Smell of Summer Grass: Pursuing Happiness at Perch Hill. Adam Nicolson
have in a half-hearted, uncertain and rather respectful way, nibble at the edges, trimming this, pulling away at that. He waded into the central problem. Confronted with the giant collapsed ash stools, the muddle of elder and bramble and old splintered oak limbs, he attacked them ruthlessly and systematically. The cosmetics were left till later. Meanwhile, the stacks of usable cordwood grew at those points on the edge of the wood where, in a ground-hardening frost, a tractor and trailer would later reach them. His fires consumed the toppings, the useless bits and pieces. Every day that winter they burned in three or four places at once, positioned so that the smoke could chimney out through a gap between the big trees around them. From a field or two away the wood looked like a small leafy settlement, with the smoke climbing out from the three or four separate hearths and the chainsaw whining and relaxing, whining and relaxing as another fallen thorn or overgrown hazel was sliced and readied.
It was a wonderful sight – in the mind’s eye as much as anything else – Peter moulding the wood in the way other people might pick up a lump of clay and shape a pot from it. He was a gentle and not especially gregarious or socially confident man. If there were other people about, he would often decide not to come in for a cup of tea or for lunch. Wooding is a private business, done in private, the results remaining virtually private, the whole event without a public face. And it was there, in that self-contained world, that he excelled. ‘Do you like wooding?’ I asked him and he replied in the way you might expect. ‘It’s a job,’ he said and lifted his eyebrows into a smile.
We have four patches of woodland on the farm. One, the Way Shaw, is a field that was let go before the war and was now a thicket of bracken and wind-twisted birches. Ken said the remains of a V-1 doodlebug lay somewhere in there, but nobody knew where. Two of the others, Toyland Shaw and Middle Shaw, are old hornbeam coppices with some big oaks in them. The fourth, the Ashwood Shaw, is a wonderful old ash coppice, with giant stools growing on a steep bank between Great Flemings and Hollow Flemings, some of the stools twelve and fifteen feet across, with four or five 60-foot-high trees growing from each divided base.
This, in miniature, is a rich inheritance, an ash wood and a hornbeam wood providing the two necessary materials: one light but strong, making perfect poles for the handles of tools, for rakes and hay forks, the other tough and resistant. Mill cogs were always made of hornbeam wood and whenever I look at them I think of that, the iron hardness lurking under the oddly snake-like bark, the trunks not making good clean poles like the ash but twisted, fixed in a frozen and rather ugly writhing. The ash and the hornbeam, the calm and the perplexed, the classic and the romantic of an English woodland.
I was feeling my way with the wood. Clearing up was obviously the first stage of what to do here, but it wouldn’t be enough. That autumn a couple of enormous ash trunks crashed out of the wood and into Hollow Flemings, the field below the shaw. There had been no great winds, nor anything else to disturb them. They had simply grown too big for their foundations. The leverage of the 60-foot trees became too much and they snapped out of their fixings at ground level, leaving a torn stump and exacerbating a weakness which meant that other stems from the same stool would soon go. The only way to save the plants was to cut them down. New growth would spring from the shorn stubs and the interrupted cycle of coppicing, which, judging from the size of the stools, must be many centuries old on that bank, undoubtedly a medieval landscape, would be resumed.
I talked to a local timber man, Zak Soudain, about the wood and he was keen to have it. The bottom end of an ash trunk, where it moves slightly out from the stool and then up towards the light, a shape which preserves even in old age the first directions taken by the new stem in the first spring after coppicing, is the most valuable part of all. It is used to make lacrosse sticks. Nothing else will do. The rest, the straight clean lightness of the ash, goes into furniture.
