‘Well, we’ve all got bills to pay.’
‘Yes, but have we got money to pay them? That’s the question, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘Some of us have and some of us haven’t. I tell you, Adam, the money doesn’t stay in my pocket. It’ll be gone by ten o’clock this morning.’
I would write the cheque out to ‘T.A. Fieldwick’. I had no idea what either T or A stood for. Meanwhile Frisky continued with the charm offensive. ‘Now what about a pony for your little girls, a nice New Forest pony? They’d love a bit of riding round here. You’ve got just the place for it.’ Frisky, apart from being earthmover extraordinaire, also bred and dealt in horses, but thank God I managed to resist. ‘Think of the memories they’ll have,’ he would say. I knew that he knew that I wouldn’t dream of buying any horses, but we went through this little routine most weeks all the same.
‘And why is it you’re called Frisky, Frisky?’ I then asked, going back to a favourite topic.
‘Oh, it’s because I was pretty frisky once!’ he said, pocketing the cheque.
Paying for the earth-moving was the best part of it. For some reason, I found the actual digging deeply disturbing. Frisky would turn up in his Land Rover, which was loose and baggy, like a giant gumboot. With him would come his son Jason and Jason’s younger brother, Ben. All three Fieldwicks had smiles like searchlights. They climbed on to the diggers and dumpers, Steve Moody, the garden contractor from up the lane, would join them, and the work began. Parts of the place, familiar not only to us but to the twenty generations of farmers who had thought of Perch Hill as their home and foundation, were sliced and eased away as if they had no permanence. This was surgery, landscape liposuction.
I couldn’t bear to watch. I felt threatened and uneasy. I spent hours in my workroom reading yellowing copies of articles I had written twenty years before. Sarah was striding around like Patton in Normandy, buoyed up by change, by things happening, by the sight of the Fieldwick battalion making its all-too-definitive cuts.
I knew, in my rational self, that this work was a good idea. The area around the pond was a mess and needed improvement. I knew that and I was sure that what would emerge would be better than what was there before. But for all that, the process was troubling. The Fieldwicks were blithe, confident and skilful. And perhaps it was precisely that panache in execution which was troubling. I wanted to think that the place I saw around me was imbued with a permanence I didn’t have myself. Everything we had done to Perch Hill Farm since coming here had been to enhance that sense of deepness and solidity. The house was becoming surrounded by gardens and garden walls. It was as though we were pegging the place down. These new earthworks were part of that process. When the little wood that we were planting on top of them had grown, full of hazels and hawthorns, wild cherries and one or two oaks, they too would embrace the buildings and farmyard, folding them in, diminishing the rather bruised openness we found on our arrival.
Sarah could clearly see the conclusion. I found myself stumbling over the way to get there. These machines were showing us how powerful we were in relation to the place. We could have demolished the whole lot in a couple of days. Within half a mile were the abandoned sites of two farmsteads which, until 15 years before, had everything you might have wished for: beautiful stone farmhouses, barns, yards, farm ponds, lives lived, memories treasured. They were demolished one day by the landlord, to prevent squatters occupying them. In the summer the nettles now grew there shoulder-high. It was that threat of erasure which alarmed me.
One day I was trying to show off to Steve Moody, the strapping gardener and dumper-truck driver. In Sarah’s Blenheim-scale rearrangement of the local landscape, Steve had been acting as her chef d’équipe. Digging a couple of holes was meant to be my contribution. This was a mistake. Ever since an experience with a beautifully muscled masseur in the Andalucian quarter of Fez – I think the place was called the Hammam Ritzy-Sevilla – in the late 1970s, my back had not been what it should be. The big masseur, gleaming like an aubergine, as heartless as a stone, didn’t seem to have cottoned on to the modern idea that ‘No means no’, He obviously thought my scream-groans were the English for ‘Stop it, I love it’. Ever since, a niggle has lurked down there somewhere in my lumbar regions to remind me of the foolishness of youth.
