All Cheeses Great and Small: A Life Less Blurry

In shops, apples all have to be exactly the same size. Shops would probably prefer it if apples were cube shaped so they could fit more in a crate, but I soon discovered that the small ones are the best. They are cuter and they are sweeter. There were four different kinds of apple in the little orchard and they were all as different as cheese and onion and salt and vinegar. There was a mist on the cherry-red skins. I’ve since learned it’s natural yeast. I polished a red one to a deep purple shine on the corner of my shirt.

The joy of fruit trees is profound. They need very little looking after. All they require is the odd haircut. No primping, feeding or weeding. Every year, they bounce back and knock me over with their bounty.

Full of apples, I wandered over to the giant sequoia, the vast tree that dominated the landscape, to see the sun go down. The giant sequoia is the largest living thing on the planet. There’s quite a well-known photo of one with a road going through the middle. They come from north-west America, but are fairly common in this country. Great avenues of them line the drives of stately homes like moon rockets, skewing the scale of everything. You see odd specimens in parkland dwarfing the ancient oaks. The farmer had told me it was supposed to be the tallest tree in Oxford, but he may have been mistaken. For starters, it’s clearly not in Oxford, Oxford is twenty miles away, but it is definitely tall, visible for miles around, straight and narrow as an arrow but leaning gently to one side. It set the tone for the whole farm really, that wonkiness. You could never be too precious living in the shadow of a vast, beautiful and lopsided tree. It towered over everything. I thought it must be hundreds of years old, but it turned out to be a mere sapling. There was one planted on each of the farms in the neighbourhood in the twenties. They can live for up to two and a half millennia but this was the sole survivor. They get struck by lightning and fall. If this one fell on the house it would be all over. Although it was leaning away and pretty unlikely to topple in the wind, it was hard to say what might happen in a lightning strike.

I gradually came under its spell as I stood there. I love that tree. It’s the first thing I look for when I’m coming home, the first thing I see when I walk out the front door. It swayed in the breeze. It’s swaying in the breeze now. Some people came round a few months ago. They said they wanted to tell me that the man who planted the tree had died, but I think they were just being nosey. I wanted to say ‘That’s a shame, I would have liked to ask him why he planted something that will be as large as the Eiffel Tower one day, quite so close to my house,’ but I managed to contain myself. It was puzzling why this colossal thing had been plonked on the doorstep. There were so many other places it could have gone. That was the perfect spot for a magnolia, not for a Tree-Rex. So many of the problems faced by farmers now are due to that kind of short-sightedness in previous generations.

I’d put my marker down on two hundred acres of England, but I still wasn’t clear exactly how big an acre was. Very few people seem to know what an acre is any more. Even the estate agent couldn’t help me there. Someone had told me Soho was about 140 acres, but it was part of a different planet. Here I was. Alone and quite liking it. I drifted across another huge concrete slab – it was instantly clear how much farmers love concrete – but beyond the huge tiles of the cast concrete pads, tessellating meadows and fields, so inviting: all that space, after being cooped up in a city for so long. I was totally, utterly, completely and blissfully clueless about farming; about building, about animal husbandry and gardens. Hedging, ditching and dry stoning all sounded like medieval forms of capital punishment. But the idea of having some land to play with was just enough to stop me being scared of what I’d done, which was to cash in all my chips for a vast ship that had foundered, run aground and, however magnificent it was, was beginning to sink.

I spent the days wandering the land, and the evening hours gazing at old drawings of the farm buildings and maps. The farmer had handed me a battered document folder full of well-thumbed drawings and plans stretching back a hundred years or so. There was also a map showing what the parish looked like a hundred years before that – almost exactly the same as it does now: it had the same field boundaries, the same roads and paths, even the ditches and drains were the same. The village was all there and just the same size. It was obvious just from wandering around though, that the valley had been under cultivation for millennia. There were a couple of fields of ‘ridge and furrow’, the remains of the farming system of the Middle Ages. There was an ‘S’-shaped field. When a field is ‘S’-shaped, it means it was ploughed by oxen so it would be very old indeed. There were ancient tumuli, standing stones and even one or two lesser known stone circles from the mists of time dotted around the parish. The oldest part of the farmhouse was the bit right next to the well and was probably built as a gamekeeper’s cottage deep in the Wychwood Forest in the 1600s – I loved the way no one knew. There were wells all around the barnyard. Every time I dug a new hole, I found a well – they are still turning up. I found another one just last month: wells and drains, everywhere. The architecture of the farm wasn’t just the stuff you could see. There was lots of stuff underground, too. It had proper sewers that, fortunately, all seemed to be working perfectly.

I’d bought a knackered cattle farm, but a hundred years ago when it was a small part of a vast feudal estate, it would have been knocking out a bit of everything. There would have been chickens, geese and ducks. A pigsty. Back then, it was home to a notable Shorthorn dairy herd. There would have been sheep for wool and for meat, as well as the extinct nuttery and the long gone orchards. A few dozen people would have worked here, taking care of the stock and tending arable crops: fodder for the animals, as well as cereal crops for the household and for market. There had been a bakery – I found the traces of the huge old bread oven, a sooty shadow on a wall – and a dairy that would have produced cheese and butter. Basically, it would have created more or less everything you can find in an upmarket delicatessen in Islington.

