In Episode Three of his new book, author Julian Roup explains that during Covid-19, his lockdown home is a ‘tanker’ moored in the Sussex countryside, 50 miles south of London – a world unto itself – but also living in fear.
In case you missed Episode 2, click here.
Life in a Time of Plague
Sussex, 11th April 2020
By Julian Roup
Living in lockdown serves to bring one’s foreground into sharp focus and the valley we live in has never looked lovelier than in this disease-ridden Spring of April of 2020.
My home valley in Sussex lies moored to its surrounding countryside like a great oil tanker, a mile long, lying east west, its starboard and port rails, half a mile apart, fenced with hills, crowned by forest, its bow rammed hard into the fabled Hundred Acre Wood of Winnie the Pooh fame, at the western end of the valley.
The deck is a working landscape of farmland producing hay, as well as sheep and cattle. There is also an ever-present population of deer in herds of up to 30 animals who move in and out of the woods at dusk and dawn, feeding on the rich pasture which, after a hard winter and this unusually good warm spring, has been producing grass with a 20 per cent protein count, fattening the horses that are also pastured on it for the summer.
On the southern side of the valley, the port side as it were, opposite my home on the northern, starboard ridge, there is an army camp that mostly stands empty. But now and again it plays host to men and women of the Army Reserve, the Territorials; weekend soldiers, who in days past have found themselves in Afghanistan and other theatres of war. The youngsters of the cadets are training for a role with the Territorials, and practice marching and shooting and orienteering on their weekends at the camp. They pass up and down their side of the valley and on the Forest in little groups, bearing maps, often lost, conferring among themselves and occasionally asking for directions, something that is probably against the rules. But for weeks of lockdown now, this place has been empty and silent and deer graze on the grass in front of the bungalows.
Normally, if I sit in the garden reading, if the wind is in the right direction, I can hear the sounds of drill from the camp. “Left right left right left right LEFT!” The phrase takes me back to my 19 year old self, a conscript rifleman in the South African army, in the care of a chaotic and semi-brutal regime that owned me for nine months, and then for subsequent camps during the next eight years. It was not a happy time, and Sussex morphs in my mind’s eye to the Oudtshoorn bush and the smell of khakibos vegetation. The feel of sweat-soaked overalls and the taste of red dust. I blink, and it’s a blessed Sussex green I see again, made all the better for its new, unusual silence.
My home turf, this semi-secret green tanker floating placidly on the northern border of East Sussex and Kent, 900 feet above the sea that lies 25 miles south at Eastbourne and Brighton, is a peacefully busy place usually, producing kids for war, lambs and calves for slaughter and horses for pleasure. War, food and pleasure is our business. Death, birth and leisure. It pretty much covers the spectrum. But now death by other means has the upper hand and food and pleasure take a back seat.
There are not many country folk around at the best of times. My neighbours, 20 in all, are scattered round the valley. Cottages grouped in ones and twos, threes and fives, are mostly inhabited by incomers who commute to London or Brighton, or who one way or another manage to make a living from home.
Until they moved recently there was David, a retired Colonel who keeps bees, and his wife Jane, who has a distinguished Irish literary pedigree. She is the granddaughter of Lady Gregory, patron to the poet W.B. Yeats (who in his way brought me here, influenced as I was by his poem, Innisfree: “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee”……). It remains an anthem for me, whose ambitions I have not quite achieved. Next door to their old house lives their daughter Belinda and her husband Miles, a former lawyer who now runs a very successful recruitment business internationally. Their children, all grown up, now live away from home.
Across the valley is Ed, the former head of IT for an international company, who in retirement has returned to his first love, agriculture and gardening and to give his full attention to the earth road to his home, which requires constant attention, or the rain will wash it away. His wife Susie is a skilled artist, whose oil paintings capture the local landscapes. We celebrated last Christmas with them, a time which now seems like a century ago, so much has happened since.
