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She took me back there the next day. Slowly the car went down the lane. The flowers in the verges, the sunlight in blobs and patches on the surface of the road. The knitted detail of this wood-and-field place. If anywhere were ever to look like nurture, privacy, withdrawal, sustenance, love, permanence and embeddedness, this was it. Sarah had found it.

Even then, at the first instinct-driven look, this felt as if it might be the place. Why was that? And how can the mind, in a series of fugitive impressions, never analysed and perhaps not consciously registered, make its mind up so fast?

First, maybe, it was because Perch Hill was hidden. It was neither exposed to the world nor making a display to it. It was clearly living in its own nest of field and wood, a refuge which could find and supply richness from inside its own boundaries.

Second, I think, it reminded me a little of all the ingredients of the landscape I had known as a boy at Sissinghurst, 15 miles away in Kent: the coppice woods and the slightly rough pastures, the streams cutting down into the clay underbase, the woodland flora along their banks, that deep sensuous structure of light and shadow in a wooded country, where as you drop down a lane you are blinded first by the dazzle of the light and then by the depth of the shade, a flickering mobility in the world around you. Even at that subliminal level, here was somewhere that promised complexity and richness, secrets to be searched for and found.

And third, it was just the time of year, the first part of May, when England looks as if it has been newly made and the stitch-wort and campion are sparkling in the lane banks and not a single leaf on a single tree has yet gone leathery or dark or lost that bright, edible, salad greenness with which leaves first emerge into the world; and when even though the sun is shining the air is still cold and you can feel the fingers of the wind making its way between your shirt and your skin, a sensation somewhere on the boundary of uncomfortable and perfect, as if nearly perfect, as if courting perfection.

I can make this analysis only now. Twenty years ago, we were driving blind.

We turned the corner, saw the agent’s board, the sign on a little brick building saying ‘Perch Hill Farm’, and drove in. Almost everything about the place was as bad, in our eyes, as you could imagine it to be. The buildings were a horrible mixture of the improved and the wrecked: yards and yards of concrete; a plastic corrugated roof to the disintegrating barn; an oast-house whose upper storey had been removed during the war; a 1980s extension to the farmhouse, in the style of a garage attempting to look like a granary, paid for, I later learned, by selling off the milk quota. The farmhouse itself was dark and dingy downstairs. In most of the ground-floor rooms I was unable to stand up. Upstairs there was grey cheap carpet, gilded light fittings, down-lighters and pine-louvred cupboards. A 1940s brick cow shed had been enlarged with an extension made of telegraph poles and more corrugated sheeting. Three other sheds – for calves, logs and rubbish, I was told – lay scattered around the site looking as if they were waiting to be tidied up. Various bits of grass were carefully mown. There was a decorative fish pond the size of a dining-room table in front of the granary-sitting room. The truncated oast-house had become a cart shed but was now in use as an art gallery. There were places for customers to park.

None of this was quite what had been imagined. The smiles remained hanging on our lips. The buildings were raw-edged. Their arrangement was not quite what you would have hoped for, not quite a clustered yard, but a little strung out along the hill. The geese by the farm pond were angry. And a wind blew from the west. Turn aside, turn aside. I have seen the sun break through … The Bright Field murmurings were no more than faint.

Was it that time we walked around the farm or another? I don’t quite remember. We left again, slowly, back up the Dudwell lane, along others. We had lunch on the grass outside the Ash Tree at Ashburnham. I drank a pint of Harvey’s bitter and the bees hummed. We were not sure. We went back on other days, again and yet again, taking friends with us. They all thought not. The place was trammelled. Whatever it might once have had was now gone. We heard somehow that the actor and com edian John Wells had looked at the place and rejected it: too much to do. We too should look elsewhere. So we did: a large fruit farm near Canterbury, other places, Brown Oak Farm, Burned Oak Farm, Five Oaks Farm, which I occasionally pass in the car nowadays, now the focus of other lives, diverged from ours like atoms that collide for an instant and then bounce on to other paths, and never to connect with ours again.

