To have cattle on the farm, then, represents a step further into the human relationship with the animal. It is something more equal than the keeping of sheep or a dog. For many years Simon Bishop had kept a herd of beautiful Sussex cattle at Ivyland Farm. They are, I think, the most beautiful cows in the world: a deep, rich, dark conker red, a cherry mahogany, often with a kind of burnish on the skin, particularly in summer when they lose the thick and tufty winter coat, replacing it with a pelt as sleek as a zebra’s. It’s a colour that goes outstandingly well with grass.
For years I had wanted to have a herd of Sussex cattle on this farm. They clearly belonged here. Until the invention of the tractor, much of the work on the heavy clay soils of the Weald was done with these cattle, pulling ploughs and harrows through the sodden winter fields, and the heavy carts on tracks that turned to fudge every winter. They are animals which have been bred over many centuries – there is a theory that the ancestors of Sussex cattle were among the indigenous breeds found in Britain at the Roman Conquest – for their docility with men, strength to cope with the exigencies of this landscape and what the Sussex Herd Book Society’s history of the breed describes as ‘the best fattening tendencies’. The Sussex is a miracle beast, ‘second to none in early production of the finest quality of marbled beef – that excellent quality of flesh which will always command a better price than the cheaply produced or imported joints, which no butcher (mindful of his reputation) cares to place side by side with the rich juicy meat which the Sussex invariably furnishes’.
To begin with Simon brought 19 of his steers over to Perch Hill. They arrived in May, coming over in a truck from his farm at Netherfield one warm, nearly summer evening. The truck reversed up to the gateway. Its rear ramp was let down into the opening and 19 blinking, slightly nervy creatures came out into the sunlight. The steers had the last tufts of their winter coats still on them, a fog of their beautiful milky breath accompanying them out into the field. Their bodies then were light, slight little things, the sort of animals on which teenage bullfighters practise.
They were here just for the summer, happily grazing down among the buttercups of Great Flemings. I used to visit them: they surrounded me, licking my hands, blowing their sweet fleshy breath over me, nosing me from behind, curious and brave in a way lambs never are, recognizable immediately as individuals. Sheep always smell acrid, ammoniac, but these young Sussex smelled of grass and milk. I have in my hand the Standard of Excellence for Sussex cattle adopted in December 1907. For bulls, their skin must be ‘mellow to the touch and covered with an abundant coat of rich soft red hair; a little white in front of the purse’ – delicate word – ‘is admissible but not desirable. A few grey hairs are not a disqualification.’ They swish their tails and run their tongues up over their nostrils. You feel with them around you, much more than with a flock of sheep, the reality of the contract which herd-keeping man has made with these beasts. What can urban life provide that matches this strange cross-species intimacy? The 1907 expectation of the appearance of a Sussex cow is not only that her eyes should be ‘bright and prominent’ and the udder ‘square, not fleshy’ but that their general appearance should be ‘smart and gay’. Who could resist that?
All through the summer, they were a wonderful presence on the farm. Mornings and evenings we would check them, either spread grazing across the hillside in Great Flemings, or clustered together in the shade of the chestnut trees at the bottom of that field, head to tail, the switch of one flicking the flies away from the nose of the other, a deep, lowering sleepiness emanating from the crowd. They were gentle animals. You could push between their big red flanks without any trouble. They would grunt aside, like sleepers in the same bed. Just a glimpse of them, away down in their own world at the end of the farm, would bring a smile to my lips. They looked as if they belonged here and the place looked better for their presence.
Slowly, as the summer went by, their bodies matured and deepened. They began to acquire that bullish silhouette, heavy in the front, where the brisket begins to bulk out over the breast bone, and across the neck where the tossing muscles thicken, but still quite light in the haunches. The mature animal looks curiously like a racing cyclist, hunched forward over the handle-bars, all his energy and focus on what is in front, and the rear legs, or rear wheel, nothing but a necessary balancing limb, useful in holding the front up, little more.
