On the Level

It is a bright Sunday morning and I am on the Pevensey Levels. The landscape is a sliver in front of me; I can pick out the form of Pevensey Castle, some three miles distant, dwarfed by an endless spring sky with only a whisper of cloud too insignificant to deter the warmth of the early sunshine. The sky dominates in these flat lands. 10,000 years ago they were sea; a thousand years ago they were marshland. Kipling immortalised this landscape in Puck of Pook’s Hill: “Salt Marsh where now is corn… And so was England born.” In reality, it is still too wet here for arable farming but some modern day English yeoman has ensured that I skirt fields of grazed pasture. Sheikh Abed Gulzar, an Eastbourne hotelier, has acquired and tidied-up farmland on the Levels but has upset the parish council and divided local opinion in the process: first, with white, four foot high lion statues at the farm entrances; second, with large Union Jacks flown in place of the lions after their removal because of lack of planning permission. Some see his eccentricities as an eyesore; some as typically English.

As the cattle turn to watch my approach, I feel like Pip with the stolen wittles in David Lean’s 1948 version of Great Expectations; but these cows don’t intrude upon my solitude. I have seen no-one since I walked out of the woods at Herstmonceux Castle and there is only the sound of the south-westerly wind and the calls of the peewits about my ears. Behind me, the church spire and the observatory dome are my navigation points. Negotiating the maze of free flowing and intersecting ditches can take the most experienced walker off course. Before now, heading for Rickney in mist, it has become Brigadoon and I have found myself by-passing it altogether, drifting eastwards and stumbling on to the Wartling Road. Its unknowable nature is what brings me back, time and again, to this landscape. There is no shame in losing yourself once in a while.

Windmills of My Mind

Being brought up on a diet of black and white films - back in my formative years the BBC daytime schedules were not full of programmes about the crap in your attic or vicarious house hunting - has had many personal consequences: a disregard for authority instilled in me by too many Ealing comedies; a reputation for being recondite that is useless, except in pub quizzes; and a disconcertion when it comes to windmills.

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 spy thriller Foreign Correspondent left an indelible mark. Starring the American Joel McCrea and supported by the urbane and English George Sanders, the perpetual chase of the film at one point leads to a Dutch landscape overpopulated by slowly turning windmills. The tension of the scene, as McCrea secretly observes the menace of the kidnappers of the drugged diplomat Van Meer behind the ostensibly benign façade of one of the windmills, terrified me; but only as much as the strange, dead ambience of a Hollywood studio set masquerading as countryside. Since then windmills have been a symbol of hidden menace. A fear, I fear, I have passed on to one of my sons who, from the age of two, could not walk past our local windmill. Often we would walk up the hill, only for him to panic and refuse to go on as the mill came in full sight, just like Michael Palin’s teacher character in Alan Bleasedale’s GBH who, everytime he had to cross a bridge, froze.

Our local windmill is magnificent: in a county renowned for windmills the Windmill Hill windmill is the tallest in Sussex and the second tallest in Britain. Built in 1814, it is one of the remaining examples of a post mill in its original condition. After a chequered ownership throughout the second half of the twentieth century, a trust acquired the mill in 1995 and completed a ten-year programme of restoration with funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, English Heritage and county and district councils.

A post mill is a timber building supported on a vertical post which acts as a pivot so that the mill can be turned to face the wind. When we first moved here my ignorance led to confusion: every time I glanced up at the windmill, it seemed to be facing a different way; that’s because it was. The mill is now open to visitors on out-of-winter Sunday afternoons and some extra days on bank holiday weekends, with entrance by donation.

My son has overcome his fear: he has not just walked past the mill but been inside it and climbed all the way to the top with me. That was an exhilarating experience but I had the scene from Foreign Correspondent in my mind all the time. I think that the Windmill Hill windmill is best enjoyed after dark when it is beautifully lit and I can see its white, spectral shape against the night sky from behind the safety of my window.

Planting Frenzy

Sunshine, a blue sky and rows of fluffy cumulus clouds sailing along just above the horizon: it feels like spring. And the annual food production has begun: in the week, I managed to get 167 cloves of garlic planted out on the allotment and, since yesterday, four different varieties of tomato - Sweet Million, Gardener's Delight, Beefmaster, Moneymaker - and sweet and chilli peppers have been germinating in seed trays under the Velux windows in the boys' warm loft room.

The past seven years of vegetable growing have taught me a couple of obvious things: it is worth growing as much as you can of crops that are expensive and it is worth growing as much as you can of crops that form a large part of your diet. As a family, we eat a lot of garlic but it is expensive to buy and we have had varied results growing it over the years. We have tried over-winter planting, we have tried spring planting; in both cases, the results have been the same: a moderately good crop but bulbs that are not that big. However, last year I planted spring garlic on the last day of January and had the best garlic harvest we have had. This year, the snow prevented similarly early planting but when the temperature rose earlier this week and the snow disappeared, I got out there with sixteen bulbs, broken into cloves, and had a planting frenzy. Last year’s garlic had run out by Christmas, I am hoping this year’s will last through until spring. I bought the bulbs on offer in a non-gardening shop and the person who served me asked how garlic grew. That each clove planted would turn into a whole bulb of garlic was a delightful revelation to her.

