Читать книгу Smell of Summer Grass: Pursuing Happiness at Perch Hill - Adam Nicolson - Страница 10

A CLOUD was down over the hill and the air was damp like a cloth that had just been wrung out. The buildings came like tankers out of the mist. Had we made a mistake? ‘Is it a sea fog?’ Sarah asked Ventnor.

‘Oh no,’ he said languidly, ‘it’s always like this here.’

Somehow his grief smeared us. He was unshaven; he had been unable to find a razor after he had packed everything. His mind was moving from one thing to another. This and that he talked about, these keys again, the oil delivery again, his own untidied odds and ends, a sort of humility in front of us as ‘the owners’ which grated as it reached us, as it must have grated as he said it. His eyes had black rings under them, wide panda-zones of unhappiness. Anyone, I suppose, would have been grieving at the loss of this place. It looked like an amputation. Even so, I felt nothing but impatience, as though it were already ours and he no more than an interloper here. He said nothing about that. What a curious business, this buying and selling of the things we love. It’s like a slave trade. Go, go, I said to him in silence.

His mother-in-law was there with him. She was less restrained. She showed us pictures of their dogs cavorting in the wood. I felt like saying ‘our wood’. She was still possessive. ‘I’d hate to think of anyone making a mess in there after what I’ve done,’ she said. I could see her primping the back of her hair and looking at me as though I were a piece of dog mess myself. And I suppose I was, in their eyes, the agent of eviction. Go on, away with you.

I was edged by it all. The house seemed ugly, stark and poky. I hardly fitted through a single door. Would it ever be redeemable? I was still standing off, waiting for the mooring line, but Sarah was sublime, confident, already arrived. ‘Why do starlings look so greasy?’ I heard myself asking Ventnor. ‘Like a head of hair that hasn’t been washed for weeks. They look like bookies.’ He went at last, his sadness bottled up inside the great length of his long, thin body.

We waited for the furniture van. The house seemed inadequate for our lives. I picked some flowers, I looked at the view from the top field, our summit, and we waited and waited for the van. At last they called, about midday. They were in Brightling, lost. Sarah went to guide them in, while Rosie slept upstairs. The van came. It was too big to fit around the corner of the track past the oast-house and so everything had to be carried from the other side, 100 yards further. All afternoon our possessions rolled out and into the buildings, this clothing of the bones. Come on, faster, faster. The place started to become ours. It was as though the house were trying on new clothes. Sarah was worried by the sight of a staked lilac. Was the wind really that bad?

The removal men went. The oast looked like a jumble sale and the various rooms of the house half OK with our furniture. ‘Change that window, pull down that extension, put the cowl of the oast back.’ I could have spent £100,000 here that day. Sarah and Rosie went off shopping. Ventnor returned to collect a few more things. I didn’t want to have to deal with him again. ‘I see they’ve done some damage there,’ he said, pointing at the place where the lorry’s wheels had cut into the turf, trying to get around the sharp corner by the oast-house. I hadn’t even noticed. I listened to his engine as he drove off towards somewhere else in England, the gears changing uphill to Brightling Needle, and then down more easily the far side, the sound, like a boat’s wake, slowly folding back into the trees. We never saw him again.

He had gone, it was quiet and I was alone for the first time in Perch Hill. I could feel the silence between my fingertips, the extraordinary substance of this new place, this new-old place, new-bought but ancient, ours and not ours, seeping and creeping around me. It was as though I had learned sub-aqua and for the first time had lowered myself gingerly into the body of the pool, to sense this new dimension thickly present around me as somewhere in which life might be lived and movements made. Until now all I had seen was the surface of the water, its tremors and eddies. Now, like a pike, I could hang inside it. I could feel the water starting to flow and ripple between my fingers.

That evening, as the sun dropped into the wood, I walked the boundaries, the shores of the island, the places where the woodland trees reached their arms out over the pastures. Here and there, the bluebells crept out into the grass like a painted shadow. Wild garlic was growing at the bottom of the Slip Field. I lay down in the Way Field, the field where we had decided to come here all those months before, a place and a decision which were now seared into my life like a brand, and as I lay there felt the earth under my back, its deep solidity, as Richard Jefferies had done 100 years before on the Wiltshire Downs. The hand of the rock itself was holding me up, presenting me to the sky, my body and self moulded to the contours and matched to the irreducibility of this hill on this farm at this moment. ‘You cannot fall through a field,’ I said aloud.

I took stock. What was this place to which we were now wedded? It had cost £432,000, plus all the fees. We had borrowed £160,000 to make that up, on top of the sale of the London house. My father was lending us £25,000. Our position was strung out and I had ricked my back. I felt as weak and as impotent as at any time in my life. It was an intuitive understanding, an act of faith, that the deep substance of this little fragment of landscape would mend that lack and make me whole. It was a farm of 90 acres in the Sussex Weald, about two hours south of London in the usual traffic, but no more than an hour from Westminster Bridge at five on a summer’s morning. It was down a little lane, as obscure as one could feel in the south of England, with no sound of traffic, no hint of a sodium glare in the sky at night and an air of enclosure and privacy. At the edge of the land, by the lane, was the farmyard, with its utterly compromised mixture of bad old and bad new.

