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

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      I still lusted after that, for all the clean hard-pressure rigour of that alienating landscape, serene precisely because it is so dreadful, because from that point of desiccation there was nowhere lower to fall. But alongside it now, there was this other thing, this undeniable life-spurt in the spring, whose toughness was subtler than the stone’s but whose persistence would outlive it. Genes last longer than rocks. They slip through unbroken while continents collide and are consumed. These plants, I now saw, were the world’s version of eternity, the lit bush. If you wanted to ally yourself with strength, nothing would be more sustaining than the spring flowers.

      Over the following days, we dressed the house as though preparing it to go out. It was like dressing a father or mother. She sat there mute while coats and ribbons were tried on her. ‘Oh you look nice like that,’ we would say, ‘or that, or maybe that.’ Rooms acquired meaning, another meaning. In the kitchen, painted on the cupboard door, I found a coat of arms: six white feathers on a blue ground and the motto ‘Labore et perseverantia’, By work and perseverance. It looked fairly new. What was it, a kind of d’Urberville story of a noble family collapsed to the poverty of this, to the resolution of that motto against all the odds? It was certainly a failed farm. That was the only reason we were there. We had crept like hermit crabs into a shell that others had vacated.

      But I guessed the arms and the motto had no great ancestry. Had Ventnor himself painted them here in the last few years? I knew that he had attempted to make a business out of this farm, to continue with the dairy herd that he had bought with it. But he didn’t know what he was doing and had lost a fortune. The last thing he asked me before he left was ‘Are you thinking of farming here?’ to which I had been noncommittal. With something of a glittery eye, he told me not to consider it. That was a sure route to disaster. Soon stories were reaching me of Ventnor sitting in the kitchen here, his unpaid bills laid out on the table in front of him like a kind of Pelmanism from hell, his head in his hands, his prospects hopeless. Every one of these stories ended with the same warning: Don’t do it.

      The Ventnor experience seemed somehow to stand between us and an earlier past. He was one of us, an urban escapee, a pastoralist, who had turned the old oast-house into an art gallery and put coach-lamp-style lights outside the doors. Where was the contact with the real thing, the real past here? There was a glimmering of discontent in my mind about that gap, still a glass wall between us and the essential nature of Perch Hill. Before Ventnor, I knew, the last farmers here had been called Weekes. Where were they? Had all trace of them disappeared? It wasn’t long before we realized that the very opposite was the case: Ken and Brenda Weekes still lived in the cottage 200 yards away across the fields. A day or two after our arrival, Sarah and I went up to see them and from that moment they became a fixed point in our lives.

      The boys were here and were shrieking in the new expanse of garden. Tom was ten, Will eight and Ben six. We planned bike routes across the fields and began making a tree house in the Middle Shaw, nailing and binding scaffold boards and half-rotten ladders to the ancient twisting hornbeams. We got a giant trampoline and put it in the barn, where the three of them competed with each other, trying to touch the tie-beams high above them. Sarah and I were anxious and buoyed up in equal measure at what we had taken on. Across the fields, we could hear Ken mowing the lawn around his cottage: the sound of a half-distant mower in early summer, a man in shirtsleeves and sleeveless jersey, his dog on the lawn beside him, the sun slipping in and out of bubbled clouds, and all around us, to east and west, Sussex stepping off into an inviting afternoon. It was, in a way, what we had come here for.

      We walked up there, not across the fields that first time but up the lane. The hedge was in brilliant new leaf. Ken and Brenda came to their garden gate, asked us in, a cup of tea in the kitchen, Gemma the dog lying by the Rayburn, and a sort of inspecting openness in them both, the welcome mixed with ‘Who are you? What sort of people are you?’ I shall always remember two things Ken said. One with his tang of acid: ‘You know what they always said about this farm, don’t you? They always said this was the poorest farm in the parish.’ The other with the warmth that can spread like butter around him: ‘That’s one thing that’s lovely, children’s voices down at the farm again. That’s a sound we haven’t had for a long time here.’

      To a degree I didn’t understand at the time, we had entered Ken Weekes’s world. Perhaps we had bought the farm, perhaps the deeds were in our name, perhaps we were living in the farmhouse, perhaps I was meant to be deciding what should happen to the woods and fields, but none of that could alter the central fact: Perch Hill was Ken’s in a deeper sense than any deed of conveyance could ever accomplish.

      He had come here in 1942 as a six-year-old boy to live in the house we were now occupying. His father, ‘Old Ron’, was farm manager for a London entrepreneur and ‘a gentleman, one of the real old gentry’, Mr George Wilson-Fox. ‘Old Wilson’ used to come down with his friends on a Saturday. The Weekeses would all put on clean white dairymen’s coats to show the proprietor and his guests the herd of prize pedigree Friesians, spotless animals, their tails washed twice a day every day, the cow shed whitewashed every year, a cow shed so clean ‘you could eat your dinner off that floor’.

      It was a place dedicated to excellence. Wilson-Fox made sure there was never any shortage of money for the farm and Ron imposed his discipline on it. ‘The cattle always came first,’ Ken remembered. ‘Even if you were dying, you had to look after the cows. I remember Old Ron kicking us out of bed to go and milk the cows one morning when I could hardly move – “Come on, you bugger, get out, there’s work to do” – and it was so cold in there in the cow shed with a north-easterly that the milk was freezing in the milk-line. But we got it done. It all had to be done by eight in the morning if you wanted to sit down to breakfast. You couldn’t have breakfast unless the cattle had been looked after first.’

      It is a lost world. Nothing like these small dairy farms exists here any more. They have all gone and Ken has witnessed their disappearance, the total evaporation of the world in which he grew up. About that he seems to feel bleak and accepting in equal measure. Every inch of this farm carries some memory or mark of Ken’s life here: the day the doodlebug crashed in the wood at the bottom of the Way Field; those moments in Beech Meadow where Old Ron, in late June or early July, would pick a bunch of flowers for Dolly, Ken’s mother, the signal for the boys that haymaking was about to begin; the day the earth suddenly slipped after they had ploughed it in the field for ever after known as the Slip Field. A farm is a farmer’s autobiography and this one belongs to Ken.

      When he married Brenda, in 1959, they moved into the cottage across the fields. His mother and brother stayed in the farmhouse. Wilson-Fox died in 1971, but Ken continued farming for the trustees of the estate for another 15 years until, in 1986, the farm was sold, along with its herd of cattle, to John Ventnor, who wanted to be a farmer. Ken stayed in the cottage, and set the art dealer on his way, helping him for a year or so, but they fell out. ‘We had a misunderstanding,’ Ken said. For several years after that Ken was not even allowed to walk his dog in these fields.

      There was something of a false cheeriness in both of us as we talked. Each of us was guarded against the other. But the afternoon floated on Ken’s stories. He could remember watching the pilots of the Luftwaffe Messerschmitts, low enough for you to see a figure in the cockpit. ‘Oh yes, you could see them sitting in there all right.’ One evening the Weekeses were all down in the Way Field getting in the hay and there were so many of the German planes that his father said they’d better go in. ‘You could never tell, could you? Bastards.’ Ken’s performance culminated in his favourite story about the hunt. He was out in the Cottage Field, tending to one of the cows which was poorly, when he chanced to look up and see a whole crowd of the hunt come pouring down the trackway that leads off the bridlepath and into the Perch Hill farmyard.

      ‘“I say,”’ Ken bellowed at them – ‘because they’ll only understand you if you talk to them in a way they do understand – “why don’t СКАЧАТЬ