AS SPRING thickened into summer, and both the hay and the corn started to coat the country in a deep green pelt, a kind of sexiness began to seep out into the fields and their hidden corners. The height of early summer turned into the most lustful moment of the year. Driving down Willingford Lane in those lush green weeks, dropping from Burwash Weald to the bridge over the Dudwell and then up through the outer patches of Dallington Forest, moving from sun to shade and back again, past our farm and on towards Brightling, you would find cars parked in the evening in the tucked-in gateways, reversed half out of sight among the cow parsley, an air of privacy and closure about them.
They were always young men’s cars, the sets of wheels that could be afforded rather than desired: a rusting Escort estate, a brown Capri, and never anyone visible in them. Each one was a strange prefiguring of the way those old men’s cars, the brown Granada, the ‘Autumn Gold’ Austin Vanden Plas with walnut trim, were always parked on similarly beautiful evenings, not in the quiet corners but at the viewpoints, on the Downs and the higher places in the Weald, the bonnets aimed at the landscape, the old man and his wife sitting calmly in the two front seats watching Sussex as though it were an intermission in Thursday night TV. They pass the thermos, the wife worries about the children, the dog farts silently on the back seat and the husband thinks his lustful thoughts about his youth and all those never-confessed-to lovers. ‘Men are April when they woo, December when they wed: maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.’ As You Like It, the route-map to the pastoral idea.
June is the month for outdoor lust, now as it always has been. The famous song sung by the two pages in As You Like It is a precise description of the sexual habits of the rural working class in early modern England:
It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o’er the green cornfield did pass …
Between the acres of the rye,
With a hey and a ho, and a hey nonino,
These pretty country folks would lie.
Everything about this is accurate: they make their way right to the other side of the growing cornfield, away from the invigilating police state of the 16th-century village, and there find the privacy they crave. You hardly ever see rye growing in England now, but it is the lovers’ crop par excellence, six feet tall by the middle of June, a wall of protective green. ‘With a hey and a ho, and a hey nonino’ sounds innocent but it isn’t. ‘Nonino’ is 16th-century for ‘a bit of the other’ and even ‘hey’ has a lustful tinge to it. In Shakespeare, the word ‘country’ is always enriched by the pun it contains. The whole movement of the song, through the fluffy acres of the fields and on into the safe and private lying place, is sexual. It is a hymn to sex as summer heaven.
It is easy to forget how thick with all this the landscape still is. I was looking that year into the history of the woods that surround our farm, the woods that formed the rich and numin ous background to all Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill stories. That was my idea of them, the source of a psychic magic in which Kipling revelled, until I began to ask in the village about what the woods had been like before the war. The old men I spoke to would begin politely enough, mention their work in the wood, the trees that had once grown there, but their eyes would light up, narrowing and brightening at the same time, when they talked about ‘going courting’ in High Wood: no better place in the summer than High Wood or Leggett’s Wood, the mossy banks in the old sunk roads, the open ground beneath the beeches where you could spread your coat on a bed of bracken, the beech mast being too crinkly and spiky if it’s under a person’s back, and you don’t want them to feel uncomfortable, do you, you don’t want them distracted by the prickles …
Those beech trees remain the poignant memorials, standing huge and isolated among the twiggy birches. One of the beech trees, in particular, is an incredible being, a balloon, in the newness of summer, of fresh lime-juice-green leaves, with two tennis courts of shade beneath its branches. The muscled limbs are clothed in elephant hide and the dress of windblown leaves acts the feminine to that massive masculinity. Of course it is the place for seduction.
The trunk is carved with the initials of forgotten lovers. The bark is cracked and pitted inside the rough-cut serifs and the places where an O or a C have thickened with time. Here and there, moss inhabits the carved-in words. Hearts enclosing girls’ initials have been stretched so wide by the swelling of the tree that they look like one of those gurning grimaces made by five-year-olds, fingers hooked in the corners of the mouth and dragged out sideways across the width of the face. Inside that gruesome cartouche, the initials are now illegible, pulled beyond understanding, no more than a smeared-out mark which the tree has done its best to erase.
It all brought back memories of outdoor love affairs decades ago, that odd sensation of the breeze in unexpected places, the disaster with my first-ever girlfriend, on a hillside in northern Spain. She was an Argentine; I hardly knew her. She had no English to speak of and so we scarcely spoke except in inadequate French. ‘Don’t hurt me,’ she said that afternoon as I was looking over at the view and I thought she meant I must not treat her badly, as all the signs were surely pointing in that way. ‘I won’t,’ I said solicitously. ‘No, don’t hurt me,’ she said with a little more emphasis and I equally fiercely said I wouldn’t, of course. ‘No, NOW,’ she screamed in my ear and pushed me away. It turned out that the way I was leaning on her was pressing her far shoulder into a small, invisible but obviously rather prickly thistle.
At Perch Hill, the thistles were well into their wild annual career and I didn’t like it. From my desk, I could look out across the rising bulk of the Cottage Field towards Coombe Wood. The field looked wonderful, a perfect sward, next winter’s hay in the making, as invitingly edible as a plate of rocket and watercress salad. But the appearance was a lie; its reality was a nightmare of weeds. Walk across it and the luxurious softness disappeared. Your boots crunched at each step as if on shingle but what you were treading were thistles, many thousands of them, still little more than horizontal rosettes at this stage, nestling invisibly in the grass but soon to start their growth upwards. Where there were no thistles there were docks, and where there were no docks there were nettles; where there were no nettles there were brambles, and where there were no brambles, there were dandelions.
