A Thick Pelt of Green
A DECADE after we had first arrived the farm was moving smoothly towards a calm and well-regulated condition. The sheep were better than they had ever been; we had got some pigs and some more chickens; the cattle were beautiful, at home and happy.
Slowly the herd built up until we had eight Sussex mothers, their daughters and their granddaughters. Calves were born outside in May or June on the fresh grass and then stayed with their mothers for the whole of the first year. Family groups were allowed to roam through several fields, choosing the corners they wanted to be in. Calves weaned themselves without stress. The family groups overwintered together in roomy barns over at Simon’s farm at Ivyland. No additive of any kind was ever fed to them. It was beef farming as beef farming should be. When Simon discovered that Tesco required us to transport the steers live to an abattoir in Cornwall, he rejected the lucrative contract on offer for ‘heritage beef’ and had them slaughtered locally. Ten hours packed in the back of a truck on the motorway was not the sort of heritage he or I would ever have been interested in. And so they were killed down the road at the abattoir in Tottingworth Farm and then cut into joints, or the pig meat made into sausages at the Network’s cutting room in Netherfield. People bought the meat direct from there, or occasionally at farmers’ markets. It was Simon who brought a sense of system to the farm and to the Network, of doing the obvious thing well and calmly, of making everyone feel that they were lucky to be part of his life.
More than that, though, Simon knew, as his central vision, what farming could do to transform a young person’s life. Many of the pupils he had at the out-station of Plumpton Agricultural College which he ran at Ivyland came from the poorest parts of Hastings. He made a particular point of looking after those with learning difficulties. ‘What have you had for breakfast?’ he would ask them every morning. Many would have had no breakfast at all and would eat nothing hot in the evening either. He set up a sort of field kitchen on his farm, in which many of them ate good, real food for the first time in their lives. These were teenagers who had no experience of encouragement or sustained support either at school or at home. But Simon, often bringing them over to Perch Hill to help in the planting of a hedge or the shearing of the sheep, treated them with a generosity, gentleness and respect that I could only watch with awe. They loved him, clustering around him. And his method, slowly developed over the years, was to make sure that the pupils engaged with the whole production cycle, giving each group a small piece of land on which to grow their own vegetables and fruit, having them work on the farm with the pigs, collecting the eggs from the chickens, herding the cattle and sheep, gathering up the goods. It became the most wonderful destiny for the farm here: not a plaything, not allowed to go to rot, not being driven for the last penny it could deliver, but doing for these children what it had already done for me.
Under Simon Bishop’s guidance, and with help from Angie Wilkins, who worked with him, we set about getting Perch Hill in even better order. First, it was some proper fencing, then dividing up some of the bigger fields so that the sheep and cattle could move on regularly to clean grazing and then piping water to each of those fields so that the animals could have a drink whenever they felt like it. It was a horribly expensive business: nearly 6 miles of sheep netting, more than 2,000 chestnut posts, thicker ones for the places where the fence turned a corner, diagonal strainers to strengthen those points, uncounted staples to fix the wire to the posts, gates, hinges, fastenings with which to close the gates. That was the hardware. Actually putting it up cost even more.
I knew we had to do this properly. I couldn’t have looked Simon in the eye if we had scrimped or cheated. Anyway, I had begun to enter the farmer mentality enough to think that one shouldn’t waste even a square yard of a field by putting the fence in from the boundary. So the boundary had to be cleared of all its brambles, overgrowth of hedgerow trees, old fence posts and old wire. Jimmy Gray, a fencer from Brightling, did the work, wading deep into the tangle with which our two biggest fields were surrounded. His tractor, with post rammer attached, got so bogged down in the glutinous fudge that lurks an eighth of an inch below the grass, that he had to summon an enormous tracked digger to get him out. The digger could get no grip on earth which had the consistency of Angel Delight. At one point it began to slide unstoppably towards the lip of a wooded bank, the driver incapable of doing anything to save himself. Only by slamming down the machine’s telescopic arm and jamming the armoured tip of the yard-wide bucket into the earth did he bring himself to a halt. The field itself looked half-ploughed, but we disced and rolled the following spring and you would never have known the difference.
A farm doesn’t work without rigour, without doing as much as you can. It’s all very well for developers developing housing estates, or borough engineers devising road schemes, or great men in their great houses laying out their parks, to think that a little spare ground can be lost or used for nothing, for effect. But not a farm. The treasured qualities of the English landscape – or any closely farmed place from here to Java, anywhere there has never been much fat to spare – come from this squeezing of the resource, this tightness in the use of land, the precise interlocking of field and wood and track arranged as closely as the words in a sentence.
So, slowly, that is what Jimmy did and we got our new fence, about £25,000-worth of sheep-netting, half of it paid for with a grant, with 27 new gates at various points through it, the whole lot enclosing about 70 acres of the grazing on the farm.
