The Land

The start of May has brought brilliant sunshine and the usual accompanying fervour to most of England this year. Under-graduates at Oxford risked life and limb on May 1st by jumping off Magdalen Bridge into just a few feet of water, despite the presence of the police. Here in Sussex I reluctantly ventured outdoors to confront the jungle that was once our garden. Thickets of grass had grown up through the cracks in the patio paving, the lavateria had climbed half way across the weed ridden, unkempt lawn, and the out of control conifers were invading the table and parasol at the far end, deterring us from the joy of dining alfresco. Even the delicate cherry blossom and scarlet Rhododendron bush that had briefly blossomed at the end of April, had begun to shed their petals in protest at my appalling neglect of nature. However, it’s gratifying how much progress can be made with the weather on your side, and since ours is only a small plot of land, I had managed to restore at least some apparent order to the garden in just a few days.

Thus, with a glow of achievement to match my weathered face, I drove my friend Simon down to the delightful Hamlet of Bignor on the edge of the South Downs, to see a dramatization of Vita Sackville-West’s epic poem, ‘The Land.’ I had never been to Bignor before, but an early sunlit evening in May was the perfect time to make its acquaintance. In the centre of the village is Holy Cross Church where the performance was taking place. An enterprising warden has developed a marvellous year-round programme of arts events at this glorious thirteenth century Church, and it was evident as we searched for a parking space in the narrow lane leading up to Holy Cross that he has made a great success of this venture. There were clusters of candles and lanterns, and an inviting bar near the church entrance where an interesting mix of the well-heeled, together with more rustic or certainly elderly folk had assembled for the performance.
‘The Land’ was the poem which Vita Sackville-West hoped the literati to remember her by. She toiled away at it between 1923-1926, with the patience and tenacity of the farmers she described in its pages,. This epic verse, around 2,500 lines long, dramatizes the encounter between man and the soil, most particularly her beloved Weald of Kent, through the seasons of the year. It is one the one hand broodingly unsentimental, acknowledging the intense conflict between the two, yet it is also charged with her infectious wonder at the beauty which emerges from the struggle:

“ The country habit has me by the heart.
He is bewitched forever who has seen
Not with his eyes but with his vision, spring,
Flow down the woods and stipple leaves with sun”

‘The Land’ has been very cleverly adapted and performed by Tim Laycock, an excellent actor and folk musician with a fine tenor voice, and Sonia Ritter an actress who has played weighty Shakespearean roles at theatres like the Globe in London. She recited long sections of the poem with magnificent intensity, as if to suggest the sheer thrill of the poet when originally penning her lines of verse all those years ago. Tim Laycock skilfully brought to life a wide range of farmers and rural craftsmen celebrated in the poem, such as the Thatcher. In this adaptation, the rich sensuality of the poetry was punctuated by rustic folk songs, with which many of the elderly in the audience joined in, making the performance feel like a communal ritual of remembrance for a way of life that, alas, has gone for ever. In the interval Simon and I sipped our wine looking over toward the Downs in the fading light. Our enterprising warden was lighting the gas flares which lined the path from the church gate to the porch. I remarked to Simon that it felt as if I’d hardly be born at all, after hearing the extraordinary litany of flowers celebrated in ‘The Land.’ Having been a Londoner for the first thirty years of life, it struck me how we need to be initiated into a deep bond with the land and nature, preferably in our early years. Parents, teachers on extended field trips, and perhaps in this case the nature poet herself, may begin this rite of passage, but we must ultimately ‘grasp the nettle’ ourselves. I’m not sure that I have, as yet. Even now, I am uneasy passing a horse on a country walk, and the trees and flowers of the fields seem like distant relations at best.
In spite of the dour reluctance of the soil to yield to cultivation, there is a sense in ‘The Land’ of a deep, mysterious collaboration between man and nature to unearth the Divine treasure that sustains and enriches life. I was interested to read that Vita Sackville-West had ‘no formal religion,’. I’m not sure the Church would know quite what to make of her affairs with other women, even now. Nonetheless, her poem seems profoundly spiritual, and she certainly uses Christian imagery in places. Her celebration of the turning year has a liturgical feel about it, and the poem has clearly grown from a deep meditation on what is, after all, one of the seven sacraments of the Church. I sense that we must seek to understand nature more and more as we get older, if we are to unlock the mysteries of the Spirit. As Jesus says to Nicodemus when he fails to comprehend the notion of spiritual rebirth in the Gospel of John, ‘I have spoken to you of earthly things, and still you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things?’ Moreover, reading the parables of Christ in the Gospels, reveals how deeply Jesus reflected on the cycles of nature and the work of the farmer, in order to make sense of the mystery of being. His is a spirituality, like Vita’s, rooted in the land. In one of his stories Jesus speaks of a farmer’s seed choked by thistles, and snatched away by the birds. When he later expounded the parable, it was clear that the soil represented the soul of mankind, and the seed the Word of God. Jesus, a son of the land, understood like the poet, the struggle to cultivate beauty from stubborn nature.
So back to my garden, to turn the heavy soil, which stares darkly up at me from the flower-beds, and to re-seed the patchy lawn, with its spreading moss and stubborn weeds. It’s never too late to begin, as they say. It’s never too late.