AT THE petrol station in the village one day, just as that long first winter felt, perhaps, that it might be on the verge of turning into spring, I happened to look up at a mirror on the wall. It was a moment of self-revelation. A slightly unshaven man in his late 30s was standing beside the pumps, a rather old young man who, in common with many men of his age, was both a little bald and in need of a haircut. The hair that he had was so dirty that it stood up in peaks like whipped egg whites. He imagined, I suppose, that it looked romantically informal, a little wind-swept, perhaps even Byronic. It didn’t.
He was wearing a pair of Argyll gumboots, which were muddy around the tops. The trousers of a baggy green corduroy suit were tucked into them. He seemed to be holding them up by putting his hands in his pockets. Under the jacket was what looked like a thick blue workman’s shirt. He was putting diesel in a large green Land Rover, which did not, thank goodness, have a bull-bar encrusted with rally-lamps across the radiator but was coated in the splashed mud of which he was obviously proud and had not washed off since he had first bought the thing eight months previously. Pitiable. In the front passenger seat was a nice-looking but rather fat yellow Labrador staring out of the window like a son watching his daddy going off to war.
As a result of the weekly column I had been writing about our life at Perch Hill, a woman from Radio 4’s On Your Farm programme rang up. I was, she told me, ‘part of a general phenomenon’. The words she in fact used were: ‘what sounds like the pantomimic quality of life at Perch Hill’. She claimed that our form of rural self-delusion was something that was happening all over the country, ‘at least in the pretty parts’.
She threatened to come down and interview us here about our style of farming. I tried to put her off. ‘We’re not really farmers at all,’ I told her, knowing that to be the truth. She took it for the most charming sort of false modesty. ‘Oh, come on,’ she said, burbling slightly as only producers can. ‘Why don’t you simply let us come down, have a chat, look around a little and take it from there?’
‘I don’t think there’ll really be enough to talk about for half an hour,’ I said desperately, thinking in fact of the dreadful mess everywhere, the chickens in their slum conditions, the ducks in their state of permanent fox-induced anxiety, the ewe that was hobbling about with a bad foot that we couldn’t clear up, the chaos of most of the woods, the mud, the mud, the mud. Did I want Radio 4 to see all this? No. It would be like an entire crew of inspecting mothers-in-law coming to stay for a week. Her laugh in response was the nearest to an aural tea-cosy that I have ever heard. ‘Oh, really Adam, don’t be silly.’
So she was coming. I felt sick and bogus. Sarah was furious. ‘I’m not cooking them breakfast,’ she said when I gave her the news. ‘But they need breakfast for the background sound effects. It’s got to sound like a farmhouse kitchen at 6.30 in the morning.’ She snorted and left the room. I had the dreadful premonition that when the day came, Sarah would remain sulking in bed while I was interviewed by Oliver Walston, On Your Farms’ resident interviewer. I’d have to hiss and spit during his questions so that it would sound as if the bacon was cooking in the background. It was going to be hell.
I was in a quandary. What was my own view of what we were doing? Part of the time, I knew we were here to recreate a beautiful, traditional landscape, rich with the polycultural detail of orchard, coppice wood, hop garden, pasture and hay meadow that it would have had, say, in the 1870s. And part of the time I realized that was somehow absurd, a meaningless gesture towards a bogus historical accuracy. Why not do what you want to do? Why not make it what you want it to be?
Take, for example, our latest innovation, which had been met with hilarity and disbelief among the neighbouring farmers: sheep bells for the sheep. I found them in a perfectly straightforward agricultural supplies shop in the suburbs of Palma in Majorca, where they form an everyday part of a sheep farmer’s equipment. We got three different sizes for three different notes and could now listen to our small flock as they prepared to lamb at the end of March, their bells rocking gently at the far end of the Target Field. It was beautiful but absurd, Petit Trianon for the 1990s. Carolyn Fieldwick, the shepherd, looked at the sky when I mentioned them. I had yet to tell her that we were also thinking of dyeing the sheep multi-colours so that they would make a broken rainbow across the pastures, pointillist dots on the spread of green. Pretty country, not very 1870s.
There was a paradox I found it difficult to accommodate here. The recreated landscape, the landscape which in some ways seems truest to the place, was in a sense the most bogus of all options, the biggest lie. And the most flippant and superficial of games, the parti-coloured sheep and their bell music from the Mediterranean, were most honestly representative of our own place here now, of our distant, disengaged and in some ways voyeuristic relationship to the land. How honest was I going to be with the people from the radio?