The few really longterm residents whose families have inhabited this green haven 50 miles south of London for generations make their living off the land. There are Richard and Robert, and Barry, who runs a wood mill and has lived on his land for so long with his wife Teresa and the two children they have raised there, that his right to build a house alongside his wood mill has been approved. It looks like another barn.
Richard is a woodsman who makes a living working for local landowners, maintaining woods by planting or felling, trimming and tidying. He brings me a load of wood for £50 twice a winter, filling the back of his pick-up truck. I help him unload and stack it behind the house, under the kitchen window where it is out of the worst of the weather, which drives in on Atlantic gales from the south west, thrashing the woods like grass. His wood burns well in our New England stove that heats the living room and the house if sufficiently stoked up. A good place to read or dream as the horizontal rain lashes the grey stone of the house.
Richard and Robert, and Robert’s son Carl, come twice a year to cut our hedges. They take the best part of a day and leave the house with more light and neatly-edged 15-foot high beech hedges that mark the frontier of our own third of an acre of England. This place on the edge of Ashdown Forest’s 6,500 acres of heather and bracken and wood has been my home this past 40 years.
Jan and I have been here so long now that we are now the senior citizens hereabouts when not so long ago we were the young newcomers. Time does play the strangest tricks on one.
Richard is a big, burly, slow-talking man in his 50’s, a bachelor whose outfit never seems to change: a knitted hat, shirt and overalls or jeans. He is a benign presence at the cottage he calls home, half a mile down our lane, where he grows cabbages for sale at his gate, and where until a few years ago he tended to his 99-year-old blind uncle, a former farrier, with whom he shared the cottage as long as we have been here. He has never married, and seems content with his life.
At the lowest point of the valley – the bilge you might say if we are to continue the ship metaphor – is a hidden lake, fed by a stream that runs down from the heights of Ashdown Forest beyond, and lower down used to feed a grain mill reputed to have produced the flour for Queen Victoria’s wedding cake.
Our nearest neighbour to the west of us is the farmhouse to what was once the big estate. It is a mellow stone house with a large concrete yard surrounded by stables for some 50 horses, which is today a thriving DIY (do-it-yourself) livery yard.
The biggest house in the valley was built in the Victorian era, a huge crenulated pile used subsequently as an officers’ mess for the Canadians, and since then by various colourful folk including the singer turned financier Adam Faith, and John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin. For the first 30 years of our time here, it was home to a former P&0 shipping line purser turned financier, Michael, now retired, who spoke fondly of his regular run aboard the cruise liners from Portsmouth to Cape Town and each February. When the length of the English winter begins to bear down hard, he and his wife Sally take themselves off to a cottage in Hout Bay, Cape Town for a month in the sun.
Today, their huge house is owned by James and Camilla, who are raising a young family there. James in normal times commutes to London, where he runs one of the best known estate agency chains.
In this valley that adopted us there is a cross-stitching, a warp and woof in the social material, that holds us together.
You cannot walk the dog without a good chat with one or two of the locals and when out riding, there are brief conversations on the network of gravel paths that crisscross the estate and the forestry plantation. Local news spreads fast. The death of a horse, a tree blocking a path, a showjumping win, the latest doings of new and old residents. Helpful local knowledge is another currency. Where the best car servicing is to be had, and who provides the cheapest stable bedding, where the first English asparagus or strawberries are to be found.
Quietly, this local culture takes you in, and the sometimes harsh and always long winters are made more bearable by this local network of people who share it alongside you.
And even now, in the midst of this pandemic that has its hands to our throat, this most civil of civilities holds firm, but at a distance of two metres. And we don’t chat for quite as long.
Besides our human neighbours, the valley is home also to many animal homesteaders, such as the aforementioned deer – roebuck, fallow and muntjack. There are secretive families of badgers who come out at dusk to forage, and innumerable rabbits make their homes in the artificial warrens, after whom the area is named: a medieval means of providing meat for the winter, the animals ferreted out when needed.
