Smell of Summer Grass: Pursuing Happiness at Perch Hill
The Smell of Summer Grass is based partly on the long out of print 'Perch Hill'. It is the story of the years spent in finding and building a personal Arcadia, sometimes a dream, sometimes a nightmare, by writer Adam Nicolson and his wife, cook and gardener, Sarah Raven.Adam Nicolson was determined to leave metropolitan life but the rundown farm in the Sussex Weald was not quite what he bargained for. The scenery was breathtaking and the rural neighbours charming but the hard end of real farming life was another matter - mud, cold, planning regulations and unco-operative livestock.But for the reader the whole enterprise is full of delight thanks to Adam Nicolson's writing: frank, witty and touching, it is a testament to the importance of holding on to your dreams and turning them into reality.
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The Smell of Summer Grass
Pursuing Happiness
at Perch Hill
ADAM NICOLSON
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
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.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007335572
Ebook Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007335589
Version: 2015-02-26
The following images are reproduced with many thanks:
| Section I page 2 top | Jeremy Newick |
| Section I page 2 bottom | Andrew Palmer |
| Section I page 5 bottom | Jonathan Buckley |
| Section I page 8 top | Alexandre Bailhache |
| Section II page 2 top | Jonathan Buckley |
| Section II page 3 bottom | Alun Price |
| Section II pages 4-5 | Jonathan Buckley |
| Endpapers | Ricca Kawai. |
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
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.
My stepfather and I do not communicate. ‘It’s only worth reading one book a year,’ he says. ‘The trouble with this country is the over-education of the young.’ ‘Calling a parcels service “Red Star” is a sign of the depth of communist influence, even now, in England.’
Nothing is given. I leave the house to walk across London to somewhere on the edges of Hammersmith, where I am living with Sarah Raven, the woman for whom, a few months previously, I have left my wife. That is a phrase which leaves me raw. Sarah has gone somewhere else this evening, to have dinner with friends, and won’t be back until midnight or later. I have left as early as I can from the Mayfair house and think ‘Why not?’ A warm night. A walk through London and its glitter in the dark, to expunge that padded house and all its upholstered hostilities.
