Smell of Summer Grass: Pursuing Happiness at Perch Hill. Adam Nicolson
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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 for Deutsche Morgan Grenfell. Not much was right with the way we had done things. The shed was wrong; it needed more air holes, its roof was not very nice, the walls were unsatisfactory and it was in the wrong position. We shouldn’t have bothered to put either chestnut or larch logs in the pile because they both spit when they burn and that wasn’t good for the kiddies, was it? The oak was useless; it only burned on a massively hot fire, which we would never achieve because the rest of the wood was such rubbish. The ash had been split far too small and would burn too quickly. Sycamore had no calorific value to speak of and what we had was rotten. It would take more energy to start the fire than would be given out by it. And were we two years ahead with our cutting programme? He looked at me in that generous, hesitating way people use to those whose self-esteem they have just bulldozed into a silage pit.
The idea of putting up a building of any kind was a mistake. You would make the windows too small. You would spend too much money on it. You would do something totally out of character. You would create a dreadful ersatz fake (‘Tesco’s’) when people in your position had a responsibility to patronize new architects and architecture. You were living in a retro hell. You would not install the correct insulation/safety features/ heating system. Heating systems! May I never, ever have another discussion about heating systems for the rest of my life.
Then there was the chicken question. You were thinking of getting far too many of them. Were you really going to be eating 80 eggs a week? Had you performed the cloacal swab test for salmonella on them yet? You certainly couldn’t think of giving eggs away if they had dirty cloacas. Their housing was disgusting and if an RSPCA man should happen by, he would be appalled. You may have heard someone was prosecuted for just this kind of thing the other day. Anyway, they should have been bedded down on sawdust not straw. It was amazing you hadn’t found that out for yourself. I don’t quite understand why you were going in for these things.
Moving quickly on, children should wear clothes made out of only naturally occurring materials, fed only naturally occurring foods and baked beans should be sugar-free. Trees – these two subjects always somehow elide – should be planted without stakes, or tied only loosely to stakes, or planted without tree-guards or only after a comprehensive drainage system has been installed, or only on M25 rootstock, or only from Deacon’s Nursery in the Isle of Wight, or only with local genetic material, gathered from the last of the local orchards, and anyway fruit trees are only a pleasure if you have done all the grafting and training yourself. Have you managed to do that, Adam? Or have you ever thought you might be taking on a little much here? Have you had your dog castrated yet? Aaaaaaaargh.
My sons – lovely stage in life – had just then started playing Oasis on their ghetto-blaster at crow-scarer volume. The songs wormed their way into the mind, colonizing whole stretches of it. After one particularly gruesome hour or two with a couple of people who came to lunch and knew every damn thing there was to know about the usual subjects – orchards, firewood, chickens, ducks (‘one says “duck”, doesn’t one, in the plural?’), heating systems, woodland management, grants (‘We’ve found we’ve done quite well out of the whole County Council Heritage Landscape scheme but I’m told, I’m afraid, that they’ve run out of money now and won’t be taking any more applicants at least until fiscal 2000’) – I found myself stacking the dishwasher and singing, much too loudly, ‘Yer gada roll wiv it/ya gorra take yer time/yer garra say wotya say/dern ledd anybuddy gerrin yer waaajy …/There’s nuthin lef for me to saaiy …’
The bravado papered over a pit of anxiety. One morning I woke at four and said, aloud, ‘I’m worried about the fields.’