The wood had most of its big oaks taken out during the Second World War. In the early 1950s it was sold to the Forestry Commission, on a 999-year lease, a legal fiction allowing the previous owners to retain shooting rights. The Commission, in its words, then ‘sprayed off the woody weeds’, in other words killed the broadleaf trees of which the wood had been made for millennia, and planted most of it up with a variety of softwoods, spruces and a kind of tall dark pine called western hemlock. In one or two places it left the old chestnut coppice and in others, where it was too wet to make wholesale replanting either practicable or financially worthwhile, it left the rough old mixture of ash, field maple, hornbeam and thorn.
The Commission put in the new roads to extract their valuable resource – roads which always seem, incidentally, unnecessarily vast for their purpose. The old draw roads by which timber was taken out are always subtly sewn into these woods, not fearsomely driven through them. The Commission then thinned its crop from time to time and waited for the final clear cut to make its killing. It never came. The hurricane in 1987 flattened acre after acre. Large parts of the wood were virtually inaccessible for years.
High Wood has now been in public ownership for over fifty years and has yet to produce a single penny of profit. The wind-devastated zone has been cleared, the ground has been scarified, new rabbit fencing has been installed, new seedlings of Scots pine and other species have been planted. In parts, the Commission has allowed natural regeneration to occur. Birch trees dominate on the sandy soil. There are one or two oaks. Here and there an older broadleaf tree has managed to survive the years of repression. Bramble entanglements fill the spaces between the school-age trees. Dead stumps of sprayed-off chestnuts poke through the thorny rubbish like the vertebrae of flensed whales.
But how much is gone! Everyone used to think of this as their wood, to walk in, make love in, make camps in, hide in, dream in, be in. But that soft communal assumption, an ancient understanding that goes beyond the law of property or contract, had been neglected and denied here by an agency said to be acting in the interests of us all.
In 2001, as a result largely of the centralization of modern farming and marketing practices, foot-and-mouth disease spread rapidly and catastrophically across the country. It never came to Sussex, but we were caught in the outer ripples of the disaster. The absurdity of what was happening struck me one week when I saw on television the epidemiologist Professor Roy Anderson, of Imperial College London, telling the House of Commons Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee that he had asked the civil servants in Defra, the Department for Farming, the Environment and Rural Affairs, for the database of farm locations by which the spread of foot-and-mouth disease had been monitored. They had sent him the data, but the co-ordinates they provided left him perplexed. Half the farms he tried to look up, as he told the committee, ‘were out in the North Sea’.
This had the MPs in stitches; there were hoots of laughter at the idiocy of computers and/or civil servants, or both. But on the ground, it became more than a joke. Foot-and-mouth hadn’t been anywhere near East Sussex, but we, like the rest of the country, continued to labour under the most pedantic licensing scheme any computer or bureaucrat could have devised. All movements of animals between one holding and another needed to be licensed and supervised by a vet, a bore for us, but also more than that.
We had some lambs in a field by the church at Netherfield, a couple of miles away, which needed to be moved to fresh grazing 300 yards down the road. The new grazing was nominally in a different holding. They needed a licence. We applied for a licence at the trading standards office in Lewes. The trading standards officer refused to grant it. Why? Because the field next to the church in Netherfield was ‘in a dirty area’.
‘A what?’
‘An infected area. The computer says it is.’
‘But there has been no foot-and-mouth in East Sussex.’
‘We can’t go against the computer.’
‘So what can we do?’
‘Talk to Defra about it.’
‘We spoke to Defra. Nothing to do with them. We should speak to Adas, the privatized agricultural consultancy (motto: ‘Helping farmers to help themselves’). Adas said it was nothing to do with them. We should speak to the trading standards people. We spoke to them again. They said we should speak to Defra again, to their map division. The map division required all the papers to do with the case. We weren’t allowed to send the details by fax. Everything had to go by post.
It is one of the more frustrating aspects of Defra culture that its relationship to modern technology is chaotic. Not only were they relying for their decision-making on computers that confused East Sussex with Cumbria, and Oxfordshire with the Goodwin Sands; if their computers broke down, which they did at steady intervals, the officials were not allowed to turn to pen and paper until the machines had failed to work for more than eight hours.