Beyond the farmyard itself, things improved. It was indeed one Bright Field after another. The buildings were at almost the highest point and in all directions the land fell away in pleats, like the folds of a cloth as it drops from the table to the floor. The creases were filled with little strips of wood under whose branches small trickly streams made their way towards the River Dudwell. The broad rounded backs of the pleats were the fields themselves, eleven of them, little hedged enclosures. They made up the small island block entirely surrounded by wood. That wood was part of the ancient forest of the Weald, whose name itself, cognate with wald, meant forest. The farmland was cut from it perhaps in the 15th or 16th century. The house was built in about 1580 and was probably made of the oaks that once grew where it stood. It was poor land, solid clay, high and windy all year, cold, wet and clammy in the winter, hard, heavy and cloddy in the summer.

Because nothing destroys a landscape like money, its poverty had preserved it. We were on the edge of viable agriculture here, one of the last pieces to be cleared from the wood and already in part going back to it. You could see the lines of old hedges, hornbeam and hawthorn, growing as 40-foot trees in the middle of the woods. Those were the boundaries of the ghost fields, abandoned and returning to their natural condition. Because it was so poor, it had never been worth a farmer’s while to drive the land hard. That’s why these fields are as beautiful as any you could find in Europe, or the world come to that.

Of course there are many other pockets of beauty in England, at least away from the great slabs of denuded arable land in East Anglia and the Midlands. In my 20s I had walked through many of them, about 3,000 miles on foot when writing a book about English paths, and then as a travel writer for the Sunday Times I had walked a great deal more. In the western counties, from Devon and Dorset, up the Welsh marches to Lancashire and Cumbria, I had fallen in love with a country I hadn’t known until then, as a knitted thing, a visible testament to the long and intimate encounter between England and the English. It is the national autobiography, written every day for 1,500 years, with more life buried in it than any of us will ever know, with little thought ever given to its overall effect and its language often obscure. Maybe that is what we found at Perch Hill, a miracle of retained memory, a depth of time, and the mute, ox-like certainty which comes with that, away from the zigzags of our own chaotic existence. Nature was part of it, not all. This was no wilderness. Nor, though, was it an exclusively man-made place, sheeny and slicked up. Sometimes now I wish Perch Hill – our lives – had happened elsewhere in England, somewhere smarter and sleeker, with an elegant trout stream or smooth chalky views, but Perch Hill, stumbled on by chance, in all its scruffiness and lack of polish, but with its promise of what we always used to call echtness, an authentic, vital beauty that came up from the roots, was the right place for us. Human and natural met there in a rough old encounter and that was the world we needed.

There was a line from a poem of Tennyson’s which, from time to time that year, bumped up into my conscious mind, and presumably lurked not far beneath for the rest of it. ‘Green Sussex,’ it said, ‘fading into blue.’ That was this farm in a phrase: the green immediacy, the plunge for the valley, the stepped ridges of the Weald, blueing into the distance 10 and 12 miles away. This wasn’t a little button of perfection, a cherry perched on a cake of the wrecked, but part of a larger world and as I lay in the Way Field that evening all I could think of was the feeling of extent that ran out from there across the lane, down into the field called Toyland, beyond that into the valley of woods running off to the west, to the river down there, the deer nosing in that wood and the sight I had that morning, as we were waiting for the van, of the fox running down through that field, on the wood edge, no more than the tip of its tail visible above the grasses, a dancing point like the tip of a conductor’s baton …

I shall not forget that evening. The spring was going haywire around me. It was DNA bedlam, nature’s opening day. The black-thorn was stark white in the dark and shady corners. The willows had turned eau-de-nil. Oaks were the odd springtime mixture of red and formaldehyde yellow, the colour of old flesh preserved in bottles. The wild cherries stood hard and white like pylons in the wood and the crab apples, lower, more crabbed in form, were in full pink flower – an incredible thing a whole tree of that, the most sweetly beautiful flower in England, dolloped and larded all over the branches of a wrinkled, half-decrepit tree. In places nothing was doing better than the nettles and the thistles, but in the wood, there were the wall-to-wall bluebells, pale, almost lilac in the Middle Shaw, that eyeshadow blue: in the half-lit green darkness of the wood, that incredible, glamorous, seductive haze of the bluebell’s blue, a nightclub sheen in the low light, the sexiest colour in the English landscape, hazing my eyes, a pool of colour into which, if I could, I would have dived there and then.

There were deer on the top field. The light was catching the ridged knobbles of their spines. I drank it up: this bright sunshine, even late, the bars of it poking into the shadows of the wood; the comfort of the grass; the lane a continuous mass of wood anemones, cuckoo flowers, primroses; and one very creamy anemone up by the gate. Its colour looked to me like the top of the milk.

