Smell of Summer Grass: Pursuing Happiness at Perch Hill. Adam Nicolson

      

       The Smell of Summer Grass

      Pursuing Happiness

      at Perch Hill

      ADAM NICOLSON

       Copyright

      William Collins

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      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.

      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

       Dedication

      In memory of Simon Bishop

       1958–2009

       Acknowledgements

      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

       Cover

       Title Page

      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

Part One BREAKING

       The Bright Field

      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