In all these various ways – the smoothing of lanes, the death and departure of the old, the commercialization of rural crafts, the management of woods, the bureaucratization of farming, the banning of the hunt – in all of them, the future here was being divorced from the past. There was only one exception, a place where landscape and memory still joined up. I went one day on the village expedition to visit the graves of the Burwash men in the cemeteries of the Ypres salient. About 125 men from Burwash and Burwash Common were killed in France and Flanders during the First World War, 18 of them in the muddy slaughterhouse of the Salient, the British Verdun. In a village of about 2,500 people, this death toll represented about 10 percent of the men, or perhaps 30 percent of the relevant generation. It is mortality on a scale you find in French villages but rarely here and it is thought in Burwash, although no one is sure, that proportionately this village suffered as much as any in England.
Perhaps that is the reason some care is still taken. The war memorial in the village street is fitted with an electric light in a small lantern crowning it. The light is lit on the days of the year when a Burwash man was killed. I have always been brought up short by that small signal. You’re driving back after a summer day, your mind is full of other things, the tape machine is on, the evening is fading from the sky, you come around the corner, past the Bell Inn and the church, and there at the side of road, that point of light, a day of death, a sudden individualization of mass catastrophe.
In the soft morning light at half past five in the village car park, the rain was solid, sluicing off the roof of the bus in which the fifty or so of us sat, perfect quagmire rain, the water flowing in tea-coloured rivulets down the lanes, clay in suspension, the Weald running away to its rivers.
This had been advertised as a pilgrimage, and in part, for sure, it was that, a return to some sort of essential point, a base to be touched and recognized for what it was, but like any pilgrimage, it was also an outing, £40 each, three-course lunch thrown in, plenty of wine, a chance for a bit of duty-free. All day long we moved in and out of those categories. Sir Frank Sanderson, a charming baronet in his mid-60s, who runs the Burwash branch of the British Legion and had arranged this trip, spoke to us from the front of the bus about the war and the casualties – quoting Sassoon, ‘the sullen swamp’, ‘the sepulchre of crime’ – and recommended making a beeline for the restaurant as soon as we got on to the ferry ‘because otherwise you won’t get a table’. And he thought that the ferry loos would be the best we would find all day.
Once over in France, the Sussex party didn’t think much of the Flemish landscape – ‘boring’ – and couldn’t see any evidence of the Flemish farmers being forced to put any of their land into set-aside but noticed that the farmhouses looked in suspiciously good nick. Everything rural England suspects about the treachery of Europe was being confirmed before their eyes. There were dark mutterings about Germany having been stopped twice but who was going to stop them this time? Sir Frank outlined the Schlieffen plan by which the Germans in 1914 intended to mop up France in a month and went on, seamlessly, to describe the Schengen Area in which other Europeans no longer have to show their passports. ‘Some might say,’ he went on, ‘there is something frighteningly similar about those two names.’ But this was something of a tease and Sanderson for one stands above Europhobia. Much later on I saw him in the chill beauty of the German cemetery at Langemarck, laying a bunch of poppies on the memorial there which he had picked the day before in a Burwash garden.
As we approached Ypres that morning, the tone had deepened. ‘We are now,’ Sanderson said, ‘on the road our martyrs took. And as we go east, remember, we are going towards the guns.’ He spoke in the present tense. There were hop gardens alongside the road and pollarded willows. Small herds of Friesians and Charolais were lying in the lush meadows. Little drainage ditches were full of flag irises and water lilies. ‘The man we are visiting,’ Sanderson said, ‘is Albert John Morris, a private in The Buffs who was wounded in June 1917 during an attack at a place called Spoil Bank or Buff Bank at the southern edge of the Salient and then brought back to a small hospital next to the railway here, where we now are, at Lijssenthoek, where there was a casualty clearing station.’
Morris was twenty four. His widowed mother, Mary, lived at Rock’s Cottages in Burwash. Her son died of his wounds on the evening of 15 June 1917, at about 8.30. Sanderson read a letter from his commanding officer to Mary Morris. It was written in a terrible rush – ‘There is a lot to do on the battlefield.’ Clearly the captain knew little about the dead soldier. ‘He was a good man and always willing to do his share,’ Captain Morrell wrote but for any hard information he recommended she get in touch with ‘17 ccs’, the Lijssenthoek Casualty Clearing Station.
Where there was once a hospital, there was now a graveyard. Wistaria was trained along its low brick walls. Giant cedars stretched their arms out across the row on row of white Portland headstones. The grass was mown like a putting green. One or two of us got out of the bus and found Morris’s grave. The vicar read a prayer over it. ‘Into thy hands, O most loving father, we commend the soul of Albert Morris, whom we remember here today, humbly beseeching Thee that he might be precious in thy sight.’ Precious in thy sight. Sir Frank’s wife, Lady Sanderson, planted a little sprig of rosemary, which she had brought with her from Burwash.