But sometimes vanity and competitiveness get the better of me and I imagine that manual labour is something I can still do as well as the next man. That’s why I walked out that day with spade and shovel to the site of the new orchard. Funded by a remortgage, a serious workforce had been on site for three weeks. A National Trust-standard car park had been installed. The ground had been cleared, what looked like blitz detritus had been spread over it, then a layer of stone precisely the colour of taramasalata, then some more blitz rubble of a finer grade, then blackish road scrapings, which might be mistaken for dead men’s teeth, partly ground, and then the final Lutyensesque topping of rich, deep river stones.
Future archaeologists would scratch their heads over this centrepiece of the new works. How on earth could a hovel like Perch Hill Farm have deserved something modelled so carefully on the traffic-handling facilities at Sir Norman Foster’s Stansted Airport? For the answer they would have to hire a medium to interrogate my wife’s spirit. ‘obsession,’ the Ouija board would spell out. I hoped the spirit world would understand.
My contribution to the Wealden Versailles was to plant and stake a couple of apple trees. The first was OK: hole, tree, stake, ties, earth, water, complete. The second went hole, tree aaaaaaargghhh, that neural, spasmodic, earth-shattering click, the moment every back-pain sufferer will recognize as the gates of hell. At least that was the sound inside. I wasn’t going to show Steve anything was wrong. ‘I think I’ll go and get a glass of water,’ I told him and broke for the house, stiffening, hobbling, crumbling upstairs and on to the bed, where I then stayed for a week, laid out, aged and with only my drugs and my laptop for company.
It was deep, deep agony at the time, an all-over clenching pain, but it wasn’t long before I was under some really big-time medication. Sarah said I was as high as a kite but it didn’t feel like that from the inside. It was the normal me in a rather good mood. Just a shot or two of morphine they gave me. Pure liquid wooze it was, straight in, happiness from a needle, and I felt fantastic. At last I’d come to understand the drug culture. The world was just beautiful, beautiful. Everyone loved me and I loved everyone. The sheep were woolly and the grass was green. I was having my own private Woodstock, but the sun was shining. We were deep into hippydom here and I was wearing my Afghan dressing gown. Modern technological medicine is a remarkable and adorable thing. Who needs the Tardis when you can have such a charming low-tech visit from the Burwash GP?
It was a dreadful/lovely time. Dreadful for the hint of paralysis it brought, those shuddering spasms of pain – the condition of washing as it travels through a mangle – but lovely as the drugs came on and you started to think this was the best of all possible worlds, that warm druggy dusk of sleepiness after pain.
I could see only the sky from my bed but I could hear life going on: trucks delivering yet further tonnages from the quarries of the globe; Sarah on the phone next to the open kitchen window saying, ‘Of course I wanted 4,000. If I said 4,000, what do you think I meant? 400?’; Steve banging in post after post as his trees went effortlessly in; Ken Weekes’s trowel clinking against the bricks of his new wall; the children screaming ‘yes, yes’ at the table football; the ducks on the pond; the ewes being penned up … Perhaps this was the kind of contentment bees felt, too, when the weather turns in the right direction. Who knows? Sarah came in. ‘I’ve ordered the lawn,’ she said. ‘That’s all right then,’ I said. ‘There’ll be croquet in a matter of weeks,’ and with those words fell fast asleep, dreaming of a heaven in which lilos covered the Perch Hill fields from hedge to hedge.
Transformations
I WAS upstairs, one spring morning, in my workroom in the oast-house, hiding.
It was the first day of Sarah’s courses. She was running them here at home. It was the first real attempt to make some money out of Perch Hill. She would teach people how to create a cutting garden, that is to say a garden not for looking at but for harvesting from. Seventy-two people, exclusively women, had signed up and, not of course that this was in any way important, paid up. But now Sarah had to deliver what her brochure had promised. I could hear her voice in the room below mine, telling the ladies about the need for ‘a good friable soil and a warm, well-drained site’. An absorbed silence accompanied her words.
It had begun as a nightmare. The worst frost of the year had chosen the previous night to attack and we woke up to see the thousands of tulips and imperial fritillaries bowed and frozen, like ranks of collapsed ice-lollies. The euphorbia was drooping on to the path when it should have been all pert and Edwina Curriesque. Then Anna Cheney’s car broke down in the village and so there was no one to look after the children. Half an hour later, the fleet of beautiful new silver Audis and dark blue Mercs started to nose cautiously into the farmyard. We knew there was nothing to pick. Secret panic reigned. ‘Keep them inside till everything warms up,’ I hissed at Sarah. A look of despair passed across her face. I then brushed the paths rather badly, hoping the ladies might think chaos charming. Then my father turned up and insisted on pressing his nose against the lecture-room window to see what the ladies looked like inside. God knows what kind of impression we were making.
