Because nothing destroys a landscape like money, its poverty had preserved it. We were on the edge of viable agriculture here, one of the last pieces to be cleared from the wood and already in part going back to it. You could see the lines of old hedges, hornbeam and hawthorn, growing as 40-foot trees in the middle of the woods. Those were the boundaries of the ghost fields, abandoned and returning to their natural condition. Because it was so poor, it had never been worth a farmer’s while to drive the land hard. That’s why these fields are as beautiful as any you could find in Europe, or the world come to that.
Of course there are many other pockets of beauty in England, at least away from the great slabs of denuded arable land in East Anglia and the Midlands. In my 20s I had walked through many of them, about 3,000 miles on foot when writing a book about English paths, and then as a travel writer for the Sunday Times I had walked a great deal more. In the western counties, from Devon and Dorset, up the Welsh marches to Lancashire and Cumbria, I had fallen in love with a country I hadn’t known until then, as a knitted thing, a visible testament to the long and intimate encounter between England and the English. It is the national autobiography, written every day for 1,500 years, with more life buried in it than any of us will ever know, with little thought ever given to its overall effect and its language often obscure. Maybe that is what we found at Perch Hill, a miracle of retained memory, a depth of time, and the mute, ox-like certainty which comes with that, away from the zigzags of our own chaotic existence. Nature was part of it, not all. This was no wilderness. Nor, though, was it an exclusively man-made place, sheeny and slicked up. Sometimes now I wish Perch Hill – our lives – had happened elsewhere in England, somewhere smarter and sleeker, with an elegant trout stream or smooth chalky views, but Perch Hill, stumbled on by chance, in all its scruffiness and lack of polish, but with its promise of what we always used to call echtness, an authentic, vital beauty that came up from the roots, was the right place for us. Human and natural met there in a rough old encounter and that was the world we needed.
There was a line from a poem of Tennyson’s which, from time to time that year, bumped up into my conscious mind, and presumably lurked not far beneath for the rest of it. ‘Green Sussex,’ it said, ‘fading into blue.’ That was this farm in a phrase: the green immediacy, the plunge for the valley, the stepped ridges of the Weald, blueing into the distance 10 and 12 miles away. This wasn’t a little button of perfection, a cherry perched on a cake of the wrecked, but part of a larger world and as I lay in the Way Field that evening all I could think of was the feeling of extent that ran out from there across the lane, down into the field called Toyland, beyond that into the valley of woods running off to the west, to the river down there, the deer nosing in that wood and the sight I had that morning, as we were waiting for the van, of the fox running down through that field, on the wood edge, no more than the tip of its tail visible above the grasses, a dancing point like the tip of a conductor’s baton …
I shall not forget that evening. The spring was going haywire around me. It was DNA bedlam, nature’s opening day. The black-thorn was stark white in the dark and shady corners. The willows had turned eau-de-nil. Oaks were the odd springtime mixture of red and formaldehyde yellow, the colour of old flesh preserved in bottles. The wild cherries stood hard and white like pylons in the wood and the crab apples, lower, more crabbed in form, were in full pink flower – an incredible thing a whole tree of that, the most sweetly beautiful flower in England, dolloped and larded all over the branches of a wrinkled, half-decrepit tree. In places nothing was doing better than the nettles and the thistles, but in the wood, there were the wall-to-wall bluebells, pale, almost lilac in the Middle Shaw, that eyeshadow blue: in the half-lit green darkness of the wood, that incredible, glamorous, seductive haze of the bluebell’s blue, a nightclub sheen in the low light, the sexiest colour in the English landscape, hazing my eyes, a pool of colour into which, if I could, I would have dived there and then.
There were deer on the top field. The light was catching the ridged knobbles of their spines. I drank it up: this bright sunshine, even late, the bars of it poking into the shadows of the wood; the comfort of the grass; the lane a continuous mass of wood anemones, cuckoo flowers, primroses; and one very creamy anemone up by the gate. Its colour looked to me like the top of the milk.
‘These foam-bells on the hidden currents of being’, Hugh MacDiarmid once called spring flowers, and that attitude, a slightly dismissive superiority, used to be mine too. Geology, the understructure, the creation of circumstances: those were the things that used to matter to me. I preferred the hard and stony parts of the north and west or the higher places in the Alps where, after the snow has gone, the crests and ridges are left as abused and brutalized as any frost-shattered quarry. Walking across those high, dry Alps, I have seen the whole world in every direction desert-like in its austerity, a bleakness beyond either ugliness or beauty, and thought that life could offer me nothing more.
I still lusted after that, for all the clean hard-pressure rigour of that alienating landscape, serene precisely because it is so dreadful, because from that point of desiccation there was nowhere lower to fall. But alongside it now, there was this other thing, this undeniable life-spurt in the spring, whose toughness was subtler than the stone’s but whose persistence would outlive it. Genes last longer than rocks. They slip through unbroken while continents collide and are consumed. These plants, I now saw, were the world’s version of eternity, the lit bush. If you wanted to ally yourself with strength, nothing would be more sustaining than the spring flowers.
Over the following days, we dressed the house as though preparing it to go out. It was like dressing a father or mother. She sat there mute while coats and ribbons were tried on her. ‘Oh you look nice like that,’ we would say, ‘or that, or maybe that.’ Rooms acquired meaning, another meaning. In the kitchen, painted on the cupboard door, I found a coat of arms: six white feathers on a blue ground and the motto ‘Labore et perseverantia’, By work and perseverance. It looked fairly new. What was it, a kind of d’Urberville story of a noble family collapsed to the poverty of this, to the resolution of that motto against all the odds? It was certainly a failed farm. That was the only reason we were there. We had crept like hermit crabs into a shell that others had vacated.
But I guessed the arms and the motto had no great ancestry. Had Ventnor himself painted them here in the last few years? I knew that he had attempted to make a business out of this farm, to continue with the dairy herd that he had bought with it. But he didn’t know what he was doing and had lost a fortune. The last thing he asked me before he left was ‘Are you thinking of farming here?’ to which I had been noncommittal. With something of a glittery eye, he told me not to consider it. That was a sure route to disaster. Soon stories were reaching me of Ventnor sitting in the kitchen here, his unpaid bills laid out on the table in front of him like a kind of Pelmanism from hell, his head in his hands, his prospects hopeless. Every one of these stories ended with the same warning: Don’t do it.
The Ventnor experience seemed somehow to stand between us and an earlier past. He was one of us, an urban escapee, a pastoralist, who had turned the old oast-house into an art gallery and put coach-lamp-style lights outside the doors. Where was the contact with the real thing, the real past here? There was a glimmering of discontent in my mind about that gap, still a glass wall between us and the essential nature of Perch Hill. Before Ventnor, I knew, the last farmers here had been called Weekes. Where were they? Had all trace of them disappeared? It wasn’t long before we realized that the very opposite was the case: Ken and Brenda Weekes still lived in the cottage 200 yards away across the fields. A day or two after our arrival, Sarah and I went up to see them and from that moment they became a fixed point in our lives.
The boys were here and were shrieking in the new expanse of garden. Tom was ten, Will eight and Ben six. We planned bike