The local tribes of squirrels prefer their roosts in the trees and in autumn are evident everywhere, harvesting the huge weight of chestnuts. There are owls and red kites and crows past counting, blackbirds and wrens and robins, fat wood pigeon, and each spring the swallows from Africa. And thanks to Chris and Martin, landholding neighbours who over the years have bought up the surrounding woodlands, the valley reverberates to the unearthly scream of peacocks and the rather mellower call of New Zealand rheas, whose enclosure is a quarter mile from our home. The rheas and the peacocks add a touch of exoticism to this Sussex fastness.
An egg safe, just 100 feet from our front door, offers chicken, duck, turkey and goose eggs for sale with an honesty box for payment. It is a useful addition to provisioning when, as now, we are often low on supplies, and the idea of a cheese and herb omelette sounds good. At £1 for a box of six chicken eggs it is excellent value, and the contents fresh, with orange yellow yolks.
And this valley is home to foxes. Their blood chilling calls sound as though some foul murder is being committed, amid screams of pain and rage. The foxes come in many shapes and sizes. Cubs in the spring, inquisitive and not yet wised up to the world, will stand and stare at you longer than an adult fox, most of whom whip themselves into the undergrowth as soon as they see you.
Some though, after an insouciant glance, will merely trot off. Some are pale in colour; others have the deep lush auburn of an Irish girl fresh off the farm. Recently, I saw a dog fox so big I thought it a wolf from a distance.
In spring, the snakes emerge and the brush by the paths are home to adders, sunning themselves. We have to watch out for them in their distinctive diamond hatching in black and brown and grey, as now and then one of our cats will have a game with an adder and invariably come off worst with a fat swollen leg where they have been bitten. A quick trip to the vet for the anti-serum does the trick, and we have not lost a cat to the adders yet.
These then are the denizens of the woods and fields around us. Two of the original cast are missing, wolves and wild boar. Doubtless if you go back far enough in time there would have been others, including woolly mammoths and bears, but within man’s last 1,000 years in these parts, it’s just the wolves and the boar that have been hunted out. The size of the deer herds are testimony to the fact that these animals have no natural predator, with the exception of a local farrier who has shooting rights to cull a few animals each season. Deer numbers are stable and they are under no great threat. And the wolves will not be back any time soon.
The wild boar, on the other hand, we watch and wait for, because this habitat is ideal for them. Heavy woods bearing acorns and chestnuts, grubs and insects aplenty, and a variety of farms to raid for sweetcorn and barley. Thus far, it’s been a four-decade long wait for them, but they will come. A farmer to the east of us who bred them for meat has lost a few over the years, canny or strong animals who felt the call of the wild and broke out of their fenced enclosures to take up residence once more in their primordial home, the deep Sussex woods. Their spread west is best noted by panel beating workshops that do a brisk trade in cars involved in collisions with boar. Now and then we hear stories of a farmer trapped up a haystack by a particularly belligerent animal, calling for rescue on his mobile phone to family and friends, asking for help with a shotgun.
So as we ride these woods, especially at dusk, I half keep an eye and an ear out for untoward rustlings and note the hairs on my arm lift now and then when a shape appears to be a wild boar. Always till now, it has been a log, or an unusual configuration of brushwood. But the day will come, sooner or later, when we will number boar amongst our neighbours, and then we will have to be rather more careful when walking the dog.
One of the joys of this ship-shaped valley is the fact that it is moored by the stern to a hill bearing the small town of Crowborough, out of sight among the woods and trees. But now it is mostly closed down, except for the supermarkets offering essential provisioning.
So the sense of isolation and peace one feels on board the quiet tanker floating in the woods is something of an illusion, linked at it is to all that man might need in the way of sustenance and services, including a railway station that links us to the coast and London and the wider world beyond.
