Smell of Summer Grass by Adam Nicolson

Author:Adam Nicolson [Adam Nicolson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-02-19T16:00:00+00:00

Peaches on the Cow-Shed Wall

NOTHING IS more calculated to turn one into a pork pie than the arrival of a poet on the doorstep. We had one staying that August and the experience changed me into a no-nonsense member of the Rother Weald Branch of the NFU. ‘Don’t you realize,’ I heard myself saying towards the end of his time, ‘that the country is where food is produced?’ Jason, who was twenty-two, looked back at me with the comfortless gaze of a man who had yet to suffer. He was the son of some people from whom I had shamelessly cadged accommodation and food a decade previously when touring the western half of the United States. Reasonably enough, they had now sent Jason over to do the same to me. We had 10 days of him and then he went off walking somewhere in southern Spain.

Jason was into haiku. It was quite charming to start with and I encouraged him to produce some pieces about the farm here. He gave me his first little Japanese creation on the second day at breakfast:

Hawk

twitch of long grass –

elegance of ambush.

‘Thank you, Jason,’ I said and felt, at least, that here was someone who was on my wavelength. But I wasn’t totally at ease. Jason’s wanness, his silences, the way he never said anything unless it came out perfectly rolled and made like a sushi – that was difficult. I longed for him to burp or knock something over or spill gravy on his shirt. Surely a little lack of control might be considered Zen too, mightn’t it?

One morning when I came down to breakfast, he said ‘Hi, Adam. How are you?’

‘Fine, thanks.’

‘Good, well done,’ Jason said. ‘I think it’s a great thing for someone to be able to say that about themselves.’

Just as exasperation was setting in, he would come out with something beautiful. I took him to see our sheep. Roger the ram was still in a field of his own, with a couple of ram lambs for company, and the ewes and ewe lambs were all together on the other side of the lane. The mothers were wearing the sheep bells I had bought for them in Majorca. Peter Clark had said the bells were stupid and cruel. ‘How would you like it?’ had been his unanswerable question.

All the same, as I explained to Jason, I loved listening to them. If you heard them from a field or two away, they sounded like snatches of a conversation which you couldn’t quite pick up. I don’t know how many times I have sat on a mountain in southern Europe, listening to their hollow, half-carried half-notes. Jason said nothing but that evening he gave me this:

Sheep bells:

toc toc –

olives in the oakwood.

Ken Weekes came to lunch and told his stories all the way through it, beaming away at the gnomic Jason, and Jason played his part to the full, economical in his courtesies and self-contained in his stillness. Ken’s performance culminated in

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