The day came. Oliver Walston, the most famous farmer in England, arrived in his enormous grey Mercedes. The jeans-and-tweed-jacketed, rumbustious, Old Etonian controversialist, who stood with his shoulders back and his chest out like a model of John Bull in a pub, treated Sarah and me gently, even sweetly. It was captivating. His trick was a sort of faux-aggressive manner which allowed him to get away with murder. Where most people say charming things full of buried hate, he said things that should have been hateful but were overflowing with care and attention. Sarah and I both thought him wonderful.
‘What are you?’ he asked me over the radio breakfast. The usual packet of Tesco’s muesli had been hidden out of sight and plates of agricultural plenty lay there between us. ‘A lily-livered, namby-pamby, dilettante aesthete floating about in a violet-tinted world of your own where you want your sheep to be pretty colours and your hedges fluffy? What have I got here, Marie Antoinette?’
‘Yes,’ I said and went off on to a long blague about the beauty of beauty, how this farm’s main crop now was what it looked like, that there was nothing ignoble or contemptible in that, that if this society were not interested in the making or saving of beautiful places, then there was little hope for it. The picture that emerged was of Sarah and me as ignorant amateurs bumbling around 90 acres of the Sussex Weald pontificating about what should and shouldn’t be done to the landscape. In other words, a highly accurate portrayal.
Were we consistently inane? Probably. There was a bad moment when I embarked on a lecture discussing the rights and wrongs of nitrogen applied to grassland and all the virtues of no-input management systems. Did I know about soil structure? No. Did I know about the calorie intake required by a grazing cow? No. The biochemical relationship of clover and rye-grass under conditions of climatic stress? No. Nevertheless, I decided to inform a million Radio 4 listeners about those highly fascinating topics. It was the radio equivalent of an undrained bog.
Walston was like the helmsman of an ocean-going yacht watching someone repeatedly capsizing in a dinghy far below. The more I drowned, the more benign his face became. You had to admire the man. After he had gone, the late winter drear seemed even drearier than before: our moment of exposure and then the privacy folding back in.
‘It’s eight months of winter here,’ Will Clark said to me on a dreadful day that February as we stood staring out of a window together at a garden that looked as if it belonged in the outskirts of Chernobyl. ‘Yep,’ he went on, when he saw from my face that I agreed too much. ‘But it won’t be long before we’re making hay!’ He said it smiling, knowing that neither he nor I believed a word of it.
It was March before the sun shone. When it appeared, I felt like shouting hello at it, slapping it on the back and shoving a large glass of sherry into its hand, saying, ‘Come on, make yourself at home! Where the hell have you been all this time?’ The first days of spring turn one into a brigadier in the East Sussex Yeomanry.
There’s a story I always think of in the springtime that comes from one of the deep beech-lined valleys of the Béarnais Pyrenees. A young farmer lived right in the pit of the valley where, all winter long, the mountains above him cast their shadow. It was a place of mist and frost. One autumn he married his sweetheart from another village in another valley and brought her to his cold and shadowed house. They were poor and they struggled through the winter, seeing almost no one and eating no meat. Then, one March day, as he was pulling on his coat in the morning to go out to work, he told her to kill one of their rabbits and cook it, because a good friend was coming to dinner. She duly killed it and cooked it but was surprised to see him coming home at midday alone. ‘Where is your friend, then?’ she asked rather shortly. He took her by the arm, and showed her the sunlight which at that moment was touching their threshold for the first time since the autumn before.
It is the light that does it, that flood of light, as bleached in reality as the appearance of a midsummer landscape when you’ve been lying asleep with the sun on your closed lids and you open them to an oddly washed-out world, like a photograph that has been sitting too long on a windowsill. Even in its weakness, spring sunshine is so greedily drunk up. Why is that? I can’t quite believe the craving for spring we all feel, so animal an instinct! Nor do I understand how it is that each year the winter seems to grow longer and deeper, the spring more hungered for and, when it comes, richer, more interesting, more of a stimulus, more dominant in the way one feels than it has ever been in your life before. It’s as though, as you approach middle age, you become more seasonal, more wafted to and fro on these annual rhythms, less continuous in your life, more susceptible than ever to the conflicting claims of memory and desire. Can that really be the case?
