Smell of Summer Grass: Pursuing Happiness at Perch Hill. Adam Nicolson
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life itself. I had met her on holiday together with a few friends. She knew my sister Rebecca and I still remember every minute of those first mornings with her. She was strong and fearless. She took control. She arranged things. I told jokes to make her laugh and she laughed with her whole head thrown back and her throat open. She didn’t take any nonsense. She raced me downhill – we were skiing – and smoked on the lifts back up. She loved the west coast of Scotland and a half-abandoned house in chestnut woods in the valley of the Tarn. She was a doctor. She always voted Labour. She wore glamorous printed silk shirts from a company called English Eccentrics. She played with her long red-brown hair while talking to me. She was the natural focus of everyone around her. There was no side or twist to her: she was what she seemed to be. She could drink for England. She seemed to like me. She loved wild flowers. She never read a book. As she pointed out to me, she had beautiful long legs, very good for walking. She was in love with the cooking of the Veneto, which she had learned as a girl. Above all she had an appetite for living. She did not seem defeated. She looked not exactly like the future but like someone with whom and alongside whom the future was full of glow and richness. Life was full for her, not as an abstract idea – nothing intellectualized here – but as a reality which involved things, food, work, happiness, children, nature, gardens, beauty. She was the substance of life.
And so we fell in love – weeks and months of looking forward to seeing her and being with her, of being enlivened by her teasing, warm, loving presence. And with that, folded in with it, my own grief and despair at what had happened. I have never known things at the same time be so beautiful and so dark.
From her house in London, Sarah and I began to search for a refuge, however naïvely and hopelessly that idea was conceived. It stemmed from no more than a belief in the pastoral. ‘Are not these woods more free from peril than the envious court?’ a figure in As You Like It asks the surrounding company. I knew in the past I had been happy in rural places. I knew, or thought I knew, that a rural place would soothe this crisis. I knew, as I walked out in the streets of London, that there was no solace there. Every surface was dead in my eyes. My mind returned constantly to those islands in Scotland which I had been thinking of on the night of the attack. For 15 years I had owned them. My father had bought them 50 years before for £1,200 and he gave them to me when I was 21, as I was to give them to my son Tom when he was 18. Cynics have said that all this was for tax reasons, but it wasn’t. I think my father gave them to me because, as a very young man, he had felt enlarged and excited by the ownership of a place like that, by the experience of being there alone or with friends, away from the thing that Auden called ‘the great bat-shadow of home’, the enclosing, claustrophobic, involuntary oppression of a parental place, which makes a bawling, complaining infant of you. He wanted, I think, to give that same enlargement to me, as I do to my own children.
It worked and the gift was this: memories of weeks there, storm-battered, sun-stilled, on which I continue to draw every day of my life. I know those islands yard by yard, I know the places to clamber up and slither down, I know the particular corners where the pair of black guillemots always nests or where the bull seal hauls himself out on the seaweedy rock, I know where the fish congregate in the tidal streams or where the eddies riffle off a nose of lichened basalt and throw your dinghy out in a sudden curving arc towards the Lewis shore. I know the natural arch where the seals swim and where the kelp gathers in an almost Ecuadorian sun-barred forest beneath your coasting hull.
I was essentially shaped by those island times. Almost everything else feels less dense and less intense than those moments of exposure. The social world, the political world, the world of getting on with work and a career, all those were for ever cast in a shadow by the raging scale and seriousness of my moments of island life. That intimacy with the natural makes the human seem vacuous.
This may be straight Wordsworthianism and I would want to disown it in favour of a less monolithically obvious thing, a glitteringly complex attitude to nature which shimmered like an opal compared with my all-too-single basalt slab. But I can’t. I know nothing bigger or finer than the feeling that all barriers are down and a full-blown flood is running to and fro between you and the rest of the world.
I know all these things and treat them as my touchstones and my yardstick. Is this life, I always ask, as good as that? Does this place measure up to that? That is the fixture; everything else can only eddy around it.
We began to search for somewhere that might be the equivalent of all that, a place which in its own terms could be an island, around which the cord could be drawn, and where life could in some ways be hidden, or even innocent. It was the search for an Arcadian simplicity in which crisis and breakdown did not and could not occur. Fantasia you might say, but it had then an urgency and reality stronger and more concrete than anything else in the world around us. There was no sense, it seemed to me, of ‘getting away’. There was no desire to enter a capsule or satellite suspended above the earth. It felt, if anything, the very opposite of that, a burrowing in, a search for a bed in which the covers could be drawn up and over us. It was, I now see, these many years later, a search for a womb, a place in which you could be protected from damage. It was an infantile need and ferociously demanding because of that.
We roamed England with the template in our minds. It seems curious now that this search might have landed almost anywhere, that anywhere might have provided the bucket into which the love could have been poured. Dorset, Devon, Somerset, Shropshire, Herefordshire, Oxfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, east Kent: all for a time became the zone in which safety might be found. It looks pathetic now, the two of us, in the white 2CV we had at the time, poking about like moles for a burrow, living with a private intensity the common stuff of rural estate agents’ offices.
I had no perspective on what we were doing, or at least suspended any perspective I might have had. We were the first to do this. Of course we weren’t – we were the last, the heirs and successors of a line that goes back at least to the Roman love affair with the suburban villa, perhaps beyond that to the first urban civilizations of the Near East, where the concentrated demands and sophistication of city life produced, even at the beginning, a dream image of the garden place, the paradise, in which the realities did not impinge, where the commercial and competitive structures of the city were absent. Is Genesis itself, I now wonder, a symptom of a disenchanted urbanity?
I had no desire to delineate, let alone puncture, the bubble. I needed its insulation and a belief in its power and reality. For years I had kept in my mind, as a sort of mantra, a poem by R.S. Thomas:
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
(‘The Bright Field’, 1975)
Thomas, a parish priest in the Lleyn peninsula in Gwynedd, in the north-west corner of Wales, is playing a fugue on the words of both Exodus and the Gospels. The Authorised Version does indeed speak of Moses ‘turning aside’ to the burning bush; Christ, talking to the Apostles, describes the Kingdom of Heaven both as the field with the treasure in it and as the pearl of great price. Both, curiously perhaps to us who dissociate so firmly the religious from the financial, use the language of money and merchants. The conditions of paradise, in Christ’s own words, can be bought. If only estate agents had cottoned on to this! Sell all that you have, money for paradise, the pearl of great price, life is neither hurrying nor hankering: turn aside to the eternity that awaits you. Heaven is waiting, the paradise womb; only look for it and you will see the bush alight beside you. The brightness