The Perch Hill valley would not go away. It had taken up residence in my mind. I bought the largest-scale map of it that I could find and kept it on my desk. I read it at night before going to sleep, walking the dream place: the extraordinary absence of roads, the isolated farms down at the end of long tracks, the lobes of wood and fingers of meadow, the streams incised into creases in the contours, the enclosed world away from the brutalizing openness which I felt had reduced me to the condition I was now in. It is a hungry business, map-reading. It only feeds the appetite for the real. I had drawn in red biro a line around the fields and woods that went with Perch Hill Farm: 90 acres in all, draped across a shoulder of hill that ran down to the valley of the River Dudwell, and entirely surrounded by the remains of Dallington Forest. The red line around these acres made an island of significance. The more I looked at the map the more real my possession of those fields became, the more that red biro line described the island reality for which we were both longing. ‘Let’s go again,’ I said to Sarah. It would be the last time, the last throw, and then I would push this map away and the place would mean nothing to us and we could move on to other places and other obsessions.

It was a summer evening, four months after Sarah had first wandered down the lane. We went not to the house but to the fields. We had brought some bread and cheese with us. We walked around and the light was pouring honey on the woods. At the end we lay down in the big hay meadow known as the Way Field and looked across the valley to the net of hedgy woods and pastures beyond it, the terracotta tile-hung farmhouses pimpled among them, the air of unfiddled-with completeness, the haze of the hay. Owls hooted; two deer and their fawns came out of the wood into the bottom of the field to graze and look, graze and look in the pausing, anxious way they do. Graze and look, graze and look: it was what we had been doing for too long. We decided there and then: for the sort of money that could have bought you an extremely nice house in west London (double-fronted, courteous neighbours, Rosemary Vereyfied garden, a frieze of parked German cars, chocolate-coloured Labradors in pairs on red leashes) we would buy a cramped, dark old farmhouse, a collection of decrepit outbuildings and some fields that would never in a thousand years produce any income worth having. Was this wise? Yes. This was wise, the right thing to do, plumping for the lit bush. What else could money be for?

John Ventnor, the art dealer who owned the place, wanted what seemed like an outrageous amount for it: £480,000. We could afford, we thought, after the endless shuffling of portfolios, the sale of heirlooms and the accommodating of ‘certain grave reservations’ of financial advisers, no more than £375,000 and that was what we offered. Not enough. We offered £20,000 more. Not enough. What would be enough? He was prepared to countenance a 10 percent discount on the asking price: £432,000. Too much. What about £410,000? Not enough. And there it stuck for months.

We began again to look at other places but none was right. The vision in the evening field had its hooks in us. We waited, hoping that the delay would get to work on him, but it didn’t. It became clear that he shared the freehold with a stepdaughter who no longer lived there. She wanted him to sell up but he didn’t want to leave. He had no incentive to lower his price any further. We were in an impasse.

Sarah sold her house in London, our daughter Rosie was born and we all moved together into a rented basement flat of profound sterility and gloominess. I got a job on a newspaper and we borrowed money on that rather slender foundation. On winter evenings I drew plans and projections on my computer of how we might change Perch Hill, what kind of garden we might make, how we might take the land and farm it in a way that would be more generous towards it. The sliced-off oast-house became whole again on my night-time screen. I took to sitting in front of it with no other light in the room, a silvery brightness emanating from the dark, a possible future set against a present reality. Plantings and vistas criss-crossed the spaces between the buildings on my computer plans. One after another of these schemes I drew up, ever more elaborate, and they all shared the same title: ‘Arcadia for £432,000.’ Give everything you have.

One winter day I went down there again. I had never seen Perch Hill outside its springtime freshness or its hay-encompassed summer glory. This day was different. I was alone; Sarah remained with Rosie in London. A wind was cutting in from the east and for days southern England had remained below zero. All colour had drained out of the landscape. In the valley, the woods were black and the fields a silky grey as in my night-time visions of the place. The stones on the track into the farm were frozen and they made no sound as I drove over them. The geese were huddled in the lee of a bank, fingers of wind lifting the feathers on their backs. Even they couldn’t bring themselves to run out and attack me. Frost-filled gusts blew across the frozen pond. The buildings were besieged by cold.

