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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