For weeks we had been hunting about, looking for signs of spring. I found a primrose leaf in February the size of a fingernail but crinkled like a Savoy cabbage still half-underground. The grains of soil had folded the tip a little backwards. The hard emergent dagger leaves of the bluebells were pushing through the leaf-litter as if from individual silos. The cow parsley was already there in low, soft-edged pouffes about the size of a dinner plate at the foot of the hedges. Dog’s mercury was everywhere in the woods, as well as lords and ladies, and the wild garlic already smelled culinary in the edge of Coombe Wood. One or two of its leaves, bright green, striped dark green, were up and out above the brown wood floor like the blades of soft-bodied assegais.
‘That bloody garlic,’ Ken Weekes called it. One year, after a winter like this one, when there was no grass left on the fields, the cows had pushed their way out of Target Field and into Coombe Wood, where they saw the alluring bright green of the garlic in the shadows. For half a day the cattle had grazed on the stinking shoots and had then come in to be milked. ‘You couldn’t even put your face in a churn,’ Ken said. ‘Phwaw. We had to chuck the lot for three days in a row.’
Apart from that, nothing. There were some leaves out on the honeysuckles and one or two on the elders, but the other trees remained tight and bound in. The hazels and the alders had their catkins dangling in the sunlight and as the breeze blew across them you could see the pollen stream against the light blowing away downwind. But the leaf buds were still hard and inscrutable, genetically wary of late frosts.
Each has its different manner. An oak bud is a heavily armoured thing, protected behind layer on layer of scales like a pangolin’s tail. If you flake them off one by one, they come away dry and brown. Only in the very centre do you find the living green, smelling sappy, the minuscule point of protected life. A hornbeam bud surrenders more easily. A couple of flicks at the protective shell, it falls apart and inside you find the cluster of leaves each no more than a 16th of an inch long and covered in silky white hairs like a Labrador’s ear. The shape of the future leaf is there. All that is missing is the material. Style precedes substance.
It is the ash, still months away from revealing itself, that is the most defended of all. Its black buds are shielded in points like a deer’s hoofs. The outer scales are thick, pointed, firmly anchored and leathery. Pull them away and you find a little capsule of brown fluffy fuzz inside, exactly like rock wool. It is an insulation blanket wrapped around the growing point. Pull that off and you will reach an ash-frond in miniature, the whole frond half the size of a single in-bud hornbeam leaf, still clogged with bits of the rock wool. It is tentacled like a sea-anemone and looks as if it should belong on a coral reef. Such care, such details! Perhaps amazement isn’t really enough of a reaction. But if not sufficient, it is at least necessary. That is what springtime is: gratitude married to amazement.
A double crisis, long predicted, and even longed for, started to close around our lives. That March, Sarah and the sheep were all, in a miraculous piece of synchronicity, on the point of giving birth at home. I was waking up with my teeth clenched. I was yo-yoing between cow shed and sitting room, sitting room and cow shed, in a stew of vastly enlarged paternal concern. Twenty mothers in my care! Sarah and I had erected a 6-foot-wide, 4-foot-deep swimming pool in front of the fire in the sitting room. All furniture had been pushed to the walls as though for a dance. By 1 March, Sarah had already had two full-blown ‘It’s coming’ crises and those were somehow worse than the real thing. I felt in those Phoney War days as though I were a Battle of Britain pilot sitting on an armchair arranged next to the runway, my Mae West around my neck, nonchalantly smoking, while my insides were doing the can-can. Rosie, our two-year-old daughter, woke me up one morning to ask if I minded if she cut off my head with a carving knife. I said that would be fine.
Then there were the sheep. They were due to lamb in a couple of weeks but some were bound to be early. Luckily they were unable to say when they were having an ‘I think it’s coming’ crisis. Or if that was what they meant by their bleating and shuffling at six in the morning, I just ignored it, gave them some more hay and told them to shut up.
It was vital that no hint of pregnant sheep came anywhere near pregnant wife for fear of disease spreading from one to the other. I have never washed so much in my life. Sitting in the kitchen, I had lessons from Carolyn Fieldwick, the shepherdess in boiler suit and woolly socks, telling me in precise and careful detail what I had to do. There would be the three-hourly, twenty-four-hour-a-day inspections of the ewes from the beginning of March until mid-April. If I found one whose womb was prolapsing (‘You’ll see a very red, pinkish blob the size of a fist coming out’), I had to turn the ewe over, wind baler twine round her middle, ‘push everything back in’ and then tie it there with a special bit of kit I had to buy.