Before we came here, I had a supremely haughty attitude to grassland. If, walking around England, I came across fields like ours, I would have one of two remarks to pass. It was usually: ‘Poor management, very poor management. They don’t really know what they are doing.’ The fact that I didn’t know what they were doing, or what they were meant to be doing, or what I would have done in the circumstances, or what sort of management history would lead to this sort of weed problem, did not stop me from passing judgement. I now realized why farmers hated people like me.
At other times I would say, ‘Of course a weed is just a frame of mind.’ That saying exists in the same sort of sententious mental lay-by as those notices at the entrances to US National Parks: ‘Take nothing but memories, leave nothing but silence, speak nothing but peace.’ I once picked up a sandstone pebble in the titanic desert emptinesses of the Utah Canyonlands – it was beautiful, with the ripples of a red Jurassic beach on its surface – only to have it confiscated by a National Park Service Ranger, a woman with brown curly hair and a revolver, on the basis that I was ‘disinheriting the generations that come after’. Forget objets trouvés; they have slipped beyond the bounds of the acceptable.
There is an idea that at one time, when the people of this country were still at home with the ways of nature, the plants we now see as weeds, of which we know nothing, were seen in their true light, useful as food or medicine. Nettles cured stomach upsets and made excellent cloth; the fruit of the bramble has been found in the stomachs of Stone Age men preserved in Irish bogs; young thistle stems, blanched and peeled, were eaten like the heart of an artichoke and were said in the 16th century to be ‘sovereign for melancholy’.
That is the side you always hear about nowadays, yet another measure of our fall from grace. But it is no more than half of it. Anyone who has read that wonderfully encyclopaedic treasure-house The Englishman’s Flora by Geoffrey Grigson, a work of love and scholarship from which everyone else has always cribbed whatever knowledge they pretend to have, will get the fuller picture. It provides a strange enlightenment.
Every year parts of the Middle Shaw are dominated by the dreary, tiny-flowered, big-leaved plant called dog’s mercury. It looks boring, it’s not useful, it’s a weed and it seems to outcompete bluebells. But what about that elegant, alluring name? Until I read Grigson I always thought I must be missing something about this plant. Not at all. This woodland mercury is a perennial, highly poisonous, both emetic and purgative, one of the lowest of the low, good only for dogs. Dog’s mercury means ‘rubbish mercury’, ‘weed mercury’. What a liberating recognition that is! The name reveals that pre-modern people hated weeds too. Grigson lists 70-odd names of wildflowers which have this dismissive ‘dog’ element in them: dog jobs, dog-cock, dog’s mouth, dog stalk and so on. As for cow parsley, which was then appearing on the banks of the lane and which everyone loves, that too is a historically despised thing, its tauntingly full but useless growth associated with the devil. It’s the devil’s parsley in Cheshire, dog parsley in Hertfordshire, gipsy’s parsley in Somerset, hare’s parsley in Wiltshire.
From admiration to contempt, from exploitation to at least local extermination, the historical attitude to wild plants covered the full range. Po-faced piety about the natural order didn’t get a look in. So, I said to Ken Weekes one morning, what shall I do about the thistles? ‘Hammer them,’ he said. ‘Hammer them as hard as you like.’ So that’s exactly what we did. Will Clark drove the tractor, I bought a giant flail topper with a 9-foot cut and Will, in sweep after sweep, beheaded every one in every field. He let me have a go, standing on the side of the field with his hands on his hips and shouting up as I passed about the throttle or the straightness of the line which the topper was leaving. The satisfaction of this: looking back, one hand on the wheel, one on the back of the tractor seat, a swept wake of grassland emerging behind you, the blades of grass laid low by the topper as it passed and now sheeny in the sunlight, orderliness, a place which has been worked.
One morning that summer a man knocked on the back door. He wore a sort of yellowish canvas coat with a corduroy collar and took his muddy shoes off with deliberation before coming to sit down in the kitchen. He had something of an ex-naval air: affable, polite, attentive.
He too, he told us, looking at the half-wreck of the oast-house outside, had gone in for building works. Oh, the headaches! He had discovered terrible subsidence and had been forced to pour money into a hole in the ground, far more money than he had. That was the reason he was now working for Orange, for Hutchison Telecom. Eyebrows up. His job was to find sites for the masts that would give the Orange network the coverage it had to provide. Would we be interested?
‘Tell me about it,’ I said, thinking, ‘No, not here, never.’ He showed us a series of photos of the masts, 50 feet high, surrounded by things that look like giant chest freezers around the base, enclosed within a chain-link anti-vandal fence and surmounted by the aerials: big, dominant and ugly.
The poor man made no attempt to pretend they were anything other than dreadful. His word, in fact, was ‘beastly’. He was charming, disarming even. I wondered, but didn’t ask, if this was the trained technique: spit the worst out early on, show them you understand what they are frightened of and then offer the blandishments. So what would the deal be?
‘We’d make an agreement for ten years,’ he said. ‘We’d rent a patch of ground 10 metres by 10 metres from you, and we usually offer £1,250 a year for that.’ My face looked like a slot machine as the dollar signs rolled. £12,500 for a patch of Beech Meadow 30 feet square? Oh yes.
