Smell of Summer Grass: Pursuing Happiness at Perch Hill

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London, SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com

First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2011

Copyright © Adam Nicolson 2011

Parts of this book were previously published in PERCH HILL (Robinson Publishing, 1999)

Adam Nicolson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780007335572

Ebook Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007335589

Version: 2015-02-26

Dedication

In memory of Simon Bishop

1958–2009

Acknowledgements

The following images are reproduced with many thanks:

Large parts of this book first appeared in the Sunday Telegraph Magazine between 1995 and 2000 and two-thirds of it between hard covers in Perch Hill: a new life, published by Constable Robinson in 1999. I would very much like to thank Charles Moore, Alexander Chancellor, Aurea Carpenter and Nick Robinson, my various editors in those places, for all their help and guidance. This book takes the Perch Hill story on another full decade and looks again, with a slightly longer perspective, at those early days on the farm. This time I would again like to thank my editor Susan Watt, who has stood by me through thick and thin over many years, and my dearly valued agent Georgina Capel.

Nothing at Perch Hill could ever have happened without the people who work there and I would like to acknowledge with enormous and deeply felt thanks the difference which Tessa Bishop, Colin Pilbeam, Bea Burke, Angie Wilkins and Ben Cole have all made to our lives. Nothing, in my experience, can match the feeling which a joint and shared attachment to a place can give.

Almost needless to say – as anyone who reads these pages will discover it soon enough for themselves – the part of Sarah Raven in this story is not far short of the role played by gravity in the universe.

Adam Nicolson

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Part One

BREAKING

The Bright Field

Green Fading into Blue

Part Two MENDING

The Darting of Life

Patrolling the Boundaries

Neighbours with the Dead

Part Three SETTLING

Spring Births, Felled Oaks

In Deepest Arcadia

Peaches on the Cow-Shed Wall

A World in Transition

Part Four GROWING

Divorcing from the Past

The Very Opposite of Poisonous

Transformations

A Thick Pelt of Green

Feeding the Sensuous Memory

Picture Section

About the Author

By the same author

About the Publisher

The Bright Field

IF I think of the time when we decided to come here in 1992, it is a backward glance into the dark.

A summer night. I am walking home from Mayfair, from dinner with a man I fear and distrust. He is my stepfather and I burp his food into the night air. It is sole and gooseberry mousse. His dining-room is lined in Chinese silk on which parakeets and birds of paradise were painted in Macao some years ago. The birds have kept their colours, they are the colour of flames, but the branches on which they once sat have faded back into the grey silk of the sky. On the table are silver swans, whose wings open to reveal the salt. The Madeiran linen, the polished mahogany, the dumb waiter: it’s alien country.

My stepfather and I do not communicate. ‘It’s only worth reading one book a year,’ he says. ‘The trouble with this country is the over-education of the young.’ ‘Calling a parcels service “Red Star” is a sign of the depth of communist influence, even now, in England.’

Nothing is given. I leave the house to walk across London to somewhere on the edges of Hammersmith, where I am living with Sarah Raven, the woman for whom, a few months previously, I have left my wife. That is a phrase which leaves me raw. Sarah has gone somewhere else this evening, to have dinner with friends, and won’t be back until midnight or later. I have left as early as I can from the Mayfair house and think ‘Why not?’ A warm night. A walk through London and its glitter in the dark, to expunge that padded house and all its upholstered hostilities.

There are whores in the street outside, bending down like mannequins to the windows of the slowing cars. Some of the women are so tall and so sweetly spoken they can only be men, with long, stockinged calves and a slow flitter to their eyes. One fixes me straight. ‘Looking for company?’ she asks. ‘Thank you, not tonight, thanks,’ and we move on.

I walk down Park Lane, where the cars are thick and the night heavy. The lights from the cars blip, blip, blip through the dark. Life is hurried. I pass the Dorchester and the Hilton, down to the corner where the subway drops into ungraffitied neon. Down and up and down again to the upper parts of Knightsbridge. Along there the windows gleam. A friend of mine has opened a shop in Beauchamp Place. It is lacquered scarlet inside and beautiful, with black Japanese furniture standing on the hard-wood floor.

On and out, increasingly out, away from the polish of the glimmer-zone, made shinier at night, to the open-late businesses of South Ken, where Frascati and champagne stand cooled in ranks behind glass and the Indian at the till leaves a cigarette always smoking on the ledge beside him. On, out, westwards, where occasional restaurants are all that interrupt the domestic streets now tailing into dark. The pubs have shut. It is nearing midnight.

