Lost and Found

The weight of history lies heavy on my spade. Did he too curse the earth beneath his feet? I wonder. For some things do not change. One hundred years on, the course I plough is written by the same white clay below and the arc of the sun above. We stand together, he and I, separated by a century, as sundials to the sky.

It was August 1919. Not a drop of rain had fallen for weeks and the mood in Westminster was febrile. Yet Sir Austen Chamberlain had other things on his mind. His beloved Ivy. He, a man that could run the country’s post-war finances, found himself hopelessly ill-equipped for affairs of the heart. He’d have to sell the Worcester china and the glass. But, he had to admit it, she was right.   

Of the weatherboarded house on the hill he wrote that summer it is “a pretty place with a lovely view and just what Ivy has always dreamed of”.

And what of that view now.

East across the Upper Rother valley, up over mishapen yew hedges, the rounded crowns of oak in the paddock give way to thickets of hazel and hawthorn. The birch roots along fault lines in the clay and crack willow takes hold at the fringes where the others daren’t go. I wander often, bleary-eyed from broken sleep, to those windows to take in the dawn. Later, with coffee thawing weathered hands.

It is a simple house; five centuries old of native oak, patched roughly with elm recovered from ships whose luck ran out. Every aspect is studded with lead mullioned windows. No door has yet managed to sit squarely in its frame. Striated shadows fall on sandstone floors. All is bleached to pewter. Time is marked by the progress of a rose called compassion. In early summer it scales the flaking weatherboard, from crimson bud to sugared almond to the colours of a November sunrise, before falling to the lichen covered terrace at its feet.

Ivy loved roses. She left me a secret. In summer I slip sideways through ferns tall enough they brush my belt-buckle. I stretch and fold, like a silent accordion, along the path I cut two seasons ago through a forest of rhododendrons. Entombed, a quartered circle of old roses awaits. Shuttlecock ferns colonise the low, drystone walls and brambles scramble to join their cousins. I arrive and squint. My eyes are slow to adjust. At first, just noisettes of white dance upon my retinas. Later, shell pink, ballet slipper, cafe au lait, apricot, and right at the back, cerise and magenta.

The youngest shoots veer skywards blood-red. Motionless, a grass snake warms her body on an old stone. Warily, she watches me, the visitor. Sunken into a nook, scent here pulses, gaining in intensity. Musky rose, hedgerow honeysuckle and the cool, dank odour of woodland after the rain.

The exhilaration of feeling right courses through me. It was worth it for this moment. The hours alone in the cold, judiciously pruning yet indiscriminately torn apart. The sweeping and the carting, the mulching and the weeding, the endless bonfires at the bottom of the hill. I think of Ivy working here, resting awhile in the spot where I sit now, looking back up towards the house on the hill.    

In winter, when the ground is too wet to work, I read his diaries by sunlight filtered through compassion’s bare bones. Inside, I search for clues. Clues as to the nature of this peculiar man of private passions. What peace did it bring him?

I look up and scan a denuded landscape for evidence of his hand. It is drafty here, and damp too. I pull the rug closer around my shoulders. The pocked tile floor darkens two shades in winter as the water table rises. Strange marks, witches marks are struck into the beam above the fire. This place holds us all in its spell. There is a rare peace to be found in a place where all facts but those which the eye perceives are forgotten. A place where it is possible to say; there is none but these walls. Suspended in time, it is here, by the light of the same window, that Chamberlain would write the letters to his sisters that I read now.

“My dear Ida,

I start to-morrow for Geneva to play a difficult hand as ever fell to a man’s lot. Not a trump has been dealt me, and, the worst of it is, the discussion here has clearly shown the poverty of the land. I do not like the job and am anxious about it. I got down last Sunday - a lovely day - and thoroughly enjoyed my rock garden. I counted over forty different species of flower… It is a shame to think I have only seen the garden twice since the middle of November and I shall not see it again for another three weeks. But such is the life of a Foreign Minister!”