‘We had the Mercury man round here last year,’ I said, lying, repeating something someone else had said to me about a visit to their farm months ago. ‘He offered £2,000 a year.’ ‘I thought that might be the case,’ our Orange rep said, ‘and obviously, as an annual tariff, we’d have to match that. Yup. And we could say that it should rise with inflation.’ Already £20,000. And he might go up a little more if I dug my heels in. But I was mucking him about. I never had the slightest intention of having such a monstrosity looming over our fields. It would be like putting callipers on the leg of a child.
‘Now this is the bit I don’t like,’ the rep said, smiling like an old friend. ‘It always sounds threatening but it’s not meant to be. If you don’t agree to have the base station on your land, I’ll have to go to your neighbours and see what they make of it. And obviously, if they think it’s a good idea, I’ll be going ahead with it with them. You do understand, don’t you?’
Oh Jesus. There is a thin sliver of land that runs through the middle of the farm which we don’t own. Its owner lives miles away. The prospect lurched up of a 50-foot hideosity on the bank above the farm and no compensation.
We both allowed the talk to burble on around this aching pothole. He mentioned ‘statutory obligation to establish a national network’. I mentioned that this was statutorily an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. He knew that and said about planning applications being granted on appeal by the Secretary of State. I said that if we didn’t want it, we’d do everything in our power to stop it happening, and I meant everything. He said he understood and I said, smiling, shaking hands, opening the door, that I’d be in touch.
I wasn’t. He rang, but I wasn’t in. He wrote, offering ‘to sugar the pill with some modest improvement on the annual fee of £2,000 I suggested and possibly throw in an Orange, with a year’s basic tariff (15 free minutes a month). At least it should work well!’ I didn’t reply but I guessed that his other options were somehow closing and that waiting was working. Then, months later, the letter we wanted. The radio engineers, with their ‘computer modelling tools’ had decided that somewhere ‘further west’ would better suit their purposes. Cheers at breakfast. The future’s bright? The future’s Orange? Not here it wasn’t.
While dreading the irruption of Orange into our lives, seeing wherever I went the spectacular unregulated ugliness of the mobile phone towers (and enjoying for the first time all the pleasure of having a mobile phone myself), I had been looking forward to something else, not the disruption of the local by the national but in many ways its opposite: the 49th Annual Heathfield and District Agricultural Show. I had been asked to be one of the judges. The invitation had arrived months before from the charming Mrs Berger, Hon. Trade Stand Secretary, and as soon as I opened the envelope, I knew that, as far as the Weald of Sussex was concerned, I had arrived. A Heathfield Show Judge!
For weeks, I was modest about it at parties but privately triumphant. The badge, a hexagon of stiff, burgundy-coloured cardboard with the word ‘judge’ stamped on it in gold, came through the post and I tried it out in front of the long bathroom mirror with a variety of different suits and ties. Dark blue was obviously wrong. Hairy Harris tweed was absurd for early summer. It could only be the cowpat-green corduroy. Come the day, I immediately realized that my fellow judges were more impressive – I want to say realistic-looking – than me. John Bines Esq. was once a government expert on the feeding of dairy cattle and then Chief Executive and Secretary of Newbury and District Agricultural Society. Mrs Valerie Chidson was Chairman of the Wealden District Council. She had, of course, unrivalled local knowledge and wore a great badge around her neck like a mayor, with a long flamboyant apricot and orange silk scarf floating above it. I was described in the programme as ‘A. Nicolson Esq., Journalist’ which looked disreputable. Why not ‘landowner, landscape theorist and visionary’? That word ‘journalist’, it’s no good. I was told by an insurance agent once that I should never, ever mention what I do. Only ‘fairground booth operator’, he told me, was considered a more dangerous risk.
Anyway, Mr Bines, Mrs Chidson and I, in a couple of hours, were walked around the two hundred-odd stands of the show. They were laid out in broad, muddy streets across a hillside outside Heathfield. The setting-up day had been rainy and the trucks had turned the field into a quagmire. But now the sun was shining on the stands and tents; on the enormously fat horses being trotted up and down by enormously fat men in suits; on the Side Saddle Concours d’Elégance where double chins wobbled beneath antique veils; and on the Heavyweight Hunter class, capable of carrying fourteen stone and over, which Miss S. Waddilove had come down from Newmarket to judge, along with the other Ridden Hunters.
In the cattle rings, the junior handlers, the boys and girls, were struggling with their recalcitrant calves. ‘Will you bloody well come on!’ one tiny boy in his pristine white coat said out of the corner of his mouth to his even tinier black and white Friesian calf, which was going all sideways in the way that calves will. Mr Vick, the cattle judge and famous breeder from Steyning in West Sussex, gave the tiny calf’s tiny bottom a tiny pat, it walked on and all was well. ‘There we are then,’ he said, and pulled his cap at an even sharper angle to the horizontal. Wonderful Heathfield Show!
We trade-stand judges were shepherded around by Peter Salter, an elegant man and our steward. He wore a pin-striped suit, a bowler hat and gumboots. For years, he had run the South of England Show at Ardingly. To begin with, we were exaggeratedly courteous about each other’s likes and dislikes. Mr Bines liked the way one agricultural equipment merchant had managed to get a combine harvester on to his stand. ‘Always some plus marks for a combine,’ he said. I said nothing. I liked the way a tent full of little food stalls had the air of 1948 about it, one step up from a village fête. It had that delicious smell of a field inside a canvas hall but Mr Bines did not comment. Mrs Chidson liked the verve of the Sussex Express stand, its honest vulgarity, but neither Mr Bines nor I said very much about that either.
