I had a meeting one Saturday morning with the Wrenns, Brian and Stephen, father and son, our farming neighbours from Perryman’s, on the other side of the hill. We were all a little shy with each other in the kitchen, too ready to agree with what the other had said.
Brian, sliding the conversation sideways, told me there were nightingales in our woods and nightjars and wheatears. I knew nothing about these things. We talked about the way that all the farmhouses here face south, their fronts to the warmth, their backs to the wind. How ingeniously the first people to settle here spied out the land. Stephen talked about the poverty of the Weald, the way there is no topsoil, all the fertility poured away down the streams to the southern rich belt, the champaign country of rich southern Sussex. ‘This is the poorest, the last bit of ground to be taken,’ he said, ‘but that’s what has saved it.’
Then I said, with the Nescafé in me, we should talk about the real matter in hand. Brian turned businesslike. ‘We would certainly like to have all the grass. But it’s too late this year to get any nitrogen on for the silage. We’ll get some heifers on to graze it later.’
‘Of course,’ I said, feeling I was about to introduce some urban gaucherie, ‘and anyway, from our side, we would like to manage it in as much of a conservationist way as we can.’ How I hate that word, but to my amazement they lay in happily with it. Even the air between us became somehow emotional at the recognition of shared ideas. Stephen talked about planting some of Perryman’s with willows to provide fuel for a wood-burning power plant. That toboggan feeling developed around the table that we were not such aliens to each other as we might have imagined. The future opened like the curtains of a theatre. We all came to an agreement: they should take some of the grass that year as summer grazing. They would pay £1,000 for it, which was better than nothing I supposed, about 1.5 percent return on capital. The real question was: were we prepared to forgo the £3,000-odd we would get from a conventional let for the sake of it looking nice and it being lovely? For saying no to nitrogen and no to high-pressure farming? Were we rich enough for that?
With a new bill-hook, I cut hazels in the wood for Sarah’s new cutting patch. The old hazel was growing in stools 8 feet across. The middle of them was a jumble of old fallen sticks. One stick had rotted entirely on the inside but the skin had remained whole as an upright paper tube. There were deer in the wood, their awkward big bodies breaking the trees they hurried past, and around my feet tall purple orchids. I was cutting with slashing blunt incompetence at the hazels, half-tearing them away, but I loved their long swinging creak next to my ear as I carried them home on my shoulder. I felt the sweat run down my side in single, finger-sized trickles and I loved the smell, the woody, sweet, bruised, tannic vegetable reeking of the cut wood. That’s what I was here for, the under-sense, those deeper connections, that core of intimacy.
I demolished the fence around the pond, shirt off, sweat and exhaustion. I sold the tractor on Will’s advice and we were for the moment tractorless. Will was looking for another more reliable one. I made teepees out of hazels from the wood and some hurdles out of split chestnut. I tried to buy a mower but my credit card failed. It was the usual humiliation in front of a queue of men who were more interested in that little human drama than anything else. Rachel the shop girl blushed. I laughed it off. I needed to earn more money and I had a feeling we were veering, slowly but quite deliberately, towards a financial crisis.
But I loved it here that first spring. I loved the sustenance of the green, the kestrel that came daily and hung above the corners of the barns, moving from station to station. I loved the little seedlings of the oak and aspen sprouting in the grass along the wood edges. I loved the knit of the country, the jersey of it. I loved the sight of the ducks, two wild mallards on the pond, I loved the substance of the place, my new fax machine, the gentleness of Will and Peter, Rosie playing in the garden with her new nanny, Anna Cheney, who only years later would dare tell us exactly how horrified she had been at the chaos in which we were living, but how one thing had convinced her to come: the sight of Rosie’s face as she sat at the kitchen table, so round and so sweet.
The garden accumulated. I tended to the house as I had tended no house before, tidying and hoovering. Sarah and I both had the feeling, if we were honest, that we should have waited to buy somewhere with more beautiful buildings but there we were: we couldn’t say that now. This would be lovely in the slow unnoticed growth of the place around us. Forty years later, as we died, we would look at it and say, ‘That was beautiful.’ Life would be over, having been lived. The moments of revelation are all there is. This is all there is. This will be the undernote of my life: the making with a purpose, not the drifting of the survivor. Make, and you will be happy.
THAT SUMMER of 1994 burned. The south of England was bleak with heat. Cars along the lane raised a floury dust in their wake. The cow parsley and the trees in the hedges were coated with it like loaves in a bakery. The streams were dry coming off the hill and the river in the trench of the valley was little more than a gravel bed across which a line of damp had been drawn, connecting the shrunken pools.
I spent long days down there in the dark, deep shade of the riverside trees. The valley felt enclosed, a place apart, and secrecy gathered inside it. Rudyard Kipling lived here for the second half of his life – he bought Bateman’s, a large 17th-century iron-master’s house just below the last of our fields, in 1902 – and the whole place remained haunted by his memory. Everywhere you went, he had already described. It was here, among the hidden constrictions of the valley where, in Kipling’s wonderful phrase, ‘wind prowling through woods sounds like exciting things going to happen’, that I felt most in touch with where I had come to live. This was the womb.
It was a pathless place, or at least the only paths were the old deeply entrenched roads, never surfaced, which dropped from the ridge to the south, crossed the river at gravelly fords and then climbed through woods again to the ridge on the other side. They were the only intrusion in what felt like an abandoned world. The woods were named – Ware’s Wood, Hook Wood, Limekiln Wood, Stonehole Wood, Great Wood, Green Wood – but it felt as if no one had been here for half a century. Hornbeam, chestnut, ash and even oak had all been coppiced in the past but none had been touched for decades. The marks of the great combing of the 1987 storm were still there: 80-foot-tall ash trees had fallen across the river from one bank to the other. The ivy that once climbed up them now hung in Amazonian curtains from the horizontal trees. Growing from the fallen trunks, small linear woods of young ashes now pushed up towards the light.
I stumbled about in here, looking for some kind of inaccessible essence of the place. The deer had broken paths through the undergrowth. The clay was scrabbled away where they had jumped the little side streams. The fields of underwood garlic had turned lemon yellow in the shade. And through it all the river wound, curling back on itself, cutting out promontories and peninsulas in the wooded banks, reaching down to the underlying layer of dark, ribbed, iron-rich sandstone. Where it cut into an iron vein, the metal bled into the stream and the water flowed past it an almost marigold orange. This too was Kipling’s world, virtually unchanged since he had described it, 90 years before, in Puck of Pook’s Hill.
Even on the shaded water the air was hot and heavy with drowsy scents, while outside, through breaks in the trees, the sunshine burned the pasture like fire …
The trees closing overhead made long tunnels through which the sunshine worked in blobs and patches. Down in the tunnels were bars of sand and gravel, old roots and trunks covered with moss or painted red by the irony water; clumps of fern and thirsty shy flowers who could not live away from moisture and shade.
As you pushed up through this wooded, private notch in Sussex, so many miles away from the bungalowed, signposted and estate-agented ridge-top roads, the river shrank still further to inch-deep pools and foot-wide rapids where banks of gravel had dammed