For a stretch the street lights are broken, perhaps two in a row, and it is darker here. I think nothing of it. My mind is on other things. On what? I was thinking of a place where I have been happy, some kind of mind-cinema of it flicking through my brain: sitting back on the oars in the sunshine in a small boat off the coast of some islands in the Hebrides, where black cliffs drop into a sea the colour of green ink and the sea caves at their feet drive 50 yards or more into pink, coralline depths.

That night I was thinking of these things, of hauling crabs from the sea, scrambling among the hissing shags and peering down the dark slum tunnels where the puffins live, lying down in the long grass while the ravens honked and flicked above me and the buzzards cruised. My mind was away there that night.

I must fight a reluctance to describe what followed. I am wearing a suit, an Italian suit I have had for years, with turn-ups to the trousers and pointed tips to the lapels. It is a sharkish, double-breasted thing. The Mayfair whores had seen a businessman inside it and so, I suppose, did the three youths, late teenagers, in the Lillie Road.

The heels of my shoes were striking the pavement too hard, like flints. I tried to soften them by treading on the balls of my feet. Two of the boys were on the inside of the pavement next to the wall. I did not look at them. The other was on the kerb. I walked between the three as though through an alley and adrenalin shocked into me as I saw their eyes go white in the unlit street. I saw the kerbside boy nod at the others. I thought how contemptible was my Daily Mail fear of these people. I was already beyond them, and relieved, when my eyes and mouth stung and burned and there were hurried hands under my armpits pulling and pushing me into the mouth of a passageway leading off the road. My body had hunched over as the ammonia came into my face – bleach squirted from a lemon squeezer – and they knelt me on the gritty pavement, as though I were being unpacked, a bale of stuff, my body and suit a pocketed rucksack, all hurry and hard fingers against my ribs. I said nothing. I tried to get up but they rubbed the bleach into my eyes, oddly without violence, in the way you would pull back on the chain of a dog, simply a control.

I was not a person but a suit with pockets. I was being fleeced, in the way a shepherd might fleece a sheep. My assets were being stripped. I knelt with the grit of the pavement pricking in my cheek while they looked for money and objects in the suit that was no longer mine. They were robbing the suit. The bleach had emptied it of a person, I could not help but regard from a distance this odd, disembodied theft. I was in pain but the burning in my eyes and mouth seemed unrelated to this professional going-over of my clothes, not my clothes, the clothes, some clothes.

They left, up the passageway. I lay for a moment on the concrete slabs, excited by the reality of what had happened. My eyes were blurry and my tongue was ulcered and raw. I can taste and smell the ammonia now, years afterwards, a chemical thickness to it, a fog of fumes rising from my mouth into my nose. I got up. I dusted the suit off; it was torn. I walked down to the North End Road. There was a fish-and-chip shop open there. I went in and asked the man behind the counter if I could wash my face in his basin. He looked at me. His apron was up around his armpits. ‘We’ve been messing about a bit, have we?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve just been fucking attacked.’

He showed me a room which had a basin and a towel in it. I washed there, deep in the water, holding the water to my face and eyes, wanting to wash the pain away, and the taste of the bleach, and the furry, clogged thickness on my tongue, but feeling, more than anything, broken, hopeless, at the end of a long and hopeless trajectory which, for many months and even years, had curved only down.

I walked to the house. It wasn’t far. I sat down on the doorstep. I said to myself I was fine. But I knew I wasn’t and eventually ended up in hospital where, at three in the morning, a doctor hosed the ammonia from my eyes, holding them open with his rubber-gloved fingers one by one, so that the water would sluice around the recesses of the eye. By pure chance, the doctor told me, precisely the same thing had happened to him the year before. Some Spurs fans had set upon him, squirted his eyes with bleach, robbed him and left him feeling blurry like this on the pavement. It was his way of consoling me, I suppose.

Only later, in Sarah’s bed, deep in the night, with the grey-yellow wash of the London street lights leaking around the edges of the curtains, did I allow myself to cry, to sob out all the held-back reservoir of humiliation and failure whose dam the mugging had broken.

It was not the attack itself for which I wept and sweated that night but everything of which it seemed, however irrationally, a culmination: the failure of my first marriage the year before, my guilt at my own part in that failure, the effect my leaving would have on my three sons by that marriage, the failure or near-failure of a business I had been involved with for five years, which I had also abandoned, unable to work properly any longer, leaving it in the hands of my cousin and co-director at the one moment he most needed my help. On top of that, a book I had been trying and failing to write had finally collapsed in exhaustion and uncertainty. If I had been a horse I would have been shot. I should have been shot. I had broken down.

