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

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СКАЧАТЬ local timber man, Zak Soudain, about the wood and he was keen to have it. The bottom end of an ash trunk, where it moves slightly out from the stool and then up towards the light, a shape which preserves even in old age the first directions taken by the new stem in the first spring after coppicing, is the most valuable part of all. It is used to make lacrosse sticks. Nothing else will do. The rest, the straight clean lightness of the ash, goes into furniture.

      So far, so profitable. But there was a hazard. We were overrun with deer. As we looked out of the bedroom window soon after seven in the morning, there would be eight or ten deer grazing in the field. The fawns in September were still playing with each other in a puppyish, skittish way. There was a stag with a single antler left, walking around lopsided like a car with one headlight out. Deer eat young trees. If we cut the ash down, they would chew off all the new shoots, the stools would die and I would have destroyed a small sliver of the late medieval landscape. But if we didn’t cut the ash trees down they would probably collapse in the next big storm and the wood would be destroyed anyway. Deer-fencing was prohibitively expensive and ugly. I wasn’t quite sure what to do about this and so I dithered while Peter easily and confidently moved through the fallen mess of things. I asked him one day what he would do. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s not for me to say. You’ve got to decide, Adam. It’s your wood.’ I didn’t tell him that, as far as I could see, the wood felt more like his.

      That autumn I bought our first sheep: 20 Border Leicester ewes, which had already been through one year’s lambing. They were advertised in the local free-sheet, £600 for the lot. I knew we had to plunge into livestock and this was a way of doing it. Will Clark and I drove over to look at them. Will said he knew about sheep and did quite a bit of squeezing of the back end of the animals in question. I certainly knew nothing. The woman selling them, wearing a fetching pair of buckskin chaps, said they were marvellous. So I bought them.

      Carolyn Fieldwick, Will Clark’s daughter and wife of Dave Fieldwick, the shepherd, had a ram to sell us. I bought him for £100. He was a big, stumbling, black-faced Suffolk and we called him Roger. He arrived on 5 November and started to mosey around our field full of ewes. If a ewe conceives on Guy Fawkes’ Day, Ken Weekes told me, the lamb will be born on April Fool’s Day. Roger seemed, it must be said, quite cheap at £100, and looked a little seedy. I could see him in a Dennis Potter play, snuffling around the ewes’ rear ends like a tramp going through the dustbins at the back of a restaurant. They didn’t much like the look of him or his intentions and used to move off to eat more grass in some other, less interfered with part of the field.

      It brought back memories of 18-year-old parties, in which all the girls were pristine, self-sufficient and adult and I was a grubby, grasping bundle of unattraction, trotting around about 2 yards behind them. At least I didn’t have to wear the sort of thing we put on Roger, a harness that Helmut Newton would have been proud of, holding a large yellow block of crayon wax in the middle of his chest. Whenever Roger managed to corner a ewe, he rubbed this, as a side-effect so to speak, all over her bottom so that we would know she’d been done. After the best part of a week, his score was two yellowed bottoms and one ewe that seemed to have an intensively crayoned left shoulder. Radical misfire or poor sense of geography: whichever it was, nothing could have been more familiar.

      What an agony for poor Roger! So many requests, so much rejection. I caught him in successful action only once: a desperate five seconds of up-ended quiver and then down on all fours again, that look of hopelessness flooding back in, a sense of everything being over, a look on his poor, crumpled-ear face of utter bemusement. Why, I said to him, can’t we all procreate like the trees?

      Winter came sidling up on us. By mid-December, the darkness had lowered over the whole place, that terrible lightlessness when all you can do is remember the long lit summer, the after-hay evenings when the fields had a purified cleanness to them, patterned with an odd and unplanned-for regularity in the bales waiting to be collected, each of them throwing its shadow to the next, like a dabbed mark with a broad-bladed pen, while the dog is manically teasing some left-out wisps of hay and the children are playing man-hunt among the bales. What a sudden inrush of lost time that is.

      My daughter Rosie, who was two that year, thought the trees were dead. ‘The trees are dead,’ she said one morning after breakfast, as one might announce that the war in Bosnia was over or Arsenal were third in the Premiership.

      ‘Not dead,’ I said, ‘just resting.’

      ‘Are they sleepy?’

      ‘Yes, they are, I suppose.’

      ‘Why aren’t they lying down then?’

      Anyone who doesn’t believe in the reality of Seasonal Affective Disorder might learn a thing or two if they took a trip to the Sussex Weald in winter. Our own immediate surroundings that December represented the English winter in excelsis: a sapless, shrunken sump. I stayed inside as much as I could and averted my eyes from the windows as I passed. The mud lapping at the walls of the house on two sides had become a glutinated bog decorated with grey-eyed puddles and the semi-mangled remains of the rubbish which something was tearing open at night and distributing among the earth-heaps and trench systems. You could hardly blame the creature; no one could tell that scattering half-consumed, half-rotten rice-puddings and stock bones over what used to be the garden wasn’t precisely what we had in mind.

      The chickens we had foolishly acquired roamed delightedly among the old-food-encrusted earthwork-play zone where we let them out every day. They redistributed the mess. None of it ever seemed to disappear.

      I had come to hate our chickens. They lurked about in the same murky province as unwritten thank-you letters and work that’s late, the guilt zone you’d rather didn’t exist. One is meant to love chickens, I know: their fluffy puffball existence, the warm rounded sound of their voices, a slow chortling, the aural equivalent of new-laid eggs, and of course the eggs themselves, gathered as the first of the morning sun breaks into the hen house and the dear loving mothers that have created them cluster around your feet for their morning scatter of corn.

      Well, I hated them. Before the chickens arrived, I loved them. I sweated for days, building their run with six-foot-high netting, buried at the base so that the fox couldn’t dig in to get them, with additional electric fencing just outside the main wire as another fox deterrent. I made a charming wooden, weather-boarded house for them, the inside of which I fitted out as though for a page in Country Living. There were some elegant nesting boxes, with balconies outside them so that the hens could walk without discomfort to their accouchements, ramps towards those balconies from the deeply straw-bedded ground, a row of roosting poles so that at night they could feel they were safe in the branches of the forest trees which the Ur-memories of their origins in the forests of south-east Asia required for peace of mind.

      When it was finished, I sat down on the rich-smelling barley straw and smoked a cigarette, thinking that this was the sort of world I would like to inhabit.

      We should have left it at that, but we didn’t. We actually bought some chickens. And a cockerel. He came in a potato sack and when I tipped him out on to the grass and dandelions of the new run, he stood there, blinking a little, surrounded by his harem, and I couldn’t believe we had acquired for £8 such a shockingly beautiful creature. He was a Maran, his white body feathers flecked black in bold, slight marks as if made with the brush of a Japanese painter. His eye was bright and his comb and long wattles the deep dark red of Venetian glass. He seemed huge, standing a good 2 feet high, and this fabulous, porcelain-figure colouring made a superb and alien presence in our brick and weatherboarded yard. His chickens, which he cornered and had with a ruthlessness and vigour we could only admire, were dumpy little brown English bundles next to him, heavy-laying Warrens, dish-mops to his Byron. For two days after his ignominious sack-borne arrival, he remained quiet but then he began to crow, his cry disturbingly loud if you were near by but, like the bagpipes, beautiful when heard СКАЧАТЬ