We realized, I think, that we were interested in rather different things and by the time we arrived back at the judges’ tent we all, I am sure, had a pretty good idea where the others stood. We sat down at a small round table in the tent, Peter Salter got us each a drink and the horse-trading began. There was the E. Watson & Sons Trophy for agricultural stands of 40 feet and over. No problem there. We all agreed the Young Farmers were outstanding, Agrifactors (Southern) Ltd had made a charming effort and Harper & Eede, who had parked their tractors very smartly in front of their tent, deserved a Highly Commended. We proceeded smoothly to the Percy Meakins Perpetual Challenge Trophy for small agricultural stands. Wealden Smallholdings won hands down, manfully overcoming the local outbreak of fowl pest which had meant they had to replace their poultry display with a Wealden cottage garden at the very last minute. Plumpton Agricultural College came a well-deserved second after they had given us a welcome glass of wine on the way round. Peasridge Livestock Equipment, with a fine display of Equine Dental Chisels, One Step Sheep Shampoo and The Original Bull Shine, enjoyed a Highly Commended in the Percy Meakins.
The judges then turned their attention to the John Harper Memorial Trophy for non-agricultural stands. Some awkwardness set in. Mr Bines was in favour of Parker Building Supplies, which had a small self-contained sewage treatment unit in operation on its stand. I was keen on the food tent that had such a charmingly ad hoc 1948 quality to it. Mrs Chidson liked the Hugo Oliver sausages stand. Peter Salter, the steward, asked us, at least, to exclude some from the long list. We did, cutting out both Shell Oil and a man who turned bowls. There we reached an impasse. All we could agree on was the excellence of Hailsham Roadstone’s driveway display. I couldn’t even remember the sewage unit Mr Bines liked so much and he didn’t like my food tent suggestion at all. A slight crackle entered the air. Peter Salter suggested Mrs Chidson and I should have another look at the sewage works. We walked to the other side of the show, had a good look and on the way back to the judges’ tent agreed: we couldn’t possibly call that the winning stand. The food tent, on the other hand, was precisely the sort of small local enterprise that should be encouraged. Absolutely not, Mr Bines still thought on our return. The impasse remained. ‘We’re not having Parker Building Supplies,’ I said, looking at Mrs Chidson. ‘Well, I’m not having Taste of the South-East,’ Mr Bines said. We all looked at the tablecloth while onlookers took another drag at the B&H. It was time for statesmanship.
What about, I suggested, giving the prize to Hailsham Roadstone, second to Hugo Oliver sausages and Highly Commended to both Parker Building Supplies and Taste of the South-East? Two Highly Commendeds? Highly unorthodox but in the circumstances the only option. Judicious nods all round. Thank God for that. We could all, at last, get stuck into the G&Ts and the white wines, safe in the knowledge that compromise is always best.
Things were not so well regulated at home. While I was away at the Heathfield show, crisis was erupting at the farm. The handsome-attractive builders we had got in to make the oast-house had run out of money before they had finished the job. We had paid them for the windows, which had been delivered to the site, but they hadn’t paid the joiners who had made them. Sarah was at home that afternoon with Rosie, tiny Molly in her arms and Patricia Howie, who had come to help while Molly was still so young.
They were all sitting in the garden on the sunny afternoon when a van pulled into the yard. Two burly men Sarah had never seen before got out, walked over to the oast-house and started loading the window frames, which were stacked against the half-made wall, into the back of their van.
Sarah went over with Molly in her arms, horrified at what was going on. ‘Hang on a minute,’ she said, ‘those are our windows. What are you doing? We have paid for them.’
‘Well, dear,’ one of the joiners said, – he was Irish, ‘you might have paid for them but we haven’t been,’ and carried on loading them up. ‘We don’t like doing this to a lady. But we haven’t got a choice.’
Sarah started crying.
Patricia then whispered in her ear, ‘I’ll distract them. You get the keys.’
‘Keys?’
‘You get the keys of their van,’ Patricia hissed. Then, to the Irishmen, twinkling a little, ‘A cup of tea, everybody? Why don’t you come in for a moment?’ They went inside, and sat down for some tea, while Sarah found an excuse to go out again, took the keys out of the ignition and hid them in a drawer in our bedroom. After the tea, and after they had finished loading the van with the windows, they said goodbye nicely and apologetically, and got in to drive away. No keys.
‘I’ve hidden them,’ Sarah said. She had already rung Alex Kelsey, the project manager on the job. ‘Get here now,’ she told him. It was a Saturday afternoon but he was there in half an hour. He had summoned the main contractors too, and between them all he then held a meeting in the yard while Rosie stood there gazing up at the huddle of enraged men. By the time I returned from the Heathfield show, Sarah and Patricia were in the kitchen, congratulating themselves on a coup; all dust had settled, money had appeared and been transferred, the men had all left, Patricia was the hero of the hour and the windows which I am now looking out through at the spring sunshine were still there, stacked against the wall.
The week after the show has gone down in memory as Chaos Week. My sister arrived at the end of it. She was wandering into the tail end of a disaster sequence out of hell. First, I am afraid, it was the sheep. In the intense and frozen days of mid-March, perhaps a little romantically, I had decided that our lambs didn’t need their tails docking. Why should they, poor little things? If God had given them a tail, and so on and so on. So all summer long they had been whisking and flicking their tails – increasingly woolly on the outside and increasingly shit-encrusted on the inside – around the pastures. It was a recipe for disaster, as everyone now tells me. They had until recently done quite well. They were almost as big as their mothers, fat and a little lumbering, but they still gambolled about from time to time, which looked ridiculous, as if Nicholas Soames were playing leap-frog in Parliament Square. You expect a degree of dignity from a sheep and doing hop-skips with a final pirouette of the hind leg, when they should, by rights, already be in some-one’s freezer, looks as grotesque as synchronized swimming.