It all made for a tiny gesture in a Flemish field, surrounded by the ridged lines of potatoes and with a warm European wind blowing across us. Nothing in itself, or almost nothing, but as the day went by and, one after another in these cemeteries scattered across the Salient, the Burwash men were remembered and the little rosemaries planted, for ‘Tinto’ Park, for J.H. Sweatman, Stanley Taylor, George Jeffrey and Arthur Chittenden, one by one these tiny acts of remembrance became something else, a reconstitution of that village generation, binding them back together, re-establishing, for us and for this day anyway, the links between them.
Why was this so moving? Perhaps because these men, who had been brought up together, who had been at the village school together, who knew the same fields and woods and girls, who were from one clumped-together genetic stock, now lay so widely scattered across this anonymous European plain. Each time the bus stopped and we climbed out into another cold, immaculate graveyard, it was as if we were visiting another fragment of a time and a place that had been blown apart. Each Burwash body was like a single autumn leaf, cast away in this place that meant nothing to Brightling or Burwash or the people who lived there. I have never thought fields so foreign. And I felt for the coldness of this distant death, these Weekeses, Groombridges and Keeleys, so far from the places they knew, and so painfully alone.
The Very Opposite of Poisonous
AT HOME, though, things were not so entirely retrospective. ‘Will you look at that?’ Simon Bishop said to us all one evening. Farmer, cook, agricultural lecturer, father, husband, wit and Sussex man into the very pit of his boots, just turned forty, slightly thin on top, smiling a gee-shucks smile like Wallace and Gromit’s, he took a wing rib from the oven and placed it on the table in front of us. It was from a pure-bred Sussex steer he had raised himself at Ivyland Farm near Netherfield. It was a Sunday evening. Sarah, I and our two daughters, Simon’s wife, Tessa, their daughters Beckie and Holly and their son James, were all there around the table. The early winter night was dark outside. There were candles on the table. ‘Quiet, everyone,’ Simon said, a sort of joke priestliness on his face.
We looked reverently on the glistening rib, its glazed sur faces, its ruckled fat, the oozing flanks of meat. This was beef on the bone, months after such a thing had been banned amid the BSE crisis. We gazed on its heroic naturalness, its grand status as a hunk of nature. ‘I feel I’m making love to it,’ Simon said.
‘Will you get on and cut the thing?’ Tessa said. ‘I’m starving.’
‘Wait,’ Simon said with a sudden inrush of authority. ‘We must let it rest.’
‘What do you mean, “
rest”?’ Tessa said. ‘It’s dead.’ Simon, the priest-magician, easing and wooing with his spell-casting fingers, said that the juices had to go back into the meat. It was quite clear he didn’t know what he was talking about. But we waited anyway as the smells wafted around the room. Cooked in an oven that was fuelled from logs cut on this farm, surrounded by leeks, carrots, potatoes, beetroots, red and white onions, marrow, tomatoes and parsnips that the Bishops had grown here and harvested that morning, this was a version of completeness. It was how things should be.
Nothing had come between us and the beef except the killing, the butchering and the roasting of it. Here was the man who had brought it up, who had tended it until it was ready, who had invited the butcher down to have a look, awaited his verdict, which was whispered, confidential (‘It does you credit, Simon’), who had chosen the hauliers to take the animal without fuss on the four- or five-mile journey to the Brownings’ abattoir at Broad Oak, who had it back here now to eat with his family and friends.
Perhaps only what was threatened needs celebration. The beef feast at Simon Bishop’s farm on that Sunday was such a moment because so few could enjoy it. If this had been a restaurant and he were not the grower, he would have been prosecuted for that dinner and heavily fined. Any chance of BSE being present in his animals, let alone us contracting new-variant CJD from eating the beef, was literally nil. The wing rib came from Simon’s single suckler herd, in which the animals, once they wean themselves from their mothers, are fed on nothing but the grass in the fields outside the window and the silage made on the farm. Nevertheless, the law applies to this beef as to any other. Beef on the bone was to be treated as poisonous by the authorities, but everything about this scene, and the Bishop family who had created it, was the very opposite of poisonous. Here was a man who believed that the life of a beef and sheep farmer in the Sussex Weald could still be happy and sustained.
Simon steered me towards some government grants and so, for the first time since we came here, I engaged with the domin ant and dictating force in the modern landscape. Subsidies now shape the rural world, but the irony was this: to do the thing that was most like what farmers do today, to book into that money-for-nothing system, felt as alien as anything I had ever done to this place.
I hired a consultant, an expert in navigating the bureaucratic shoals with which government money is guarded. Together with him, for an enjoyable morning, we decided how to work the system to our advantage. It was a revelatory experience, a brief exposure to the frame of mind which farmers must now enter if they are to survive in the radically distorted agricultural market. Civil servants would decide if I was to get the money I wanted and so, like other farmers, I had to second-guess their intentions and even prejudices. Would they really contribute to the cost of a new barn roof? Could we say a new barn roof would perform some educational purpose? What about removing that horrible old fence? Could we say it was an eyesore visible from a public path? I gathered, from my consultant, that certain areas had been or were likely to be ‘under-applied’ that year and so I shouldn’t hold back from going for as much as possible. I was to exercise canniness, creating an attractive package which the civil servants would ‘buy’. It was not, in terms of the money that some East Anglian barley barons were then receiving from the Exchequer, or even what your average farmer was getting, a large amount. But I certainly wasn’t sniffing at it.
