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

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СКАЧАТЬ you know what? They did!’

      Another piece soon dropped into place. Will Clark came up one day from the village. He had been doing some work on the farm for John Ventnor. Peter, his son, had been working in the wood and mowing the grass. Ventnor had said that there was no one he could recommend more highly. And that’s how it turned out. As soon as Will walked into the yard I could see what he meant. His eyes were the colour of old jeans. He swept his hair in a repeated gesture up and over his forehead into a wide long curl that could only be the descendant of a rocker’s quiff, 40 years on. He smiled with his eyes and talked with a laugh in his voice. ‘We’ll be haying soon,’ he said. He cuddled Rosie. His taste in shirts was perfect, lime green and tangerine orange, unchanged, I guess, since he was bike-mad in the fifties, when he used to do a ton down the long straight stretch to Lewes called The Broyle, or burn up and down the High Street in the village to impress the girls. He was the only man in Burwash ever to get to Tunbridge Wells in 12½ minutes, or so he told me. He talked broad Sussex: fence posts were ‘spiles’, working in the mud got you ‘all slubbed up’, anything that needed doing always involved ‘stirring it about a bit’, a sickle was ‘a swap’. He had started his working life when he was 14 on a farm at Hawkhurst, just over the border into Kent, looking after the horses. He knew all about machines and wood and wooding and how to get a big ash butt out of a difficult corner. He was the man of the place and he would be the man for us. Will had been ill for years – his kidneys scarcely worked and he had to spend three hours a day at home on a dialysis machine – and he said that Peter would have to do the heavy work. ‘He’s the muscle man.’ And so we plugged in. This other world was closing over us, some version of pastoral folding us in its lap.

      All the same, I was anxious about it all. The stupidity of what we were doing was brought home, involuntarily or not, when people we knew from London dropped in. There was always a vulture in the party, someone who would unerringly make you sour with a remark. ‘Oh yes,’ one of these people said in the early days, nosing around the ugliness of our horrible buildings, ‘it’s a very nice spot, isn’t it?’ A very nice spot: the silent pinchedness of what is not said. Why do these people wreak destruction? Why do they do such dishonest damage? I couldn’t believe how soured I felt by them. But why should I have been? Why did I even care? Perhaps because the whole point of Perch Hill was to take ourselves out of range of their criticisms, their worldly knowingness. Now, I am sure, nothing they said would come anywhere near me. It is one of the consolations of age that your own self-knowledge allows other people’s criticisms to break around you like little waves. But then, in our tender state, to have their all-too-predictable strictures applied to our precious refuge was like an experience you occasionally get as a writer. You have written something which matters to you and which tries to say something beyond what is ordinarily said, and as a result is likely to be a little rough at the edges. Your reader looks at it, but they don’t read into the heart of it, the point of it, and stay critically on the edge, looking at the punctuation or the length of sentences or, worst of all, the definition of terms. I once wrote a book about a place I loved and which, on its first page, mentioned the ‘branched orchids’ that grew there. A woman told me casually one day that she hadn’t got any further than that first page because ‘There aren’t any branched orchids.’ I have never been able to look at an orchid since without feeling with the ends of my fingers for those tiny branches on which each of its individual flowers sits.

      Now, though, in retrospect, I get the point: Perch Hill is a nice spot but there was nothing nice about its buildings. The judgement was correct. But Sarah and I were not living in the world of correct judgements. And our visitors from London could never have understood the powerful psychic reality here: the way I wanted to wriggle under the skin of this place so that only my eyes were above the skin of the turf like a hippo in its river and the bed of green comfort around me, the osmotic relation to place so that there was no distinction between me and it, no boundary at the skin. Of course they couldn’t, because that is not something that can be said in polite society. It was that kind of pre-rational understanding that I was after, like a dog rolling in muck.

      We didn’t know what we were doing. We arrived on this farm as naked as Adam and Eve and we were setting about making it right. We knew what we wanted – a sense of completeness. That sounds so vague now and perhaps it was. But there were real models in our minds. As a boy at Sissinghurst, I had known a kind of completeness in the world that surrounded me, a house and garden, farm, woods, streams and fields, with a sense of that pattern continuing beyond its boundaries in much the same way, to be explored on foot through the woods and hay meadows, by bike down the long sinuous lanes which only decades later did I realize were the drove roads by which the Weald was first settled. That was a memory which seemed to have all the elements of a life – adventure, energy, people, community, love, beauty.

      And then, more recently, Sarah and I had stayed for a few months in a cottage next to a house belonging to John and Caryl Hubbard in Dorset, at Chilcombe, a tiny settlement with its own tiny church, looking out over a theatre of fields and woods that led down to the shingle bank at Chesil Beach. Here too house and garden and chickens and sheep and cattle and the whole wide view and the sense of Dorset and England – with, miraculously, the strip of shining sea laid above it all – were folded in together in a way that is simply not accessible in any city.

      This is not an aberrational idea. It appears at the earliest moments of Europe, in Minoan Crete, in the Bronze Age 4,000 years ago, when the priest rulers of that civilization made for themselves small and elegant country houses, surrounded by flower gardens, vineyards, orchards and olives groves, in carefully and beautifully chosen places where the cultivated country and the distant mountains were laid out around them like the background to a Renaissance portrait. This is the vision of the Horatian farm, an easy place because it is at ease with its surroundings; it is the ideal behind the Palladian villas of the late 16th-century Veneto; it is the transformed vision in eighteenth-century England and the English seaboard of America; it lies behind the ideals of Ruskin and Morris, driven by a need for an intimacy with the natural which goes beyond the crude act of buying which is at the root of all cities. That is what completeness meant and means to me: an entirely full and committed engagement with the real world in all the dimensions which the world can offer.

      We didn’t quite know how to get there. All we could do was stumble off into the dark, hoping and trusting that our instincts were right. That was the point. The whole enterprise was a blunder into truth, wobbling chaotically towards the goal. It was good because it was messy. If it had all been neater, if we had known what we were doing, it wouldn’t have had the juice in it. The whole thing would have flattened out in the drear of expertise. As it was, ignorance was the great enabler and incompetence the condition of life. Or so I would say to myself in my storming rage after the nay-sayers had gone.

      Sometimes I felt we were surrounded by know-alls. Not the people who lived near us, the Will Clarks, the Ken Weekeses, who approached our efforts with a delicate sense of neither wanting to intrude nor wanting us to come too much of a cropper. No, the real killer know-alls were the partly ruralized urbanites who had acquired the cultural habit of telling other people what to do. It probably stemmed from the prefect system at public schools, compounded by middle-class careers in which the only necessary skill is the ability to disguise bossiness as brains.

      You could see them heaving into view a mile away. They were struggling with their mission to inform. They knew they shouldn’t. They felt they must. They wished they didn’t have to. But they knew they ought to. One has a duty, after all. It’s a responsibility to the landscape as a whole. And it would be so sad, wouldn’t it, if it all came unstuck in the end for Adam and Sarah?

      Out came the supercilious smiles. These were the opening, but doomed, attempts at a spirit of generosity. Soon enough they gave way to the barrage of assured, you-really-should-have-asked-me-first, pain-in-the-neck blather. The spirit hit the iceberg and sank.

      No area of life was immune. I remember, classically, having our stack of firewood analysed by a man who, from what he was saying, was obviously chief firewood analyst СКАЧАТЬ