‘These foam-bells on the hidden currents of being’, Hugh MacDiarmid once called spring flowers, and that attitude, a slightly dismissive superiority, used to be mine too. Geology, the understructure, the creation of circumstances: those were the things that used to matter to me. I preferred the hard and stony parts of the north and west or the higher places in the Alps where, after the snow has gone, the crests and ridges are left as abused and brutalized as any frost-shattered quarry. Walking across those high, dry Alps, I have seen the whole world in every direction desert-like in its austerity, a bleakness beyond either ugliness or beauty, and thought that life could offer me nothing more.

I still lusted after that, for all the clean hard-pressure rigour of that alienating landscape, serene precisely because it is so dreadful, because from that point of desiccation there was nowhere lower to fall. But alongside it now, there was this other thing, this undeniable life-spurt in the spring, whose toughness was subtler than the stone’s but whose persistence would outlive it. Genes last longer than rocks. They slip through unbroken while continents collide and are consumed. These plants, I now saw, were the world’s version of eternity, the lit bush. If you wanted to ally yourself with strength, nothing would be more sustaining than the spring flowers.

Over the following days, we dressed the house as though preparing it to go out. It was like dressing a father or mother. She sat there mute while coats and ribbons were tried on her. ‘Oh you look nice like that,’ we would say, ‘or that, or maybe that.’ Rooms acquired meaning, another meaning. In the kitchen, painted on the cupboard door, I found a coat of arms: six white feathers on a blue ground and the motto ‘Labore et perseverantia’, By work and perseverance. It looked fairly new. What was it, a kind of d’Urberville story of a noble family collapsed to the poverty of this, to the resolution of that motto against all the odds? It was certainly a failed farm. That was the only reason we were there. We had crept like hermit crabs into a shell that others had vacated.

But I guessed the arms and the motto had no great ancestry. Had Ventnor himself painted them here in the last few years? I knew that he had attempted to make a business out of this farm, to continue with the dairy herd that he had bought with it. But he didn’t know what he was doing and had lost a fortune. The last thing he asked me before he left was ‘Are you thinking of farming here?’ to which I had been noncommittal. With something of a glittery eye, he told me not to consider it. That was a sure route to disaster. Soon stories were reaching me of Ventnor sitting in the kitchen here, his unpaid bills laid out on the table in front of him like a kind of Pelmanism from hell, his head in his hands, his prospects hopeless. Every one of these stories ended with the same warning: Don’t do it.

The Ventnor experience seemed somehow to stand between us and an earlier past. He was one of us, an urban escapee, a pastoralist, who had turned the old oast-house into an art gallery and put coach-lamp-style lights outside the doors. Where was the contact with the real thing, the real past here? There was a glimmering of discontent in my mind about that gap, still a glass wall between us and the essential nature of Perch Hill. Before Ventnor, I knew, the last farmers here had been called Weekes. Where were they? Had all trace of them disappeared? It wasn’t long before we realized that the very opposite was the case: Ken and Brenda Weekes still lived in the cottage 200 yards away across the fields. A day or two after our arrival, Sarah and I went up to see them and from that moment they became a fixed point in our lives.

The boys were here and were shrieking in the new expanse of garden. Tom was ten, Will eight and Ben six. We planned bike routes across the fields and began making a tree house in the Middle Shaw, nailing and binding scaffold boards and half-rotten ladders to the ancient twisting hornbeams. We got a giant trampoline and put it in the barn, where the three of them competed with each other, trying to touch the tie-beams high above them. Sarah and I were anxious and buoyed up in equal measure at what we had taken on. Across the fields, we could hear Ken mowing the lawn around his cottage: the sound of a half-distant mower in early summer, a man in shirtsleeves and sleeveless jersey, his dog on the lawn beside him, the sun slipping in and out of bubbled clouds, and all around us, to east and west, Sussex stepping off into an inviting afternoon. It was, in a way, what we had come here for.

We walked up there, not across the fields that first time but up the lane. The hedge was in brilliant new leaf. Ken and Brenda came to their garden gate, asked us in, a cup of tea in the kitchen, Gemma the dog lying by the Rayburn, and a sort of inspecting openness in them both, the welcome mixed with ‘Who are you? What sort of people are you?’ I shall always remember two things Ken said. One with his tang of acid: ‘You know what they always said about this farm, don’t you? They always said this was the poorest farm in the parish.’ The other with the warmth that can spread like butter around him: ‘That’s one thing that’s lovely, children’s voices down at the farm again. That’s a sound we haven’t had for a long time here.’

To a degree I didn’t understand at the time, we had entered Ken Weekes’s world. Perhaps we had bought the farm, perhaps the deeds were in our name, perhaps we were living in the farmhouse, perhaps I was meant to be deciding what should happen to the woods and fields, but none of that could alter the central fact: Perch Hill was Ken’s in a deeper sense than any deed of conveyance could ever accomplish.

He had come here in 1942 as a six-year-old boy to live in the house we were now occupying. His father, ‘Old Ron’, was farm manager for a London entrepreneur and ‘a gentleman, one of the real old gentry’, Mr George Wilson-Fox. ‘Old Wilson’ used to come down with his friends on a Saturday. The Weekeses would all put on clean white dairymen’s coats to show the proprietor and his guests the herd of prize pedigree Friesians, spotless animals, their tails washed twice a day every day, the cow shed whitewashed every year, a cow shed so clean ‘you could eat your dinner off that floor’.