What if the lambs were coming out head but not feet first? Reach in to get the feet out but check that the feet belong to the lamb whose head you can see. Twins get muddled up together. Didn’t Ted Hughes write a poem about pulling on a lamb so hard that its head came off in the womb? What if it was coming out backwards? What if the second lamb was all muddled up with the ‘bag’? What do you do about the navel? What about triplets? How do you get triplets all to suckle? What if the mother dies? I was in a state of tense, exhausted paralysis.
The weather made it worse. March, it has to be said, is the most vindictive month. There is a catty, cold-blooded compassionlessness about the way it promises you everything and never delivers. March, in fact, is a liar. It lets you pretend for a while that England is a northern limb of that benign southern Europe where apricots coat the walls and life is lush and generous. But March comes back, old and deceiving, turns the heat and benignity off, replacing Provence with Spitzbergen, and prunes away at the loose-limbed hopes the warmth had engendered. Spring had come, with its usual severity.
Three in the morning, two weeks later. I’m in the cow shed to see that the sheep are all right. The night in as dark as it will ever be. The south-east wind is cruising in like a shark off the English Channel, ten miles away. It’s coming in through the spaces at the top of the barn doors and out the far side. The water is frozen in the buckets.
The ewes are in here, nineteen of them, as pregnant as a fleet of East Indiamen, laden to the gunwales, bulging with themselves. Some of them look as though they had a pair of saddlebags strapped around their middles and when they lie down, as they are now, their vast, filled midriffs pool out on either side in an ocean of motherhood and fecundity.
Their time is due. Roger, our Suffolk ram, now grazing with two young ram lambs in the field on the far side of the road, did well in the autumn. Only one old black ewe, well past her prime and possibly barren, is not in lamb. She’s in the bull pen now and she looks out past the hurdle at the door with an air of abandonment and age. Her black wool is grizzled; she won’t last the spring.
That’s not what it’s like in here. Despite the cold, despite their laden condition, the ewes are lying out across their thick bed of straw in pure horizontal contentment. We’ve fed them well, for weeks now, on quantities of ewe nuts. Half a ton has disappeared down their gullets, not to speak of 2 acres-worth of the hay we made last July in Beech Meadow, good ‘blue’ hay, meaning there is still a certain greenness to it even at the tail end of the winter. The sheep have had nothing but the best and they look marvellous on it. There is something about them which reminds me of a plateful of gnocchi, a rounded warmness, comfort made flesh. Their chins are lifted in the attitude of sheep at ease and a low snorting sort of snoring is coming from their nostrils. The expectant mothers are happy.
One has already done what she needs to do and is over the other side in an individual pen with her lamb. It was Sunday lunchtime. She had been shuffling about all morning, looking, as Peter Clark so precisely described it, ‘a little sheepish’, and then during lunch must have delivered.
We found her with the lamb still smeary with the membranes at her feet and the afterbirth still hanging from her. It was all so normal, so griefless, so prosaic in its way, so without agony that it now seems absurd that I should have gone in for so much apprehension. This was as it should be: ewes in good condition deliver easily and have the appearance afterwards of nothing having happened.
I picked up the lamb to put her in the pen. The little thing felt just as if someone had broken eggs all over the wool. The ewe followed us. They licked and nosed each other. A lamb is a survival machine: a big head, a big mouth and four stocky black legs out of proportion to the sack of a body which joins these standing and eating parts together. The ewe had a full udder, and the lamb soon found its way to suck, wriggling its tail, the instinctive drive at work, the vital colostrum running into the gut. Survival.
A sheep has no face, no screen on which its mental state can be read as ours can in such detail and with such immediacy. You look at a sheep and see a certain blankness: no pleasure, no pain, no grief, no anger, no delight, no regret. But if there’s no face, you can at least read its body and, unlike the sisters still waiting for their birthing moment so relaxedly in their communal pre-crèche, the mother with its lamb was obviously in a state of acute anxiety. For twenty-four hours after the birth, whenever I came in to see how the lamb was doing – my own anxiety, needing this thing to survive, not to die on me, not this first one – I found the mother standing alert, eyes big, defensive, stamping her front feet as I approached the pen or picked up the lamb to look at the navel and the shrivelling cord or to feel its, gratifyingly, filling belly. The ewe is tensed to protect her own. She is a servant of her genetic destiny. Her life can only be dedicated to these fragile, transitional moments on which so much hinges. So this instant, in the pen with the hours-old lamb, with the tautened presence of the protective mother, this is one of those moments when you come close to ‘the blood of the world’, to the essential juices running under the everyday surface of things, when the curtain is drawn back and you find yourself face to face with how things are.
