The Garden in the Clouds: From Derelict Smallholding to Mountain Paradise. Antony Woodward

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ was indispensable to hypnotists, who need to make their subject feel secure, contented, fulfilled, calm and relaxed—in short, highly susceptible to whatever humiliating routines he had planned for them—in a hurry. ‘Just get them into the garden,’ he finished cheerfully. ‘Then you’ve got ’em.’

      ‘What if they don’t have a favourite garden?’

      ‘Everyone has a favourite garden.’

      Somehow, this idea stuck in my head. The genius of it was its individuality. The instant he said it, I knew I had just such a place. It was the house where my grandmother lived when I was little: a gabled, Elizabethan Cotswold farmhouse with outbuildings, down a long drive, above a valley of hanging beech woods. The house was built of that honey-coloured limestone that seems to absorb the sunshine then radiate it back so even on grey days it still felt warm. The roof was of mossy stone tiles, the windows mullioned. The south-facing garden side was framed by two trees: a vast and ancient Irish yew and a flowering cherry whose white blossom indicated spring had arrived. A stream ran across the lawn in front of the house, feeding a natural swimming pool hewn out of the rock. Inside the dark interior, there were beams and oak panelling and a smell of wood smoke and beeswax. A trap door under the sitting-room carpet led to the cellar. Even the name was charmed: Rookwoods-on-the-Holy-Brook.

      Rookwoods was sold in 1968, when I was five and my brother Jonny was seven. ‘It was far too remote for an old woman in winter,’ my mother would declare matter-of-factly when, later, we demanded to know why. ‘It only took a frost for her to be cut off.’ It was the only criticism of Rookwoods I ever heard. The sense of loss, the mounting resentment, the indignant accusations, they followed gradually. As we grew up, vignettes of our Cotswold idyll would drift back, until, by our teens, mere mention of the name was enough to trigger outraged nostalgia. My brother and I would compete for whose imagination had the greater claim on the place, trumping each other’s memories in an area in which my brother, with a two-and-a-half-year head start, had an irksome advantage.

      When Granny died, decades later, we inherited two Rookwoods heirlooms. One was a bird table made by Cyril, the gardener. Architecturally, it was little different to most bird tables—a platform on a post beneath a pitched roof—but it was clearly handmade. The pitched roof was of beaten tin. Whittled oak pegs served as perches. The supporting pole had an irregular section where Cyril had taken the corners off with a draw knife. Erected in its new home, our garden, the bits gradually fell off: first the roof, then the supporting pillars, then the perches and the lip to stop the food blowing off. But, because it was oak, the rest, the pole and the platform, lasted: a daily presence outside the kitchen, gently reminding us of its charmed provenance.

      The other heirloom was a picture. Before selling Rookwoods, Granny commissioned a painting of the house from a retired artist who lived nearby. The artist was Ernest Dinkel (the illustrator behind some of the classic 1930s underground posters) and he made a particularly good job of it. His watercolour, in its limed oak frame, moved with Granny to her next house. When she died it came to us, and when Jonny and I left home, it went to him, sparking a row so immense my father had a copy made for me.

      I once read that in loving relationships between adults, the relationship does not start the day two people meet, but in the childhood of each partner. That’s when the template which governs adult behaviour, when it comes to love, is laid down. If that’s the case, then why shouldn’t much the same apply to our relationship with places? It’s always fascinated me that if you ask someone where, if they could have one, their secret rural hideaway would be—by a stream, say, in the woods, by the sea or in the hills—they always seem to know immediately. How can this be?

      When I started trying to make my own garden, I discovered the task had actually begun years earlier, before I’d even found the place where my garden was to be, and that I was embarking on a more involved adventure than I could possibly have guessed, one in which all kinds of unexpected influences came to bear. Careful, patient assessment of the garden in my head, no doubt, might have explained some of these things, while simultaneously revealing much about myself (to make your paradise, after all, you need to know yourself). I did no such thing. Instead, I blundered on, baffled but trying to stay loyal to my instincts, following inexplicable imperatives. Only gradually did some explanations begin to dawn. The result is a book that often strays beyond the garden gate to all kinds of peripheral things, from childhood and family to wood-chopping.

      My hope is that, on the off chance that others, too, have a garden in their heads alongside the one that they’re trying to make for real, my explorations will prompt them to reflect on theirs. After all, no one can deny the sheer grandeur of ambition or romantic purity of the impulse behind Britain’s greatest shared passion, to which anyone who’s ever dropped into a garden centre of a Saturday morning, hauled resentfully on a mower pull-start, or opened a packet of seeds has, however unconsciously, already succumbed.

      A. W.

      Tair-Ffynnon, 2010

       1 Walking country

      Now and then we passed through winding valleys speckled with farms that looked romantic and pretty from a distance, but bleak and comfortless up close. Mostly they were smallholdings with lots of rusted tin everywhere—tin sheds, tin hen huts, tin fences—looking rickety and weatherbattered. We were entering one of those weird zones, always a sign of remoteness from the known world, where nothing is ever thrown away. Every farmyard was cluttered with piles of cast-offs, as if the owner thought that one day he might need 132 half-rotted fence-posts, a ton of broken bricks and the shell of a 1964 Ford Zodiac.

      BILL BRYSON, Notes from a Small Island, 1996

      ‘What d’you want that old place for? You a farmer? You don’t sound like a farmer.’

      Mr. Games had the easy telephone manner of someone used to talking for a living and the cheery directness which I was beginning to associate with the Borderland brogue. It was late September and I’d been told there was nothing he didn’t know about property in the Black Mountains of South Wales. If we needed someone to bid on our behalf, then, as a pillar of one of the old established local auctioneers, valuers and land agents, no one was better for the task than Mr. Games.

      ‘I’m a writer.’

      ‘Are you, bloody hell?’

      ‘I was wondering, is there any chance—’

      ‘If you’re a writer, you’ll know Oliver Goldsmith? I was thinking of him just now.’

      ‘Oliver Goldsmith? No, I don’t think—’

      ‘Her modest looks the cottage might adorn,/Sweet as the primrose peeps beneath the thorn;/Now lost to all; her friends, her virtue fled,/Near her betrayer’s door she lays her head,/And, pinched with cold and shrinking from the shower,/With heavy heart deplores that luckless hour.’

      ‘That is lovely. No, I don’t know that poem, but—’

      ‘The Deserted Village. You must know that.’

      ‘I must look it up. But I was wondering—?’

      ‘What about СКАЧАТЬ