It was a place dedicated to excellence. Wilson-Fox made sure there was never any shortage of money for the farm and Ron imposed his discipline on it. ‘The cattle always came first,’ Ken remembered. ‘Even if you were dying, you had to look after the cows. I remember Old Ron kicking us out of bed to go and milk the cows one morning when I could hardly move – “Come on, you bugger, get out, there’s work to do” – and it was so cold in there in the cow shed with a north-easterly that the milk was freezing in the milk-line. But we got it done. It all had to be done by eight in the morning if you wanted to sit down to breakfast. You couldn’t have breakfast unless the cattle had been looked after first.’

It is a lost world. Nothing like these small dairy farms exists here any more. They have all gone and Ken has witnessed their disappearance, the total evaporation of the world in which he grew up. About that he seems to feel bleak and accepting in equal measure. Every inch of this farm carries some memory or mark of Ken’s life here: the day the doodlebug crashed in the wood at the bottom of the Way Field; those moments in Beech Meadow where Old Ron, in late June or early July, would pick a bunch of flowers for Dolly, Ken’s mother, the signal for the boys that haymaking was about to begin; the day the earth suddenly slipped after they had ploughed it in the field for ever after known as the Slip Field. A farm is a farmer’s autobiography and this one belongs to Ken.

When he married Brenda, in 1959, they moved into the cottage across the fields. His mother and brother stayed in the farmhouse. Wilson-Fox died in 1971, but Ken continued farming for the trustees of the estate for another 15 years until, in 1986, the farm was sold, along with its herd of cattle, to John Ventnor, who wanted to be a farmer. Ken stayed in the cottage, and set the art dealer on his way, helping him for a year or so, but they fell out. ‘We had a misunderstanding,’ Ken said. For several years after that Ken was not even allowed to walk his dog in these fields.

There was something of a false cheeriness in both of us as we talked. Each of us was guarded against the other. But the afternoon floated on Ken’s stories. He could remember watching the pilots of the Luftwaffe Messerschmitts, low enough for you to see a figure in the cockpit. ‘Oh yes, you could see them sitting in there all right.’ One evening the Weekeses were all down in the Way Field getting in the hay and there were so many of the German planes that his father said they’d better go in. ‘You could never tell, could you? Bastards.’ Ken’s performance culminated in his favourite story about the hunt. He was out in the Cottage Field, tending to one of the cows which was poorly, when he chanced to look up and see a whole crowd of the hunt come pouring down the trackway that leads off the bridlepath and into the Perch Hill farmyard.

‘“I say,”’ Ken bellowed at them – ‘because they’ll only understand you if you talk to them in a way they do understand – “why don’t you fucking well bugger off out of there?” And,’ Ken says, looking round, all smiles, ‘do you know what? They did!’

Another piece soon dropped into place. Will Clark came up one day from the village. He had been doing some work on the farm for John Ventnor. Peter, his son, had been working in the wood and mowing the grass. Ventnor had said that there was no one he could recommend more highly. And that’s how it turned out. As soon as Will walked into the yard I could see what he meant. His eyes were the colour of old jeans. He swept his hair in a repeated gesture up and over his forehead into a wide long curl that could only be the descendant of a rocker’s quiff, 40 years on. He smiled with his eyes and talked with a laugh in his voice. ‘We’ll be haying soon,’ he said. He cuddled Rosie. His taste in shirts was perfect, lime green and tangerine orange, unchanged, I guess, since he was bike-mad in the fifties, when he used to do a ton down the long straight stretch to Lewes called The Broyle, or burn up and down the High Street in the village to impress the girls. He was the only man in Burwash ever to get to Tunbridge Wells in 12½ minutes, or so he told me. He talked broad Sussex: fence posts were ‘spiles’, working in the mud got you ‘all slubbed up’, anything that needed doing always involved ‘stirring it about a bit’, a sickle was ‘a swap’. He had started his working life when he was 14 on a farm at Hawkhurst, just over the border into Kent, looking after the horses. He knew all about machines and wood and wooding and how to get a big ash butt out of a difficult corner. He was the man of the place and he would be the man for us. Will had been ill for years – his kidneys scarcely worked and he had to spend three hours a day at home on a dialysis machine – and he said that Peter would have to do the heavy work. ‘He’s the muscle man.’ And so we plugged in. This other world was closing over us, some version of pastoral folding us in its lap.

