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

William Collins

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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

In memory of Simon Bishop

1958–2009

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 The Smell of Summer Grass Pursuing Happiness at Perch Hill ADAM NICOLSON

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

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.