Over the last hundred years agriculture has changed beyond all recognition. Within living memory, fields were all ploughed by horse-drawn equipment: now it’s all about space age technology; combine harvesters linked by computers to satellites. Farms used to produce a wide variety of crops, but recently farmers have tended to concentrate on just doing one thing – watching machines. There are fewer farm workers and the countryside is peppered with beautiful, but redundant farm buildings. It’s easy to make stuff grow, but it’s very hard to make money from farming.

Even vegetable gardens, once such practical things, have become quite whimsical luxuries. In terms of cost, it really doesn’t make sense to grow your own vegetables. Allotments are popular but no one grows their own to save money. They do it because they like it.

I suppose I was coming at the place from a different perspective than anyone who had ever worked here, seeing its resources from a tourist’s point of view, with a sense of wonder at all the stuff that had accumulated as the wheels of agriculture had begun to turn faster and faster. I hired someone to help, a farm manager, but he clearly thought I was mad and left after a week. I continued poking around and turned up all kinds of treasure. I found a steel chopper, a scythe, in an old shed, it was rusty, but beautifully made and the blade, when sharpened, was the finest piece of steel I’ve ever seen. I didn’t find the old cricket pitch. But after a bit more poking around I did find the remains of a motte and bailey in the railway field – a Norman castle. It had just been sitting there quietly all along.

There was a river. I’d asked the farmer if there were fish in it. He said he thought so but that he’d never had time to go fishing. This seemed crazy. The river frontage was one of the main reasons that I bought the farm. What a thing to have! A river. There was about a quarter of a mile of the Evenlode. It was soon obvious that I would never have time to go fishing either, but the river was a source of hope, the only thing that really seemed to work in the whole place – the only thing I could trust to do what it was supposed to do and not break down, fall over or need servicing. It’s been rolling happily down the border of the farm for centuries and will do for centuries to come.

There was a railway line following the river and an eight-acre wood backing on to the railway line. Eight acres of ancient woodland: eight city blocks of the European equivalent of tropical rainforest. Giant puffballs, strange toadstools, thriving in the tangle and orchids, among the remains of rusting pheasant pens, a big pile of green tyres and a mess of rooks. I only found out for sure it was ancient woodland later but the very first time I fought my way in there, it was clear it was primordial. To enter, was to step inside another world with a slightly different climate. Even at the end of a hot summer, in places it was still really quite boggy among the oak trees. The place hadn’t been cultivated for decades, hadn’t been touched. A dashing hare, a dancing weasel, but no people had been in there for years.

The last few owners had more pressing concerns. Even the farmer before the one I bought the place from, had been chasing his tail. He’d chopped down fifty acres of ancient woodland but there was still a handful of the old forest left. He must have known it was vital. And it was. It was smaller than it had been, but once inside it felt like it went on forever and there was nowhere else in the world; a bit like when you’re in Selfridges.

I was used to being one of a crowd. I rarely spent much time alone. The more it was very still and very quiet, the less I seemed to notice I was on my own.

I’d been on endless loops of world tours – passing through hotel rooms, ballrooms and bedrooms – but now I felt anchored to something. The river, those woods and fields, but mainly to my wife. I loved her. It was a combination of things that brought me to a standstill, snapped me to my senses. As a travelling man, I suppose I led many lives simultaneously and didn’t take any of them particularly seriously, but now I got to work, thinking with all my might: new home, newly wed, new job. There were a lot of puzzles to solve. My friends all thought I had gone mad, and I had. Love does that. Every shed was a new possibility and for the first time in my life, at the age of thirty-two, I began to get out of bed early. I was always busy. I became absorbed by everything about the place, even the weather. I spent the evenings researching wind speed gauges and rainfall indicators as the heat of the summer began to disperse. The colours changed, and the supreme calm of late September cast its spell over the farm as the haze of summer gradually cleared. The distant horizon emerged in sharp focus and I could glimpse stately homes on their hilltops. The whole landscape softened, all the hard edges obscured by seeding grasses and haywire shrubs. Those derelict buildings full of birds, butterflies and dragonflies, silver sunlight and long shadows, standing still in a strong breeze. The leaves on the fruit trees were starting to droop, yellow and drop. While dawdling in the garden I spotted, picked and ate a solitary apple – a real beauty that had been missed, high up, hidden by leaves until just then. It was only a couple of weeks ago that high summer had its moment, but the blackberries now seemed to belong to a different world, another time and place altogether. Other than that apple and a few cheerful bright jewels of alpine strawberries, there was just the pear tree with its bounty still intact, dangling from almost bare branches, like upside down balloons. The garden party was over.

It was the very last firework of summer, that pear tree. It’s miraculous really. I was sure that, like the rest of the garden, it had had little or no attention over the year, or years past. But it was spectacular. I’ve never had pears quite that juicy.

A fire burned in the grate as I picked every last one, a great big basketful: all shapes and sizes, some long and thin like sausages, and some almost completely round, like dumplings, but somehow still all very clearly pear-like. I couldn’t resist eating the little tiny ones while I was out there. The biggest nobbly ones we sliced, seasoned, sloshed with oil and roasted on the fire. Eating them with sticky fingers in a silent huddle, feeling the little kicks in Claire’s tummy, watching the flames and listening to the rain as the wind rattled the windows.

And that was it. All of a sudden, snap, the nights drew in. A cold wind rolled in from the east. The lawn was a carpet of leaves and broken rose petals. We’d been living in the garden as much as the house, but from now until the spring we’d be holed up in the draughty house.

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