It might seem that everything we were doing at Perch Hill, getting the farm up and running, restoring the buildings, making a garden, attempting to turn the place back into what it should be, not just a place to sleep and eat but a centre of life, of people coming and going – that all this was driven in me by a need to remake the place where I had lived when I was a child.
But there was something else in play here. At Perch Hill we were trying to make a version of home which was truer and better than what I had known as a boy. This wasn’t simply a repeat; it was an improvement. And the improvement was not one of status or importance. The garden at Sissinghurst had been created by my grandparents, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, in the ruins of a great Elizabethan house. It was filled with echoes of grandeur, faint and crumbled maybe, but which Perch Hill could never hope to match. No, the improvement was at the other end of the scale. What Sarah and I found at Perch Hill and everything we have done there has been driven not by any sense of status or importance but by a need for rootedness. We both wanted to make a place that felt richly itself, that glowed with its own life, that felt as if all its ingredients were contributing to a small but particularly whole economy, in the Greek sense of that word: oiko-nomos, the law of the house. It was to be a place that felt good in itself and good to be in. Perhaps the drive to make a place like that came from a certain lack at Sissinghurst, a hint of well-delivered sterility, a smartness, a sleek swishness which concealed an emotional thinness, the absence of a beating heart. That in the end is the subject of this book: the search for a beating heart.
So Sissinghurst and Perch Hill came to play different and complementary roles in our lives. My father died in September 2004 and we stayed on at Sissinghurst then, yo-yoing between there and Perch Hill, sometimes sleeping in one, sometimes the other, working in one or the other. Sissinghurst was the most heart-stoppingly beautiful of places but it came with tensions and burdens: a National Trust place; many people who thought of it as theirs and us as interlopers; and a lack of control over the garden and the environment which at times felt as though we were trying to live in a glass-walled museum. On a couple of occasions we decided we could no longer live at Sissinghurst. We had tried for long enough to remain buoyant in the face of a certain bleakness and unfriendliness from a couple of individuals. We had done our best to give Sissinghurst what we could. But it is impossible to live somewhere in which you feel, every day, from some quarters, resented and unwelcome. It made Sissinghurst toxic.
A strange moment came in the summer of 2006. The house at Sissinghurst needed to be rewired and so we moved back to Perch Hill. It felt as if we were repossessing a simpler past. Perch Hill was unpolitical. There was no need for manoeuvring there. It felt like home. We yawned and stretched with relief, the muscles of our relaxing selves suddenly finding room where they had been cramped into a box before. I don’t think we had realized how tense we had been. That evening was warm and we went out with a picnic on to the farm, to the Way Field, where the hay had just been made and turned and was lying in rumpled rows, waiting for the baler the next day. We played there with the girls. I made a hay castle for them, and a hay hurdle course, like the Grand National, and then we all sneezed and drank beer with our bread and cheese. I felt as happy as a happy dog, as if I had been let out and let off. I remembered something Gaston Bachelard, the great French philosopher of place, had said: ‘The purpose of a house is to allow you to dream in peace.’ I lay out in the warm starry night that evening, after the others had gone to bed, and rolled that phrase over in my mind. It wasn’t a house exactly which provided the shelter here. It was more a form of psychic skin, a cloak, a tent, under which you could hide, and somehow in that hidden condition feel the world as it was meant to be. How at Sissinghurst, a busy, multi-faceted public institution, could one ever hope for that? But here at Perch, under this roof of stars, nothing could be plainer. Everything Sarah and I had once seen in this field was still here.
But we did not stay at Perch Hill. When the rewiring was completed at Sissinghurst, we went back there. The truth is that Sissinghurst had diverted us. As I have described in another book, I took it upon myself to persuade the National Trust to re-establish some of those qualities of authenticity and rooted vitality which had withered in the place since I had known it as a boy. A half-acknowledged conversation was going on in my mind. The Sissinghurst I remembered from the 1960s, with its hops, orchards, cattle, pigs and chickens, had been intuitively or not the basis for what I wanted at Perch Hill. Those huge communal lunches we always had in the Perch Hill kitchen in the early days, when Will and Peter Clark, Ken Weekes and Sarah and I and Rosie and sometimes Steve Moody (the garden contractor) and his wife Alison, and Anna Cheney (the girls’ nanny) and her daughter Charlotte, when we all sat down together in the kitchen to a mountain of pasta or two or three chickens – what were they but a kind of recreation of the thick communal well-being I had sensed in the air as a boy at Sissinghurst?
But if Sissinghurst had shaped Perch Hill, Perch Hill had returned to shape my idea of what Sissinghurst might be – not a slightly heartless, controlled and driven visitor attraction but a place in which the people who lived and worked there felt at home, which wasn’t rigidly and drearily proper in the way it went about its business, but left some room for the quirks and wrinkles which an unpolished life might give rise to. If old Sissinghurst gave Perch Hill a vision of integrated completeness, Perch Hill could give Sissinghurst a dose of vitality and delight.