By 11.30 a.m. we’d had the first session and then coffee. My sister Juliet cleaned the floor. The flowers had begun to lift in the sunshine. During the coffee break, two of the ducks decided to have sex in one of the flower-beds outside the kitchen. It was a terrifying vision of avian rape which finished only as the drake decided he’d had enough and walked away straight on up the back of his victim and then over her head, shoving it deep into the mushroom compost, as though her body was just another one of those things one has to negotiate in life. The rapee shuddered and shook herself like someone coming out of the shower in a shampoo ad. ‘Do you always let the ducks into the garden?’ a lady in an apricot cardigan said to me. Before I could answer, Rosie, in a deep Sussex accent said, ‘Oh yeah. They eat the slugs, donay, Dad?’ ‘Oh really,’ Mrs Apricot murmured and sipped her coffee, smiling a little distantly with her eyes.
Just before lunch, the party was out in the garden wielding scissors. Individual characters were emerging. Those who felt they shouldn’t entirely destroy Sarah’s incredible, sumptuous, intense and beautiful spring garden were hesitating before snipping one or two rather small tulips that were, if they were honest about it, slightly going over. Others, it was clear, thought they’d paid their money and so they were bloody well going to make their choice. One lady in particular returned with a bunch so large that you couldn’t see her head behind it. I was hoping she would trip over. She didn’t, but dumped her gatherings in a bucket and then said to me, ‘Are you the man who tells everyone he writes articles in the Telegraph?’
‘Yes,’ I said, a little warily.
‘Well, I’ve never seen any. Have you ever got one published?’ I could hear myself laughing and it sounded like the last drops of water draining from the bath.
Lunch was a rip-roaring success. Just before it began, Sarah had recommended that cut flowers needed one thing more than anything else: a good long drink. ‘Oh yeaah,’ one laconic American beauty said, ‘and what about the clients?’ Long drinks all round.
After lunch, the natural tendency was to wander a little among the flowers, over towards the edge of the garden from which the lovely view stretches down the Dudwell valley. That was all very well for background, but in the foreground, upwind in the prevailing breeze, was the totally failed, utterly disgusting and profoundly health-hazardous reed-bed sewage system whose accompanying pond still looked like a tureen full of mushy peas. It was of course inevitable that the entire course should end up surveying this part of the garden.
A Neapolitan smell of what are always called ‘drains’ blew across the ladies. I was praying they thought it something obscurely agricultural. ‘Is that your wildlife pond?’ one of them asked empathetically. A long and quivering moment of hesitation followed. Could I possibly get away with this lie? Which answer would be least likely to undermine Sarah’s standing as a horticulturist of genius? ‘Yes,’ I said resolutely. ‘We think it’s very important to allow the wild a place in the garden and for all sorts of natural processes to be seen for what they are …’ Grim nods all round at the wisdom of this, and I saw one of the Japanese ladies making a note in her notebook. I knew what it said: ‘English character – never less trustworthy than when claiming high moral ground.’
By five p.m. it was over. We slumped around the kitchen table. A champagne cork lolled on the floor. Only another nine days like that one. It had been a triumph. Every one of them went away saying how much they’d enjoyed themselves. Sarah was exhausted but exultant. Everything worked in the end. I was thinking of the money and how to get the schmooze schmoozier. ‘Ladies,’ perhaps I would say next lunchtime, ‘I’d like to show you our wildlife pond. It’s so important to let the wild into the garden, don’t you think?’ Or perhaps not. Sarah said it might be better if I spent the day in London.