I was there to persuade Ventnor that he should sell his farm to us for something less than the £432,000 at which he had stuck for so long. I had no real tools or levers with which to achieve this, only the suggestion that a lower price might be fair. Smilingly, over a cup of coffee, he refused. We sat first in the kitchen and then by the fire. He was polite but adamant. The oak logs burned slowly. To my own surprise, I felt no resentment. I sat there agreeing with every word he said. Why should he leave the embrace of this? Why should the poor man go out into the cold if he did not want to?

He left the room to see a man who had come to the door and as I sat there I began to be embraced by the warmth of the house. I felt it wrap its own fingers around me. If a house could speak, that was the day it spoke, the day I learned this wasn’t simply a place where we could come and impose our preconceptions. We couldn’t simply land the Bright Field fantasy here and take that as the reality in which we were now ensconced. There was some kind of dignity of place to be respected here. It had a self-sufficiency which went beyond the demands and obsessions of its current occupants. There was a pattern to it, a private rhythm, the deep, slow music to which it had been moving for the four or five centuries that people had lived in it. The two of us men sitting here now in front of the fire, what were we in the light of that? Transient parasites.

I left and we had failed to agree on price but in some other, quite unstated way, I had succumbed. The buildings might be a mishmash of what we wanted and what we didn’t. They might confront us with a list of things to do that stretched 10, 20 years into the future. The price that was required might be unreasonably high. But all of that was translated that frosty day, or perhaps started to be translated that frosty day, with the hot oak fire glowing as the only point of colour in a colourless world, into something quite different: a commitment to the place as it actually was, with all the wrinkles of its history and its habits, all its failings and imperfections, all its human muddle. Stop fussing, it said. Give yourself over to what seems good. Here – after catastrophe and culpable failure in my own life, after I had witnessed Sarah, now my wife, tending to me as I collapsed – was some kind of signpost towards coherence. Don’t look for the perfect; don’t be dissatisfied if the reality does not match the vision. Don’t insist on your own way. Feed yourself into patterns that others have made and draw your sustenance from them. Accept the other.

‘You mean pay him what he wants?’ Sarah asked that evening as I put this to her.

‘Yes,’ I said. And we did.

If a son or daughter of mine said to me nowadays that they were thinking of doing what we did then, selling everything, taking on deep debts, putting their families on the verge of penury for years to come and acquiring a place that needed more sorting out than they knew how to pay for, a rambling collection of half-coherent buildings and raggedy fields, I would say, ‘Are you sure? Are you sure you want to shackle yourself with all this? Do you know what it is you are so hungry for that this seems a price worth paying?’

Just now, faintly, as ghosts from the past, I remember people saying those things to us at the time and thinking, ‘Ah, so they don’t understand either. They haven’t understood what it is to be really and properly alive.’ And knowing for sure what that meant myself: that when faced with a steep slope or a rough sea, you should not quiver on the brink, or spend your life pacing up and down on the sand looking at the surf. You should plunge off down it or into it, trusting that when you arrive at the bottom or the far shore, you will know at least that the world’s terrors are not quite as terrifying as they sometimes seem.

Do I believe that now? Nelson told his captains that the boldest moves were the safest, but Nelson was happy to lose everyone and everything in pursuit of victory. I can’t forget the decades of debt and anxiety which lay ahead of us then, the years of work in trying to reduce the mountain of borrowings, article after article, the alarm clocks in the dark, the working late on into the night to try to balance the books. But would I now exchange the life we have had for one in which we had never taken that risk or made that step? No, not at all. I am as happy that Sarah and I married ourselves to Perch Hill as I am about the existence and beauty of my own children.

Green Fading into Blue

A CLOUD was down over the hill and the air was damp like a cloth that had just been wrung out. The buildings came like tankers out of the mist. Had we made a mistake? ‘Is it a sea fog?’ Sarah asked Ventnor.

‘Oh no,’ he said languidly, ‘it’s always like this here.’