On the other hand, one could perhaps see it as the last gay flicker of childhood before they sank into the morose condition of adult sheepness. Why are grown-up sheep so morose? Why don’t they play with each other? It’s easy to imagine endless games of British Bulldog, up and down, up and down the fields, until they finally collapse in the evening, exhausted but happy. Why weren’t sheep like that?
As it was, at the beginning of that week, four of the lambs suddenly developed the most gruesome condition I have ever seen. It was a case of maggoty bums, and we had to do urgent, heavy remedial work to save the poor things, dressing up in protective gear to administer the dip to their unhappy bottoms, spraying them and anointing them with a pharmacopoeia of sheep treatments.
Sheep are not low-maintenance farming. This has to be understood. You don’t get a flock of perfectly whole and lovely-looking sheep on perfectly lovely short-cropped green grass just by putting one on top of the other. That’s what I imagined, but it’s not true. So, having gone down the wrong track, my sheep now looked as if they’d just come back from a fashion shoot. They all had blue blobs here and there to identify them as mine, except for those which had green blobs to identify them as Peter Clark’s. Those which were nicked in the shearing had patches of violet wool where we had sprayed them with antiseptic. One which had knocked its horn off against a gate-post had a half-yellow head where I had smeared it with a yellow paint-cream which keeps the flies off. The lambs with sore bottoms were now, from behind, a slightly disorientating mixture of Cadbury’s-chocolate-wrapper violet and vanilla-ice-cream yellow. I looked at them and felt only a sense of guilt and failure. Perhaps the thing to do was to dip them all in shocking pink and pretend it was on purpose. I had to do better.
Against this background of three-o’clock-in-the-morning remorse and anxiety, there had been a burbling stream of other hopelessnesses. British Telecom wanted to put a giant new telegraph pole right at the end of the garden, dominating Sarah’s carefully orchestrated harmonies. So that had to be negotiated away and underground but once it had, I realized the new duct for the telephone wires had been laid wrongly. The reeds in the new sewage system seemed to have died and the smell predicted by Ken Weekes from such a newfangled thing had started to waft up towards the house. A lorry delivering stone had smashed a manhole over the sewage pipe, which didn’t help. Then I found the children playing on the gravel among the dead reeds, popping the little pebbles into their mouths in a game which involved getting as many of the sewage-encrusted stones as possible in their mouths at the same time. ‘Never let me see you doing that again,’ I said, and as I walked away I saw them out of the corner of my eye hunching their shoulders and putting their hands over their mouths in the time-honoured signal of: Uncontrollable Giggles Brought On By Expostulation From Old Fart.
Meanwhile, as the farm and the fields and the stock and I all looked increasingly decrepit and, at times, beyond redemption, Sarah’s garden was entering its glory phase. There was a time when, unkindly, I had referred to that 80- by 40-foot patch of walled, hedged, pathed, manured, sanded, worked-over, reworked-over, planted, replanted, deplanted, weedkilled and cosseted piece of ground simply as ‘The Expensive Garden’. I realized now that was a tautology; gardens were £20 notes on stalks.
Even so, the garden had become, in its first real moment of completion, an incredibly beautiful thing, floating free of all that had gone into making it. It was brimming with intense colour, as concentrated as flowers in a vase. It was so full you had to push your way through its paths, getting a soaking in the early morning from the dew, brushing up against things which the sheer height and thickness of the other plants had obscured until you were on top of them, a small colony of sunflowers in one corner, wafting drifts of white and pink cosmos in another, like a hillside in Bhutan.
All week long a stream of garden photographers had been trooping in and out of it for their various magazines. A lady from Gardeners’ World came to video Sarah talking about the propagation of annuals. Intense tidying up had gone on between each of these visits, but the process had been dogged by something which came to symbolize the difference between garden and farm, Sarah and me.
There was a rogue chicken. It would not go back in the run but instead, just as Sarah had finished her last sweep and survey before Andrew Lawson or Howard Sooley arrived, would wander into the garden and begin to shuffle its way messily through the applied mulch. That was the pattern of the week: chicken, Lawson, chicken, Sooley, chicken, BBC, like some monstrous club sandwich. ‘What is it with your animals?’ Sarah asked. ‘Can’t you get anything organized?’
That’s when we hit our big sheep crisis. But when wasn’t there a sheep crisis? Sheep are crisis. The ewes had been having their problems. One of them had somehow cut a tendon in her back leg. It would not mend and so she had to be put down and buried. Then another ewe started to behave in a way that was most unsheeplike. She would wander off to be on her own, often choosing a place in the field just on the brow of the hill, from which in a dreamy and rather poetic way she would gaze at the radiant colours of the life-burgeoning Weald. This was exciting: a Romantic sheep, evidence of the appreciation of beauty in the lower orders of creation. One evening, the sheep and I even spent some moments together, side by side, looking at the folded view of wood and valley before us.
