houses. But more than any of that, he gave us all access to other things: a contact with the past and with Sussex; a sense of continuity amid all the changes we had imposed; any number of introductions to the local world of Groombridges, Keeleys and Bowleys, the underlying essence of this part of the Weald; and an unending sequence of jokes and stories rolling round and round the kitchen table.
Now Ken and Brenda were leaving for a house in Robertsbridge, travelling back down the road he had come up in 1942. The trust which owned their cottage was selling it. Ken had been at Perch Hill for fifty-six years, Brenda for thirty-nine. I looked out of the window one evening just before they left. Ken was walking there, Gemma his dog at his heels. Perhaps I was over-interpreting it but it looked as if his tread was heavier than before. He climbed the stile into his garden slowly and laboriously, conscious, I am sure, that this was the end of something. Gemma died the day they left and she was buried in the garden of their new house. Ken planted a rose Sarah and I had given them in the earth above her grave. People like the Weekeses wouldn’t live at Perch Hill again. Ken felt that his moving was only the natural end of something that had been going on all around him for the last 10 or 20 years. ‘I’m a stranger here now,’ he said. ‘It’s all changed. There’s hardly anyone I knew as a boy still here. It’s sad really.’ None of the five former dairy farms in our lane was now occupied by a farmer, at least in the strict sense of the word. We were all incomers now, deriving our livings from other places: the City, the media, estate agency. Only the Moodys in the nursery at the top of the lane, a lady who grew cyclamens and Sarah – to some extent – were actually getting a living from the land.
I found myself looking for the fragments of the past, for those elements in rural Sussex which had either gone or were on the point of going.
Late one winter I attended the annual South of England Hedge Laying Society Competition Day. Was this where I would find the past still alive? It was in full swing from about nine in the morning. About forty men – no women – from all over Surrey, Kent and both halves of Sussex, each with their 10-yard section of hedge, were confronting the task in front of them. The hedge was a tangle of overgrown hawthorn, spiky blackthorn, briar, bramble, one or two oaks, a goat willow here and there, old wire and mud. The hedge-layers had to cut, lay and bind this into order by 1.30 that afternoon. Then it was lunch and prizes in the Golden Cross Inn.
The grumbling discontent was already apparent when I arrived: the allocations of hedge had not been fair. As usual, the hedge-layers were divided into four classes: Novices, who had never won anything; Seniors, who had won at least a novice class; Veterans, which meant over sixty, but there was one man here who was eighty-six, swinging his chainsaw around his head as if it were a cheerleader’s pompom; and Champions, who had at least won the Seniors before.
I had done a very small bit of hedge-laying myself and I could recognize easily enough if a hedge could be laid without problems. The whole task is to re-impose order on plants that want to break free of it. Hedge plants all want to become trees; laying a hedge is slapping them back into use. It used to be a common skill and it’s not that difficult. The need for it disappeared when wire fencing arrived after the war: cheaper, quicker, easier and uglier. Before that, every farm used to have a man doing nothing but hedging and ditching all winter. Although it takes great skill to produce the beautiful pieces of craftsmanship the champions create, it is quite easy to make something that is crudely passable.
I quickly walked round the competition site. It was quite clear that the Champions class, seven or eight of the big men of the hedge-laying world, national champions among them, had been allocated by far the best stretch. They were cruising along, laying the plants – the pleachers – at a steady 30-degree angle to the horizontal, a pattern that was already looking like swept hair, combed out, regular.
Further down the ladder, things were not quite so happy. In fact, the further down you went, the unhappier they became. The Champions had been given the best stretch, the Seniors the next best – plenty of material, on the whole, but some big trees in amongst it – the Veterans worse than that, with thickets of briar on either side of the hedge, and the Novices, poor dears, stuck down on a hedge dividing the fields well away from the road, an absolute hell. The mood down their end was bad. Some of them were standing in cowy sludge halfway up their shins; others were faced with a stretch of ‘hedge’, only half of which was there.
Ian Johnson, a polite and dignified man, a retired town planner and novice hedger, slogging away at a few intractable hawthorns, had his hair plastered to his head with sweat. He looked suicidal. ‘It is a bit of a …’ he said, leaving that gap out of courtesy. Next to him, Fred Hoad from Dorking, ‘a semi-retired venture capitalist’, was more forthcoming. Was he enjoying himself? ‘No.’ What was his section like? ‘The worst I have ever had and the muddiest patch I have ever seen.’ How would he describe it? ‘A bitch. Half of it’s rotten at the bottom.’