If I had only known it then, this was the beginning of Perch Hill’s new and spectacular life, as a place in which Sarah’s genius would come to flower. Alongside it, increasingly guided by Simon Bishop, the farm started to blossom too. He was the most inspiring of men, so attached to Sussex that he always said that if he left the county he would get a nose-bleed. But he wasn’t stuffy about that, the very opposite in fact. As a lecturer at Plumpton Agricultural College, he was a forward-thinking educationalist. He was full of business ideas, he loved cows and cow-culture and did endless work to vitalize the Sussex farming people he lived among. Communitarian, blessed with managerial charms, a good friend, from the moment I met him I thought Simon was the model of the modern man, integrationist, optimistic and dynamic.
On holiday with his in-laws in Africa, he had been thinking about the future of the Weald, of places like this farm. How could we get things to work when the prices at the market were something of a joke? How to prevent the crude model of the capitalist economy slowly debilitating the Wealden landscape?
Simon’s flash of inspiration was that farmers here didn’t have to drown individually; they could float together. They could take advantage of their crowdedness. They could cooperate. Of course this idea is as old as the Weald itself. Every Wealden farmhouse of any age, made from the oaks that were cut from the surrounding woods, would have been made cooperatively. Here, as elsewhere in rural Europe, your neighbours would have built your house with you, and you theirs. Equipment and plough teams would have been shared. Favours would have been exchanged. Common struggle would, at least in part, have dealt with common difficulties.
But that habit had faded. Modern individualism, in which every man on his own plot likes to make his own way in the world, had broken this system and perhaps by no coincidence redundancy was now facing this stretch of country. The ancient pattern of holdings which on average are about 90 or 100 acres was in danger of drifting into abandoned uselessness. The farms on their own were failing. Why not establish a local network of these farms? Many of them now, like this one, belonged to people whose main source of livelihood was not the land itself. As farms, they were no more than ticking over. They were in effect doing nothing and were ready – along with other large slices of rural England – to be steered in a new direction.
That direction, in Simon Bishop’s mind, was what he called at first a Wealden Organic Network, WON. (It later became the Wealden Farmers’ Network, because we didn’t want to shut people out who weren’t organic.) He would be overall director. I and the other landowners would enter into a profit-share agreement, based on the value of the resources we put at the Network’s disposal. Arable land would count for more than rough grazing, a dairy herd more than a flock of
sheep, a local high-street shop more than the kind of derelict shed I could offer. Because much of the land around here was doing virtually nothing anyway, beyond providing pretty views for its owners, the Network would not have a large up-front rental to pay. Profit-sharing would pay out only what had already been gathered in. The pooled acreage would be used for the rational planning of beef, dairy, cereal and vegetable production in a way that small and isolated farms couldn’t manage economically.
It was a marvellous moment: so obvious, so clear, but providing the answer to a question I had been troubled by for years. How to make these marginal agricultural landscapes live again? The Network was to have its own shop and its own website, on which local availability of produce could be advertised, orders placed, days out on the farm announced, community picnics suggested, messages left and observations made. It could ask what the community might like to eat next year so that the right crops could be planted and the right animals raised. The shop itself would be in a village and would have a café attached so that its energy and example would spread rings of happiness around it. It would be a way of sewing together the very things which modern agriculture had severed: people and place, good food and good environments. When I heard all this I knew that Simon Bishop was the man.
So that summer, the Network was set up with three other local farms and the cattle arrived at Perch Hill. It was the moment I had been waiting for. Until then we had been a sheep place. The sheep had done what they were here to do: eat the grass, produce their lambs, mutely accepting their function as mowers with wombs, bleating from time to time, falling ill from time to time and dying for no known reason from time to time. The annual sheep cycle had established itself here in a neat and reliable rhythm but cattle represent something rather richer. It is a curious fact that the length of time a species has been domesticated by man is reflected in our relationship towards it. Dogs probably evolved into man’s working colleagues about 13,000 years ago. Sheep followed just over 3,000 years later, cattle about 7,000 years ago and horses about 2,000 years after that. If you consider the relative wildness of each of those species now, the flightiness of their relations to us, the chronological sequence is clearly reflected in the animals’ docility. Horses still have to be broken; cattle are still a little jumpy when you are in among them; sheep, at least the sheep you know, generally have a mildness and accepting calm which would be exceptional among cattle. But you would never consider having a sheep in the house as you would a dog. The shorter the time a species has lived with us, the wilder it continues to be.
Smell of Summer Grass Page 25