Somehow his grief smeared us. He was unshaven; he had been unable to find a razor after he had packed everything. His mind was moving from one thing to another. This and that he talked about, these keys again, the oil delivery again, his own untidied odds and ends, a sort of humility in front of us as ‘the owners’ which grated as it reached us, as it must have grated as he said it. His eyes had black rings under them, wide panda-zones of unhappiness. Anyone, I suppose, would have been grieving at the loss of this place. It looked like an amputation. Even so, I felt nothing but impatience, as though it were already ours and he no more than an interloper here. He said nothing about that. What a curious business, this buying and selling of the things we love. It’s like a slave trade. Go, go, I said to him in silence.

His mother-in-law was there with him. She was less restrained. She showed us pictures of their dogs cavorting in the wood. I felt like saying ‘our wood’. She was still possessive. ‘I’d hate to think of anyone making a mess in there after what I’ve done,’ she said. I could see her primping the back of her hair and looking at me as though I were a piece of dog mess myself. And I suppose I was, in their eyes, the agent of eviction. Go on, away with you.

I was edged by it all. The house seemed ugly, stark and poky. I hardly fitted through a single door. Would it ever be redeemable? I was still standing off, waiting for the mooring line, but Sarah was sublime, confident, already arrived. ‘Why do starlings look so greasy?’ I heard myself asking Ventnor. ‘Like a head of hair that hasn’t been washed for weeks. They look like bookies.’ He went at last, his sadness bottled up inside the great length of his long, thin body.

We waited for the furniture van. The house seemed inadequate for our lives. I picked some flowers, I looked at the view from the top field, our summit, and we waited and waited for the van. At last they called, about midday. They were in Brightling, lost. Sarah went to guide them in, while Rosie slept upstairs. The van came. It was too big to fit around the corner of the track past the oast-house and so everything had to be carried from the other side, 100 yards further. All afternoon our possessions rolled out and into the buildings, this clothing of the bones. Come on, faster, faster. The place started to become ours. It was as though the house were trying on new clothes. Sarah was worried by the sight of a staked lilac. Was the wind really that bad?

The removal men went. The oast looked like a jumble sale and the various rooms of the house half OK with our furniture. ‘Change that window, pull down that extension, put the cowl of the oast back.’ I could have spent £100,000 here that day. Sarah and Rosie went off shopping. Ventnor returned to collect a few more things. I didn’t want to have to deal with him again. ‘I see they’ve done some damage there,’ he said, pointing at the place where the lorry’s wheels had cut into the turf, trying to get around the sharp corner by the oast-house. I hadn’t even noticed. I listened to his engine as he drove off towards somewhere else in England, the gears changing uphill to Brightling Needle, and then down more easily the far side, the sound, like a boat’s wake, slowly folding back into the trees. We never saw him again.

He had gone, it was quiet and I was alone for the first time in Perch Hill. I could feel the silence between my fingertips, the extraordinary substance of this new place, this new-old place, new-bought but ancient, ours and not ours, seeping and creeping around me. It was as though I had learned sub-aqua and for the first time had lowered myself gingerly into the body of the pool, to sense this new dimension thickly present around me as somewhere in which life might be lived and movements made. Until now all I had seen was the surface of the water, its tremors and eddies. Now, like a pike, I could hang inside it. I could feel the water starting to flow and ripple between my fingers.

That evening, as the sun dropped into the wood, I walked the boundaries, the shores of the island, the places where the woodland trees reached their arms out over the pastures. Here and there, the bluebells crept out into the grass like a painted shadow. Wild garlic was growing at the bottom of the Slip Field. I lay down in the Way Field, the field where we had decided to come here all those months before, a place and a decision which were now seared into my life like a brand, and as I lay there felt the earth under my back, its deep solidity, as Richard Jefferies had done 100 years before on the Wiltshire Downs. The hand of the rock itself was holding me up, presenting me to the sky, my body and self moulded to the contours and matched to the irreducibility of this hill on this farm at this moment. ‘You cannot fall through a field,’ I said aloud.