All the same, I was anxious about it all. The stupidity of what we were doing was brought home, involuntarily or not, when people we knew from London dropped in. There was always a vulture in the party, someone who would unerringly make you sour with a remark. ‘Oh yes,’ one of these people said in the early days, nosing around the ugliness of our horrible buildings, ‘it’s a very nice spot, isn’t it?’ A very nice spot: the silent pinchedness of what is not said. Why do these people wreak destruction? Why do they do such dishonest damage? I couldn’t believe how soured I felt by them. But why should I have been? Why did I even care? Perhaps because the whole point of Perch Hill was to take ourselves out of range of their criticisms, their worldly knowingness. Now, I am sure, nothing they said would come anywhere near me. It is one of the consolations of age that your own self-knowledge allows other people’s criticisms to break around you like little waves. But then, in our tender state, to have their all-too-predictable strictures applied to our precious refuge was like an experience you occasionally get as a writer. You have written something which matters to you and which tries to say something beyond what is ordinarily said, and as a result is likely to be a little rough at the edges. Your reader looks at it, but they don’t read into the heart of it, the point of it, and stay critically on the edge, looking at the punctuation or the length of sentences or, worst of all, the definition of terms. I once wrote a book about a place I loved and which, on its first page, mentioned the ‘branched orchids’ that grew there. A woman told me casually one day that she hadn’t got any further than that first page because ‘There aren’t any branched orchids.’ I have never been able to look at an orchid since without feeling with the ends of my fingers for those tiny branches on which each of its individual flowers sits.

Now, though, in retrospect, I get the point: Perch Hill is a nice spot but there was nothing nice about its buildings. The judgement was correct. But Sarah and I were not living in the world of correct judgements. And our visitors from London could never have understood the powerful psychic reality here: the way I wanted to wriggle under the skin of this place so that only my eyes were above the skin of the turf like a hippo in its river and the bed of green comfort around me, the osmotic relation to place so that there was no distinction between me and it, no boundary at the skin. Of course they couldn’t, because that is not something that can be said in polite society. It was that kind of pre-rational understanding that I was after, like a dog rolling in muck.

We didn’t know what we were doing. We arrived on this farm as naked as Adam and Eve and we were setting about making it right. We knew what we wanted – a sense of completeness. That sounds so vague now and perhaps it was. But there were real models in our minds. As a boy at Sissinghurst, I had known a kind of completeness in the world that surrounded me, a house and garden, farm, woods, streams and fields, with a sense of that pattern continuing beyond its boundaries in much the same way, to be explored on foot through the woods and hay meadows, by bike down the long sinuous lanes which only decades later did I realize were the drove roads by which the Weald was first settled. That was a memory which seemed to have all the elements of a life – adventure, energy, people, community, love, beauty.

And then, more recently, Sarah and I had stayed for a few months in a cottage next to a house belonging to John and Caryl Hubbard in Dorset, at Chilcombe, a tiny settlement with its own tiny church, looking out over a theatre of fields and woods that led down to the shingle bank at Chesil Beach. Here too house and garden and chickens and sheep and cattle and the whole wide view and the sense of Dorset and England – with, miraculously, the strip of shining sea laid above it all – were folded in together in a way that is simply not accessible in any city.

This is not an aberrational idea. It appears at the earliest moments of Europe, in Minoan Crete, in the Bronze Age 4,000 years ago, when the priest rulers of that civilization made for themselves small and elegant country houses, surrounded by flower gardens, vineyards, orchards and olives groves, in carefully and beautifully chosen places where the cultivated country and the distant mountains were laid out around them like the background to a Renaissance portrait. This is the vision of the Horatian farm, an easy place because it is at ease with its surroundings; it is the ideal behind the Palladian villas of the late 16th-century Veneto; it is the transformed vision in eighteenth-century England and the English seaboard of America; it lies behind the ideals of Ruskin and Morris, driven by a need for an intimacy with the natural which goes beyond the crude act of buying which is at the root of all cities. That is what completeness meant and means to me: an entirely full and committed engagement with the real world in all the dimensions which the world can offer.

We didn’t quite know how to get there. All we could do was stumble off into the dark, hoping and trusting that our instincts were right. That was the point. The whole enterprise was a blunder into truth, wobbling chaotically towards the goal. It was good because it was messy. If it had all been neater, if we had known what we were doing, it wouldn’t have had the juice in it. The whole thing would have flattened out in the drear of expertise. As it was, ignorance was the great enabler and incompetence the condition of life. Or so I would say to myself in my storming rage after the nay-sayers had gone.

Sometimes I felt we were surrounded by know-alls. Not the people who lived near us, the Will Clarks, the Ken Weekeses, who approached our efforts with a delicate sense of neither wanting to intrude nor wanting us to come too much of a cropper. No, the real killer know-alls were the partly ruralized urbanites who had acquired the cultural habit of telling other people what to do. It probably stemmed from the prefect system at public schools, compounded by middle-class careers in which the only necessary skill is the ability to disguise bossiness as brains.

You could see them heaving into view a mile away. They were struggling with their mission to inform. They knew they shouldn’t. They felt they must. They wished they didn’t have to. But they knew they ought to. One has a duty, after all. It’s a responsibility to the landscape as a whole. And it would be so sad, wouldn’t it, if it all came unstuck in the end for Adam and Sarah?

Out came the supercilious smiles. These were the opening, but doomed, attempts at a spirit of generosity. Soon enough they gave way to the barrage of assured, you-really-should-have-asked-me-first, pain-in-the-neck blather. The spirit hit the iceberg and sank.