It snowed the following night and in the morning the east wind blew thick drifts of it off the field and into the trench of Willingford Lane, blocking it. Sarah was due to give birth at home any day and in these conditions no doctor or midwife could reach her. I drove up the lane in the Land Rover with a spade and shovel and for four hours dug a way through the snow, cutting the route which an emergency would make necessary. It was the opposite of digging a grave, cutting a life-path through the snow, a car wide, three or four feet deep for about 50 yards along the lane, just on the crest where it was open to the wind and where the snow had swelled into bulbous goitres and growths between the hedges.
The next day Sarah gave birth to our second daughter. The contractions began the evening before. I half-slept, waking, stoking the fire, sleeping again, refilling the pool with warm water, and Sarah bathed there throughout the night, calm and easy. Sarah’s sister Jane was staying and while I slept, she looked after Sarah. An old friend, Patricia Howie, was here too, to look after us all. The midwife came at about six. By nine in the morning the whole process had steepened and deepened. In quite a sudden way, with the growing contractions, it reached a huge and passionate intensity. Sarah looked in this extremis like one of the sibyls on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, a vast being in pain. I could hardly recognize her. I was amazed by it. The sheer hurt of the delivery seemed at times to balloon out from her to fill the whole room, the whole house, the whole of here. She was shouting louder than I had heard anyone shout before. Human birth, when seen at home, when suffered by someone you know and love, when not dulled or interfered with by the dislocations of hospital and its comprehensive anaesthesia, is a vast and violent thing. A husband, an observer, can do little but stand and watch, gormless in his irrelevance, awed by the sort of instinctive courage this moment summons, bewildered by the sheer scale of an experience which little else in life can match and finally swept away and dissolved in the relief of its ending, its happy ending in a daughter who was well and who would survive. Sarah and Molly were well. But why should it be like this? Why should human birth take such a toll? Why can’t a woman give birth like a ewe? At just after ten in the morning, Molly was born into the water of the pool, scooped up and out on to Sarah’s breast and I wept with the relief of it. An hour later they were both in our bed and I put flowers all round them and tall branches of hazel cut from the wood with the tops of the hazel fronds bent down by our bedroom ceiling, so that all round the bed the catkins hung down over them both, a bower for my family.
This of course was how it should be, an unbroken transition from womb to life, and as I looked at Molly that morning, still blinking in the shock of her extra-uterine existence, I realized that in some ways she was still being born.
Only one Molly, but endless lambs. By the time she was a week old, 10 of the ewes had given birth and they had delivered 18 lambs. Most had been twins, but there had been a set of triplets and one or two singletons. Only one lamb, one of a pair of black twins, had died, a week after Molly’s birthday, at breakfast. It had been born the afternoon before and looked all right to start with, if very small, and I didn’t notice anything the matter when I checked at about midnight and again at five the next morning. But at eight o’clock I found the poor black thing suddenly crashed out and hopeless, lying all wrong on the straw, its body too heavy for itself. When I picked it up, the head hung down at the end of a muscleless neck and its body slumped in my arms like a little pietà.
We brought it into the kitchen to warm it up and bottle-feed it. The milk went in and it seemed to be swallowing but that can only have been an involuntary impulse; the animal was already virtually dead. It had probably gone too far by the time I found it, for some reason neglected by its mother overnight, even though it had been feeding well enough in the evening. Its heart was still fluttering when I first picked it up in the morning but within half an hour the pulse had gone and its whole body had moved across the unnoticed line between ‘ill’ and ‘dead’. We buried it near a ewe that had died the previous autumn. The dribbled bottle-milk was still coating its chin in a veined white slick as the lumps of clay fell and bounced on the body.