It is easy enough to call for a taxi to get you from the forest-farmland quiet and within 45 minutes have you in the mad bustle of Gatwick Airport, or adding another thirty minutes to that, and depending on the London orbital M25 traffic, have you at Heathrow, one of the world’s busiest airports. This is part of the joy of this place; it is an amalgam of deep rural quiet, yet with easy access to London and the world and all the sophistication and distractions it offers. But now this prized quiet spreads far and wide across England, Scotland, Wales, and Europe beyond.
It is hard to believe that such a place exists just 50 miles from one of the greatest cities in the world. A place where adders sun themselves in contentment and deer roam free to multiply at will. The sense of deep countryside increases in summer as the rampant foliage hides and disguises the sign of human habitation, trees heavy with leaf and hedgerows expanding in every direction with Queen Anne’s lace, holly, blackthorn, blackberry-briar, honeysuckle, bracken and a hundred other plant varieties.
And in the heart of the winter, as the snow falls and a deeper silence comes, it takes a good four-wheel drive vehicle to access these parts. The mile-long lane from the cottage into town is uphill for the last quarter mile, and it needs traction.
It is no surprise, then, that the town has been described as ‘Scotland in Sussex’ because of its weather and setting. The high Crowborough Beacon would have been visible for miles around thanks to its yellow gorse flowers, and so the origin of the name Crowborough is probably ‘a golden coloured hill’.
It is attractive enough to have caught the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the Sherlock Holmes phenomenon who lived here for the last 26 years of his life. It is here that he wrote many of his best-known books while also serving as chairman of the local Beacon Golf Course, though an indifferent golfer himself. It is a pleasing thought that two of the most eminent Victorian men of letters, Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling, (based nearby at Burwash), played golf together in Crowborough. Both tragically lost sons to the carnage of World War 1, both finding solace in spiritualism in attempts to contact them.
To walk in the paths of these men who wrote about the natural world, one instinctively knows that these miles of heath and wood entered their writing through their eyes. Another such for whom the area is famed is the creator of Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne, who lived over the hill on the other side of Five Hundred Acre Wood, on the outskirts of Hartfield. If this place is indeed a tanker, his home might well have been the anchor buoy.
Conan Doyle, Kipling and Milne are good company for a writer. They run the gamut from murder mystery, military and empire, to the whimsy of imagination run riot in these woods, with the stuffed animal escapees from a boy’s toy cupboard. It is hardly surprising that I feel at home.
We have raised a family here, a boy and a girl, now 28 and 30; both went to London and further afield abroad to seek fame and fortune. London drew them as they grew up as insistently as iron filings are drawn to a magnet. But much as they love the excitement of the big smoke, they are also drawn to Sussex, and at present they both live nearby.
In the garden are buried cats and dogs that have been part of the family. And close by two horses, a skewbald called Traveller and Callum, the chestnut who nearly threw me, live quiet lives, munching hay. They carry us to the far corners of this world, from the tanker’s deck to the surrounding seas of Ashdown Forest where after nearly four decades we are still finding new paths and hidden corners. When lockdown ends, we will once more find our way to our secret places.
At night, walking the dog or just outside for a last commune with nature, there is another world to greet me, the constellation of stars, undimmed by city light pollution. On clear nights, they hold a comfort for me in their clarity, allowing me to get to grips with my insignificance in the scale of space and time, to realise afresh that the scourge that besets the world right now will pass, as everything does in time. There is a comfort in knowing these same stars shone down on Neanderthal man who walked this way, and will shine down on whatever is left centuries hence, when my own time here will have been as forgotten as a dream. Why this should be a comfort I do not know or question overmuch. But it is, and invariably I make my way to bed easier in my mind.
The tanker lies stilled in starlight, the hills silhouetted behind me to the north and south, west and east. All is quiet as we plow through the night, amid constellations beyond counting, in this valley I call home. And the waves of Coronavirus seems a phantom fear that we will plough through in time and the valley will be here still, unchanged.
Click here for Episode 4.