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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

Part Two MENDING

       The Darting of Life

      THAT SUMMER of 1994 burned. The south of England was bleak with heat. Cars along the lane raised a floury dust in their wake. The cow parsley and the trees in the hedges were coated with it like loaves in a bakery. The streams were dry coming off the hill and the river in the trench of the valley was little more than a gravel bed across which a line of damp had been drawn, connecting the shrunken pools.

      I spent long days down there in the dark, deep shade of the riverside trees. The valley felt enclosed, a place apart, and secrecy gathered inside it. Rudyard Kipling lived here for the second half of his life – he bought Bateman’s, a large 17th-century iron-master’s house just below the last of our fields, in 1902 – and the whole place remained haunted by his memory. Everywhere you went, he had already described. It was here, among the hidden constrictions of the valley where, in Kipling’s wonderful phrase, ‘wind prowling through woods sounds like exciting things going to happen’, that I felt most in touch with where I had come to live. This was the womb.

      It was a pathless place, or at least the only paths were the old deeply entrenched roads, never surfaced, which dropped from the ridge to the south, crossed the river at gravelly fords and then climbed through woods again to the ridge on the other side. They were the only intrusion in what felt like an abandoned world. The woods were named – Ware’s Wood, Hook Wood, Limekiln Wood, Stonehole Wood, Great Wood, Green Wood – but it felt as if no one had been here for half a century. Hornbeam, chestnut, ash and even oak had all been coppiced in the past but none had been touched for decades. The marks of the great combing of the 1987 storm were still there: 80-foot-tall ash trees had fallen across the river from one bank to the other. The ivy that once climbed up them now hung in Amazonian curtains from the horizontal trees. Growing from the fallen trunks, small linear woods of young ashes now pushed up towards the light.

      I stumbled about in here, looking for some kind of inaccessible essence of the place. The deer had broken paths through the undergrowth. The clay was scrabbled away where they had jumped the little side streams. The fields of underwood garlic had turned lemon yellow in the shade. And through it all the river wound, curling back on itself, cutting out promontories and peninsulas in the wooded banks, reaching down to the underlying layer of dark, ribbed, iron-rich sandstone. Where it cut into an iron vein, the metal bled into the stream and the water flowed past it an almost marigold orange. This too was Kipling’s world, virtually unchanged since he had described it, 90 years before, in Puck of Pook’s Hill.

      Even on the shaded water the air was hot and heavy with drowsy scents, while outside, through breaks in the trees, the sunshine burned the pasture like fire …

      The trees closing overhead made long tunnels through which the sunshine worked in blobs and patches. Down in the tunnels were bars of sand and gravel, old roots and trunks covered with moss or painted red by the irony water; clumps of fern and thirsty shy flowers who could not live away from moisture and shade.

      As you pushed up through this wooded, private notch in Sussex, so many miles away from the bungalowed, signposted and estate-agented ridge-top roads, the river shrank still further to inch-deep pools and foot-wide rapids where banks of gravel had dammed the flow. In that clear, shallow water, life was exploding. Midges in Brownian motion were flashing on and off in the rods of sunlight that were rammed through the trees. Across the lazily moving water, insects drifted as slowly as those half-transparent specks that float across the surface of your eye. Far below, an inch away on the floor of the stream, their shadows tracked them, dark, four-petalled flowers easing across the stones. The dog snapped his chops at the passing bronze-backed flies. A 3-inch-long worm, as thin and as white as a cotton thread, snaked through the water and then under a stone. The stream was full of little shrimps, lying immobile on the gravel or wriggling there like rugby players caught in a tackle or, best of all, jetting around above it as fluidly as spaceships in their fluid medium, the darting of life.

      By the middle of July, in all our hayfields, the grass was crisp and it was already late for the haying. That’s what they call it here. Not haymaking or the hay harvest, but straightforward ‘haying’ on the same principle as lambing or wooding. It’s the climax of the grass year and, as nothing except grass and thistles will grow on this farm, these few days became the point around which everything else revolved. It was high summer. Even as it was happening you could feel the winter nostalgia for it. You won’t get a cattle or sheep farmer to talk starry-eyed about haymaking, but there was no doubt, in one sense anyway, that was how they felt. ‘Look at that,’ one of my neighbours would say to me during the following winter about a bale of his own hay he was trying to sell me. ‘You can smell the summer sunshine in it,’ and he buried his nose in the bale like a wine-taster in the heady, open mouth of his glass.

      A friend rang up from London as we were about to start. ‘Make hay while the sun shines,’ he said to me on the phone, as if there were something original about the phrase. But it hardly needed to be said. Anxiety hovered over the beautiful fields.

      They were beautiful. The buttercups and the red tips of the sorrel gave a colour-wash to the uncut grasses, a shifting chromatic shimmer to the browning fields. The enormous old hedges had thickened into little, banky woods so that the hay, even though it wasn’t very thick that year, was cupped in their dark green bowls, a pale soup lapping at the brim.

      Ken Weekes had been trying to persuade me all year that what was needed was a good dose of chemicals for the thistles and a ton or two of nitrogen to make the grass grow. We were already squabbling like a pair of old spinsters and I was relying on him for everything I did. Ken told me I needed Fred Groombridge, the sheep man from the village. Fred came down. He looked at me with only one eye, as though permanently squinting at the sun. ‘That’s because he’s thinking with the other one,’ Ken said.

      I sold most of the hay to Fred as standing grass, £17.50 an acre. I had asked for £30, Fred suggested £15. He budged an inch, I moved a mile, but in return for that absurdly low price, Fred would also cut, turn, row up and bale 6 acres for me, 500 bales, which I would then have carted into the barn at my own expense. ‘Perfect,’ Fred said with his left eye, grinning. ‘It’s only money.’

      Fred brought down his wife, Margaret – she gave me a cheque before they cut a single blade of grass – and his nephew, Jimmy Gray. Ken helped. Will and Peter Clark helped. Make hay while the sun shines. And for days it did. For the fields, it’s the hair-dressing moment of the year. When first cut, the hay lies flat and shiny on the razored surface. The sun glints along it like a light on those snips of wet hair that lie on a barber’s floor. To dry it, the grass is tossed with the tedder – Margaret’s job, eight hours at a stretch, up and down, up and down in the battered old Ford 4000 tractor, ‘stirring it about’ and mussing it up, the shampoo shuffle. Then it is fluffed back into rows for the baler, the final hairspray and set. What this means is long, long hours at the wheel of a tractor, looking back over one’s shoulder at the machine that’s doing the job, with such concentration that Fred went past me three times before he noticed that I was standing there on the edge of the field waiting to talk to him.

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