There were offices all over the country where officials were sitting for hours at a time twiddling their thumbs. Nor could any movement licences be faxed out. They too all had to go in the post. And they couldn’t be sent to the farmer who needed to move his animals. They could only go to the vet the farmer had nominated – yet another stiffening of the system. Individual vets had received forty movement licences in a single post, which they could not possibly deal with in a single day.
So what happened to the Netherfield lambs? Their grass ran out. In the two weeks the system took to work through its coils, two of the lambs died. The rest lost condition in a way no farmer likes to see in his stock. And, of course, there was not an ounce of compensation.
It was laughable. Sheer delay, the reports estimated, was responsible for the slaughter of about three million animals which would otherwise have been unaffected. There was talk of making the licensing scheme a permanent feature of farmers’ lives, to be controlled by officials who know as much about the geography of rural Britain, and the lives of those who occupy it, as they do about the Matto Grosso or the hunting habits of the Nambikwara.
The foot-and-mouth disaster occurred against the background of the campaign to ban hunting. I have never been a hunter myself and have always been more interested in feeling alive in the world than in killing other inhabitants of it. But I have never been one with a fierce ideological objection to hunting or shooting. I once spent a beautiful day chasing foxes on foot with the Blencathra Foxhounds in the Lake District, and, as I described on page 89, the last animal I shot – or to be honest shot at – died of a heart attack.
I had missed the hare I had aimed at but it then died of fright. A shameful thing.
Twenty-seven years went by. I sold my guns. I even sold the guns my grandfather left me, a beautiful matched pair, whose value was poured into the overdraft. Shooting belonged to a previous existence. Every morning at the pond in our farmyard, when we went out to feed our ducks there with a handful or two of mixed corn, there was a small, although nowadays increasingly large, train of refugee pheasants that came silently and with great dignity after the squabbling, nattering ducks had barged their way in towards the scattered corn. There is a high-stepping gait to the pheasant which, especially after rain with their high-coloured feathers all bedraggled with the wet, turns them into White Russians, aristocrats fallen on thin times. The ducks are like fishwives next to them, English born and bred, indifferent to the higher forms of melancholy.
Of course I felt sympathy with the pheasants. They looked like portraits by Graham Sutherland, or members of an ancient family eking out an existance in a National Trust house which was no longer theirs, Cavaliers left over after the King’s head had been cut off, their dignity somehow bound up with their sense of impotence. Why did they exist, except to provide a moment’s diversion for a well-heeled, amateur killer, who was either thinking of what would happen at lunch or slightly hazy with its after-effects? At the Day of Judgement, when the pheasant-shooters are lined up on one sside of the court and the pheasants on the other, could there ever b
e any doubt which would be sent to heaven and which to hell?
And I’d been beating once. I had somehow imagined it would be a noisy, whooping business, but it wasn’t. The other beaters and I swept in a curving line through a plantation in almost total silence. Only the sticks knocking against the tree trunks could be heard and the occasional high-pitched whistle for a dog. It was as though we were drawing a net in, ushering the pheasants into the foot of the bag. They scuttled ahead of us, silently and creepingly. It was a strange piece of theatre, three groups of us involved: the silent, knocking men, the silent, creeping birds, and the silent, waiting guns.
One or two birds shuffled into flight, blustering through the larches and then out into the field, gathering height and then over the wood in which the guns were standing. The air smacked with the sound of the cartridges going off – a big, flat-palmed slapping of the air – and the pheasants flew on, virtually every one of them, completely unaffected. The beaters were guiding hundreds of birds out of the wood over the line of guns; the men in suits and ties were banging away at the pheasants overhead and missing. The keeper and his team of beaters stood and watched as the carefully raised, fed, nurtured and now driven birds flew towards their destiny. Bang, bang, bang, bang, went the wood, like an upper-class laugh, the pheasants flew onwards and the keeper turned away smiling. ‘Useless,’ he grinned.