At the same time as I sow tomato and pepper seeds, I usually devote a seed tray to aubergines; but after persevering with these temperamental plants every year, this year I have given up. I have invested a lot of time in trying to grow them but germination has always been hit and miss. I have tried a number of different varieties and some have fared better than others but any plants that have matured have taken up valuable greenhouse space only to produce poor fruit. The dismal truth is that, in seven years, we have been rewarded with only a few decent sized aubergines. So, no more; the greenhouse space will be given over to more cucumbers, which the kids devour in the summer months. And that’s another obvious thing that vegetable growing has taught me: don’t spend time and money on a crop if it outweighs the value of the harvest.

My Funny Valentine

Padding around the orchards of Greenways Fruit Farm yesterday, with Smithy the dog, I fell in love with a thing of rare beauty: it caught me completely by surprise and still seems inexplicable because I had passed the obscure object of my desire many times before without a flicker of emotion.

Perhaps because I had changed the direction of my usual walk from clockwise to counter, and came upon it from the opposite direction, sight of it from a different perspective made me truly see it for the first time.

Perhaps it was the power of the music I was listening to on my headphones - my soul already stirred - that accounted for the feeling that overwhelmed me. As I came up the hill I was listening to Tiger Man from British Sea Power’s atmospheric instrumental album, Man of Aran; at the very moment I turned the corner at the top and caught sight of it through the gap in the beech windbreaks, the track shuffled to the extraordinary Decades by Joy Division.

Joy Division’s music is the perfect snow music: this was cemented in my psyche early on by Kevin Cummins’ beautiful photograph from January 1979 of the band on a snow-covered footbridge. At the highest point of the bridge’s curve, the four are isolated in the bleached landscape, trapped by the symmetry of the railings and streetlights. This connection between Joy Division and snow was probably further compounded by the fact that it seemed to snow a lot in those winters at the end of the seventies and the start of the eighties when I was listening to their music; mind you, I have never really stopped listening to their music and there has been a lot of snow since, too.

So, perhaps the ethereal atmosphere of the snow and freezing fog had made me insubstantial and vulnerable and, when I suddenly found myself in its presence, its towering imposition overwhelmed me.

Whatever prompted it, there is no denying that I fell in love with an electricity pylon; pylon number 4VM 029 to be exact. I had never before considered the beauty of one of these structures but with its graceful, curving sweep from broad base to narrow pinnacle, its delicate latticed framework and its deific trio of pairs of crossarms, it struck me as both magnificent and tender. And its position on the fruit farm, near the top of the hill, shows it in all its glory.

All transmission towers, as pylons are called in the trade, are variations of an original design by Milliken Brothers, commissioned in 1928 by Sir Reginald Blomfield for the Central Electricity Board. The design has since been used all over the world. My pylon looks like an L6 D model but I stand to be corrected.

The American poet (Alfred) Joyce Kilmer wrote in 1913, “I think that I shall never see/ a poem lovely as a tree”. Spike Milligan reimagined these lines from the view of a cocked-legged dog; the people at the Pylon Appreciation Society would probably reimagine the tree as a pylon. For them, the poetry of a pylon is plain to see and they dedicate their efforts to helping the rest of us see their worth. For most however, I am sure the pylon is an eyesore, the forerunner of the dreaded wind turbine. Those who would have the countryside preserved in aspic can only see beauty in a sentimental construct of thatched roofs and tea rooms. The giants of the national grid, roped together as they march cross-country, are a stunning sight on the horizon or at close quarters; and you only have to drive across Romney Marsh and see the towers of Little Cheyne Court in the distance to be filled with awe by wind turbines, too.

Kilmer, incidentally, died in battle in northern France in 1918, by which time every tree had probably been blown to kingdom come. He never got to see the likes of 4VM 029; he would have loved them.

The Rites of Spring

With snow still on the ground, particularly in our garden where the kids’ sledge has compacted last weekend’s fall into an unshiftable and potentially lethal version of the Cresta Run, it’s hard to imagine that winter will ever end. Despite most of the landscape looking and feeling like the tundra, I have known for a while now that spring is just around the corner; and I know this because my seed potatoes have been chitting in the shed for over a fortnight and that means one of the rites of spring – potato planting – will soon be upon us.

Chitting is the process of sprouting the eyes of the tubers before planting. It simply involves putting them in shallow, open trays or boxes with most eyes facing upwards. They need plenty of natural light – a shed with windows, a porch, a greenhouse – and a cool but not frosty temperature. Chitting takes 6 – 8 weeks, or until the sprouts are an inch or two long. Each of these sprouts will produce loads of potatoes, thereby contributing to the miracle of the multitude produced by one innocuous-looking seed potato.