No area of life was immune. I remember, classically, having our stack of firewood analysed by a man who, from what he was saying, was obviously chief firewood analyst for Deutsche Morgan Grenfell. Not much was right with the way we had done things. The shed was wrong; it needed more air holes, its roof was not very nice, the walls were unsatisfactory and it was in the wrong position. We shouldn’t have bothered to put either chestnut or larch logs in the pile because they both spit when they burn and that wasn’t good for the kiddies, was it? The oak was useless; it only burned on a massively hot fire, which we would never achieve because the rest of the wood was such rubbish. The ash had been split far too small and would burn too quickly. Sycamore had no calorific value to speak of and what we had was rotten. It would take more energy to start the fire than would be given out by it. And were we two years ahead with our cutting programme? He looked at me in that generous, hesitating way people use to those whose self-esteem they have just bulldozed into a silage pit.

The idea of putting up a building of any kind was a mistake. You would make the windows too small. You would spend too much money on it. You would do something totally out of character. You would create a dreadful ersatz fake (‘Tesco’s’) when people in your position had a responsibility to patronize new architects and architecture. You were living in a retro hell. You would not install the correct insulation/safety features/ heating system. Heating systems! May I never, ever have another discussion about heating systems for the rest of my life.

Then there was the chicken question. You were thinking of getting far too many of them. Were you really going to be eating 80 eggs a week? Had you performed the cloacal swab test for salmonella on them yet? You certainly couldn’t think of giving eggs away if they had dirty cloacas. Their housing was disgusting and if an RSPCA man should happen by, he would be appalled. You may have heard someone was prosecuted for just this kind of thing the other day. Anyway, they should have been bedded down on sawdust not straw. It was amazing you hadn’t found that out for yourself. I don’t quite understand why you were going in for these things.

Moving quickly on, children should wear clothes made out of only naturally occurring materials, fed only naturally occurring foods and baked beans should be sugar-free. Trees – these two subjects always somehow elide – should be planted without stakes, or tied only loosely to stakes, or planted without tree-guards or only after a comprehensive drainage system has been installed, or only on M25 rootstock, or only from Deacon’s Nursery in the Isle of Wight, or only with local genetic material, gathered from the last of the local orchards, and anyway fruit trees are only a pleasure if you have done all the grafting and training yourself. Have you managed to do that, Adam? Or have you ever thought you might be taking on a little much here? Have you had your dog castrated yet? Aaaaaaaargh.

My sons – lovely stage in life – had just then started playing Oasis on their ghetto-blaster at crow-scarer volume. The songs wormed their way into the mind, colonizing whole stretches of it. After one particularly gruesome hour or two with a couple of people who came to lunch and knew every damn thing there was to know about the usual subjects – orchards, firewood, chickens, ducks (‘one says “duck”, doesn’t one, in the plural?’), heating systems, woodland management, grants (‘We’ve found we’ve done quite well out of the whole County Council Heritage Landscape scheme but I’m told, I’m afraid, that they’ve run out of money now and won’t be taking any more applicants at least until fiscal 2000’) – I found myself stacking the dishwasher and singing, much too loudly, ‘Yer gada roll wiv it/ya gorra take yer time/yer garra say wotya say/dern ledd anybuddy gerrin yer waaajy …/There’s nuthin lef for me to saaiy …’

The bravado papered over a pit of anxiety. One morning I woke at four and said, aloud, ‘I’m worried about the fields.’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ Sarah said without a momentary flicker. She’d heard this sort of thing before and, anyway, was already awake worrying about the garden. We lay there in silence for a moment, travelling through the universe together at 24,000 miles an hour, each in a private little cubicle of hysteria and each thinking the other stupid. ‘The fields are fine.’

‘They aren’t. What’s wrong with the garden?’

‘It’s out of control.’

‘That,’ I told her, ‘is also what’s wrong with the fields.’

‘I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous. Fields don’t get out of control. That’s one of the good things about them. They just sit there perfectly in control for day after day.’ Gardens didn’t, apparently. Gardens were nature on speed. In fact, you could see them as hyperactive fields. They went mad if you didn’t look after them. Anyway the fields were not going to be photographed on Wednesday, were they?

This was true. Sarah had got a job as a junior doctor in the renal unit of the hospital in Brighton. She was sharing it with another young doctor but even half-time, in the days of famously long hours for junior doctors, it often required her to be there 40 hours a week. The hospital was about 45 minutes’ drive each way. Day after day, she had to leave early and return late, missing Rosie, feeling that she had come here to find a new life with us but that her work was taking her away to the point where our lives were hardly shared at all. Even when at home, she was too tired to take much pleasure in what we were doing, or where we had come to. It seemed absurd.

We decided together that she couldn’t go on. When she had been pregnant with Rosie and after she was born, Sarah, who is incapable of doing nothing, had taken time off and set up a florist’s business called Garlic & Sapphire with her university friend Lou Farman. As florists do, they had bought their flowers and foliage from wholesale merchants in Covent Garden market. This was fine, but it was not that easy to make any kind of living, and anyway it felt a little tertiary: selling flower arrangements to London clients from boxes of flowers bought at a market and almost entirely shipped in from industrial-scale producers in Holland. We could do better than that.

