religion.
‘But you don’t go to church, Dick?’
‘Well, no. Most people round these parts don’t.’
‘And yet you’re a believer?’
He gave a sly grin. ‘When it suits me, I am. In the resurrection of the body, for instance. Now that’s something I believe in. And I’ve every right to. It gives anybody like me a second chance, doesn’t it? If the Bible says God can put back my missing bits who am I to argue about it?’ This, I supposed, was meant to be a joke.
In my second year at Long Crendon the new farmer moved in. The black-and-white cows had long gone, and the farmer ploughed up the field and planted horse-beans, the most hideous of all crops. For thirty years the Essex farmers had been adding a few feet here and there to their usable land by tearing out hedges, but they had done it in a haphazard and disorganised fashion, whereas my neighbour was thorough. The trees across the moat were on his land, and they all came down, dead or alive, and were cut up. Those were the days when psychedelic painting was in vogue, and he rode round on a tractor painted in astonishing colours, like Sennacherib in his chariot, dealing death and destruction to nature. One of the big chemical firms was encouraging farmers to experiment with its sprays. He sprayed the banks of the moat on his side and in doing so killed off a vast colony of frogs. The resident mallards, feeding on these, also died. I watched them seized by a kind of paralysis, trying to take off. After splashing about in desperate fashion for a while they subsided and swam in slow, tightening circles. In the end they could no longer hold their heads up, and drowned. In a single year this man quite changed everything included in my view of the Essex landscape. What had looked in summer like the southern, treeless edge of the Argentine Pampas, became Siberia in the winter. This was perhaps the hardest, due to the efforts of my neighbour and his friends, of the century. Nothing held the east wind back as it blew in from the North Sea. Six inches of snow lay in the ploughed fields and the wind plucked it up like feathers from a moulting goose and dropped it into the hollows of the land. When spring came that year there were still yard-deep pockets of frozen snow lying between the bare banks at the bottom of the lanes.
Every penny Dorothea and Dick could scrape together was saved to send Jane to Woodford, but Jane was already thirteen and they were becoming desperate. Dorothea now worked three days a week at the Rancho Grande, owned by a man who had made a fortune from laundromats. Her beloved horse was for sale but there were no takers. She got permission to build on her garden and sold it off to a speculator. This was a sacrifice indeed for, endlessly enriched with the night soil from their cesspit, it produced vegetables of spectacular size and quality. Henceforth, she said, they would live on Cornish pasties with the occasional addition of sugar beet leaves. These, which the farmers threw away, looked and tasted like spinach of an inferior kind. ‘Are you really sure,’ I asked her, ‘that what you’re doing is for the best?’
‘We have to do everything we can to give her a proper start,’ Dorothea said. ‘After that it’s up to her.’ She mentioned her cousins, the Broadbents, accepted as the leading Cloate family. They had done well in the post-war period out of buying up and stripping the assets of several derelict estates in the neighbourhood, clearing the few remaining woods and turning the land over to agriculture. Bill and Emily Broadbent’s daughter Patricia had just finished four years at Woodford, and had gone straight from it to one of the leading schools for models and faced the prospect of a dazzling future. Pictures of her were already beginning to appear in the Essex newspapers, and there was talk of contracts. I made no attempt to dampen her enthusiasm. It was hard to believe that Jane—slouching about the village with rounded