Smell of Summer Grass: Pursuing Happiness at Perch Hill. Adam Nicolson
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Название: Smell of Summer Grass: Pursuing Happiness at Perch Hill

Автор: Adam Nicolson

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары

Серия:

isbn: 9780007335589

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