I asked the president, John Wilson, why the best had been given the best and the worst the worst. He put his finger in his mouth like a boy found out. ‘You couldn’t trust the Novices with the roadside. It’s got to look good on the roadside.’ That was part of it, but why weren’t the Champions given the Seniors’ stretch? No answer to that but we all knew what was going on: unto every one that hath … the old story.
Up with the Champions, life couldn’t have been sunnier. Des Whittington from Blackboys in Sussex said, ‘They call me Dick. You can understand why.’ ‘Yes,’ says Alan Ashby, one of the greats, next to him, ‘and that’s the right word for Whittington.’ Ashby and Peter Tunks, from Horley near Gatwick, national champion in twelve out of the last fourteen seasons, had just done two miles of hedge-laying together on the M1. Where was that? ‘Between Junctions 8 and 9, northbound. Another lot were doing the southbound.’ What were they like? ‘Rustic,’ Ashby said.
It was all like that: heavy joshing. At 1.30 the hooter went to mark the end of the time. Half the men didn’t pay attention and carried on working for twenty minutes or more. The chief steward couldn’t be found – one theory was that he’d gone off to lunch. Eventually we all ambled off to the pub. The hedge we left behind looked wonderful, a neat, twiggy-basket line of living plants, stockproof, resilient and with a future.
There was a stinging surprise in the tail. Peter Tunks, one of the world’s best, had produced, as ever, what looked like an immaculate piece of work. He was not happy with it – ‘a bit gappy’ – but he never is. After lunch, the prize-giving. The Novices and Seniors were announced. No controversy. John Wilson, the president, won the Veteran class. Everyone was pleased. Then the Champions class. In reverse order: 4th John Savings, from Oxfordshire, one of the Midland boys; 3rd Dave Truran, from Burgess Hill, who’d been struggling with his kit all morning – the blade fell off his chainsaw – but he’d come through; 2nd Alan Ashby, all smiles. At the table I was sitting at, everyone was predicting Tunks. ‘It’s got to be Tunksy, hasn’t it?’ ‘And the winner is Robert Graham.’ The young man from Five Oak Green near Tunbridge Wells received his trophy and thanked everyone blushingly. Tunksy was unplaced.
I started asking afterwards why the star had come nowhere. Sudde
nly, a man in the pub corridor, I didn’t know who he was, flew off the handle. ‘We don’t want you coming here and questioning our judge’s conclusions.’ There was a distinct red patch in his neck. ‘A judge’s decision is final. What do you know about hedge-laying, anyway?’ I found Tunks. He raised his eyebrows. ‘It’s all part of the game, isn’t it,’ he said. Mystery on mystery. But what, really, did any of this have to do with the rural past? Could it really have been like this before? Had even hedge-laying entered a modern, de-natured condition?
Of all the trashed inheritances around us, none was more shocking than the big wood that surrounds the whole eastern end of our farm. It was, in my eyes anyway, a wreck. It was a symbol of precisely what not to do if you are entrusted with a place that is full of ancient significance and layered meanings. Its modern condition is a monument to hubris, to the pitfalls of arrogance, to the careless substitution of what looks like a good scam for an apparently less productive and outdated way of doing things. It will take centuries to mend the damage that has been done, if it ever can be.
High Wood used to clothe the sides of the Dudwell valley. It formed a wooded belt between the last of our fields and those, a mile away, belonging to Bateman’s. The land on which the trees grew above the fertile valley floor is poor, mostly acid, sandy heath, full of heathers and broom. It could never have been cultivated. The wood was certainly older than any records of it, a fragment of the forest that once covered the Weald from edge to edge, a place of deep stability.
As Kipling wrote in Puck of Pook’s Hill, these were ‘the woods that know everything and tell nothing’. They became for him a sort of reservoir of the English spirit which could emerge from the leafy shadows for an hour or two and then blend back into them, a place where the gates were down between the landscape, the idea of history and the feeling of other lives and other spirits inhabiting the world we call ours.
Smell of Summer Grass Page 22