Smell of Summer Grass: Pursuing Happiness at Perch Hill. Adam Nicolson
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itself was dark and dingy downstairs. In most of the ground-floor rooms I was unable to stand up. Upstairs there was grey cheap carpet, gilded light fittings, down-lighters and pine-louvred cupboards. A 1940s brick cow shed had been enlarged with an extension made of telegraph poles and more corrugated sheeting. Three other sheds – for calves, logs and rubbish, I was told – lay scattered around the site looking as if they were waiting to be tidied up. Various bits of grass were carefully mown. There was a decorative fish pond the size of a dining-room table in front of the granary-sitting room. The truncated oast-house had become a cart shed but was now in use as an art gallery. There were places for customers to park.
None of this was quite what had been imagined. The smiles remained hanging on our lips. The buildings were raw-edged. Their arrangement was not quite what you would have hoped for, not quite a clustered yard, but a little strung out along the hill. The geese by the farm pond were angry. And a wind blew from the west. Turn aside, turn aside. I have seen the sun break through … The Bright Field murmurings were no more than faint.
Was it that time we walked around the farm or another? I don’t quite remember. We left again, slowly, back up the Dudwell lane, along others. We had lunch on the grass outside the Ash Tree at Ashburnham. I drank a pint of Harvey’s bitter and the bees hummed. We were not sure. We went back on other days, again and yet again, taking friends with us. They all thought not. The place was trammelled. Whatever it might once have had was now gone. We heard somehow that the actor and com edian John Wells had looked at the place and rejected it: too much to do. We too should look elsewhere. So we did: a large fruit farm near Canterbury, other places, Brown Oak Farm, Burned Oak Farm, Five Oaks Farm, which I occasionally pass in the car nowadays, now the focus of other lives, diverged from ours like atoms that collide for an instant and then bounce on to other paths, and never to connect with ours again.
The Perch Hill valley would not go away. It had taken up residence in my mind. I bought the largest-scale map of it that I could find and kept it on my desk. I read it at night before going to sleep, walking the dream place: the extraordinary absence of roads, the isolated farms down at the end of long tracks, the lobes of wood and fingers of meadow, the streams incised into creases in the contours, the enclosed world away from the brutalizing openness which I felt had reduced me to the condition I was now in. It is a hungry business, map-reading. It only feeds the appetite for the real. I had drawn in red biro a line around the fields and woods that went with Perch Hill Farm: 90 acres in all, draped across a shoulder of hill that ran down to the valley of the River Dudwell, and entirely surrounded by the remains of Dallington Forest. The red line around these acres made an island of significance. The more I looked at the map the more real my possession of those fields became, the more that red biro line described the island reality for which we were both longing. ‘Let’s go again,’ I said to Sarah. It would be the last time, the last throw, and then I would push this map away and the place would mean nothing to us and we could move on to other places and other obsessions.
It was a summer evening, four months after Sarah had first wandered down the lane. We went not to the house but to the fields. We had brought some bread and cheese with us. We walked around and the light was pouring honey on the woods. At the end we lay down in the big hay meadow known as the Way Field and looked across the valley to the net of hedgy woods and pastures beyond it, the terracotta tile-hung farmhouses pimpled among them, the air of unfiddled-with completeness, the haze of the hay. Owls hooted; two deer and their fawns came out of the wood into the bottom of the field to graze and look, graze and look in the pausing, anxious way they do. Graze and look, graze and look: it was what we had been doing for too long. We decided there and then: for the sort of money that could have bought you an extremely nice house in west London (double-fronted, courteous neighbours, Rosemary Vereyfied garden, a frieze of parked German cars, chocolate-coloured Labradors in pairs on red leashes) we would buy a cramped, dark old farmhouse, a collection of decrepit outbuildings and some fields that would never in a thousand years produce any income worth having. Was this wise? Yes. This was wise, the right thing to do, plumping for the lit bush. What else could money be for?
John Ventnor, the art dealer who owned the place, wanted what seemed like an outrageous amount for it: £480,000. We could afford, we thought, after the endless shuffling of portfolios, the sale of heirlooms and the accommodating of ‘certain grave reservations’ of financial advisers, no more than £375,000 and that was what we offered. Not enough. We offered £20,000 more. Not enough. What would be enough? He was prepared to countenance a 10 percent discount on the asking price: £432,000. Too much. What about £410,000? Not enough. And there it stuck for months.
We began again to look at other places but none was right. The vision in the evening field had its hooks in us. We waited, hoping that the delay would get to work on him, but it didn’t. It became clear that he shared the freehold with a stepdaughter who no longer lived there. She wanted him to sell up but he didn’t want to leave. He had no incentive to lower his price any further. We were in an impasse.
Sarah sold her house in London, our daughter Rosie was born and we all moved together into a rented basement flat of profound sterility and gloominess. I got a job on a newspaper and we borrowed money on that rather slender foundation. On winter evenings I drew plans and projections on my computer of how we might change Perch Hill, what kind of garden we might make, how we might take the land and farm it in a way that would be more generous towards it. The sliced-off oast-house became whole again on my night-time screen. I took to sitting in front of it with no other light in the room, a silvery brightness emanating from the dark, a possible future set against a present reality. Plantings and vistas criss-crossed the spaces between the buildings on my computer plans. One after another of these schemes I drew up, ever more elaborate, and they all shared the same title: ‘Arcadia for £432,000.’ Give everything you have.
One winter day I went down there again. I had never seen Perch Hill outside its springtime freshness or its hay-encompassed summer glory. This day was different. I was alone; Sarah remained with Rosie in London. A wind was cutting in from the east and for days southern England had remained below zero. All colour had drained out of the landscape. In the valley, the woods were black and the fields a silky grey as in my night-time visions of the place. The stones on the track into the farm were frozen and they made no sound as I drove over them. The geese were huddled in the lee of a bank, fingers of wind lifting the feathers on their backs. Even they couldn’t bring themselves to run out and attack me. Frost-filled gusts blew across the frozen pond. The buildings were besieged by cold.
I was there to persuade Ventnor that he should sell his farm to us for something less than the £432,000 at which he had stuck for so long. I had no real tools or levers with which to achieve this, only the suggestion that a lower price might be fair. Smilingly, over a cup of coffee, he refused. We sat first in the kitchen and then by the fire. He was polite but adamant. The oak logs burned slowly. To my own surprise, I felt no resentment. I sat there agreeing with every word he said. Why should he leave the embrace of this? Why should the poor man go out into the cold if he did not want to?
He left the room to see a man who had come to the door and as I sat there I began to be embraced by the warmth of the house. I felt it wrap its own fingers around me. If a house could speak, that was the day it spoke, the day I learned this wasn’t simply a place where we could come and impose our preconceptions. We couldn’t simply land the Bright Field fantasy here and take that as the reality in which we were now ensconced. There was some kind of dignity of place to be respected here. It had a self-sufficiency which went beyond the demands and obsessions of its current occupants. There was a pattern to it, a private rhythm, the deep, slow music to which it had been moving for the four or five centuries that people had lived in it. The two of us men sitting here now in front of the fire, what were we in the light of that? Transient parasites.
I left and we had failed to agree on price but in some other, quite unstated way, I had succumbed. The buildings might be a mishmash of what we wanted and what we didn’t. They might confront us with a list of things to do that stretched 10, 20 years into the future. The price that was required might be unreasonably high. But all of that was translated that frosty day, or perhaps started to be translated that frosty day, with the hot oak fire glowing as the only point of colour in a colourless world, into something quite different: a commitment to the place as it actually