That’s not how a butcher or grazier would look on it. You can measure an animal’s readiness by the pudgy little bulbs of fat that appear on its hindquarters. The best cuts are there. By the beginning of November the Perch Hill steers were ready to go. The grass of the farm had fed them, nothing else. Simon Bishop came over in Sepember to have a look at them. He always arrived smiling, rubbing the palms of his hands together, a big challenging ‘Hello’ written all over his face, as if to ask, ‘Right, so what new delight have we got to enjoy today?’ We climbed over the gate together into Jim’s Field and then walked down towards Great Flemings where the cattle liked to gather. The grass had turned green again with the first of the autumn rains and the cattle lifted their heads from it to look at us. A smiling satisfaction crept over his face. ‘They’ve done well,’ he said.
That autumn was a beautiful thing. The trees filling the valley looked like old velvet, crushed and rumpled, with different lights in different places. None of the garish polychrome of New England here, or those sugary Japanese maples. An oaky, time-worn exhaustion, browning at the edges, coloured the view. I love this, the collapse from within, the life juices withdrawing as you watch. These woods are a forgotten library smelling of cigars. Silence hangs about them. There are leather patches on every elbow. The potpourri sits in blue glass bowls and the world is filled with the colours of sun-bleached tapestries. It is the last days of the ancient regime.
The strange, warm Neapolitan sunshine, in which the woods had been drenched for day after day, was interrupted by something else in the week the cattle left the farm. Sudden wind and rain smacked out of the west and thrashed around the hill. Our bedroom window was torn off its hinges and flung into the garden below. It looked like a car crash, some of the dahlias squeezed half flat by the one pane that remained whole, the others poking up past the splintered frame.
The entire arm of an oak tree fell into the lane, torn out of its stump. I found it lying half across a hedge. I cantilevered it up and shoved into the field. The surface of the lane was left littered with pieces of bark and brown leaves, like the floor of a workshop. Little twigs and torn pieces of tree were blown all over the paths. In the fields, the sheen of wet lay on the grass, like new silvering on a mirror. The tracks of night-time animals cut hesitant, wandering, investigative diagonals across it.
On one of those wild and windy days, the steers were driven up from the far end of the field, back towards the lorry from which they had come six months before. They weren’t troubled or stressed. The Sussex is a biddable animal, and, one or two at a time, they clambered back up the ramp into the lorry. The wet day had left the hair on their backs sleek and rippled like a swimmer’s. They smelled beefy now, where they had been milky before. They were going back to Netherfield and then within a few days to the slaughterhouse at Broad Oak. They were packed into the lorry and held in tightly so that the short journey would not trouble them. Ten tons of Sussex beef, easy animals, a good life, moved off up the lane. The lorry’s engine struggled and groaned with the load. Perch Hill beef from Perch Hill grass. I could hear the weight of it, the best thing this farm had made since we came here. It felt like a signal of everything that might be good.
Through Simon, both Tessa, his wife, and a young Sussex boy, Colin Pilbeam, who had been one of his pupils at Ivyland, came to work at Perch Hill. Tessa helped Sarah in all sorts of ways, in her office, in the garden, running the courses and in the fledgling mail-order business we started to set up. Colin also worked in the garden, laying brick paths, making hazel and willow structures for the climbers to grow up, as well as looking af
ter the animals, seeing every day that the sheep and cattle were all right, tending the dogs, pigs and the chickens, mowing the grass, weeding the beds, piling on the grit and the spent mushroom compost, sorting out the greenhouse, shooting the foxes, the rabbits and the occasional deer. Colin became, in other words, the invaluable core of Perch Hill. It is as much his as anybody’s now. Every part of Simon’s love for the animals found an echo in Colin. If a calf was poorly he would nurse it; the pigs learned the sound of his footsteps as he came over the gate to feed them; the dogs knew the note of his engine and would run out to meet him in the morning.
Even now, only a few years later, I am filled with nostalgia for those years at Perch Hill. Sarah was transforming the garden with her rampaging new appetite for intense colours, a kind of beautiful smoky richness that sharpened in places into the brazen and the garish. She was making something entirely unconnected with the Sussex landscape, but that could not have mattered less. I urged on her that the hedges at least should be of hawthorn, and if she was to have an avenue of trees, they should be hawthorns too, simply to root the garden in the place. But within the containers which those hedges made she should allow the exotic and the rich, the packed and the crammed in to have a dense, heightened life beside which the grass, the buttercups and the sorrel of my precious hay-fields could play their part as the rice to her curry, balm to her drama.