Then, in the winter of 2002 one of my friends and neighbours asked me if I would like to come for a day’s shooting. ‘Why not?’ I said. So I turned up, Saturday morning, ten to nine, a beautiful day, diamond clear, frost on the lips. I was in jeans, a T-shirt and a fleece jacket. Everyone else was in tweed plus-fours, tweed jackets and waistcoats, collars and ties, long socks with garters from which little flags hung down below the turned-down stockings, tweed caps, fresh faces, lovely welcoming smiles. My hat was a blue nylon thing with the word ‘Dolomite’ embroidered on it. I felt utterly at home.
My neighbour Simon gave me a gun, a cartridge belt and a quick talk. Don’t shoot anyone was the burden of his message. Safety, really, that’s the key. Lovely. Simon exudes a sense of heavenly contentment and generosity. Everything was going to be marvellous.
On to the first drive. I was between Frank and Tarquin, lined up 80 yards apart across a grassy bank on which the frost still lay. In front of us the margins of a wood. We waited. Having not pulled a trigger for quarter of a century, I was a little nervous. The tock-tocking of the beaters’ sticks against the trees. The first scatter of songbirds coming out of the wood high above us, flittering this way and that. I suppose in Italy we might have shot them. The guns stood silently. I put a pair of cartridges in the breech and waited. I slid the safety catch to and fro. I fingered the triggers. I tried a few practice swings: up to the shoulder, both eyes open, keep swinging through the bird, don’t stiffen up.
We waited. I was staring over at the far corner of the wood where the songbirds had for some reason gathered. It was a dreamy morning. I wasn’t concentrating. ‘adam,’ Frank shouted at me from below. I looked up. A hen pheasant was sailing calmly over my head. I watched it go, saw its breast feathers above me, raised no gun to it, listened to it churring away into the distance. Not a good start.
Gun now in two hands, left thumb aligned along the barrel, right finger on trigger guard. Oh Christ, here it comes. The cock pheasant, curving gently towards me out of the top of the wood, dark against the Eton-blue sky, a steady easy straight flight right into my line of fire. Up comes the gun, safety catch off, barrels over the bird, swinging through, squeeze, keep it going, phlam! Ringing in the ears, the pheasant flying on past me, calm itself, untroubled, perfect, a clear escape off towards the bobbled, tree-filled distances of the Weald and then again phlam! Frank, swinging easily from his stance below me, picks the pheasant out of the air, all its poise crumples, its head goes jerking back as if hit by a wall, its arranged body now a bundle of washing thudding into the earth. It sounds like a slightly deflated football.
All morning I fired and missed. I didn’t mind. All the other guns gave me sweet advice. Think of it as if you are flinging a handful of gravel into the air. It’s a chucking motion. Don’t aim. Just throw it. None of it did any good. I stood and watched a woodcock fly past me, darting and quivering between the trees. A rather chubby fox trotted slowly through the line of guns. Any pheasant that came past I fired at to no effect. A beater standing next to me, watching this embarrassing performance, said quite courteously that I shouldn’t poke my gun at it: you wouldn’t get them with poking. He had been picking up for Prince Edward at Eridge the week before and the prince had apologized to him whenever he didn’t kill a bird outright. So I felt perfectly happy apologizing for not killing any at all.
We walked back for a steaming lunch. A couple of glasses of delicious claret. Suffused warmth and contentment. This was the style for the new millennium: a return to the 1920s. Was it that sudden acceptance that made the difference? Or was it the claret? Who can say? But difference there was. I stood at my peg for the first drive after lunch. A steep bank of beech, holly and hornbeam rose in front of me. The fallen leaves were pulled about by the breeze. The now-familiar knocking of the beaters’ sticks. A slight, early evening mist creeping between the branches, the snuffling about of their dogs. A hen pheasant comes over, steers to my left, I follow it round, swinging through, chuck the gravel, squeeze the trigger and the bird tumbles to the ground dead. That clenching, air-punching yes which is not, I think, quite the proper thing to do. And then another, a few minutes later. And then far too excited, shooting low in front of me and told off by the Guards officer standing to my left. ‘Rather too low, I think,’ he said in the most courteous of voices. ‘Quite, quite,’ I said, ‘sorry, sorry,’ rather surprised to hear my voice now sounding like that of a captain in the Grenadiers, but at the same time and quite suddenly realizing I hadn’t had such fun since surfing at Polzeath the previous summer.