The mugging was a catalyst not of change, but of paralysis. I scarcely moved for three months. I lay in bed. Sarah went alone to work and to parties. I saw in her face a terror of what she had allowed into her life. I let everything about me – my own work, my sense of self-esteem, any idea of care or responsibility for others – fall away. Nothing meant anything to me. I could make no decisions. When I met people I knew, they looked into my face as though something were missing there. I woke up tired. I spoke more slowly than before. I saw a psychotherapist and told him that I felt like a sooted chimney, nothing but a dusty black hollow cylinder inside my skin. I felt that my breath polluted the air around me. I dreamed of my children. One night we were walking in a rocky place like Crete. ‘I am sorry,’ I told them. ‘I must leave you behind,’ and without waiting for an answer set off up the side of a mountain which reminded me of Mount Ida, its dry, limestone bulk, its sterility, its demand to be climbed. I arrived at the chapel on the summit, a place of bare rock, and slumped down beside the walls, my face in my hands, my body with every muscle slackened, every limb like a bone in a bag. When I looked up, I saw the three boys coming towards me, easily moving up on to the final rise, a bobbing movement, alive, lightened, untaxed by the journey on which I had deserted them. ‘Why do divorced men become obsessed by their children?’ I heard a woman ask. I could have told her: because they watch them from what seems like the far side of death.

In the face of all that, Sarah was life itself. I had met her on holiday together with a few friends. She knew my sister Rebecca and I still remember every minute of those first mornings with her. She was strong and fearless. She took control. She arranged things. I told jokes to make her laugh and she laughed with her whole head thrown back and her throat open. She didn’t take any nonsense. She raced me downhill – we were skiing – and smoked on the lifts back up. She loved the west coast of Scotland and a half-abandoned house in chestnut woods in the valley of the Tarn. She was a doctor. She always voted Labour. She wore glamorous printed silk shirts from a company called English Eccentrics. She played with her long red-brown hair while talking to me. She was the natural focus of everyone around her. There was no side or twist to her: she was what she seemed to be. She could drink for England. She seemed to like me. She loved wild flowers. She never read a book. As she pointed out to me, she had beautiful long legs, very good for walking. She was in love with the cooking of the Veneto, which she had learned as a girl. Above all she had an appetite for living. She did not seem defeated. She looked not exactly like the future but like someone with whom and alongside whom the future was full of glow and richness. Life was full for her, not as an abstract idea – nothing intellectualized here – but as a reality which involved things, food, work, happiness, children, nature, gardens, beauty. She was the substance of life.

And so we fell in love – weeks and months of looking forward to seeing her and being with her, of being enlivened by her teasing, warm, loving presence. And with that, folded in with it, my own grief and despair at what had happened. I have never known things at the same time be so beautiful and so dark.

From her house in London, Sarah and I began to search for a refuge, however naïvely and hopelessly that idea was conceived. It stemmed from no more than a belief in the pastoral. ‘Are not these woods more free from peril than the envious court?’ a figure in As You Like It asks the surrounding company. I knew in the past I had been happy in rural places. I knew, or thought I knew, that a rural place would soothe this crisis. I knew, as I walked out in the streets of London, that there was no solace there. Every surface was dead in my eyes. My mind returned constantly to those islands in Scotland which I had been thinking of on the night of the attack. For 15 years I had owned them. My father had bought them 50 years before for £1,200 and he gave them to me when I was 21, as I was to give them to my son Tom when he was 18. Cynics have said that all this was for tax reasons, but it wasn’t. I think my father gave them to me because, as a very young man, he had felt enlarged and excited by the ownership of a place like that, by the experience of being there alone or with friends, away from the thing that Auden called ‘the great bat-shadow of home’, the enclosing, claustrophobic, involuntary oppression of a parental place, which makes a bawling, complaining infant of you. He wanted, I think, to give that same enlargement to me, as I do to my own children.

It worked and the gift was this: memories of weeks there, storm-battered, sun-stilled, on which I continue to draw every day of my life. I know those islands yard by yard, I know the places to clamber up and slither down, I know the particular corners where the pair of black guillemots always nests or where the bull seal hauls himself out on the seaweedy rock, I know where the fish congregate in the tidal streams or where the eddies riffle off a nose of lichened basalt and throw your dinghy out in a sudden curving arc towards the Lewis shore. I know the natural arch where the seals swim and where the kelp gathers in an almost Ecuadorian sun-barred forest beneath your coasting hull.