So far, so profitable. But there was a hazard. We were overrun with deer. As we looked out of the bedroom window soon after seven in the morning, there would be eight or ten deer grazing in the field. The fawns in September were still playing with each other in a puppyish, skittish way. There was a stag with a single antler left, walking around lopsided like a car with one headlight out. Deer eat young trees. If we cut the ash down, they would chew off all the new shoots, the stools would die and I would have destroyed a small sliver of the late medieval landscape. But if we didn’t cut the ash trees down they would probably collapse in the next big storm and the wood would be destroyed anyway. Deer-fencing was prohibitively expensive and ugly. I wasn’t quite sure what to do about this and so I dithered while Peter easily and confidently moved through the fallen mess of things. I asked him one day what he would do. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s not for me to say. You’ve got to decide, Adam. It’s your wood.’ I didn’t tell him that, as far as I could see, the wood felt more like his.
That autumn I bought our first sheep: 20 Border Leicester ewes, which had already been through one year’s lambing. They were advertised in the local free-sheet, £600 for the lot. I knew we had to plunge into livestock and this was a way of doing it. Will Clark and I drove over to look at them. Will said he knew about sheep and did quite a bit of squeezing of the back end of the animals in question. I certainly knew nothing. The woman selling them, wearing a fetching pair of buckskin chaps, said they were marvellous. So I bought them.
Carolyn Fieldwick, Will Clark’s daughter and wife of Dave Fieldwick, the shepherd, had a ram to sell us. I bought him for £100. He was a big, stumbling, black-faced Suffolk and we called him Roger. He arrived on 5 November and started to mosey around our field full of ewes. If a ewe conceives on Guy Fawkes’ Day, Ken Weekes told me, the lamb will be born on April Fool’s Day. Roger seemed, it must be said, quite cheap at £100, and looked a little seedy. I could see him in a Dennis Potter play, snuffling around the ewes’ rear ends like a tramp going through the dustbins at the back of a restaurant. They didn’t much like the look of him or his intentions and used to move off to eat more grass in some other, less interfered with part of the field.
It brought back memories of 18-year-old parties, in which all the girls were pristine, self-sufficient and adult and I was a grubby, grasping bundle of unattraction, trotting around about 2 yards behind them. At least I didn’t have to wear the sort of thing we put on Roger, a harness that Helmut Newton would have been proud of, holding a large yellow block of crayon wax in the middle of his chest. Whenever Roger managed to corner a ewe, he rubbed this, as a side-effect so to speak, all over her bottom so that we would know she’d been done. After the best part of a week, his score was two yellowed bottoms and one ewe that seemed to have an intensively crayoned left shoulder. Radical misfire or poor sense of geography: whichever it was, nothing could have been more familiar.
What an agony for poor Roger! So many requests, so much rejection. I caught him in successful action only once: a desperate five seconds of up-ended quiver and then down on all fours again, that look of hopelessness flooding back in, a sense of everything being over, a look on his poor, crumpled-ear face of utter bemusement. Why, I said to him, can’t we all procreate like the trees?
Winter came sidling up on us. By mid-December, the darkness had lowered over the whole place, that terrible lightlessness when all you can do is remember the long lit summer, the after-hay evenings when the fields had a purified cleanness to them, patterned with an odd and unplanned-for regularity in the bales waiting to be collected, each of them throwing its shadow to the next, like a dabbed mark with a broad-bladed pen, while the dog is manically teasing some left-out wisps of hay and the children are playing man-hunt among the bales. What a sudden inrush of lost time that is.
My daughter Rosie, who was two that year, thought the trees were dead. ‘The trees are dead,’ she said one morning after breakfast, as one might announce that the war in Bosnia was over or Arsenal were third in the Premiership.
‘Not dead,’ I said, ‘just resting.’
‘Are they sleepy?’
‘Yes, they are, I suppose.’
‘Why aren’t they lying down then?’
Anyone who doesn’t believe in the reality of Seasonal Affective Disorder might learn a thing or two if they took a trip to the Sussex Weald in winter. Our own immediate surroundings that December represented the English winter in excelsis: a sapless, shrunken sump. I stayed