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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ as Fred called it, a green tinge to the grey of the drying grasses, in the rowed-up lines on the field. Not a drop of rain had touched it. This was some of the best hay anyone had made for years. But then, of course, things changed. The forecast predicted thunderstorms that evening and the baler broke. Fred had bought it from the two old Davis boys who were retiring from the place over the hill. I only heard this late in the day, but it was not surprising Fred had kept the source of the baler a little quiet. That was where, the year before, the BBC had stumbled on a fragment of old England, nettles growing through abandoned horse-drawn hay rakes, fields that looked as if they had just got out of bed, a farmhouse soft in its long slow journey towards dilapidation. They had decided to make their film of Cold Comfort Farm there. God knows how old the baler was. There was something seriously wrong with it, but no one could work out what. The bales it produced were either the size of a handbag or emerged 8 feet long, oozing out with a terrible constipated slowness from the machine’s rear vent.

      ‘Neither’s any good,’ Fred said, and for 15 hours, while the rain threatened, men from various parts of Sussex pored over its innards. The handbook was out on the field. They drank Ribena. Parts were greased, others rubbed down. ‘If I never see another Case International baler,’ Ken said, ‘I won’t be sorry.’ The weather forecast was getting worse by the hour. In the end, there was nothing for it and the hay was baled in these stupid lengths. As soon as it was done, we stacked it on trailers and carted it into the barn, just as it was, the long and short of it, an acre an hour for six hours of exhausting, dusty, sweaty work. By the time the rain came, my 500 bales were in the barn, perhaps £1,000 worth. We felt delighted. The hay was saved and the barn, filled to the eaves, smelled sweet and musty. We were all sneezing with the dust and seeds in our hair and nostrils. My forearms were pricked with the stub ends of the stalks. Motes danced in the sun where its light came in through the wide-open doors of the barn. The hay was stacked 15 feet high in two blocks, each 20 feet deep and 20 square, one block on either side of the barn’s central cartway, held there by the diagonal oak braces and the central oak pillars of the barn. Scraps of hay lay on the barn floor, like scattered herbs in a medieval house.

      The picture of fullness this gave me, a building as tightly stuffed as a pillow, a barn filled with exactly what it was meant to be filled with, was a version of the completeness I had come here for. The hay had been made – baler or no baler – with the techniques people had learned when they first kept animals in this country 5,000 years ago, and the five of us stood around drinking tea, looking at the completed thing as one does when a job is finished, all of us, in a way I can hardly describe now, jointly happy at what we had done.

      I couldn’t work out why Fred was looking so pleased with himself too. All his hay was still out in the fields, baled in the modern round jumbo bales, which a highly efficient brand-new machine had been creating all afternoon. They were bound to get a soaking. ‘Oh, I don’t worry about that,’ Fred said through his one eye. ‘Rain doesn’t hurt jumbo bales. They can stay out there for weeks.’ So why on earth had we sweated over our ridiculous salami/sliver-sized bales all afternoon? ‘Oh,’ Fred said, with a grin the size of the English Channel, ‘I thought you wanted to do it up here like we did it in the old days. You didn’t want those jumbo bales, did you? You wanted something you could get sweaty picking up and putting down so you could feel what it was like to be a real farmer. You did, didn’t you?’ I looked up at him as he asked me and saw – one of those moments of true recognition – that Fred had both of his eyes, the colour of the sky on a distant, sun-swept horizon, wide open, as the first drops of rain began to fall on the bleached and razored fields.

      The hay was in, but the trees were suffering. For weeks on end, from midsummer onwards, they looked bruised and battered. A ride on the Northern Line in the evening rush hour would not have revealed a more exhausted set of faces than the trees displayed that summer. Our neighbour from Perryman’s, the young dairy farmer, Stephen Wrenn, who had taken some of the grazing for his bullocks, came over for a drink one evening. ‘I don’t know a farm that’s as lucky as this one with its trees. You’ll look after your oaks, won’t you?’

      We had long talks together about what to do with this land. He had persuaded his father to give up the dairy herd, rent out the milk quota and turn Perryman’s over to the new short-rotation willow coppice which can be harvested every couple of years and burned for energy. So the cows were sold and they were trying to sell his milk quota. But it had been such a dry year with so little thick growth in the grass – all top and no bottom, as they say here – that no one was in the market to take on extra capacity because feeding the cattle in the coming winter would cost a fortune. Drought was stalking all of us.

      Even at the end of July, the leaves on the trees already looked used, dirty, in need of replacement. By early August, some of the hawthorn and hornbeams in the hedges were already largely yellow. By the end of the month, the spindle leaves were spotted black and had dried at the edges into a pair of narrow red curling lips. Elders had gone bald before their time and there were ash trees of which whole sections had been a dead manila brown for weeks.

      An oak tree 60 feet high and wide may drink about 40,000 gallons of water a year. It is a huge and silent pump, a humidifier of the air, drawing mineral sustenance from these daily lakes of water that pass through it. Where, in a summer like this, could such a tree have got the income it needed?

      The truth is, at least with some of the oaks here, they had been running on empty, trying to live through a grinding climatic recession. I was fencing between the Cottage and Target Fields – the Wrenns’ bullocks had, as ever, been getting through – and I leant on a low oak branch as I unwound the wire. As I pushed against it, quite unconsciously, without any real effort, the branch, perhaps 15 or 20 feet long, came away from the trunk of the tree and dropped slowly to the ground. It had seemed fully alive, decked with leaves and new acorns as much as any other, but it pulled away as softly, as willingly as the wingbone of a well-cooked chicken. I pushed it into the fence, as an extra deterrent to the cattle.

      Two days later, at the top of the Slip Field, I found an enormous branch, full of leaves and acorns, lying on the ground beneath its parent, perhaps 40 feet long, the bulk of a small house or a lorry. It too had been neatly severed at the base, as if the branch had been sacked, ruthlessly dropped for the greater good of the whole.

      These living branches rejected in mid-season made me look at the oaks here in a new light – their scarred bodies, their withered limbs, the usual asymmetry to their outlines, the slightly uneven track taken by each branch as it moved out from the main stem – and started to see each oak not as a thing whole and neatly inevitable in itself, but as the record of its own history of survival and failure, retraction and extension, stress and abundance. Each oak has a visible past. The story it tells is more like the history of a human family than of an individual, forever negotiating hazards, accommodating loss, reshaping its existence.

      One afternoon we were all in the kitchen together. We were sitting around the table and Ken as ever was regaling us with stories of past triumphs. Suddenly we heard, coming over the wood, from the lane that runs down from Brightling Needle towards the valley and on up to Burwash, the sound of sirens: ambulances, police, fire? We didn’t know. It was a rare noise, more troubling here than in any city street. It marked a real person’s crisis, that of someone you knew. We heard that evening. Stephen Wrenn had been killed. A tractor he had been driving toppled over a little bank, no higher than the back of a chair, and crushed his head. He died instantly. He and his new wife had only just returned from their honeymoon. The entire village went into shock over it. Two or three hundred people attended the funeral and the vicar who, a couple of weeks previously, had married him, helped bury him too.

      One evening later that summer, when I was taking the children down to the seaside to play on the sands at the mouth of the River Rother, I happened to meet Brian Wrenn, sitting quietly by the river, looking out to sea. I sent the children on down the track and sat down next to him. We talked about Stephen. Brian said he was ‘learning to face a different future’. It was as if his whole being was bruised. There is very СКАЧАТЬ