So she began to cultivate, above all, a sense of the large in contained places, a feeling for abundance as the source of delight in life, for colour as a visible symbol of a world beyond the ordinary. A vegetable and fruit garden was the inevitable outgrowth of a vision that saw the world as essentially consumable. It was all very well picking flowers, but what about lunch? And so, compartment by compartment, bed by bed, Sarah’s grand demonstrative empire spread around the old farmhouse. The ladies came on her courses. The nature of the courses evolved, so that chefs and experts in meat began to come. A flood of adventure was sweeping through Perch Hill, with Simon Bishop, who loved Sarah, presiding over it all and Sarah’s own appetite for the extraordinary providing the dynamo at its heart. Eventually, we thought that the garden itself might be opened to the public. It was only one day, a Tuesday in midsummer, but it had been written in our diaries for months, a glowing D-Day in whose service the entire year was shaped, a point in time beyond which all would be different.
The courses had brought a steady stream of people, but only eight or ten at a time and all very decorous. Once, I had made the fateful mistake of describing the arrival in our nettle-fringed yard of the blue Audis and silver Mercs as ‘more welcome than the swallows in springtime, the life-enhancing sight of a fleet of cheques on wheels’. The phrase rippled around the neighbourhood like a computer virus, damaging Sarah’s reputation and destroying mine. If I had been a computer, I would have crashed. Even nowadays unfamiliar women repeat the phrase with a look that is always the same: a roulade of offended morality, triple-layered with contempt, distaste and pity.
Despite these efforts at alienating the local population, Sarah had kept them coming through the doors. Each year, her business had doubled in size and with it the place had grown in variety and assurance. There was now a necklace of different gardens strung around the house and barns. Each was shut off from the wind with its own walls and hedges and so we were now living in a set of boxes where the flowers flowered and the fruit fruited.
By the oast-house the huge grasses and pompom alliums, the acanthus and tiger-lilies, the sugar-pink dahlias and rusty rudbeckias crowded the paths and overwhelmed the walls so that you had to push and creep your way between them. In the garden by the cow shed, blood-red cornflowers and marigolds filled the panels of a tapestry sampler. By the house in the kitchen garden, there is still a frost-resistant olive-tree and a shocking-pink bench next to lines of blue cabbages and lapping seas of nasturtiums. Roses flopped across the herb-garden beds and agapanthuses leant into the paths. The smell of a coppery fennel filled the air. Sarah’s first cutting garden was, for that summer, lying mostly fallow, the ground cleared and plums fattening on the trees. The lower half, in its semi-neglect, was the most beautiful, a careless muddle of pink and orange poppies. When the wind blew they dropped their petals in a snowstorm of polychrome confetti. Across the track in the new cutting garden, a sudden summer thickness of annuals had appeared, all grown here from seed: tobacco and maize, sunflowers, larkspur and sweet peas, love-lies-bleeding and a beautiful lavender-coloured sage, which in the evening light glowed like blue lamps on green glass stems. Who wouldn’t want to show this to the world?
The open day was in aid of St Michael’s Hospice in Eastbourne, part of a programme they have of garden openings which runs for 12 weeks through the summer. Before the day itself, none of us here had any idea of the scale of the operation run by their fund-raiser, the dynamic Jenny Tyrrell. We were expecting 30, maybe 40 people to come. Even for them, though, there was some frantic tidying up: strimming at the docks, pulling out the bindweed, or at least anything of it you could see on the surface, mowing the bumpy bit of field we call the lawn, digging out the few remaining thistles, removing the lumps of sand that had hung around in various corners awaiting a purpose for the previous four years or so.
Perch Hill, incredibly, changed as I watched. Its old combination of mess and beauty, the ragged and the exotic, concrete and ipomeas, roses on the corrugated asbestos of the old bull pen, started to sort itself out, to shudder and shake itself, acquiring a curious and wonderful adult bloom in the process. I walked around thinking, ‘Is this here? Is this, at last, the first hint of an arrival?’