But I was mistaken. The ewe was growing mad, not wise. I described the symptoms to Carolyn Fieldwick. ‘No, Adam,’ she said. ‘I don’t think the ewe is gazing at the Sussex landscape.’ The ewe’s problem, it turned out, was magnesium deficiency, which brings on a state of dignified but eventually fatal calm. She, too, had to be put down and buried in the corner of a field.
Sheep, contrary to what one might expect, are choosy eaters. They won’t touch nettles, thistles, ragwort or dock. What is more difficult to accept is that they will not eat grass – perfectly good, organic, herb-rich, Sussex meadow grass – if it’s even slightly too long. This is frustrating. You put them in a field of what looks like the most delicious of salads, and they stand about disconsolately, staring at you with wrinkled contempt, like an aunt who has just stepped in some dog mess. The whole flock reminded me of the faces one sees through the rain-smeared windows of a bus tour of the Scottish Highlands. We didn’t have enough sheep to keep the grass short. We needed more sheep.
This was when the crisis began. Our neighbour, Shirley, who had the cottage and a couple of acres on the edge of the Big Wood, was an accountant who worked in the village. She had a few sheep of her own, but they were eating her grass to nothing and one or two had broken out and got into our hay. We wanted more sheep, she wanted to be rid of hers. It was obvious that they should become ours. Here the waters started to become a little murky. I maintained that we had been unable to agree a price; she maintained that we did agree a price, £35 a ewe. Anyway, the sheep were transferred to our fields. The money business, as I thought anyway, was left pending, but we were in dispute about that.
Three of the sheep weren’t happy about the transfer. They had been fed ewe nuts at home and, unenthused about the grass-only diet we were offering, decided to go back, breaking their way through our slightly gappy fencing in their bid for freedom. We took them back but they broke for home again and we left them to it.
This would have been all right, but disaster struck. Our neigh-bour’s boyfriend, Dick, a director of a national car business of immense standing, decided to store a luxurious car – a bottle-green Lexus worth £35,000 – at her house to prevent it being vandalized in Heathfield. What safer place could one think of than out here in the Arcadian idyll?
Only days later the poor man arrived at the back door, his face as long as a Blue Leicester tup’s. ‘Your sheep,’ he said, ‘have been headbutting my car. They were spotted attacking the doors.’
Have you ever had a phone call mid-morning from your children’s headmaster, telling you that there has been an incident at break and do you think you could come over and talk to the parties involved because it is best to sort these things out straight away? Sick in the stomach, I went to inspect the damage. The four doors of the Lexus’ were indeed neatly dented at about sheep-head height. The paintwork was buffed up and dust-free at that level too, as if by a fleece still attached to its owner. I thought of suggesting that he might like to keep a sheep in his showroom in Heathfield to maintain his cars in a perfectly shiny condition. I refrained. It was not the right time.
I had no insurance against any damage any sheep on my land might do to anyone else’s property. That extra clause to our insurance policy would have cost £30.50 a year. I had thought the idea ridiculous. What would any sheep living here do to anyone else’s property? Go and attack it? A night raid on their ewe nuts? It was just another insurance scam. But I pay that premium now.
The sheep/neighbour/limousine/solicitor/insurance company crisis dogged our lives for years. Shirley’s son, Jonny, had seen ‘my’ sheep (whose they actually were remained in dispute for month after month, the meter ticking away in various well-appointed legal offices) attacking the car from an upper window. He wrote a graphic account of how the sheep, in an orchestrated manoeuvre, approached the flanks of the limousine. The synchronized animals attacked the car. They kicked and head-butted both sides, Jonny told the insurance company. Nothing if not systematic. You had to laugh. But then the bill came in. It was £2,300 for repairing the damage to the doors and another £2,000-odd for the loss of income Dick would have had from hiring out the car in the meantime.
Shirley had been away when the incident occurred. Only Jonny had witnessed it, although Dick did admit to having moved some sheep into an ungated field not long before it was said to have happened. We maintained that ewes didn’t do that kind of thing. We even paid a professor of animal behaviour from Cambridge University to trawl through the literature on sheep. There was not a single example in the long annals of biological science of ewes attacking cars. Rams have, but never ewes. And ewes have never been seen to kick anything at all.
Despite the power of that evidence, there was no movement on the other side. Their solicitor came down here in his red Audi estate. I walked him around the fields. We followed the presumed route the sheep must have taken. I referred at one point while talking to him, charmingly, smilingly, the sun on our backs, not to ‘the sheep’ but to ‘our sheep’. It was a slip of the tongue. I should have said “our sheep”, making that little sign with fingers in the air to show quote marks in the way of American academics discussing “perception” or “reality”. But I didn’t and the solicitor, with the keys to his Audi bulging in his pocket, and his meter ticking, said, all bright and sharp, ‘“Our sheep”? You mean they were your sheep, were they? You consider that you owned these sheep at the time, do you?’ For God’s sake, I thought. Imagine living your life like that.
On it rolled. Relations with Shirley were not good but our lives were painfully enmeshed. We were already in dispute about her water supply and the track to her house. We were like a pair of sumo wrestlers, podgily shoving and clutching at each other. Attempts at settlement and compromise never seemed to work. She became ill. Just when I hoped one of the issues might have faded away, another solicitor’s letter or another angry note or dark remark about the track or the water would appear. I offered to pay a third of the track repair costs. That got nowhere. There was some mutual berating. The place where we lived was beautiful but it felt as though it had an abscess in its gum.
