It was the very last firework of summer, that pear tree. It’s miraculous really. I was sure that, like the rest of the garden, it had had little or no attention over the year, or years past. But it was spectacular. I’ve never had pears quite that juicy.
A fire burned in the grate as I picked every last one, a great big basketful: all shapes and sizes, some long and thin like sausages, and some almost completely round, like dumplings, but somehow still all very clearly pear-like. I couldn’t resist eating the little tiny ones while I was out there. The biggest nobbly ones we sliced, seasoned, sloshed with oil and roasted on the fire. Eating them with sticky fingers in a silent huddle, feeling the little kicks in Claire’s tummy, watching the flames and listening to the rain as the wind rattled the windows.
And that was it. All of a sudden, snap, the nights drew in. A cold wind rolled in from the east. The lawn was a carpet of leaves and broken rose petals. We’d been living in the garden as much as the house, but from now until the spring we’d be holed up in the draughty house.
SOME PEOPLE
AND ANIMALS
Personally, the transformation from metropolitan hell-raiser to quiet country gentleman was one thing, but this was also a professional volte-face. I’d bought a business as well as a home.
Playing the bass in a rock and roll band for a living is probably the easiest job in the world. You’d be hard pushed to find a bass player in an internationally successful rock group who’d disagree with that. On the other hand, you’ll never hear farmers say anything similar about their line of work. No one says farming is easy, and the rusting supertanker of a farm I’d taken command of was already threatening to drift over the horizon.
The whole thing was moving. Ever so slowly, moving. It wasn’t a house. It was a machine. It was a little bit alive, and things happened even when no one was making them happen. I had no idea what the machine was really, where it started or ended, how to drive it or what to point it at, and I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t met Paddy.
I thought I was doing something quite drastic, quite daring, moving to the country but now I think about it it’s quite hard to call to mind an ageing rock gentleman who doesn’t live in the country on a farm. The farm is probably the closest thing the ageing rock gentleman has to a natural habitat. As it became clear just how much it would cost to fix the place, and how much there was to know about this world, all of it completely new to me, it was reassuring to think how many of my peers also lived on farms. And it’s not just rockers. There are always statistics saying no one wants to be a farmer, but it’s the first thing Formula One champions, lottery winners, and movie moguls and billionaires do, as soon as they get the sniff of a chance. Even princes buy farms and none of these people know anything about farming until things start leaking and falling over, and by then it’s just too late. They’re already hooked.
In the way that rock bands have managers to take care of business, anyone who lives on a farm but isn’t really a farmer, needs an expert to call upon for advice on the practicalities. Whether the farm is falling down or a tidy business, there are always lots of those. Things you just don’t consider when you’re on a picnic: fences, ditches, thistles, trees, frogs. There’s a reason why they are all exactly where they are. They’ve either been put there by somebody, or they live there, or they’ve escaped or invaded. The countryside is a carefully managed environment. And at the very top of the food chain is the land agent.
Paddy is my land agent. It would be hard to conceive of someone who would fit the bill of English Country Gentleman more perfectly. Educated not far from where I grew up, but in a parallel universe. The product of good genes and a good system, a county-level rugby player and a man able to cope in any situation the world might throw at him. A man of grace and impeccable manners. A keen shot and an excellent rider, he also has a beautiful wife who adores him and a dog who is crazy about him. Everybody liked Paddy and he worked very hard. He was very discreet about his other clients, but I know he built Madonna’s stables for her. I’m always disappointed by the lack of imagination of the fantastically successful. They always seem to want the same things as everybody else. There are so many other things to be had. A stable block is so run of the mill. Stables are usually the first thing rock wives go for when they arrive in the country, and are a piece of cake for a seasoned land agent. Paddy and I have had many conversations about stables. We got as far as laying a sort of sub-base layer for a riding school. Claire would have liked stables, but I kept getting distracted. Distracted, constantly overwhelmed by dreams of things that were more interesting and actual things that were much less interesting: the cellar flooding in the middle of the night; sheep escaping and eating the flowers; roofs blowing away. Even the river didn’t take too long to burst its banks.
We met every week and I looked forward to it. I always had a long list of questions for him. What is DEFRA? When is the latest we can plant fruit trees? What is the deal with bees? What is the best way to find a cricket pitch? One week I said, ‘I want a runway.’ He didn’t flinch. He said ‘That’ll be about £150.’ Paddy took everything in his stride. Things started to move but the giddying sense of the endless possibilities of a piece of land was constant. There were quite a lot of experts. ‘Farm’ is another word for a building site, there is a lot to know about building. It is all quite simple, but there is a lot of it and it all happens simultaneously and it is all quite expensive. There are two ways of learning about building. You can go to college for seven years and study architecture or you can use your own money and learn very quickly. Even if you decide to employ an architect you have to know what’s what, because if you asked any leading architect for an apple he would sharpen his pencils, draw an orchard and charge you twenty grand. And that would probably still only get you to the planning stage. An expensive architect will save you the most money, but the only way to ever save money is by spending more money than you wanted to in the first place, so any kind of architect is always the start of a slippery slope.
As we rebuilt the house I learned on the go, sometimes at tremendous cost, all the practicalities of plumbing, heating, wiring and flues. I learned about insulation and hardcore and U-values, and all kinds of building regulations, and planning permissions and licences. It was endless and Claire and I would argue about what kind of taps we wanted: polished nickel or satin steel. It was always the ones that were a bit more expensive, that were just a little bit nicer. Soon I had lost interest in taps but became quite fascinated by plumbing systems and water pressure – everything that happens before the taps. They don’t really ever manage to make you feel good about yourself, posh taps, not in the way the posh tap brochure tries to make you think they will, but water gushing out of a leaky system like a fountain always lifts the spirits somehow.
We got a couple of pigs without really giving it much thought. I suppose they were the complete opposite of posh taps – pigs were, for hundreds of years, the marker of the peasantry. Actually only very posh people keep pigs any more. Once we’d had them a couple of weeks, it was