stage, and yet he had not heard of her. Nor had I.
Her name was Susan Chilcott.
Two
LOSING
It is late last night the dog was speaking of you;
The snipe was speaking of you in the deep marsh.
It is you are the lonely bird through the woods;
And that you may be without a mate until you find me.
Lady Gregory, ‘Poets and Dreamers’ (translating eighth-century Irish)
Our farm was J’s dream from childhood, an echo of his happy family home with its barns and entourage of animals – to which ours bore a strange resemblance. An old, low, sprawling building protected from the worst winds by being tucked into a dip in the land, like the space a dog makes when it turns round and round to scoop out its bed. A house with barns and stables, a settlement whose ancient stones would become imprinted with our story, to add to all those it had known over three centuries. A home that could be created in our own image – the dank inner courtyard brought into the house, glazed and turned into an atrium, its weight supported by Bath stone corbels which we had beautifully carved by an artist-craftsman in situ to my master design. They represented the four seasons, four elements, literary themes and so on. We wanted our house to be a work of art as well as to contain our collection.
But it needed to be made bigger, for we had moved there (following J’s dream of farming organically) from a large rectory in a pretty village a few miles away and the existing farmhouse was too small for our needs. So a long, dilapidated animal shed at right angles to the main house was renovated to form a study for me, a spectacular double-height sitting room with windows on three sides and (best of all) a low, peaceful library with two window seats overlooking the valley. Across from the house was a small building which became a cottage for Robin (when he was around, as he worked a lot abroad) and our son Daniel, and (later) for J’s groom and her family. There would be extra rooms for us over there too, and across the yard was the huge barn which would become, in time, a games room. We loved to have a house full of friends and family. At New Year for instance: space was necessary. The place was unusual and extraordinary, with a 145-degree view that was miraculous when the valley was full of mist but the surrounding hills and farms rose above it, like ships on a foaming sea. I find it almost impossible to describe the magical atmosphere of the home J and I created, or its wild beauty.
The summer we moved there (1994) had been the hottest in decades and the whole valley crisped to golden brown. These were the classic dog days of summer, when Sirius burned brightly in the night sky. This is the Dog Star, the faithful creature at the heels of Orion, the brightest star in Canis Major and called Canicula (little dog) by the Romans. Strangely, native American peoples associated it with dogs too – the Cherokee seeing it as a guardian of the ‘Path of Souls’, the Blackfoot calling it ‘Dogface’ and the Alaskan Inuit naming it ‘Moon Dog’. Yes, it was right that the brightest star in the firmament should hang in the sultry night sky above our new home. But in the Iliad Homer describes this frozen firework as ‘an evil portent, bringing heat/And fevers to suffering humanity’. That was to prove right.
We celebrated the two stages of the huge building project with parties for the carpenters, stonemasons, electricians and labourers who became as familiar as friends and gained nutty tans working shirtless on the site. But by the end of that first winter we had learned the measure of the place; the wind howled about the house like the ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff and the north-facing position meant that frost and ice would remain in pockets and corners for weeks. Our flock of Lleyn sheep huddled below the library windows, coughing and grumbling under the ancient stone walls, just a couple of metres from my books. At night the brief, harsh yelps of foxes and screech owls would shatter the bitter air. Upper Langridge Farm justified its reputation as ‘the coldest farm 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