for miles around’ – as a neighbour had helpfully mentioned while we were moving in and I was wondering what on earth we were doing. I had wept to leave our previous home, where the children had grown up and where the fifteen years had been (for the most part) contented. For a long time I would have a recurring dream of letting myself into the old, beloved rectory, walking through rooms that were empty and just as I had left them, then creeping into the attic to hide – for ever.
J and I were brave with each other, but at times I knew even he wondered if we had done the right thing. We made mistakes with the building, which was cold, cold, cold. The wind howled not just around it but through it. Poet Michael Longley captured both the good and the bad in these lines:
No insulation –
A house full of draughts,
Visitors, friends:
Its warmth escaping –
The snow on our roof
The first to melt.
The unlit yard was slate black. One night, having driven my daughter to a friend’s (as the mothers of teenagers must), I stopped halfway down the track to the farm – because nobody was at home and I could not face its dark emptiness. I was starting to cry when, suddenly, I was startled by a flash of white and a muffled thud of paws. A badger charged across the rough track in front of my stationary car, and away into the darkness. Excited, I took it as a positive sign and went home.
The isolation could render your heart speechless in the face of the night and its sounds. This is not a fear of marauders, you must understand – although friends would ask me, ‘Don’t you get spooked – alone here?’ It is the silence that underlies the harsh chatter of rooks in the susurrating stand of trees, as well as the sense of generations of struggle imprinted on the stones of that windy hillside. It is the exposure to such an immensity of sky you cannot but be brought face to face with your own inadequacy. And mortality. The strangest truth was this: in all the years J and I lived at the farm I (who had previously written five novels, many more children’s books and liked to paint and make things) found it impossible to create. Once the home itself was made, just living there and running our lives took almost all my reserves of energy. Feng shui practitioners would say the chi – the energy – could not stay in a house like that because the front door and the back door were exactly aligned. Whoosh – it goes, whirling through, and taking a part of your soul with it. Tractors. Hedge planting. Infected sheep. Cows getting out. People coming and going. Black ice matching the hole of the farm finances. Feed delivered by lumbering lorries. Lambing in a May frost. The track so bumpy taxis refused to come down and so it had to be made up properly, at more cost. The troughs frozen. Poisonous ragwort. Fences breaking. Running out of oil. The fox leaving two headless chickens on the track. A kitchen garden carved out of the hillside at great cost. Dead sheep.
Ah, but on summer days, the light would spill over the creamy stone floors of our hall and atrium and the homestead had a Mediterranean air and everybody who came would breathe in the scent of thyme planted in the courtyard, exclaiming with admiration at what we had created for ourselves. There was a meadow called the Aldermoor where grew about twenty varieties of wild flower. The house appeared in magazines. J said it was his favourite place in the whole world and everyone who visited saw why – even if they might not have chosen to live on the windy hill.
You have to allow places to change you, or else you will never settle, let alone be happy. I confess (broken-hearted over the move from my dream house, our rectory) that I was puzzled that my husband should become so obsessed with the need to farm, at a time when farming was not in good health. Yet that need was rooted deep in his childhood. Despite myself I understood, even if I lacked sympathy. Not only had he been a champion show-jumper in his teens, but he had studied agriculture, worked on the Royal Farm at Windsor Castle, broken and trained champion horses professionally – and that all before going to University College London to read philosophy where (a brilliant student and student editor who took on the college authorities with late-sixties radicalism) he was to write a dissertation on ‘Base and Superstructure in Marx’. There followed a distinguished career during which he reported from all over the world, made history in Ethiopia, risked his life working under cover in Pinochet’s Chile, saw terrible sights and interviewed leaders, made countless documentary series (this in the much-lamented golden era of British television), wrote books, did sterling work for various charities … But through it all he never lost his yearning for a real country life: the deep desire to plant hedges, husband good soil, stride out on land that is your own.
Whenever I welcomed him back home to the farm from London, where he would have been interviewing politicians for his eponymous weekly television programme, he would throw off his suit to pull on old clothes and stride to the sheds to help with the lambing, like a true Renaissance man. When he bought a horse (then two, then three) and was still (in his fifties) able to vault straight up without even putting a foot in the stirrup, I knew that the most accomplished gaucho in Argentina would nod approval at his prowess. Women like men who straddle more than one world.
Gradually I became tougher, although my brother-in-law once said I was the least likely farmer’s wife he had ever seen. I bought rubber boots – but rarely wore them. Learned to layer big sweaters over thick skirts. Even once drove the huge, ancient Land-Rover in the snow, because otherwise I would have been marooned. Alone on the farm (as I so often was), I learned independence. Once, with a coat over my nightdress, I even rounded up the escaped cows who were destroying the garden, placing Billie and Sam like troops on the flank and advancing fearlessly, shouting ‘Garn!’ and thwacking with my stick, driving them up to the barn, so that when the stockman and his wife arrived at last I was in charge. J was immensely (and disbelievingly) proud of me. The story of how the urban writer tamed the herd went up and down the valley. ‘Field-cred’ I called it.
One spring morning, not a year after we had moved, I experienced the epiphany which leads – in a way I can now see but could not possibly have known then – me back to the subject of this book.
It was late April and I was alone. The light woke me very early and from the window I glimpsed a morning of such limpid perfection it was impossible to remain indoors. I dressed quickly, afraid to miss the glitter of the dew, and released Billie and Sam from the laundry room where they had their beds. No need for leads. Out into the watery gold of the day with the dogs bounding and snapping at the air in exhilaration.
I walked past the well, across the wide circle of gravel, past the handsome barn and thence right into the fields. And then I saw them. The Herefords were crowding near the fence, their chestnut flanks gleaming in the sunlight as they bent their creamy topknots to tug at the grass. There is a sweetness about cows I had never noticed before: their gentle, wary eyes in big white moon faces. That heavy, grassy smell and the rhythmic, chomping sounds they make, between low, faintly protesting moos. Because it was still chilly their breaths came out in little clouds, like ectoplasm hanging in the air – the whispering spirits of their beefy herd. What had they witnessed since the seventeenth century, those pedigree Herefords, what breed memory looked out through those rolling eyes?
They ruminated and inspected me. I leaned on the fence and looked back and we were not afraid of each other. The air waited. And it was with a sudden leap of the spirit that I said aloud, ‘Good morning, girls. You’re looking so beautiful this morning! Aren’t you gorgeous?’
To speak to them like that, to acknowledge their presence as I would a fellow human and admire their individual, curly-topped, four-square magnificence, was to put us on a level. To take my part in the wholeness of things. I now realize that it was at that precise point that I allowed myself to be affected by the genius loci – the spirit of the place. And it was the animals – rather than the trees or the distant sweep of the land, or the astonishing sense of worship I felt before the first primroses and the swathes of cowslips – which eased