Death at lambing is only to be expected. In fact, we got away lightly. The ewes were all fine and the rest of the lambs well and lusty. The Fieldwicks, with 400 ewes, which were not meant to have started lambing until April, had already lost four of them. They had been found dead in the field. The year before, for no reason they could tell, they had 60 barren out of the 400 and trailerloads of dead lambs carted away to the tip. This for them was the anxious time. The week before, a ewe had been delivered of triplets prematurely. One of them had died almost straight away. The second needed bottle-feeding, the third was sucking well from its mother. Two nights later Carolyn found the ewe herself dead in the field. She had rolled over and crushed the one lamb that was making a go of it. The prospect of exhaustion and failure hung around the whole business. I could only thank God that this was not the way I earned my living. I knew young farmers around here, struggling in the grip of this, man and wife working all hours, crucified on the cost of the grass keep, with a quota only for a small proportion of their flock, their young teenage children dragooned into helping when they would otherwise be at school, the strain telling on everyone’s face. I was always amazed at how young these old-looking people were. People I thought of as much older than me turned out to be far younger. I felt coddled by comparison, padded by the softness of a sort of life which their whole life’s work might in the end bring them. And only then if it went well, if they stuck at it, if disaster did not pick away at their sliver-thin margins.
The survival rate of lambs, the cost of rations for the pregnant mothers, the condition of ewes after lambing: these things are the determining factors in what their lives would be like this year, next year and for ever. To be so dependent on the uterine workings of another species! I said to one of them one day, his face taut with exhaustion, what hell the life of a small, under-capitalized sheep farmer must be. It was a mistake. He sat up, flicked his head half sideways in the way a cockerel might, and said, ‘Why? What’s wrong with it? I like my life. I like it a damn sight more than I’d like yours.’ We are all tender.
For us, though, it was the sweetest of times. Rosie played among the lambs. They danced and pranced together in the orchard outside the house. Molly peeked like a mouse from her swaddling. Tom, William and Ben cradled their sister in turn and the lemon-yellow sun shone on our lives.
A few weeks before Molly and all those first lambs were coming to life, I had forty oak trees cut down. We wanted them for a building, to restore the oast, the other side of the yard from the house. Forty oak trees! I could imagine them growing in the sort of open circular grove the Greeks would have admired, gradually filling out over the course of this century, swept by the wind, a grassy lawn beneath them. And I had them cut down.
In fact, I never saw them standing. They had been growing in a wood at Ashburnham, a few miles south of here, and I could imagine the rawness their removal left, a stretch of land looking as a gum feels after a tooth has been drawn: the awful, shocked absence at the site, a ragged-edged nothing where something should be, a place whose gruesome softnesses your tongue can only tentatively explore.
I first saw our trees in the timber yard belonging to Zak Soudain a few miles away from here near Broad Oak. The wood was still wet and very green, as the word is, although the real colour of sodden, recently felled oak is an orangey yellow that verges on pink. Where a chisel hacks at it, flaking the fibres of the wood, the nearest thing to green oak that I’ve ever seen is the raw flesh of a salmon. The lichen was still growing on the bark of the enormous, horizontal trees as they lay in Zak’s yard, so you could still tell which had been the sunny southern side and which the northern when they had been standing in the wood. Despite that, though, the oaks had already moved over from one side of the equation – the handsome shape of the living tree – to the other, a dignified after-life as timber.
I didn’t feel a trace of regret about having the trees felled at the time, and still don’t, only excitement at what was to become of them. The new building was to have a green oak frame and be clothed in oak weatherboards. The structural techniques, the joints used and the material of which the building was made were all identical to those used to put up the farmhouse 400 years ago, the hay barn about 180 years ago and the original oast-house about 130 years ago. Every one of these buildings has used the local oaks for their main structural members. Our new building would be the fourth time in four centuries that someone at Perch Hill Farm would have had a fair stand of oak trees felled and put to use. And each time the woodland was not lost but cropped.
There is rationale to those time intervals. They are governed by the market. Each of the moments that one of these buildings was put up marks a period of optimism and expansion in the farms of the Sussex Weald. In the sixteenth century, as prices rose under population pressure, it became profitable to farm even the more marginal lands like our wet, woody clays: time for a new farmhouse at Perch Hill. In the Napoleonic Wars, blockades created shortages and shortages created cash for suppliers: time for a new barn. In the 1860s, booming populations demanded oceans of beer, railways allowed national distribution and hops became the new cash crop: time for an oast-house at Perch Hill.
