V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

Such refinement! But perhaps the scale — for farming — was wrong. Perhaps time should never be as valuable as that, day after day. Perhaps when routines became as tight as that, they could too easily go awry. One broken link — and human ventures were always liable to error — could throw the entire operation out of true.

Everything the new farm did was big. A very big silage pit was excavated at the bottom of the hill just across the lane from the windbreak, and not far from the cottages. There was only one old-fashioned aspect to that silage pit. It was covered by black plastic sheeting, and the things used to keep the plastic sheeting tight and in place were the things that in my experience had always been used for that purpose: old tires. They were bought in enormous numbers. Scores and scores of them must have been used; and scores and scores of them were about at the bottom of the valley, in the droveway, just across from what used to be Jack’s goose ground.

Those tires, and the deep new silage pit with its braced-up wall of timber planks, and the banks of rubble from the digging for the pit, and the dark-brown silage additive trickling out at the bottom, gave a touch of the rubbish tip to that part of the droveway where, when Jack lived, geese and ducks wandered about.

With the old farm workers the first caution with strangers, the sizing up, was followed by a dumb friendliness, the country sociableness of people who spent hours alone in the fields in their tractors. The new workers, who were like city people in the country, city people in a larger workplace, didn’t have that kind of friendliness. They hadn’t come to the valley to stay. They saw themselves as people with a new kind of job and skill; they were almost migrant agricultural workers; they were people on the move. Quite a few came and went.

I never got a smile from any of the people who moved into Jack’s house after Jack’s wife had left. She had said of the first lot of her new neighbors that they were “snobbish” people, who were interested in lawns and horses rather than old-fashioned cottage gardens. After some comings and goings, people who fitted that description settled in Jack’s cottage.

His greenhouse, the one bought as it seemed from a catalog and once green with hanging plants, was empty, its glass murky with dust and rain, its timber frame weathered. One day it was taken down, revealing the concrete foundation or floor. The elaborate garden, with all its time-eating chores, was flattened. What was left didn’t need much attention. No bedding out plants now; no forking over of the ground below the hawthorn tree; no delphiniums in the summer. The garden was flattened, all but two or three rose bushes and two or three apple trees which Jack had pruned in such a way that they bunched out at the top from a thick straight trunk. And the ground was grassed over. The hedge, once tight at the top, mud-spattered and ragged at the bottom, a half or quarter barrier between garden and rutted farm road, the hedge began to grow out into trees.

Now more than ever the cottages appeared to have neither front nor back, and to stand in a kind of waste ground. It matched the people and their attitude to the place. It matched the new way of farming, logic taken to extremes, the earth stripped finally of its sanctity — the way the pink thatched cottage on the public road, once pretty with its rose hedge, had been stripped of its atmosphere of home by the people who looked to it only for shelter.

But that might have been only my way of looking. I had known — for a short time — the straight stretch of the droveway open and unfenced. It had been fenced down the middle in my first year and had remained fenced; but I carried that earlier picture. I had arrived at my feeling for the seasons by looking at Jack’s garden, adding events on the river and the manor riverbank to what I saw in his garden. But there were other ways of looking. Jack himself, giving the attention he gave to a meaningless hedge — a hedge that ran down the length of his garden and then abruptly stopped — saw something else, certainly.

And perhaps the young children of the new people in Jack’s cottage saw differently. They went to a junior school in Salisbury. The afternoon bus, bringing them back, set them down on the public road; their mother picked them up in her car. Often on my afternoon walk I had to stand aside on the paved lane to allow the mother’s car to pass. She never acknowledged my stepping aside; she behaved as though the lane were a public road and her car had the right of way. And I also never took in or properly noticed what she was like. Her personality was expressed for me only in the color and shape of her car, speeding up or down the hill, going to get her children, or coming back with them.

I doubt whether any children in those farm cottages had been met like that off the school bus. What pictures of their time at the bottom of the valley — brief though that time was to be — would remain for them! What immense views, what a memory of emptiness, down the vast droveway and over the flinty slopes of the downs!

At the foot of the paved lane down the hill, across from the silage pit, there was a narrow, little-used track, overgrown, hardly showing as a track, that ran along a dip in the downs to a small abandoned farm building, weathered, not very noticeable, something perhaps from the last century. In that lane one Saturday afternoon, when they were free from school and the bus, I saw the children from Jack’s old cottage playing. Like prehistorical children, in a great solitude. But they were among the leftover tires of the silage pit (certain ones had been turned into their toys, their pretend paddling rafts); and the whitening banks and mounds of excavated rubble sprouting scattered weeds, pale green with bright yellow flowers; and concrete blocks left over from the building.

F RIENDSHIP HAS its odd ways. I had thought of the couple who looked after the manor, Mr. and Mrs. Phillips, people in their forties, as stern and self-sufficient, locked away and content in their manor job, and having a private and much less stern leisure life with old friends in a town somewhere. But then they developed a local friendship, and for some time I felt this friendship threatened my own life in the manor grounds.

Across the lawn from my cottage, against the “farmhouse” wall of the squash court — not farmhouse, not squash court — against that wall with its studied mixture of flint, red brickbats and bits of stone, there grew three old pear trees. They had been carefully pruned and trained at one time; and even now the main branches, still pinned to the wall, created a formal effect, making the trees look like large candelabra. The seasons dressed these branches in different ways; and the view from my cottage was always rich. The trees bore fruit. Always a surprise; always seemingly sudden. But to me they were not fruit to eat, and only partly because the fruit belonged to the manor: they were part of the picture.

In the great days of the manor sixteen gardeners looked after the grounds and the orchard and the walled vegetable garden. So I was told. Sixteen! How could anyone not running a plant nursery find sixteen gardeners nowadays or pay their wages? How different the hamlets and villages round about must have been then, how many working people in little houses!

The cottage where I lived had once been the garden office. Now I, who did nothing in the grounds, lived there. And there was only one gardener. He had a system. He used a hover-mower to cut the lawns, at the back and side of the manor and in front of my cottage, two or three times in the summer, after a very low cut in the early spring. In the early spring he also laid down weed killer on the drive and the old graveled path around the cottage lawn and on all those paths that had not been surrendered to grass. Once a year, in late August, he cut the tall grass and stalky weeds in the old orchard, where in the hollow knots of untended trees nestlings cheeped in the spring, and the trees themselves grew on, flowering at the correct time, bearing fruit, dropping fruit, attracting wasps. In the autumn he had a great leaf gathering. But his main work for much of the year was on the vegetable and flower garden, separated from the path at the back of my cottage by a high wall. The system worked. The garden had its wild parts; the water meadows were marsh; but elsewhere the gardener’s attentions, slight but regular and with method, suggested a controlling hand.