On one particularly bad corner in the lane, Anna Cheney collided with a car coming the other way, driven by Shirley. Anna, who looks after our children, had both our daughters in the back of her car. I had a phone call from the woman who lives in the nearest farm and rushed down there. No one was hurt but the girls were in tears, the cars looked mangled and everyone was feeling fluttery and shaken. Except for one of the policemen, who was all smiles and hands-in-pockets, seen-it-all-before, get-this-every-day-ofthe-week, what’s-the-fuss. I very nearly had a row with him until Anna restrained me, telling me I would get arrested. I realize now it was Shirley I was boilingly angry with.
Two events finally propelled our relationship into the strangest realms. Sarah and I were sitting at home after dinner on a Friday night. The children were all in bed and the dog was lying in front of the fire. Then, as mothers do, even through the chat, Sarah heard Molly crying. ‘Sssh,’ she said, listening. We heard the sound again, but it wasn’t Molly. It was a siren coming up the lane. First one and then another fire engine came up to our garden gate, paused and then went on towards Ken Weekes’s house, paused there, saw nothing, and then on again, up towards Barn Farm and Mount Farm, up at the top of the lane.
We sat down again. Some poor family or other had obviously set fire to a chimney. We had done it once a couple of years before. But on that Friday night the fire engines weren’t for us. The sirens faded away. After a few minutes, though, we heard them coming back. I went out. ‘Where do you want?’ I shouted. The first driver shouted the name of a house. It was Shirley’s. I told them how to get there, found a torch and ran over there myself.
It was about eleven at night. A west wind which had been blowing all day was still spitting the rain horizontally on to the back of my head. I was only a few minutes behind the fire engines but by the time I got to the house the fire brigade’s whole system was up and running: arc lights providing a wash of white light like a film set; hoses unreeled around the house, charged with water and with a junior fireman on the end of each one; a white-board on a tripod where a fireman with a black marker was recording the sequence of events. Two teams with breathing apparatus had gone straight into the building and were fighting the fire in the kitchen. Shirley, still in her nightdress but with a blue anorak over it, was sitting in one of the fire engines, shocked and shaky. She had been watching TV in bed when the electricity had suddenly gone off. She had opened the door to go downstairs to the fusebox, only to be met by a solid wall of smoke, poisonous-tasting, gagging in her throat. The phone was still working and, even though she had to dial in the dark, she had called 999 and then got herself out of the building into the wet night.
The worry was her animals. She had three dogs and three cats. The cats could probably look after themselves but two of the dogs had slipped back inside the house after she had got out herself. They were now trapped in the scullery, between the fire and the locked back door, and she couldn’t get at them. She was terrified that they would be burnt or were suffocating in the black smoke.
The first thing the firemen did was to break open a pane in the back door, unlock it, release the animals, all unharmed, and shut them in the stable. The boiler had burst into flames and was still burning in the kitchen. Within a few minutes, though, the crisis was already over and the tension winding down. One crew was coming out of the house, tearing off their oxygen masks, their heads and faces running with sweat. The seat of the fire was out. The other crew was still in there, checking for flames in other parts.
Suddenly, from between the tiles of the roof, and snatched away by the wind, smoke poured into the night air. Firemen shone their torches up at the gables and ran extra hoses round the downwind side of the house. Smoke was crowding out of the roof. The firemen had opened a hatch to the attic, air had poured in there and fire had suddenly erupted, soon taking hold. New urgency gripped the firemen. The fire controller got on the radio and the men in breathing apparatus went back in. Shirley sat in the fire engine. I watched aghast.
The conventional wisdom is that once a fire takes hold in the roof space of a building, it is extremely difficult to prevent the whole roof going or, in some cases, to save the building itself. If no one had been at home that evening, or if it had been a little later and Shirley had been asleep and not noticed the electricity going off, then the chances are that the house would have burned down. For a while no one was sure if this roof fire was going to be contained. There was talk of calling in extra tenders. For perhaps 10 minutes there was uncertainty until, quite abruptly, the smoke pouring from between the tiles diminished. They had extinguished it. It was ‘a good stop’.
I took Shirley and her three dogs home with me that night. We drank most of a bottle of whisky in our kitchen, waiting for the firemen to finish clearing up, checking no embers remained. At about one o’clock in the morning I went back up there. Half the contents of the attic, old suitcases, boxes of books, the sort of baggage we all have stuck away in the uninspected corners of our lives, had been hauled out on to the drive in front of the house. It was all now scorched and sodden. The boiler itself looked as if it had been bombed, the kitchen black, wrecked, unusable.
It was the sight of the attic that was most alarming: the rafters charred, all the implications there of what might have happened, how near a real catastrophe might have been. A few minutes’ more burning and the end would have been quite different. As it is, or so says Ken Weekes, who had had a fire a few years before, ‘The smell won’t go away. Sometimes you just catch it, just a whiff of it. It brings it back, I can tell you.’
Shirley stayed with us for a few days, the awkward subjects untouched, a sort of grinning distance between us. None of us had any idea what was really going on in her life. There had been whispers but we had ignored them. She went off to stay somewhere else, leaving behind a pair of shoes. By chance, just then, quite suddenly, resolutions: the car insurance company graciously accepted £3,000 to go away. There had been costs of more than £1,000 on top of that. I know that £4,000 may seem like a monstrous amount to get someone off your back but we were dealing with one of the biggest insurance companies, a rich and powerful organization, prepared to go to court and spend who knows how much, to batter us into submission, to extend and amplify the arguments, to explore the niceties of blame and responsibility, knowing that our funds would run out before theirs did. So we paid. Around the same time, Shirley’s ex-husband, a beautifully reasonable man, brokered a deal about the track; and the discovery of the leak in the water pipe explained the many months of problems over the water bills.