And now? The market is no longer in such obvious commodities. Hops, corn and milk can now only be produced commercially on a scale to which this landscape has been unable to adapt. Ten years ago there were five active dairy farms on our lane. Now there is none. Every farmhouse is occupied by one urban professional or another. The farming is done by people renting the grazing from elsewhere. The City, land agency, the media, old folks’ homes, fashion, the law: that is where the money is now and that is what now owns Willingford Lane. The only crop this landscape can viably produce is beauty and the only thing it can sell is itself. It is doing that very well. New money from the cities has arrived and once again, in a green-oak building, Perch Hill is getting the reward it deserves. Ever since this farm was first cut from the forest, the market for its produce has been urban. There is no radical break with the past in what we are doing. This is the Perch Hill way: an influx of urban money means green-oak buildings, built to last for centuries. The 1590s, the 1810s, the 1860s, the 1990s: these are the steps in the graph, the moments Perch Hill takes another step forward.
To begin with – doesn’t everybody begin the story of a building project with that phrase? – all was marvellous. The trees were cut into the shapes required for the giant frame. Others were sliced by a cheese-paring saw into the long, feather-edged weather boards that were to clad the walls. The money we had would be enough. We saw the building changing day by day, the holes for windows opened, the brickwork growing for the new upper storey to the roundel. But then, creepingly, apparently unawares, delays began to appear. People wouldn’t turn up. Alterations turned out to cost much more than expected. An air of catastrophe hung above the scheme. Its noise and disturbance began to eat at our sense of well-being.
One day that summer, a minibus full of semi-antique ladies from Bexhill, most of them wearing the kind of maroon felt hats that look as if they should be the central structural element in one of Delia’s Light Afternoon Sponges, pulled up outside our farm gate. The bus had parked just opposite the chaos of our building site. The job was now many, many weeks late. Mess lay everywhere. No one was at work.
The tour leader on the bus, microphone in hand, pointed out of the window at our building and said, ‘There you have one of the old oast-houses of Sussex and Kent in which, in the old days, they used to dry the old hops. Lovely things; you could always smell the drying hops for miles away downwind.’ The bus aahed. ‘But many farmers,’ he went on, ‘are now finding oast-houses rather inconvenient and, as you can see here, are dismantling them to make way for more suitable buildings. It’s a shame but many farmers are struggling to make a living in this part of the country and after all it is a free world.’
I stood there in my gumboots, listening to this open-mouthed. The Fruit Compôtes in the bus in front of me all turned their attention from the building – which was costing as much as a Ferrari Testarossa to put up, entirely funded by some particularly acute investments I had made in the 1980s, the farsightedness of Barclays Bank, Hammersmith and the blessed generosity of my own father – and, in a single, coordinated gesture of patronizing benevolence, directed fourteen pairs of twinkling glacé cherry eyes on me. I had to turn away.
What was done of the building was, on the whole, beautifully done. If you could ignore the fact that, six months after it was due to be complete, it was still unfinished, that the pointing of the new brickwork seemed to have been done by someone who had only ever previously worked with play-dough, that there were no doors, that the windows had no catches, that there was no floor upstairs, that four of the seven lights they installed one week were not working the next and that my brother-in-law thought the whole pitch of the roof was wrong, it was really very good indeed.
There was the slight problem that the two men who were meant to be the main contractors on the job, and whom we engaged only because they were so attractive (one in a rather saturnine, agonized, Übermensch-under-strain way, one a fresh-faced male version of the freckled English rose), had fallen out with each other so badly that they were on the brink of a vicious legalo-financio-emotional-hurt-and-betrayal dispute which might or might not end up in court. The saturnine one of the pair, who had a Heathcliff-goes-clubbing look to him, and wore a sort of silver anorak that seemed to have been cut from the fuselage of a 1952 USAF strato-cruiser, had arrived on site with a new black eye on two different eyes in two consecutive weeks and had said both times that he had walked into his car door the previous evening.
All that aside, the job went rather well. The blips and hiccups, the overruns and punch-ups, the walkings-off the job, the mysteri ous disappearance of a septic tank one night and the discovery that the oak floorboards we had already paid for were so wet that if they had been nailed down in that condition they would all have buckled into a model of the North Dakota badlands within a couple of months, all that was nothing more than what you might expect. That was what life should be like – a little spurty, free enough to go wrong.