The sun shone on the open day. Ladies with aprons arrived at nine o’clock. Rectangular cakes, each 3 feet long and 18 inches wide, were brought to the kitchen and left there under cloths. A tea urn was set up on the lawn. Men with sun umbrellas and fold-out tables with fold-out chairs arranged them as if at Ascot. A man asked me where the traffic signs should go. His lieutenants donned lemon-yellow Day-Glo jackets. We pushed the sheep and cattle into a distant field and shut the gate. At ten the cars began to arrive: 20, 40, 100, 150, more than 200 cars by lunchtime. Sarah put out her seeds for sale. Other ladies had brought pot plants, with which they made their own stall near the greenhouse.
The people wandered around the garden. A low murmur of enjoyment, like a human bee hum, came from within the various enclosures. They stopped and discussed the stranger plants in which Sarah indulges, the daturas and cleomes, pushing their noses in, flitting on, pollinating the place with their presence.
I couldn’t keep the smile from my face. It was like watching an audience enjoying your own play in the theatre. All that preparation in private, that anxiety and stumbling, all that scrabbling and failing to catch the wave, and now here on this sunny day, the beautiful sight of shared pleasure, Perch Hill surfing on its own beauty. I met people who had known the place in the 1920s, the ’40s, the ’60s. ‘You never told anyone the garden was like this,’ they said.
Eventually it was over. Jenny Tyrrell counted things up: 618 people had come, £2,250 had been raised for the hospice, several acres of cake had been consumed. ‘A triumph,’ Sarah said last thing at night. She never says anything like that. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yours. It’s yours.’
In order to supply the growing garden with the plants it needed, we put up first one and then a second polytunnel. It wasn’t an entirely easy decision. I always used to think of polytunnels as plastic slugs littering the fields, the building equivalent of a rambler in a cagoule, but worse because immo-bile and stuck there for years. Beautiful buildings grow more beautiful the older they get. Polytunnels go in the opposite direction, declining rapidly with age, tarnished not burnished by experience, yellowing in the sun, flapping in the wind, turning baggy, loose-bellied and brown. A polytunnel seems to be dying as you look at it. They are made of the cheapest and most unseductive of materials: polythene stretched across a thin metal frame.
But Sarah was adamant. We couldn’t afford a proper gree
nhouse (we had a shambolic lean-to of a greenhouse but it wasn’t big enough) and the garden needed something more. I wasn’t to sneer. The polytunnel would be the foundation of a new way of doing things. Rather than an ever-growing acreage of Tudor-style executive home estates with triple garages, she said, the polytunnel was precisely the sort of building of which there should be more in rural England. It embodied something that was valuable and important: affordable fertility. Nothing could be more valuable. So I listened to her, we found a site which was largely concealed by trees and we put one up.
Sarah and I and the dogs and the girls used to spend mornings in there, never more beautiful than in the early spring. Beyond the plastic membrane, Sussex would be pure hostility. A dilute sun seeped between the clouds and the wind cutting in like a slash of razor wire out of the east, pushing the cold damp of the Channel between the stitches of your clothes. But inside, within the polytunnel’s embrace, it was a kind of early spring. The damp warm earth in the raised beds flavoured the air. The air itself was like a vegetable soup. Everywhere the little seedlings were poking up out of their compost nests. Nowhere was more full of promise on a spring day. The whole shape of the year to come was in here, all the vegetables and the tender flowers, one summer lunch after another, all in pure potential. ‘Just add June,’ the instructions on the packet should say. We spent all morning in there, watering the seedlings, tidying up, feeling the warmth which the plastic skin traps inside the tunnel. It is a way of enjoying summer twice, once in March when you see it ready, like this, waiting to happen, and once, you hope, again, when it’s out there in the oast-garden and the vegetable garden, when each of these plants would be released into the flowering time of year, a flood of them running from the gates like children after school. It was the polytunnel which allowed Sarah to lay the foundations of her writing and gardening career. Here, year after year and season after season, she would sow the many different flowers and vegetables on a scale which would otherwise be impossible. It was our route to fertility. It was doing what this place and places like this are meant to do: growing, growing, growing. We should abandon the exterior view, consider places wonderful if wonderful things are happening in them, not if they conform to a surface vision of rural coherence. It was all part of our new confidence in life: the cattle, the beautiful fields, the Network, the people visiting the garden: all that made Perch Hill a happy place.
Smell of Summer Grass Page 26