Sarah’s father, a classics don at King’s College, Cambridge, had also been a passionate botanist who with his own father had painted the entire British flora and was the co-author of the New Naturalist volume on mountain flowers. He had taken Sarah as a girl botanizing across bog, heath, mountain, meadow and moor in England, Scotland, Italy and Greece. She had drunk flowers in at his knee and from him had learned the science of flower reproduction and habitat. The Ravens had also made inspirationally beautiful gardens at their house near Cambridge (chalky) and around their holiday house on the west coast of Scotland (acid). So this much was clear: Sarah had gardens in her genes. She had to make a garden. Her life would not be complete unless she did.

We had made together a small and lovely garden in London with pebble paths and hazel hurdles and we had talked together about making it more productive. One day I happened to be sitting next to the publisher Frances Lincoln at a wedding party. ‘Do you know what you should publish?’ I said. ‘No,’ she said, a little wary. ‘A book called The Cutting Garden about growing flowers to be cut and brought inside the house.’ ‘Are you going to do it?’ she asked. No, I wasn’t, but I knew someone who could.

So this was already in our mind when we came to Perch Hill and it was obvious that when Sarah gave up her job as a doctor, to look after Rosie and to be with us at home, she should embark on making the cutting garden and writing the book. We wrote the proposal together, with plans, plant lists and seasonal successions, and sent it off to Frances, and soon enough it was commissioned. Perch Hill was about to take its first step to new productivity.

It was to be a highly and beautifully illustrated book whose working title at home anyway was The Expensive Garden. From time to time in various parts of the house I used to find half-scribbled lists on the back of invoices from garden centres spread across the south of England, working out exactly how much had been spent on dahlia tubers, brick paths, taking up the brick paths because they were in the wrong place, the new, correctly aligned brick paths, the hypocaust system for the first greenhouse, the automatically opening vent system for the second, the underground electric wiring for the heated cold frames (yes, heated cold frames), the woven hazel fencing to give the correct cheap, rustic cottage look (gratifyingly more expensive than any other garden fencing currently on the market) and the extra pyramid box trees needed before Wednesday.

The consignment of topiary was delivered, one day early that summer, by an articulated Volvo turbo-cooled truck, whose body stretched 80 feet down the lane – it had caused a slight traffic rumpus on the main road just outside Burwash, attempting to manoeuvre itself like a suppository into the entrance of the lane – and whose driver with a flourish drew aside the long curtain that ran the length of its flank, saying ‘There you are, instant gardening!’ He must have done it before.

The inside of the lorry was a sort of tableau illustrating ‘The Riches of Flora’. It contained enough topiary to re-equip the Villa Lante. Species ceanothus, or whatever they were, sported themselves decorously among the aluminium stanchions of the lorry. The rear section was the kind of over-elaborate rose and clematis love-seat-cum-gazebo you sometimes see on stage in As You Like It. Transferred to the perfectly unpretentious vegetable patch maintained by the Weekeses, the disgorged innards of the Volvo turned Perch Hill Farm, instantly, as the man said, into the sort of embowered house-and-garden most people might labour for 20 years to produce. A visitor the following week congratulated Sarah on what he called ‘its marvellous, patinated effect’. Some patina, I said, some cheque book.

At that stage, the advance on The Expensive Garden had covered about fifteen percent of the money spent on making it. If even a tenth of that amount had been spent on the farm we would already be one of the showpieces of southern England. ‘That point,’ Sarah was in the habit of saying, for reasons I have never yet got her to explain, ‘which you always make when we have people to supper, is totally inadmissible.’

But I was serious about the fields. I wanted the fields, which were beautiful in the large scale, to be perfect in detail too. I wanted to walk about in them and think, ‘Yes, this is right, this is how things should be. This is complete.’ That is not what I was thinking that summer. In fact, the more I got to know them, the more dissatisfied I became. Hence the 4 a.m. anxieties. The thistles were terrible. Some fields were so thick with thistles that my dear dog, the slightly fearful and profoundly loving Colonel Custard, refused to come for a walk in them. He stopped at the gate, sat down and put on the face which all dog-owners will recognize: ‘Me through that?’

In the early hours, I used to have a sort of internal debate about the fields. It came from an unresolved conflict in my own mind, which could be reduced to this question: was the farm a vastly enlarged garden or was it part of the natural world which happened to be ours for the time being? The idea that it might be a business which could earn us money had never been seriously entertained. We might choose to have sheep, cows, chickens, ducks and pigs wandering about on it, but only in the same way that Sarah might order another five mature tulip trees for a little quincunx she had in mind. I would have animals because they looked nice.

To the question of big garden or slice of nature, I veered between one answer and then the other. In part it was like a huge, low-intensity garden. We were here because it was heart-stoppingly beautiful and one of the things that made it beautiful was the interfolding of wood, hedge and field. If the distinctions between them became blurred then a great deal of the beauty would go. The fields must look like fields, shorn, bright and clean, and the woods must look like woods, fluffy, full and dense. Field and wood were, here anyway, the rice and curry of landscape aesthetics. Scurfy fields, as spotty as a week’s stubble on an unshaven chin, looked horrible, untended, a room in a mess.

