By the middle of July, in all our hayfields, the grass was crisp and it was already late for the haying. That’s what they call it here. Not haymaking or the hay harvest, but straightforward ‘haying’ on the same principle as lambing or wooding. It’s the climax of the grass year and, as nothing except grass and thistles will grow on this farm, these few days became the point around which everything else revolved. It was high summer. Even as it was happening you could feel the winter nostalgia for it. You won’t get a cattle or sheep farmer to talk starry-eyed about haymaking, but there was no doubt, in one sense anyway, that was how they felt. ‘Look at that,’ one of my neighbours would say to me during the following winter about a bale of his own hay he was trying to sell me. ‘You can smell the summer sunshine in it,’ and he buried his nose in the bale like a wine-taster in the heady, open mouth of his glass.
A friend rang up from London as we were about to start. ‘Make hay while the sun shines,’ he said to me on the phone, as if there were something original about the phrase. But it hardly needed to be said. Anxiety hovered over the beautiful fields.
They were beautiful. The buttercups and the red tips of the sorrel gave a colour-wash to the uncut grasses, a shifting chromatic shimmer to the browning fields. The enormous old hedges had thickened into little, banky woods so that the hay, even though it wasn’t very thick that year, was cupped in their dark green bowls, a pale soup lapping at the brim.
Ken Weekes had been trying to persuade me all year that what was needed was a good dose of chemicals for the thistles and a ton or two of nitrogen to make the grass grow. We were already squabbling like a pair of old spinsters and I was relying on him for everything I did. Ken told me I needed Fred Groombridge, the sheep man from the village. Fred came down. He looked at me with only one eye, as though permanently squinting at the sun. ‘That’s because he’s thinking with the other one,’ Ken said.
I sold most of the hay to Fred as standing grass, £17.50 an acre. I had asked for £30, Fred suggested £15. He budged an inch, I moved a mile, but in return for that absurdly low price, Fred would also cut, turn, row up and bale 6 acres for me, 500 bales, which I would then have carted into the barn at my own expense. ‘Perfect,’ Fred said with his left eye, grinning. ‘It’s only money.’
Fred brought down his wife, Margaret – she gave me a cheque before they cut a single blade of grass – and his nephew, Jimmy Gray. Ken helped. Will and Peter Clark helped. Make hay while the sun shines. And for days it did. For the fields, it’s the hair-dressing moment of the year. When first cut, the hay lies flat and shiny on the razored surface. The sun glints along it like a light on those snips of wet hair that lie on a barber’s floor. To dry it, the grass is tossed with the tedder – Margaret’s job, eight hours at a stretch, up and down, up and down in the battered old Ford 4000 tractor, ‘stirring it about’ and mussing it up, the shampoo shuffle. Then it is fluffed back into rows for the baler, the final hairspray and set. What this means is long, long hours at the wheel of a tractor, looking back over one’s shoulder at the machine that’s doing the job, with such concentration that Fred went past me three times before he noticed that I was standing there on the edge of the field waiting to talk to him.
Everything went like a dream and the hay lay soft, light and ‘blue’ as Fred called it, a green tinge to the grey of the drying grasses, in the rowed-up lines on the field. Not a drop of rain had touched it. This was some of the best hay anyone had made for years. But then, of course, things changed. The forecast predicted thunderstorms that evening and the baler broke. Fred had bought it from the two old Davis boys who were retiring from the place over the hill. I only heard this late in the day, but it was not surprising Fred had kept the source of the baler a little quiet. That was where, the year before, the BBC had stumbled on a fragment of old England, nettles growing through abandoned horse-drawn hay rakes, fields that looked as if they had just got out of bed, a farmhouse soft in its long slow journey towards dilapidation. They had decided to make their film of Cold Comfort Farm there. God knows how old the baler was. There was something seriously wrong with it, but no one could work out what. The bales it produced were either the size of a handbag or emerged 8 feet long, oozing out with a terrible constipated slowness from the machine’s rear vent.
‘Neither’s any good,’ Fred said, and for 15 hours, while the rain threatened, men from various parts of Sussex pored over its innards. The handbook was out on the field. They drank Ribena. Parts were greased, others rubbed down. ‘If I never see another Case International baler,’ Ken said, ‘I won’t be sorry.’ The weather forecast was getting worse by the hour. In the end, there was nothing for it and the hay was baled in these stupid lengths. As soon as it was done, we stacked it on trailers and carted it into the barn, just as it was, the long and short of it, an acre an hour for six hours of exhausting, dusty, sweaty work. By the time the rain came, my 500 bales were in the barn, perhaps £1,000 worth. We felt delighted. The hay was saved and the barn, filled to the eaves, smelled sweet and musty. We were all sneezing with the dust and seeds in our hair and nostrils. My forearms were pricked with the stub ends of the stalks. Motes danced in the sun where its light came in through the wide-open doors of the barn. The hay was stacked 15 feet high in two blocks, each 20 feet deep and 20 square, one block on either side of the barn’s central cartway, held there by the diagonal oak braces and the central oak pillars of the barn. Scraps of hay lay on the barn floor, like scattered herbs in a medieval house.
The picture of fullness this gave me, a building as tightly stuffed as a pillow, a barn filled with exactly what it was meant to be filled with, was a version of the completeness I had come here for. The hay had been made – baler or no baler – with the techniques people had learned when they first kept animals in this country 5,000 years ago, and the five of us stood around drinking tea, looking at the completed thing as one does when a job is finished, all of us, in a way I can hardly describe now, jointly happy at what we had done.
I couldn’t work out why Fred was looking so pleased with himself too. All his hay was still out in the fields, baled in the modern round jumbo bales, which a highly efficient brand-new machine had been creating all afternoon. They were bound to get a soaking. ‘Oh, I don’t worry about that,’ Fred said through his one eye. ‘Rain doesn’t hurt jumbo bales. They can stay out there for weeks.’ So why on earth had we sweated over our ridiculous salami/sliver-sized bales all afternoon? ‘Oh,’ Fred said, with a grin the size of the English Channel, ‘I thought you wanted to do it up here like we did it in the old days. You didn’t want those jumbo bales, did you? You wanted something you could get sweaty picking up and putting down so you could feel what it was like to be a real farmer. You did, didn’t you?’ I looked up at him as he asked me and saw – one of those moments of true recognition – that Fred had both of his eyes, the colour of the sky on a distant, sun-swept horizon, wide open, as the first drops of rain began to fall on the bleached and razored fields.
The hay was in, but the trees were suffering. For weeks on end, from midsummer onwards, they looked bruised and battered. A ride on the Northern Line in the evening rush hour would not have revealed a more exhausted set of faces than the trees displayed that summer. Our neighbour from Perryman’s, the young dairy farmer, Stephen Wrenn, who had taken some of the grazing for his bullocks, came over for a drink one evening. ‘I don’t know a farm that’s as lucky as this one with its trees. You’ll look after your oaks, won’t you?’
We had long talks together about what to do with this land. He had persuaded his father to give up the dairy herd, rent out the milk quota and turn Perryman’s over to the new short-rotation willow coppice which can be harvested every couple of years and burned for energy. So the cows were sold and they were trying to sell his milk quota. But it had been such a dry year