Monocled and ridiculed, the elder statesman was anxious that France and Germany would not see a weakened hand. Debt and doubt pulled at the threads of country’s tailcoats.  Poverty lacerated the land. Britain would never recover from the Great War. Yet the thought of another was too much to bear. A solution must be found. He was duty-bound to devise one.

Stresemann had promised to guarantee the existing position on the Rhine. Perhaps that was something. Yet did he dare to rely upon the word of a German foreign minister? Could he persuade the French Prime Minister and the Italians to do the same? If so, a fragile peace might hold. But to build frontiers so impervious that no nation would dare cross them would take time. Time he would give, because here was a man of singular determination.

Perhaps his gaze lingered on the old apple tree ahead. Perhaps his stance softened as he picked out signs of progress in the crescent-shaped beds beyond. All of that is lost now, of course. Only shadows of uneven growth on the lawn remain; vestiges of summers spent under its boughs with a book. I look out, instead over a runaway slope of sheep’s sorrel and a single, uneven south-facing border. Like an abandoned, incomplete crossword, the omissions make me anxious.

Austen sought salvation here. “You may think me foolish to garden so much but it rests the mind” he confessed to his sister, during one crisis of confidence in preparation for the 1919 Budget. Abroad, the minister pursued peace. At home, he amassed a longed-for kingdom of his own. Eschewing a family preoccupation with orchids, Austen sought out less immediate charms. In plants as in politics, whatever penchant for the bold Austen failed to inherit from his father, Jo, he made up for in quiet tenacity. For thirty years he had waited. It was only now that conditions conspired to enable the creation his own Alpine garden. To be separated from it was a source of deep frustration.

28 May 1922  
11 Downing Street

“Mr dear Hilda,

Your garden talk makes me homesick for my flowers. Are they being burnt up? Or cut to pieces by hailstones? Or washed out of the ground by thunder storms? or beautiful as I see them in my waking dreams?”

Yet each step from Downing Street to Europe provided the plantsman with an opportunity to strengthen his Sussex stronghold. It was on one such diplomatic mission that Chamberlain first discovered lady tulips, beguiling Iranian escapees, naturalised along the granite scree of Southern Europe. He brought the tiny bulbs back here, to re-settle on Italian tufa in damper climes. One of the greatest authorities on alpine plants on the Continent, Henri Correvon, I discover, was impressed. “There is a minister of foreign affairs in every country, but there is only one who can identify tulipa clusiana by its leaves.” I take my cue. I spend an afternoon trying to outwit this year’s crop of field mice, squirrelling away clutches of Lady Janes between the boulders, where I hope she will be safe.

In Spring, this craggy morass erupts into life, as a valley of citadels from the snow. Bell-towers of bugleweed are first to answer the call of the bees; opening violet throats to early nectar. Species tulips flash obliquely in pageantry of red and white and gold. Cushions of saxifraga guide the first migrants in from the air. A feast gathers on the banks for the great crested newts that assemble like dragons. Sated, soundlessly they descend into the algal pond below, readying for courtship.

Later, azalea fireworks spark a discordant note. The water meadows of the valley below drift upwards into the garden on a south-westerly.

In May the rockery shimmers yellow with a thousand buttercups held in suspension above it. Foxgloves fortify the remains of a conifer. The sulphur clocks of dandelions ghost to nothing as the spears of Siberian irises explode into shots of cobalt taffeta.  

In June, a bank of Mexican satin flowers rises up along the southern edge, separating the unyielding limestone hummocks from the fecundity of the plum orchard beyond.

Long summer days urge the Corsican thyme & cotton lavender to release their tang into the breeze. The complex matrix of the maintained and the serendipitous plays out and over each other.

Above the shifting equilibrium, a quaking aspen hushes and soothes. Beyond, the russets of Sussex bleed into each other, punctured by the sobre baritone of fastigiate yew. Fog rolls unfettered across Pevensey marsh like the untethered barrel. A fox slips silently under a gap in the hedge. The symphony pauses, just for a moment. Here stands a land of other-worldly charm. A place of dreams. A vision of hope. I tread lightly among the ghosts.