It took about five years for this to happen, five years which began in upset and resentment but which by the summer of 2009 seemed, in the usual strangely sudden way of these things, to have settled into a new path. A new farmer, John Hickman, had arrived. He had been by pure chance one of Simon Bishop’s pupils, and he brought his Sussex cattle and Romney sheep to the Sissinghurst farm. Nearly a mile of new hedge on old lines had gone in, a big new orchard, new hay meadows, a new vegetable garden, new woods, new wetlands for the willow warblers and nightingales. Above all a new sense of purpose had emerged there, a vision of the place which went beyond curating the lives of Vita and Harold and started to see the 30-odd years they had lived there as just another episode in the long and evolving story whose roots had begun at the end of the Ice Age 10,000 years ago.
That beautifully long perspective, combined with the surge of energy from new people coming to work there and find new purpose there, was a stimulus for Sissinghurst, whose atmosphere rose into a balloon of optimism. For me and Sarah, it was a kind of cure. I felt Sissinghurst lifting away from me. It was set on a good track, with some good people steering it, and Sarah and I felt released by that to turn our attentions again to Perch Hill.
But there is no arrival. As I was writing these pages, we were hit with the news that Simon Bishop, driving home one evening in November 2009, was killed when a deer came in through the windscreen of his car. It was a freak of an accident. Simon never drove fast, nor took any risks. It was in his nature to make life steady and calm. It always seemed in his presence that not only would life be all right: it would be fun and funny. His attachment to the land and its animals, and the constancy which they imposed, meant that thrills and spills were nearly absent from his life. This was blind chance: a car coming the other way down the B road between Plumpton and Netherfield hit the deer and flipped it up into the air and into Simon’s car just at the second he was passing.
His death cut holes in all of us. Six hundred people came to his funeral in the big, stalwart Norman church at Battle. Hundreds of pupils and colleagues crammed in there. There wasn’t room for everyone to sit down. Colin Pilbeam cut boughs from the Perch Hill wood. With Jo Clark, Simon’s sister-in-law, Sarah made arrangements in the church, mixing the autumn leaves of the oak and silver birch with giant white lilies and laying a wreath of lilies on his coffin.
He had been the centre of so many lives that Perch Hill without him seemed at first like a car whose axles had been removed. Everything was still i
n place, but nothing was whole. For Tessa and their children, the bleakness was all enveloping. For the rest of us, we had to understand how to go on without him. We had to ensure that the farm network he had set up and run, and the courses he had established at Ivyland and whose pupils had done so much at Perch, would both continue. All of us felt we had a duty to maintain his vision of the furture. He knew that Sussex was wonderful. It could only be up to us, and the hundreds of others he had inspired, to make sure it was. At the moment things look fine; his death has brought no break in the systems he worked to establish. There’s no arrival; just going on in the best possible way, as Simon would have wanted.
We had always been full of plans for the buildings at the farm, but never had the money to carry them out. There were times when we couldn’t buy furniture for the rooms. And because we couldn’t afford to do what we wanted to do, we ended up doing nothing. The result was that the buildings, over nearly 20 years, started to look very dog-eared, crumblingly charming as the backdrop to a garden, but scarcely the right way to treat the place you were meant to love. You can be sure enough that ‘the messuage called Perchhowse’ that was here in the 1580s would not have been crumblingly charming.
Sarah and I saved up enough money to make an investment in the buildings. We didn’t want the place swished up. The barn would be made good but remain a barn. The farmhouse itself would be made comfortable, wind- and rat-proof at last, but nothing hi-luxe. We must choose simplicity, the true materials, no gilt downlighters, no knocking down of ancient walls. We shouldn’t change the footprint of the house. It should remain in effect as simple as the place required. This was never going to be an estate agent’s dream. Instead, we thought, we should put the tiles back on the barn which it had lost in the hurricane of 1987, when the whole roof structure was blown off and put back up there by one of the Weekes boys using the front loader of the tractor.
As the children grow up and begin to earn a living and our expenses begin to drop, we might be able to bring Sarah’s school to a gentle conclusion. She and I could then work in there, she in the greenhouse, me in the plain white room where, long ago, I did the lambing in the raw east wind coming off the Channel at night, freezing the water in the buckets around me. We have put up a cow shed, steel-framed and practical. Its floor, as they often used to be, is of rammed chalk, sealed with sour milk. It’s a beautiful thing in the winter, an enhancement to the landscape, smelling sweetly of the cattle and their straw. The sheep have their lambs in there once the cattle have gone out to their summer pasture. More than that, though, I have the feeling that this shed somehow pegs Perch Hill Farm down into its place. Even the knowledge of the animals there in the winter, the sight of their hay stacked from midsummer onwards, the late-summer arrival of the straw from an arable farm and then the dunged straw going back on to the fields in the springtime – all this is a deeply rewarding contribution to the tangible cycle of life to which this book and this whole story have been committed. It provides the bass note, the ballast, for everything else here.
I know this bit of country now. The real pleasure is not in the management, control and decision-making that owning land involves. It is something both less and more than that. It is the ability to roam in your mind across the surface of a place which is so well known to you that it has become indistinguishable from who you are. A deeply and properly known stretch of country clamps itself on to your existence like a second skin. In that marriage of you with your surroundings, something extraordinary happens. You can run your mental fingers over the place you know, feel the familiar grooves and hollows, the shiny, well-rubbed parts like the burnished wood on the arm of a chair, or the nicks and elbows in it, the knobbly interruptions.
