We walked up there, not across the fields that first time but up the lane. The hedge was in brilliant new leaf. Ken and Brenda came to their garden gate, asked us in, a cup of tea in the kitchen, Gemma the dog lying by the Rayburn, and a sort of inspecting openness in them both, the welcome mixed with ‘Who are you? What sort of people are you?’ I shall always remember two things Ken said. One with his tang of acid: ‘You know what they always said about this farm, don’t you? They always said this was the poorest farm in the parish.’ The other with the warmth that can spread like butter around him: ‘That’s one thing that’s lovely, children’s voices down at the farm again. That’s a sound we haven’t had for a long time here.’
To a degree I didn’t understand at the time, we had entered Ken Weekes’s world. Perhaps we had bought the farm, perhaps the deeds were in our name, perhaps we were living in the farmhouse, perhaps I was meant to be deciding what should happen to the woods and fields, but none of that could alter the central fact: Perch Hill was Ken’s in a deeper sense than any deed of conveyance could ever accomplish.
He had come here in 1942 as a six-year-old boy to live in the house we were now occupying. His father, ‘Old Ron’, was farm manager for a London entrepreneur and ‘a gentleman, one of the real old gentry’, Mr George Wilson-Fox. ‘Old Wilson’ used to come down with his friends on a Saturday. The Weekeses would all put on clean white dairymen’s coats to show the proprietor and his guests the herd of prize pedigree Friesians, spotless animals, their tails washed twice a day every day, the cow shed whitewashed every year, a cow shed so clean ‘you could eat your dinner off that floor’.
It was a place dedicated to excellence. Wilson-Fox made sure there was never any shortage of money for the farm and Ron imposed his discipline on it. ‘The cattle always came first,’ Ken remembered. ‘Even if you were dying, you had to look after the cows. I remember Old Ron kicking us out of bed to go and milk the cows one morning when I could hardly move – “Come on, you bugger, get out, there’s work to do” – and it was so cold in there in the cow shed with a north-easterly that the milk was freezing in the milk-line. But we got it done. It all had to be done by eight in the morning if you wanted to sit down to breakfast. You couldn’t have breakfast unless the cattle had been looked after first.’
It is a lost world. Nothing like these small dairy farms exists here any more. They have all gone and Ken has witnessed their disappearance, the total evaporation of the world in which he grew up. About that he seems to feel bleak and accepting in equal measure. Every inch of this farm carries some memory or mark of Ken’s life here: the day the doodlebug crashed in the wood at the bottom of the Way Field; those moments in Beech Meadow where Old Ron, in late June or early July, would pick a bunch of flowers for Dolly, Ken’s mother, the signal for the boys that haymaking was about to begin; the day the earth suddenly slipped after they had ploughed it in the field for ever after known as the Slip Field. A farm is a farmer’s autobiography and this one belongs to Ken.
When he married Brenda, in 1959, they moved into the cottage across the fields. His mother and brother stayed in the farmhouse. Wilson-Fox died in 1971, but Ken continued farming for the trustees of the estate for another 15 years until, in 1986, the farm was sold, along with its herd of cattle, to John Ventnor, who wanted to be a farmer. Ken stayed in the cottage, and set the art dealer on his way, helping him for a year or so, but they fell out. ‘We had a misunderstanding,’ Ken said. For several years after that Ken was not even allowed to walk his dog in these fields.
There was something of a false cheeriness in both of us as we talked. Each of us was guarded against the other. But the afternoon floated on Ken’s stories. He could remember watching the pilots of the Luftwaffe Messerschmitts, low enough for you to see a figure in the cockpit. ‘Oh yes, you could see them sitting in there all right.’ One evening the Weekeses were all down in the Way Field getting in the hay and there were so many of the German planes that his father said they’d better go in. ‘You could never tell, could you? Bastards.’ Ken’s performance culminated in his favourite story about the hunt. He was out in the Cottage Field, tending to one of the cows which was poorly, when he chanced to look up and see a whole crowd of the hunt come pouring down the trackway that leads off the bridlepath and into the Perch Hill farmyard.
‘“I say,”’ Ken bellowed at them – ‘because they’ll only understand you if you talk to them in a way they do understand – “why don’t you fucking well bugger off out of there?” And,’ Ken says, looking round, all smiles, ‘do you know what? They did!’
Another piece soon dropped into place. Will Clark came up one day from the village. He had been doing some work on the farm for John Ventnor. Peter, his son, had been working in the wood and mowing the grass. Ventnor had said that there was no one he could recommend more highly. And that’s how it turned out. As soon as Will walked into the yard I could see what he meant. His eyes were the colour of old jeans. He swept his hair in a repeated gesture up and over his forehead into a wide long curl that could only be the descendant of a rocker’s quiff, 40 years on. He smiled with his eyes and talked with a laugh in his voice. ‘We’ll be haying soon,’ he said. He cuddled Rosie. His taste in shirts was perfect, lime green and tangerine orange, unchanged, I guess, since he was bike-mad in the fifties, when he used to do a ton down the long straight stretch to Lewes called The Broyle, or burn up and down the High Street in the village to impress the girls. He was the only man in Burwash ever to get to Tunbridge Wells in 12½ minutes, or so he told me. He talked broad Sussex: fence posts were ‘spiles’, working in the mud got you ‘all slubbed up’, anything that needed doing always involved ‘stirring it about a bit’, a sickle was ‘a swap’. He had started his working life when he was 14 on a farm at Hawkhurst, just over the border into Kent, looking after the horses. He knew all about machines and wood and wooding and how to get a big ash butt out of a difficult corner. He was the man of the place and he would be the man for us. Will had been ill for years – his kidneys scarcely worked and he had to spend three hours a day at home on a dialysis machine – and he said that Peter would have to do the heavy work. ‘He’s the muscle man.’ And so we plugged in. This other world was closing over us, some version of pastoral folding us in its lap.
All the same, I was anxious about it all. The stupidity of what we were doing was brought home, involuntarily or not, when people we knew from London dropped in. There was always a vulture in the party, someone who would unerringly make you sour with a remark. ‘Oh yes,’ one of these people said in the early days, nosing around the ugliness of our horrible buildings, ‘it’s a very nice spot, isn’t it?’ A very nice spot: the silent pinchedness of what is not said. Why do these people wreak destruction? Why do they do such dishonest damage? I couldn’t believe how soured I felt by them. But why should I have been? Why did I even care? Perhaps because the whole point of Perch Hill was to take ourselves out of range of their criticisms, their worldly knowingness. Now, I am sure, nothing they said would come anywhere near me. It is one of the consolations of age that your own self-knowledge allows other people’s criticisms to break around you like little waves. But then, in our tender state, to have their all-too-predictable strictures applied to our precious refuge was like an experience you occasionally get as a writer. You have written something which matters to you and which tries to say something beyond what is ordinarily said, and as a result is likely to be a little rough at the edges. Your reader looks at it, but they don’t read into the heart of it, the point of it, and stay critically on the edge, looking at the punctuation or the length of sentences or, worst of all, the definition of terms. I once wrote a book about a place I loved and which, on its first page, mentioned the ‘branched orchids’ that grew there. A woman told me casually one day that she hadn’t got any further than that first page because ‘There aren’t any branched orchids.’ I have never been able to look at an orchid since without