I was essentially shaped by those island times. Almost everything else feels less dense and less intense than those moments of exposure. The social world, the political world, the world of getting on with work and a career, all those were for ever cast in a shadow by the raging scale and seriousness of my moments of island life. That intimacy with the natural makes the human seem vacuous.

This may be straight Wordsworthianism and I would want to disown it in favour of a less monolithically obvious thing, a glitteringly complex attitude to nature which shimmered like an opal compared with my all-too-single basalt slab. But I can’t. I know nothing bigger or finer than the feeling that all barriers are down and a full-blown flood is running to and fro between you and the rest of the world.

I know all these things and treat them as my touchstones and my yardstick. Is this life, I always ask, as good as that? Does this place measure up to that? That is the fixture; everything else can only eddy around it.

We began to search for somewhere that might be the equivalent of all that, a place which in its own terms could be an island, around which the cord could be drawn, and where life could in some ways be hidden, or even innocent. It was the search for an Arcadian simplicity in which crisis and breakdown did not and could not occur. Fantasia you might say, but it had then an urgency and reality stronger and more concrete than anything else in the world around us. There was no sense, it seemed to me, of ‘getting away’. There was no desire to enter a capsule or satellite suspended above the earth. It felt, if anything, the very opposite of that, a burrowing in, a search for a bed in which the covers could be drawn up and over us. It was, I now see, these many years later, a search for a womb, a place in which you could be protected from damage. It was an infantile need and ferociously demanding because of that.

We roamed England with the template in our minds. It seems curious now that this search might have landed almost anywhere, that anywhere might have provided the bucket into which the love could have been poured. Dorset, Devon, Somerset, Shropshire, Herefordshire, Oxfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, east Kent: all for a time became the zone in which safety might be found. It looks pathetic now, the two of us, in the white 2CV we had at the time, poking about like moles for a burrow, living with a private intensity the common stuff of rural estate agents’ offices.

I had no perspective on what we were doing, or at least suspended any perspective I might have had. We were the first to do this. Of course we weren’t – we were the last, the heirs and successors of a line that goes back at least to the Roman love affair with the suburban villa, perhaps beyond that to the first urban civilizations of the Near East, where the concentrated demands and sophistication of city life produced, even at the beginning, a dream image of the garden place, the paradise, in which the realities did not impinge, where the commercial and competitive structures of the city were absent. Is Genesis itself, I now wonder, a symptom of a disenchanted urbanity?

I had no desire to delineate, let alone puncture, the bubble. I needed its insulation and a belief in its power and reality. For years I had kept in my mind, as a sort of mantra, a poem by R.S. Thomas:

I have seen the sun break through

to illuminate a small field

for a while, and gone my way

and forgotten it. But that was the pearl

of great price, the one field that had

the treasure in it. I realize now

that I must give all that I have

to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after

an imagined past. It is the turning

aside like Moses to the miracle

of the lit bush, to a brightness

that seemed as transitory as your youth

once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

(‘The Bright Field’, 1975)

Thomas, a parish priest in the Lleyn peninsula in Gwynedd, in the north-west corner of Wales, is playing a fugue on the words of both Exodus and the Gospels. The Authorised Version does indeed speak of Moses ‘turning aside’ to the burning bush; Christ, talking to the Apostles, describes the Kingdom of Heaven both as the field with the treasure in it and as the pearl of great price. Both, curiously perhaps to us who dissociate so firmly the religious from the financial, use the language of money and merchants. The conditions of paradise, in Christ’s own words, can be bought. If only estate agents had cottoned on to this! Sell all that you have, money for paradise, the pearl of great price, life is neither hurrying nor hankering: turn aside to the eternity that awaits you. Heaven is waiting, the paradise womb; only look for it and you will see the bush alight beside you. The brightness of youth can be once again to hand.

I look at myself then, nearly twenty years ago, and scarcely recognize the man I was: driven by a hunger for authenticity, for a place in the world that did not seem compromised but was somehow, in reality, almost heavenly. And I feel both nostalgia for that man – for the simplicity of his proposition – and utterly removed from him, as if he were some remote cousin, sharing a few common traits, and with something of a shared history, but with an attitude to the world that seems to know about almost nothing but himself. His need for happiness was so powerful that it erased nearly everything around him. It was as if he were walking through the world surrounded by a halo of need.