Then came the greatest shock of all. A reporter from the local paper turned up. Shirley had been convicted of stealing from her own clients at Lewes Crown Court and sent to jail for nine months. The reporter also said that over the time we had known her she had attempted suicide twice. There had been murmurings but I had understood nothing. What I had seen as awkwardness and recalcitrance were only the surface symptoms of a life in crisis. She had never divulged the reality. Just a quarter of a mile away across the fields had been someone breaking down, and we had not had the faintest idea. Her house was burnt and empty. The ivy began to grow across the windows. Her two fields turned ragged with thistles and docks.
Despite it all, Perch Hill itself was resilient. It provided resilience. It was in its heart what we wanted it to be. One morning in particular that summer (it was 2 June 1996) felt as if it were the day for which the whole of the rest of the year had been a preparation. The long grind of the winter and its sense of enclos ure and endlessness; the seeping way its dankness enters every aspect of your life; the delay of spring, the long poking about looking for spring, many weeks before it has any intention of showing itself – all of the waiting had gone. The day that we had been waiting for was today.
I was up early, having to get some work into the newspaper before people arrived at the office there. As I walked over to my workroom across the yard at a few minutes past five, the tanger ine sun had just cleared the upper tips of the oak trees in the Middle Shaw. The ducks and chickens were scratching about on the compost by the old cow shed, there was a big lamb bleating for no reason I could see down in the Long Field, there was dew in the grass and the whole place was suffused with that orange-grey, cold-warm, utterly private light of sunrise.
By mid-morning, the work was done, I’d had breakfast and I’d got the day free. I don’t understand how sunshine works but everything that morning looked as if it had acquired another dimension. Far to the east, for twelve miles or so to the hills above Rye, it was so clear that I felt I could see individual trees. Westwards I could surely make out the slats in the sails of the Punnett’s Town mill, which is a good hour and a half’s walk from here. Was all this simply the sharpness and clarity of rain-washed air? Whatever it was, the whole place looked as a glass of white wine tastes.
I went down to the Slip Field. It is the one field on the farm that we all love best here, and that day it was wearing its midsummer clothes. It is a south-facing bank of about two and a half acres surrounded on all sides by wood, the oak and hazel of the Middle Shaw to the right, the long frondy arms of the ashes in the Ashwood Shaw to the left and, in front of me, at the foot of the hillside, the 2 acres of garlic flowering then in the hazelwood shade of Coombe Wood, a stinking, lush and frothy garden which squeaked as you walked through it at that time of year with the big, rubberized, smelly leaves rubbing up against your shins.
It was the field itself which was the zone of heaven that day. Its slippy soil meant that it had never been reseeded with commercial grass mixtures and so here, between the garlic and the bluebell woods, hidden from the world but open to the sun, was our field of flowers. There were sheets and sheets of the yellow vetch with blood-red tips called eggs and bacon. Here the common blue butterflies flitted in pairs, their blue backs just greying to silver along the outer margins of the wing. Curiously, those precise colours, and their relationship, a silvery lining to an eye-blue wing, was exactly repeated in the speedwells that grew in mats among the yellow vetches. Beyond these beds of eggs and bacon, with a scatter of blue among and above them, where the dog and I were both warmly lying, the buttercups and the daisies, with pink fringes to their flowers, spread out to the margins of the woods where the pyramidal bugles clustered a darker blue against the one or two bluebells that had leaked out into the field. The dyer’s greenweed was not yet in flower and only some tiny forget-me-nots and the taller spiky speedwells added to the picture. A holly tree on the edge of the wood had turned pale with its clusters of white flowers.
A slight wind started the field nodding and other butterflies cruised and flickered in. A pale tortoiseshell hung for a minute on the vetches, followed by a bumblebee which pushed its entire body inside the blooms. A big cabbage white flirted with the nettles at the top of the field and then two brown moths, each the size of a fingernail, came dancing in a woven spiral across the hillside, as close in with each other, as bound to and as mobile with each other as the different parts of a guttering flame. The whole wood was needled with birdsong, a clustered shrieking sharpness, interrupted only by the jays’ coarse squawking, the sudden dropping-off dwaark of pheasants and, behind it all, the continuous, laid-back strumming of the woodland bassists, the pigeons in their five-part, broken-backed rhythm, two rising, a pause, two falling, doo-doo, doo, doo-doo, the only soundtrack you need for an English summer.
I was sinking into sleep. The dog already had, and his nostrils were twitching as he snored. There was a drone of light planes. One of Ken Weekes’s grandchildren must have been playing football up by the cottage and that snatched-at, childish shouting came in scraps and patches across the fields. A thin but unending river of feathery willow-seeds was blowing from out of the wood, on past me and down towards Bateman’s and Burwash. Here and there a thistle standing in the field was covered in the willow fluff it had picked from the passing air.
All this was nothing compared to the soporific warmth of the sun, on the field and on my back. My shirt itself felt hot from the warmth it had absorbed. Even the hot dog next to me smelled nice, but then perhaps I only thought that because he was my dog and I thought him wonderful anyway. I rolled over, turned my face away and down into the grass, buried my nose in the sun-warmed turf, breathed it in, smelled how good it was, its hot vegetable dryness, and knew that coming to live here was the best thing I had ever done.