What Jimmy had done looked efficient but there was a certain rawness to it, where the hedgerow trees had been lopped and all the old field margin scurf cut away and burnt. I knew all that would soon return. The brightness of the fence posts would dim and the fields would once again acquire the aged, patinated calm which all this work seemed to have erased. We hadn’t sprayed anything and all the woody hedge plants were still there. It was not as if any permanent damage had been done. Behind the fences, we were planting new hedges and filling up the gaps where the hedges had decayed into isolated fragments. In 10 years it would be all right.
In fact, this work on the ground, making the place feel right in itself, redeeming something which had been on the way down for too long, turning that trajectory around: all of that was a deeper pleasure than simply enjoying or longing for the aesthetics of the old. The following summer, in the heat of the morning, with my shirt off and the sweat running down me, I did a job that had been hanging over me for months. The wood which we had cut from the field margins had been lying there in lumps all spring. At last, I was getting it in.
‘There is little better in the world than this,’ I thought. I had my small John Deere and its trailer next to me. I was loading it with the lengths of wood from the field. The Sussex steers were looking at me like a panel of jurors confronted with a thief. The county after which they are named was going blue in the distance as it dropped away from our own green fields. The swallows were skimming the grasses like swimmers after the dive, seen beneath the water, their hair slicked back on to the bones of their heads.
I was taking in the lengths of wood to burn on our winter fires, gathering our winter warmth in the middle of the summer heat. I am not quite sure why this felt so good. Perhaps it was simply the pleasure of planning, of doing something now which meant that we would be prepared when the winter came. I should have done it months before, before the grass and thistles grew up among the piles of cut wood, but other things had intervened and I hadn’t. Now, at least, the ground was dry. The place by the gate where the water had gathered in little ponds and which was filled for a week or so with frogspawn was now a dusty hollow. The wheels of the trailer bounced happily across the dry surface and the steers’ hooves drummed on the field as if on a wooden chest.
This was more, though, than complacent pleasure in my own timeliness. I love, above all things here, the connectedness and lack of profligacy in these things: new fence pushed to old boundary meant new f
irewood for old fires. It was maintenance, that word which, as somebody reminded me, means, etymologically, ‘holding in your hand’, the Latin, I suppose, for ‘keeping up’. In doing this, in loading this trailer, in sweating over the wood, and then in splitting it outside the wood shed, with the heavy head of the splitting axe, cleaving between the fibres of the tree, I was holding Perch Hill in my hand, keeping it up, repeating the pattern.
It was not the life for lying back. Sarah’s courses were doing well. She was writing more, increasingly both on gardening and food, and the buildings we had weren’t good enough for what had in effect become a gardening and cookery school. It was an exciting and terrifying time, as if we had left behind our childhood and entered a fiercer and more adult world. Anyone who has set up an enterprise like Sarah’s knows, above all, the difficulty of making it grow. I think we fell for every mistake in the book. We tried to run a mail-order business from the barn. We installed more telephone and computer equipment than I ever want to see again. Her customer base ballooned from 300 to 25,000. Delivery lorries crammed themselves down the lane. We employed far too many people: at one point there were 35 of them coming to work at the farm. We borrowed too much money. The tiny beginnings of the business, in which we had hand-coloured her seed catalogues on the kitchen table, got left behind in a welter of largeness, other people and alien ideas. It couldn’t stay small: nothing can. But as it got bigger, it seemed to acquire a vast, dominating presence in our lives, like a puppy transmuting into an elephant. People we scarcely knew were making decisions about what ‘Sarah Raven’ – ‘Not the person, Adam, the brand’ – really stood for.
On open days, quite regularly, 1,000 people would arrive. The cars parked in the Cottage Field stretched for hundreds of yards down towards the wood. I sat at the gate taking the entrance money. Colin directed the traffic. Neighbours came in for free. Sarah gave talks in the old kitchen, Tessa Bishop ran a small shop for seeds. Bea Burke, the young Hungarian whom Sarah had taken on as a gardener, sold the plants she had raised in the polytunnels. Simon Bishop and Angie Wilkins sold cuts of meat and sausages from the Wealden Farmers’ Network and other local entrepreneurs – nurserymen, bakers and wine-makers – sold their wares in a little market outside the barn.
The old 1940s cow shed, in which I had lambed the lambs, had become little better than a dusty junkyard for most of the year. We decided to convert it into Sarah’s new school. I had met the Scottish architect Kathryn Findlay and together with her team we designed a beautiful new building: a greenhouse clamped to the southern side of the big old shed, the asbestos roof replaced, offices and a kitchen all squeezed in. Four separate doors connected the greenhouse to the school so that life could flow happily from one to the other. Everything inside was to be white and clear so that the flowers themselves – and the delicious cooking smells – would become the stars of the show. The big bank outside the greenhouse was planted up with vegetables and annuals and from that greenhouse the fields and woods of the southern part of the farm seemed to spread out like a ruched and ruffled apron of interleaved greens. ‘Look,’ the view said. ‘Look how wonderful Perch Hill is.’