But shooting is not hunting and one weekend, as the prospect of the ban was looming over the countryside, I had myself hunted. The Coakham Bloodhounds were meeting at a farm on the shoulders of Ashdown Forest in the north of the county. It was a slightly drizzly morning, but all the usual hunt scenes were there: expensive-looking horse-boxes; men shuffling out of jeans and into riding breeches at the far side of Land Rovers; women putting lipstick on lips and hair in nets; people, in short, getting dressed for the hunt as if for an appearance in Barry Lyndon, 21st-century barristers, shipbrokers, farmers and builders suddenly emerging with their horses like characters from a Stubbs.
These were the people whose quarry I had volunteered to be. The bloodhound is a solemn-looking figure, the most droopingly melancholy of dogs, curtain-jowled and heavy-eyed, with feet the size of lions’ paws and an appearance that suggests what he is: a body in pursuit of a nose. Bloodhounds are smelling machines, originally used to sniff out the blood of a wounded deer, extraordinarily able to pursue the most fugitive of scents across field, moor, wood and even rivers and well able to chase after the sweet healthy smell of men on the move.
There were four of us that Sunday: Adrian ‘Blobby’ or ‘Bear’ Paice, the man-mountain of a Quarry Captain; a super-fit, ex-Royal Engineers bomb-disposal expert, Derek ‘Piers’ Barnes, who from time to time would declare his love for ‘Blobs’ and kiss him on both cheeks; Robbie ‘Freddy’ Miles, who had once run a line for the hunt and then jumped on a horse and followed the hounds after his own scent; and me.
The mounted figures from the eighteenth century drank something alcoholic out of plastic cups, while we quarry stood waiting for the hounds. There was a slight tinge here of class drama: runner-squaddies headed for the front line, hunter General Staff inspecting them from horseback, and saying from time to time, ‘Well done, thank you so much, thank you for all your efforts.’ We Baldricks soon had ourselves nuzzled and licked by the pack, huge soft bloodhound noses sniffing every part of us, the hounds putting their paws up on our chests, noses discovering who we were.
The
n, as the language of this wonderfully retrospective corner of Englishness expressed it, ‘for the first scurry, the quarry are enlarged twenty minutes before the hounds are laid on’. It was excitement itself. We ran nine miles in front of the hounds, through woods, wading through rivers, up the steep-sided valleys that cut into Ashdown Forest, scrambling through hedgerows, jumping over tiger traps. Two or three times, at pre-arranged places, we stopped and allowed our pursuers to catch us. The music, as it is called, of a pack of hounds on your trail, faint at first, carried up the valley on the wind, gradually getting louder, the honking, baying joint passion of the pack coming after you, is, no doubt, a faintly disturbing thing: it is not difficult to imagine it as happening for real, the sound of imminent death.
It is soon followed by the noise of the hounds crashing through the wood in your wake, nothing to stop them, before they finally break cover, up the field to find you, lips and ears flapping at each bounding step, tongues flying like commodore’s pennants, and then the arrival, the death by a hundred licks. ‘Good boys,’ we all say mindlessly. ‘Gooood booooys,’ handing out the dog biscuits we have been carrying in our pockets, lick, sniff, lick, wag, as the field arrives, massively out of breath, red in the face, sweat on the flanks of the horses. After a few minutes’ rest, the runners set off again, twenty minutes’ start on the hounds, the whole ritual re-enacted. It is – as it is meant to be – a strange picture of happiness.
I’ve rarely had such fun: get-fit, urban runners spend the day with go-for-it rural hunters; no one and nothing gets killed; something of the tradition of hunting a pack of hounds is kept alive; the management of the landscape for hunting continues; and everybody is happy. Was that right? Not entirely. It was so clearly a game, only one step removed from paint-balling. A runner obviously loves it but the hunters don’t really like it. They told me that manhunting is too hard and too fast, with none of the hanging about, the chat, that characterizes a fox hunt and, anyway, as one of them said to me, ‘Hunting a jogger is like kissing your sister: not the real thing.’ The coming ban would mean that the real thing would be denied them and this would be all they had left.
Smell of Summer Grass Page 23