No one else could understand this point of view, particularly Sarah and the bank manager. Mainly to satisfy them, I did, on a couple of occasions, lose my temper with Heathcliff-inclubland. It was cynically done. I was at the end of my tether anyway and it seemed to me that screaming at the poor man down the phone was better than kicking the dogs/cats/sheep/ ducks/chickens/walls/children and would go down well with the wife. It didn’t have the right effect at all. Heathcliff came round, explained the problem away perfectly and looked hunkier than ever. Sarah ended up admiring him more than me and I thought for an alienated minute they were going to go out together that evening to a fantastic place he knew in Croydon – ‘brilliant, it’s a warehouse which has been lined inside with the façade of a Renaissance château’. The job continued to progress at an inch a week.
There was one little thing about the building which remained a niggle, which ran against the lovely freedom-is-beauty gospel to which the whole of the farm had become dedicated. The new building had two bathrooms in it, one upstairs and one down. Both had large windows opening on to a view of a grassy bank and, over to one side, the chicken slum where the three survivors out of our original flock of twenty hens and one cockerel were scratching out their tragic lives. Both these windows opened fully. This is one of the breeziest places in Sussex and there is never any shortage of fresh air. If you had your priorities upside down, and if things ever turned financially disastrous, this would be a prime spot for a wind farm.
Despite the natural gush of air past our fully opening windows, despite the fact that we would probably like to open those windows to enjoy the sort of air that we had come here for, we were obliged to install in each bathroom an electric extractor fan. They are ugly little things, plastic, louvred squares which turn on when the light turns on. I hated everything about these fans: the look of them, their noise, their enforced presence, their waste of money – £40 each – their attitude, above all, of tidying up our lives for us. I could imagine lying in the bath in the future looking up at the fan whirring its little whir above me and thinking, ‘Go away, I hate you.’
It was the 1991 Building Regulations (1995 Edition) Part F (i) which required me to install these little things. It was all to do with ‘interstitial condensation’ – or damp in the rafters. I couldn’t, first of all, be trusted to open the windows myself, which was irritating in itself. But from talking to the Rother District Council Building Control Officer, it became clear that this little plastic imposition was symptomatic of a much larger phenomenon. Houses used to breathe. Surfaces and materials were in some ways permeable to the wet; there was more of a flow between inside and outside. Then came central heating, then the requirement to preserve more of the heat so expensively created, then thick insulating materials, then what the RDCBCO called ‘the house like a kettle’, all the hot wetness from kitchens and bathrooms held within this sealed container. Then came the requirement for the electric fans because people could no longer be trusted to open their windows and break the precious seal.
It was the classic example of the way in which people had removed themselves from their natural environment. Every step follows logically from the one before until you suddenly look round and find you are halfway up a cliff and don’t like the feeling at all.
It is not that it is ugly; a light switch or a plug is ugly and I don’t mind them. The fan was horrible because it was the mark of alienation, of a sterilized, cut-off tightness, of a ludicrously unnatural way of regulating your life, of over-prescription, of denying yourself the feeling, that wonderful summer feeling, of the breeze against the skin, which is one of the reasons you are alive in the first place. So once the fans were in, I took them out and I felt the building, the beautiful, creaking, appallingly expensive, debt-creating, naturally sweet-smelling, oaky heaven of a building, sigh with relief.
It is in that fan-free place that I have written this book. I live with the wood day by day. The timber dries and as it dries it shifts. As it shifts it splits and as it splits it creaks, as though the whole thing were springing apart. From time to time, unexpectedly, at a quiet moment, the whole frame creaks, not in an old or easy way but with a sudden, high-pitched jerking under stress, a shriek of wood, a spasmodic movement, in the way that earthquakes happen. Over many months or even years, the tension builds and then, bang, catastrophe theory at work, it becomes too much. The pieces move not with an easy, oiled constancy, but in a little convulsion, a twitch.
That moment sounds not wooden at all, but polystyrene. You might hear in that agonized squeal the sound of all the torture that preceded it, a final, desperate outburst of the wood under strain, its elasticity stretched quite literally to breaking. Every time it happens, I look up at the jowl-posts and tie-beams, at the scissor brace in the apex of each truss, and see nothing. The building, an invisibly clenched and tense thing, where the fibres in the timbers are tightening and stretching against the pegs that hold them together, remains inscrutable. It looks stiff, solid, immobile, as reliable as buildings are meant to be. ‘What, me?’ those impassive beams ask, as I interrogate them about the noise they’ve just made. ‘Can’t you see, we are what we always were?’