We put seven out of the eleven fields into a scheme run by the Ministry called Countryside Stewardship. We agreed, in essence, not to overstock the pastures, nor to fertilize them so that the weaker plants would have a chance and, if the fields were to be shut up for hay, to cut them very late so that the flowers could set seed.
For this, which was basically agreeing not to push the land hard, the Ministry would pay me £70 a hectare, with a supplement of £30 a hectare if the fields were small and another supplement of £40 a hectare if there was a serious thistle problem, which there was. We would also agree to have visits from schools on six mornings a year to show them what was going on and for that we would get a payment of £400 a year. The result was that we would get a total subsidy on just over 16 hectares, or about 40 acres, of a little over £2,000 a year over the ten years for which we entered the agreement. On top of that, the government would pay just about half the costs of reinstating and repairing ancient hedgerows and gateways to the tune of about £5,300 over the following five years. In all, then, I would get from the taxpayer over the next decade about £25,000.
What did we think about that? The first thing was that these figures were laughably low compared with other places. There were seven English farmers who received over £500,000 the previous year alone and you could be pretty sure that bung would have come on top of almost equivalent profits on grain sales. If, now, instead of putting my 16 hectares in the Countryside Stewardship scheme, I had decided to sow linseed I would have received £650 a hectare a year in subsidy, which would add up to more than £100,000 if I did it for ten years, four times the amount my flower-conscious management of grassland might get me. If this were my profession, which do you think I might go for? £2,000 a year for wild flowers or £10,000 a year, from the same area of ground, for linseed oil? No one should be surprised that farmers with flowery meadows were ploughing them up, and would be ploughing them up the following winter, to plant the miracle subsidy crops. They were being paid to do so.
The national picture was totally lopsided. In the whole country that year the government was putting £100 million of its receipts from the Common Agricultural Policy towards improving the agricultural environment. That sounded quite good, but it sounds less good when you hear that they were spending £4,300 million on agricultural production without any thought of the environment whatsoever. So it was ridiculous of me to be feeling any qualms about accepting some of their landscape-improvement money. I was mopping up an infinitesimally tiny fraction of a government budget to produce real and good effects, beautiful fields, full of highly various and valuable living things. Gaggles of schoolchildren would see this process at work and might, who knows, be turned by the experience towards the richness and solace that could be found in nature.
This Countryside Stewardship scheme, with its pompous and heavyweight title, may have been no more than a fig leaf. It represented only 2.5 percent of a budget of which 97.5 percent paid no attention to the meaning of the landscape at all. And even if the purpose of that little fig leaf, the scrap of green, was somehow to perpetuate the life of those landscape-destructive subsidies by distracting attention from them, did that matter? In the end I thought it didn’t. We took the money, planted the hedges, managed the fields with floweriness in mind, had the children over, introduced them to beautiful fields, removed the eyesores and felt that this was public money being put towards an objective and public good.
At the same time, Sarah was beginning to address the garden. She is a woman who is not, it can safely be said, in any way moderate in what she does. With some relish she got the earthmovers in. She wanted the hill on which we were living resculpted. Most people might be happy to garden on the ground which God gave them but Sarah wasn’t. Before we moved here, she used to spend a good proportion of her time in her London house rearranging furniture. In the course of one particularly distressing six-month period, the sitting room moved to three separate locations on two different floors, the various bedrooms and studies trailing woefully after it. I used to dread waking up in the morning. ‘I wonder if the boys’ room shouldn’t be at the front?’ the day would begin and I’d know we’d be in for many hours of the dining-room table being stuck at an angle on the stairs.
Now that we were on top of a hill in Sussex, the hire of large-scale earth-moving equipment was the outlet for this neurosis. It was becoming a spring ritual. As soon as the trees began to bud, I heard Sarah on the phone to Frisky Fieldwick, the earthmoving contractor. ‘I would have thought two or three men for a couple of weeks would do it,’ she said.
Frisky was one of
the wildest-looking people I had ever met. He was the human equivalent of a Sussex wood. If you stood him in the undergrowth of some rather unkempt coppice, it would be impossible to tell he was there. Like those wonderful 1960s photographs of the model Verushka, her body painted to mimic the wall or trees against which she stood, Frisky would quite naturally have melted into his background. If I had to cast Puck, he would be the man. It might largely have been an effect of his hair, which looked like a hedge which has been driven through by an alcoholic with a brush-cutter, or maybe the jerseys the colour and consistency of a well-raked loam. I never saw him wearing anything except 10-gallon gumboots but Frisky was pure style. He would have looked fantastic on a cat-walk – Alan Bates meets Alexander McQueen – and he was blessed with the most spellbindingly seductive manner.
I tried to adopt something of the way in which he presented a bill. An enormous smile stole across his face, one eyebrow lifted a little, his hand moved like a gunfighter’s towards his back pocket and you knew what was coming. ‘You know what’s coming, don’t you, Adam?’ he would say as the brown envelope, always folded in two, began to move elegantly towards you. The ritual continued. It was the same every time.
‘I suppose you’d like it paid today, Frisky?’
Smell of Summer Grass Page 24