There is a school of thought that you don’t need to chit seed potatoes but chitting does seem to produce an earlier and larger harvest. Last year, I didn’t buy any seed potatoes until late February and, by the time of planting in March, they had been chitting for barely three weeks. As a result, my crop was slow to grow and the potatoes small in size; and holding off the harvest for as long as possible resulted in getting caught by the blight of early autumn.

Determined not to be wrong-footed this year, I took an early trip to Lime Cross Nursery (support your local independent!) between Herstmonceux and Windmill Hill where they sell seed potatoes loose so you can mix your crop up a bit. I went for two varieties I have grown before and know to be reliable: Pentland Javelin for first earlies and Maris Piper for main crop; and I went for Charlotte as my second earlies. Earlies and main crop refer to the time of planting and lifting: earlies can be planted in mid-March, main crop in early April; earlies need 16-18 weeks before harvesting, main crop 18-20 weeks.

Now I’m hoping that I might have a sight of the soil soon so I can start preparing; but with the temperature four below zero as I write this, even if I cleared the snow I don’t think it would take a spade just yet.

Hastings Hero

In these hard times, when the most vulnerable are scapegoated and capitalism is unable to face up to its own failings, it is important not only to remind ourselves why a civilised society needs a safety net but also that if we looked to alternatives to the iniquitous system of capital in the first instance, that safety net would not be needed.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, a novel by the Irishman Robert Noonan under the pen name Robert Tressell, is set in 1906 in a thinly disguised Hastings and concerns a group of painters and decorators. The Edwardian era is often recalled as a golden age of endless carefree summers where differences between rich and poor did not matter. Tressell, however, describes the lives of working men and the poverty, exploitation and destitution they and their families face. It is a novel of humour, warmth and tragedy. The philanthropists of the title are the colleagues of the novel’s hero, the socialist Owen, whom he believes give their skill and labour to their boss without just or deserving reward. The constant divide and rule used by the employers to drive down wages, exploits the fact that in a world before the welfare state, being unable to work brought the fear of the workhouse into sharp relief. The novel charts Owen’s attempts to convince his workmates that socialism is the only solution to their many privations: in a chapter called ‘The Great Money Trick’, he hilariously demonstrates how their labour creates surplus value that is appropriated and accumulated by the bosses as personal wealth.

Many of Owen’s experiences were clearly Tressell’s own. Having left his native Dublin, he arrived in England, via South Africa, and worked as a painter and decorator in Hastings. Hastings has long had a place in its heart for Tressell: The Robert Tressell Society is based in St. Leonards and holds an annual festival commemorating his life and work; the Robert Tressell Collection is held at the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery; and the Hastings Chronicle website has a very detailed record of all the Hastings locations used in the novel. A single parent of a daughter, fear of destitution because of his failing health spurred Tressell on to write of his experiences in Hastings. Having completed the manuscript in 1910, he failed to find a publisher and decided to emigrate to Canada the following year; but he only got as far as Liverpool where he died of tuberculosis in a workhouse hospital and was buried in a pauper’s grave.

The novel was published posthumously in 1914 in a much abridged version and, as interest in socialism steadily grew, so did the reputation of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. An unabridged version was eventually published and, when Labour won a landslide victory in the 1945 general election, some influence was credited to copies of the book being widely passed around amongst returning troops. As the 20th century wore on, the novel’s reputation as an accessible and seminal text of the left increased. As a teenager forming my political views in the late 1970s, a work colleague gave me a battered copy to read; within a week my socialism was cemented. I still have that copy and I have re-read it several times since then, most recently last year when I taught it to A level students. It is a salutary lesson in why we created the welfare state and - in a week where politicians in denial over the real cause of the economic crisis use the oxymoronic phrase “responsible capitalism” - a reminder that the current system is pernicious and immoral and should be dismantled to make way for a fairer way of organising society.

It would be a good idea if some of those currently in control of the Labour Party were to re-read The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (that’s if these career politicians have read it in the first place); they might find something they have lost: socialism.

Distant Lights

In the bleakness of early January, the mellow fruitfulness of autumn and the rising sap of spring seem equally distant from this trough of the year. It is dusk and, from my garden, I can still make out the church spire at Dallington on the far ridge. Distant lights of homes have started to twinkle in the valley and on the horizon. These moments fill me with both sorrow and joy: sorrow at the space between us, joy that there are others out there. I set out for a short walk to fill the lungs and shake off the month.

With John Clare's poetry in my head, my solitude feels like the return of teenage Neurotic Boy Outsider paranoia: 'what I am none cares or knows...I am the self-consumer of my woes’; and, with the frozen land in the grip of the cold, dead hand of Cameronomics, 'there is neither sense of life nor joys’; my self-pity would make Morrissey proud. High above, the tail-lights of Gatwick-bound planes wink through the gathering darkness; and Clare’s ‘vaulted sky’ is a glittering panoply of stars to lift the spirits. With not a soul close by, I am as one of anarchist artist Clifford Harper’s ink drawings – a solitary figure in the landscape. For a supposedly crowded island, this distance makes it feel little like it at this time of year - and day - in the Sussex Weald.