I took stock. What was this place to which we were now wedded? It had cost £432,000, plus all the fees. We had borrowed £160,000 to make that up, on top of the sale of the London house. My father was lending us £25,000. Our position was strung out and I had ricked my back. I felt as weak and as impotent as at any time in my life. It was an intuitive understanding, an act of faith, that the deep substance of this little fragment of landscape would mend that lack and make me whole. It was a farm of 90 acres in the Sussex Weald, about two hours south of London in the usual traffic, but no more than an hour from Westminster Bridge at five on a summer’s morning. It was down a little lane, as obscure as one could feel in the south of England, with no sound of traffic, no hint of a sodium glare in the sky at night and an air of enclosure and privacy. At the edge of the land, by the lane, was the farmyard, with its utterly compromised mixture of bad old and bad new.

Beyond the farmyard itself, things improved. It was indeed one Bright Field after another. The buildings were at almost the highest point and in all directions the land fell away in pleats, like the folds of a cloth as it drops from the table to the floor. The creases were filled with little strips of wood under whose branches small trickly streams made their way towards the River Dudwell. The broad rounded backs of the pleats were the fields themselves, eleven of them, little hedged enclosures. They made up the small island block entirely surrounded by wood. That wood was part of the ancient forest of the Weald, whose name itself, cognate with wald, meant forest. The farmland was cut from it perhaps in the 15th or 16th century. The house was built in about 1580 and was probably made of the oaks that once grew where it stood. It was poor land, solid clay, high and windy all year, cold, wet and clammy in the winter, hard, heavy and cloddy in the summer.

Because nothing destroys a landscape like money, its poverty had preserved it. We were on the edge of viable agriculture here, one of the last pieces to be cleared from the wood and already in part going back to it. You could see the lines of old hedges, hornbeam and hawthorn, growing as 40-foot trees in the middle of the woods. Those were the boundaries of the ghost fields, abandoned and returning to their natural condition. Because it was so poor, it had never been worth a farmer’s while to drive the land hard. That’s why these fields are as beautiful as any you could find in Europe, or the world come to that.

Of course there are many other pockets of beauty in England, at least away from the great slabs of denuded arable land in East Anglia and the Midlands. In my 20s I had walked through many of them, about 3,000 miles on foot when writing a book about English paths, and then as a travel writer for the Sunday Times I had walked a great deal more. In the western counties, from Devon and Dorset, up the Welsh marches to Lancashire and Cumbria, I had fallen in love with a country I hadn’t known until then, as a knitted thing, a visible testament to the long and intimate encounter between England and the English. It is the national autobiography, written every day for 1,500 years, with more life buried in it than any of us will ever know, with little thought ever given to its overall effect and its language often obscure. Maybe that is what we found at Perch Hill, a miracle of retained memory, a depth of time, and the mute, ox-like certainty which comes with that, away from the zigzags of our own chaotic existence. Nature was part of it, not all. This was no wilderness. Nor, though, was it an exclusively man-made place, sheeny and slicked up. Sometimes now I wish Perch Hill – our lives – had happened elsewhere in England, somewhere smarter and sleeker, with an elegant trout stream or smooth chalky views, but Perch Hill, stumbled on by chance, in all its scruffiness and lack of polish, but with its promise of what we always used to call echtness, an authentic, vital beauty that came up from the roots, was the right place for us. Human and natural met there in a rough old encounter and that was the world we needed.

There was a line from a poem of Tennyson’s which, from time to time that year, bumped up into my conscious mind, and presumably lurked not far beneath for the rest of it. ‘Green Sussex,’ it said, ‘fading into blue.’ That was this farm in a phrase: the green immediacy, the plunge for the valley, the stepped ridges of the Weald, blueing into the distance 10 and 12 miles away. This wasn’t a little button of perfection, a cherry perched on a cake of the wrecked, but part of a larger world and as I lay in the Way Field that evening all I could think of was the feeling of extent that ran out from there across the lane, down into the field called Toyland, beyond that into the valley of woods running off to the west, to the river down there, the deer nosing in that wood and the sight I had that morning, as we were waiting for the van, of the fox running down through that field, on the wood edge, no more than the tip of its tail visible above the grasses, a dancing point like the tip of a conductor’s baton …