There were other things to think of too. If we simply mowed the fields to keep them bright and green or, horror of horrors, sprayed off the docks and thistles, we would not be attending to other aspects of the grassland which of course are valuable in themselves. There were clumps of dyer’s greenweed here, whole spreads of the vetch here, called eggs and bacon and early purple orchids on the edges of the wood. Sprays would wreck all that and you had to allow those things to set seed and reproduce if they were going to continue. You had to allow them to look messy. What to do? Obviously I had to learn how to manage grassland properly. I was blundering around in my ignorance.

I had a meeting one Saturday morning with the Wrenns, Brian and Stephen, father and son, our farming neighbours from Perryman’s, on the other side of the hill. We were all a little shy with each other in the kitchen, too ready to agree with what the other had said.

Brian, sliding the conversation sideways, told me there were nightingales in our woods and nightjars and wheatears. I knew nothing about these things. We talked about the way that all the farmhouses here face south, their fronts to the warmth, their backs to the wind. How ingeniously the first people to settle here spied out the land. Stephen talked about the poverty of the Weald, the way there is no topsoil, all the fertility poured away down the streams to the southern rich belt, the champaign country of rich southern Sussex. ‘This is the poorest, the last bit of ground to be taken,’ he said, ‘but that’s what has saved it.’

Then I said, with the Nescafé in me, we should talk about the real matter in hand. Brian turned businesslike. ‘We would certainly like to have all the grass. But it’s too late this year to get any nitrogen on for the silage. We’ll get some heifers on to graze it later.’

‘Of course,’ I said, feeling I was about to introduce some urban gaucherie, ‘and anyway, from our side, we would like to manage it in as much of a conservationist way as we can.’ How I hate that word, but to my amazement they lay in happily with it. Even the air between us became somehow emotional at the recognition of shared ideas. Stephen talked about planting some of Perryman’s with willows to provide fuel for a wood-burning power plant. That toboggan feeling developed around the table that we were not such aliens to each other as we might have imagined. The future opened like the curtains of a theatre. We all came to an agreement: they should take some of the grass that year as summer grazing. They would pay £1,000 for it, which was better than nothing I supposed, about 1.5 percent return on capital. The real question was: were we prepared to forgo the £3,000-odd we would get from a conventional let for the sake of it looking nice and it being lovely? For saying no to nitrogen and no to high-pressure farming? Were we rich enough for that?

With a new bill-hook, I cut hazels in the wood for Sarah’s new cutting patch. The old hazel was growing in stools 8 feet across. The middle of them was a jumble of old fallen sticks. One stick had rotted entirely on the inside but the skin had remained whole as an upright paper tube. There were deer in the wood, their awkward big bodies breaking the trees they hurried past, and around my feet tall purple orchids. I was cutting with slashing blunt incompetence at the hazels, half-tearing them away, but I loved their long swinging creak next to my ear as I carried them home on my shoulder. I felt the sweat run down my side in single, finger-sized trickles and I loved the smell, the woody, sweet, bruised, tannic vegetable reeking of the cut wood. That’s what I was here for, the under-sense, those deeper connections, that core of intimacy.

I demolished the fence around the pond, shirt off, sweat and exhaustion. I sold the tractor on Will’s advice and we were for the moment tractorless. Will was looking for another more reliable one. I made teepees out of hazels from the wood and some hurdles out of split chestnut. I tried to buy a mower but my credit card failed. It was the usual humiliation in front of a queue of men who were more interested in that little human drama than anything else. Rachel the shop girl blushed. I laughed it off. I needed to earn more money and I had a feeling we were veering, slowly but quite deliberately, towards a financial crisis.

But I loved it here that first spring. I loved the sustenance of the green, the kestrel that came daily and hung above the corners of the barns, moving from station to station. I loved the little seedlings of the oak and aspen sprouting in the grass along the wood edges. I loved the knit of the country, the jersey of it. I loved the sight of the ducks, two wild mallards on the pond, I loved the substance of the place, my new fax machine, the gentleness of Will and Peter, Rosie playing in the garden with her new nanny, Anna Cheney, who only years later would dare tell us exactly how horrified she had been at the chaos in which we were living, but how one thing had convinced her to come: the sight of Rosie’s face as she sat at the kitchen table, so round and so sweet.

The garden accumulated. I tended to the house as I had tended no house before, tidying and hoovering. Sarah and I both had the feeling, if we were honest, that we should have waited to buy somewhere with more beautiful buildings but there we were: we couldn’t say that now. This would be lovely in the slow unnoticed growth of the place around us. Forty years later, as we died, we would look at it and say, ‘That was beautiful.’ Life would be over, having been lived. The moments of revelation are all there is. This is all there is. This will be the undernote of my life: the making with a purpose, not the drifting of the survivor. Make, and you will be happy.