If you lie in the bath and think of these things, the mind becomes like another eye or hand itself. These are the workings of the sensuous memory. It can feel a remembered landscape like a shepherd at the market feeling along the back of a lamb for the meat covering the bones. Once you know what to look for, and once that sensuous knowledge has registered, it enters a deep and animal layer of the consciousness from which physical shapes can be recalled far more easily than anything that is more refined. It is that instinctive belonging which this book has been about.
The things we have done to the farm and garden are somehow joining us in that state of knowledge. The perennial plants are ageing in the garden and it is acquiring a more serious and adult air, the froth and glitter of the annuals finding a big responsive background in the clematis and roses, which now thicken each summer on the walls. The hedges we have put in are now tall and dense. Many of the trees we have planted have started to acquire a dignity and presence of their own. Young oaks and ashes are pushing up above the hedgerows. Clusters of horn-beams in the Cottage Field can now provide shade for the cattle in the summer. Time horizons are starting to stretch away. What was once a jittery lurch from one month and then one year to the next has now started to acquire the contours of a lifetime’s work. I can see Perch Hill now as I will when I am dead, and I think how lucky I am to have lived this life, even to have been through the travails with which this book began, because they were what led me to the rewards Perch Hill held, waiting and in secret.
I know this now: when we spend all our money on a wrecked farm; when we feel drawn to the riches of an ancient landscape; when we hang on to the privacy of a secluded place; when our hearts open to the beauty of a dawn in that place, or a long summer evening; when you are there with someone you love those are the moments when you know the value and richness of being alive.
Picture Section
Looking east from Jim’s Field at Perch Hill over the woods, fields and farms of the Sussex Weald.
Adam Nicolson in about 1990, just as his life was falling apart.
Sarah Raven at the same moment.
The transformation of the garden begins, getting much worse before it could ever get better.
Friends help to lay out the beginnings of Sarah’s cutting garden, with woven hazel windbreaks and a semblance of order.
Ben and Rosie Nicolson in the newly laid out garden with brick paths and far-too-expensive new pots.
Chestnut stakes, with turned onion tops turned, painted to look like gondola posts, with blue plant labels marking out the rows: Sarah starts to evolve the Perch Hill style.
Donald, by far the longest living of all our ducks, sorts out the slugs in an early version of the springtime cutting garden.
Sarah with Will Clark and a slightly disgruntled Rosie.
The new oast house emerges from a sea of mud, snow and rubbish.
Nipper Keeley, Sussex man par excellence, wood merchant, dog-breeder, furniture maker, wit and raconteur, gives Sarah a bunch of his supremely long-stemmed sweet peas.
Summer supper with Rosie, Adam, Molly, Sarah and, half-visible, Colonel Custard the dog.
Ken Weekes, born at Perch Hill, dairy farmer at Perch Hill, by the 1990s tenant of Perch Hill cottage, general guide and advisor on every element of Perch Hill life.
Years of topping the thistles and using no sprays on the pastures have produced a rich, flowery and diverse sward full of vetches and clovers, as here in the bottom of Great Flemings.
Bluebells and orchids in the wood.
The Perch Hill herd of Sussex cattle in Target Field: as soon as they arrived it felt as if the farm was complete.
Glossy, full and fat on Perch Hill grass, the cattle came to seem what Perch Hill was for.
Simon Bishop, with Norman the Sussex bull and one of his cows, steered the farm at Perch Hill into a wonderful, new and healthy state which it would never have reached without him. He was tragically killed in a road accident in November 2009.
California and Iceland poppies, cornflowers and foxgloves fill a misty summer morning in the cutting garden, as the house now sits in its sea of flowers.
Beech Meadow, which in the 50s and 60s was used as the farm’s only arable field, now alternates between pasture for sheep and cattle and a hay mea
dow.
White foxgloves line the hedge between the fruit garden and the entrance track. A standard hawthorn planted in 1997 leans away from the prevailing southwesterlies.
The converted cowshed now has a green house attached and is surrounded by a mixture of artichokes and herbs. This has become Sarah’s garden and cookery school.
Sarah talks to a group of visitors in the new vegetable garden on the virtues of growing your own.
The smell of summer grass.
About the Author
Adam Nicolson is the author of many critically acclaimed and bestselling books on history and the landscape including Sissinghurst, Sea Room and When God Spoke English. The Mighty Dead was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and he has won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the WH Heinemann Prize and the Ondaatje Prize. He has written and presented many series for television, most recently The Century That Wrote Itself, about life and writing in the 17th century. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Sussex with his wife and family.
By the same author
Wetland: Life in the Somerset Levels
Restoration: The Rebuilding of Windsor Castle
Sea Room: An Island Life
When God Spoke English: The Making of the King James Bible
Atlantic Britain
Men of Honour: Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero
Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History
Arcadia: The Dream of Perfection in Renaissance England
Smell of Summer Grass Page 29