I shall not forget that evening. The spring was going haywire around me. It was DNA bedlam, nature’s opening day. The black-thorn was stark white in the dark and shady corners. The willows had turned eau-de-nil. Oaks were the odd springtime mixture of red and formaldehyde yellow, the colour of old flesh preserved in bottles. The wild cherries stood hard and white like pylons in the wood and the crab apples, lower, more crabbed in form, were in full pink flower – an incredible thing a whole tree of that, the most sweetly beautiful flower in England, dolloped and larded all over the branches of a wrinkled, half-decrepit tree. In places nothing was doing better than the nettles and the thistles, but in the wood, there were the wall-to-wall bluebells, pale, almost lilac in the Middle Shaw, that eyeshadow blue: in the half-lit green darkness of the wood, that incredible, glamorous, seductive haze of the bluebell’s blue, a nightclub sheen in the low light, the sexiest colour in the English landscape, hazing my eyes, a pool of colour into which, if I could, I would have dived there and then.

There were deer on the top field. The light was catching the ridged knobbles of their spines. I drank it up: this bright sunshine, even late, the bars of it poking into the shadows of the wood; the comfort of the grass; the lane a continuous mass of wood anemones, cuckoo flowers, primroses; and one very creamy anemone up by the gate. Its colour looked to me like the top of the milk.

‘These foam-bells on the hidden currents of being’, Hugh MacDiarmid once called spring flowers, and that attitude, a slightly dismissive superiority, used to be mine too. Geology, the understructure, the creation of circumstances: those were the things that used to matter to me. I preferred the hard and stony parts of the north and west or the higher places in the Alps where, after the snow has gone, the crests and ridges are left as abused and brutalized as any frost-shattered quarry. Walking across those high, dry Alps, I have seen the whole world in every direction desert-like in its austerity, a bleakness beyond either ugliness or beauty, and thought that life could offer me nothing more.

I still lusted after that, for all the clean hard-pressure rigour of that alienating landscape, serene precisely because it is so dreadful, because from that point of desiccation there was nowhere lower to fall. But alongside it now, there was this other thing, this undeniable life-spurt in the spring, whose toughness was subtler than the stone’s but whose persistence would outlive it. Genes last longer than rocks. They slip through unbroken while continents collide and are consumed. These plants, I now saw, were the world’s version of eternity, the lit bush. If you wanted to ally yourself with strength, nothing would be more sustaining than the spring flowers.

Over the following days, we dressed the house as though preparing it to go out. It was like dressing a father or mother. She sat there mute while coats and ribbons were tried on her. ‘Oh you look nice like that,’ we would say, ‘or that, or maybe that.’ Rooms acquired meaning, another meaning. In the kitchen, painted on the cupboard door, I found a coat of arms: six white feathers on a blue ground and the motto ‘Labore et perseverantia’, By work and perseverance. It looked fairly new. What was it, a kind of d’Urberville story of a noble family collapsed to the poverty of this, to the resolution of that motto against all the odds? It was certainly a failed farm. That was the only reason we were there. We had crept like hermit crabs into a shell that others had vacated.

But I guessed the arms and the motto had no great ancestry. Had Ventnor himself painted them here in the last few years? I knew that he had attempted to make a business out of this farm, to continue with the dairy herd that he had bought with it. But he didn’t know what he was doing and had lost a fortune. The last thing he asked me before he left was ‘Are you thinking of farming here?’ to which I had been noncommittal. With something of a glittery eye, he told me not to consider it. That was a sure route to disaster. Soon stories were reaching me of Ventnor sitting in the kitchen here, his unpaid bills laid out on the table in front of him like a kind of Pelmanism from hell, his head in his hands, his prospects hopeless. Every one of these stories ended with the same warning: Don’t do it.

The Ventnor experience seemed somehow to stand between us and an earlier past. He was one of us, an urban escapee, a pastoralist, who had turned the old oast-house into an art gallery and put coach-lamp-style lights outside the doors. Where was the contact with the real thing, the real past here? There was a glimmering of discontent in my mind about that gap, still a glass wall between us and the essential nature of Perch Hill. Before Ventnor, I knew, the last farmers here had been called Weekes. Where were they? Had all trace of them disappeared? It wasn’t long before we realized that the very opposite was the case: Ken and Brenda Weekes still lived in the cottage 200 yards away across the fields. A day or two after our arrival, Sarah and I went up to see them and from that moment they became a fixed point in our lives.