The new school became the most beautiful building at Perch Hill. Nipper Keeley made a giant maplewood table to go in its greenhouse, and when the courses were not going on, we took to living in there, half-amazed at the little slice of glamour which the building had brought into our lives. Matthew Rice told us all how to keep chickens. We became very nearly self-sufficient in meat, eggs and veg and, away from the chronically troublesome business, Sarah found all the solace she could hope for in the burgeoning productivity of her garden.
So this was the situation in 2004: we had done well with the farm at Perch Hill. It was in good shape and in good hands. Sarah had made something astonishingly beautiful in the garden here, completely of its own kind, a garden dedicated to the idea that its beauty consisted in its own abundance, a place in which nature could be allowed and encouraged to be its most demonstrative. Her garden was a theatre of fullness. On summer mornings I would walk out into it – heady, thick, dripping, colour-drenched – and feel that she had made a miracle, a descendant of Great Dixter in part but heroically itself. We had done well by some of the buildings but others were still in a sorry state. We had made a place our children loved.
The farm had settled into clarity and simplicity. On a summer’s day I took one of my farming neighbours to see what I think of as our most beautiful field. It’s always been known as the Way Field, but we call it Rosie’s Field, because it is where, during our first summer here, we had a party for her first birthday. We put a tent up next to the top hedge, its flaps open to the field. Sarah had decorated the eaves of the tent with the looping lines of a summer swag: poppies, cornflowers and marigolds all picked from her new annuals garden, providing a frieze of colour above Perch Hill’s most seductive view. The 11 acres of standing hay spread out in front of us as an apron of red sorrel, with yellow and blue vetches, the sharp, almost blue-white heads of the yarrow flowers, the grasses going tan and khaki, the lilac tufts here and there of the flowering thistles and the pools of red and white clover. Beyond them – and this is one of the best things the summer does to the Weald – the sun was casting deep eye-sockets of shadow along the edges of the wood, in which only the trunks of the birches stood out as stripes of paleness.
The party was the first time we showed our friends what this place was like. It was more a demonstration to them than a party for Rosie.
I felt, rather absurdly, proud of what you could see from the tent; of what I could now say I owned, with its butterflies dancing in and out of the hay tips, and the way it so clearly fitted the picture of what a place like this might be. When the wind turned in the right direction, the smell of the field blew over us, the smell of warmed vegetation. It also brought the sound of the bells of Burwash church. Down in the bottom of the field, a troupe of deer processed in a line across the field like ducklings at a fairground shooting arcade. Afterwards, we lay down in the hay, careless of the extravagance of this, and looked up at the sky through the rim of stalks.
Now, five years later, I was lying in the field again, writing this. If anything, the hay was better, more flowery than it had ever been. More vetches made blue patches in the bleached grass tops. The yellow rattle I had sown over the previous two winters had now taken in dense colonies 10 or 15 feet across and was setting its own seed. I manage the field for floweriness: a very late cut of the hay, not before the end of July and sometimes later; grazing the aftermath so that by midwinter the sward is right down to nothing and in places small patches of bare earth are visible between the plants; taking the sheep off so that they don’t hammer it too hard; then allowing the cycle to begin again. As a system, it seems to provide just the conditions on which the flowering plants thrive. The dogs were now lying beside me, panting in the heat, as the late hay threw its diagonal, muddled shadows across the page.
Despite the Elysian nature of this, all I can think of, and I know why, is what my farming neighbour said when I showed him this field last haytime. Its polychromatic shimmer moved under the wind coming down the valley. The dogs bounced around in it as though in a playground, disappearing from view momentarily at each bound. ‘What do you think of that then?’ I asked him. This wasn’t even a negotiation. I wasn’t trying to sell him or persuade him of anything. I just wanted to have him agree that the Way Field was a marvellous thing, in the way you might show someone a picture you liked or tell them a story that had intrigued you.
‘What about that, then?’ he asked, killing the enthusiasm in the question, shifting the emphasis from ‘that’ to ‘what’.
‘Isn’t it a marvellous sight?’ I repeated, pushing for a yes.
‘It’s a desert,’ he said. ‘It’d hardly be worth baling.’ We walked out into the field, pushing past the knapweed, sending up the meadow browns, like the sparkle above a glass of lemonade. ‘It’s all top and no bottom,’ he said. That year, when the spri
ng and early summer had been dry, he was right. What looked like a solid slice of grass, 15 inches thick and 11 acres in extent, turned out as you walked through it to be made mostly of air. The tractor-borne mower would be spending most of its time slicing on nothing.
Ever since, I have looked for bottom in a hayfield. You can’t judge it from a distance. Only if the understorey of grass clogs your shoes as you push through it will it be any good. This year, the deep reserves of damp from the wet winter and spring had ensured that the Way Field, beneath its tawny, flamboyant upper layer, was thick with goodness, a thick pelt of green which soon enough would make many hundreds of bales. In a way the farmer was right. But if I understood he was right, I didn’t and still don’t accept that I was wrong. For the Way Field to be beautiful is a form of value too.
Smell of Summer Grass Page 27