Adam Nicolson - Smell of Summer Grass - Pursuing Happiness at Perch Hill

One winter day I went down there again. I had never seen Perch Hill outside its springtime freshness or its hay-encompassed summer glory. This day was different. I was alone; Sarah remained with Rosie in London. A wind was cutting in from the east and for days southern England had remained below zero. All colour had drained out of the landscape. In the valley, the woods were black and the fields a silky grey as in my night-time visions of the place. The stones on the track into the farm were frozen and they made no sound as I drove over them. The geese were huddled in the lee of a bank, fingers of wind lifting the feathers on their backs. Even they couldn’t bring themselves to run out and attack me. Frost-filled gusts blew across the frozen pond. The buildings were besieged by cold.

I was there to persuade Ventnor that he should sell his farm to us for something less than the £432,000 at which he had stuck for so long. I had no real tools or levers with which to achieve this, only the suggestion that a lower price might be fair. Smilingly, over a cup of coffee, he refused. We sat first in the kitchen and then by the fire. He was polite but adamant. The oak logs burned slowly. To my own surprise, I felt no resentment. I sat there agreeing with every word he said. Why should he leave the embrace of this? Why should the poor man go out into the cold if he did not want to?

He left the room to see a man who had come to the door and as I sat there I began to be embraced by the warmth of the house. I felt it wrap its own fingers around me. If a house could speak, that was the day it spoke, the day I learned this wasn’t simply a place where we could come and impose our preconceptions. We couldn’t simply land the Bright Field fantasy here and take that as the reality in which we were now ensconced. There was some kind of dignity of place to be respected here. It had a self-sufficiency which went beyond the demands and obsessions of its current occupants. There was a pattern to it, a private rhythm, the deep, slow music to which it had been moving for the four or five centuries that people had lived in it. The two of us men sitting here now in front of the fire, what were we in the light of that? Transient parasites.

I left and we had failed to agree on price but in some other, quite unstated way, I had succumbed. The buildings might be a mishmash of what we wanted and what we didn’t. They might confront us with a list of things to do that stretched 10, 20 years into the future. The price that was required might be unreasonably high. But all of that was translated that frosty day, or perhaps started to be translated that frosty day, with the hot oak fire glowing as the only point of colour in a colourless world, into something quite different: a commitment to the place as it actually was, with all the wrinkles of its history and its habits, all its failings and imperfections, all its human muddle. Stop fussing, it said. Give yourself over to what seems good. Here – after catastrophe and culpable failure in my own life, after I had witnessed Sarah, now my wife, tending to me as I collapsed – was some kind of signpost towards coherence. Don’t look for the perfect; don’t be dissatisfied if the reality does not match the vision. Don’t insist on your own way. Feed yourself into patterns that others have made and draw your sustenance from them. Accept the other.

‘You mean pay him what he wants?’ Sarah asked that evening as I put this to her.

‘Yes,’ I said. And we did.

If a son or daughter of mine said to me nowadays that they were thinking of doing what we did then, selling everything, taking on deep debts, putting their families on the verge of penury for years to come and acquiring a place that needed more sorting out than they knew how to pay for, a rambling collection of half-coherent buildings and raggedy fields, I would say, ‘Are you sure? Are you sure you want to shackle yourself with all this? Do you know what it is you are so hungry for that this seems a price worth paying?’

Just now, faintly, as ghosts from the past, I remember people saying those things to us at the time and thinking, ‘Ah, so they don’t understand either. They haven’t understood what it is to be really and properly alive.’ And knowing for sure what that meant myself: that when faced with a steep slope or a rough sea, you should not quiver on the brink, or spend your life pacing up and down on the sand looking at the surf. You should plunge off down it or into it, trusting that when you arrive at the bottom or the far shore, you will know at least that the world’s terrors are not quite as terrifying as they sometimes seem.

Do I believe that now? Nelson told his captains that the boldest moves were the safest, but Nelson was happy to lose everyone and everything in pursuit of victory. I can’t forget the decades of debt and anxiety which lay ahead of us then, the years of work in trying to reduce the mountain of borrowings, article after article, the alarm clocks in the dark, the working late on into the night to try to balance the books. But would I now exchange the life we have had for one in which we had never taken that risk or made that step? No, not at all. I am as happy that Sarah and I married ourselves to Perch Hill as I am about the existence and beauty of my own children.

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