A Field with a View by Jane Ryan

The evening of 21 March 2020, I was woken from a deep covid-sleep by my phone ringing. It was my son Asher telling me that he and his boys had decided to escape the city. They’d go crazy, he said, if they had to be locked down in their two-bedroomed house in Hackney. They’d found a barn conversion not far from my home in Suffolk and would be up there in by the end of the week. Two days later they moved in. The place was twice the size of their London home, with a vaulted living room overlooking a paddock and some black timber outbuildings. On one side, views stretched across flat farmland, thick with rapeseed coming into flower. On the other, there was a brick farmhouse to which another family from London had  also escaped.

I ventured out to see them as soon as I was well, usually under the auspices of swapping groceries. We sat outside, chatting about this weird new world. These visits became a pattern. We ate outside, wandered around fields of sprouting barley. The good weather felt almost as unlikely as the pandemic with a high-pressure system locked into place by a buckle in the jet stream. Day after day the sky was cerulean blue, empty of vapour. The clay ground was hardening, tightened by cold at night, parched in the sun by day. As we roamed the farmland in a state of pleasurable bewilderment we seemed, confusingly, to be as much on holiday as in a state of emergency – in a reprieve from reality. Maybe it was the suspension of usual pressures or just the fun of being together in the open country, but one evening huddled around hot coals on the barbeque we began to share the fantasy of having some land forever – a place to which we could always return. A sanctuary in a seemingly less safe world.

I’d never been in a position to buy land before but had recently sold my company and thought that between us we might have enough money for an acre or two, should such a small plot be available. That night I googled ‘Land for sale in Suffolk’ and a possibility popped up on my screen: a meadow near Coddenham that was being sold by Woodlandsforsale – those people whose advertising boards appear on trees all over England. I rang the number provided. Just go and take a look, a guy called Pete told me. Pay no attention to hostile notices, it’s legit to be there on business. Follow the hard track. Call me if you get lost. It was one of several plots, he explained, that had been part of an 80-acre estate that they were selling off. The land had once been the hunting grounds of a Tudor manor which had burnt down, the now ominous Shrubland Hall that was grandly rebuilt in the eighteenth century.

The next day Asher and I drove along the quiet roads to Barham Woods and parked up by a heavy iron gate bearing a homemade sign saying: YOU SHOULD NOT BE HERE. GO HOME. Ignoring this, we took the footpath into the woodlands, following a track that carved its way through a thick undergrowth of nettles and comfrey. A pheasant squawked and a twig cracked as a muntjac meandered nearby. Bees hummed their way through the stitchwort. A man and woman passed us on the path. They were returning from tending their hives, they anxiously explained, as if an explanation was required. We followed the track for about six or seven hundred yards until it opened onto a broad sloping meadow beyond which, through a gap between some tall oaks, we could see a ribbon of fields and woodlands receding across Suffolk. This place is lovely, Asher said. I love those trees. The Scots pine? Yeh, they make me think of being in mountains. Look at those two birds circling above. Buzzards. Maybe a breeding pair?

We spent some time exploring the estate, walking through sections of wood onto other fields and vistas, my dog Hope darting after animal scents in a world of her own. Pausing to sit on a log for a while, I looked at Asher – his hands resting on his knees, eyes closed, face tilted towards the sun. He seemed more at peace than I had seen him in years.

Let’s go for this, he said. The next day, I phoned Pete to say we’d like to take two acres. Some negotiation followed, savings raided, and he eventually agreed to let us have it for £23,000. We were lucky to get it for so little, he told me.

This wasn’t the first time I’d wanted to own land. A few years before, my friend Maggie had written a dystopian novel set in a moment when the climate crisis was reaching states of catastrophe. In her imagined England of 2044, access to land was critical for survival – for food, shelter, and water. Stirred by her accounts of people needing to find or defend scarce supplies, and already preoccupied with what climate change might mean in thirty years, I went on search for land back then. Small plots were (and are) hard to find though, usually only for sale when a farmer needs to raise quick cash. The moment passed. But now we were experiencing in real time how quickly shortages can occur. How social structures can suddenly fold into unrecognisable forms. And here was this field: a sanctuary in a time of chaos.

It seemed to be a kind of answer to a spectrum of concerns, but I had an unspoken anxiety about how friendly Suffolk people would be towards Asher and the boys. Ever since my husband Chris and I moved here in 2000, I’d worried about whether their brown skin and curly hair would lead to racism when visiting. Once Asher and the boys were glared at throughout a family lunch in the pub. We’re not moving table, Asher insisted, seeing this affront as a battle of minds. In my protective white skin, I can pass invisibly along streets and lanes here, but with them we are apparently out of place in England’s pastoral idyll, deemed to have strayed from some urban area. There is, of course, scant recorded history of Black people in Suffolk. It begins with a thin scattering of those who were brought via the Transatlantic Slave Trade, like the servant Rosanna, described in parish records of 1688 as a ‘Black-amore’. Later there were American servicemen who constructed airfields in the Second World War, or returned in the Cold War from 1948. But few stayed.

I knew that ownership was one key to the sense of safety that this meadow was offering us, but also that ownership doesn’t lead to peace per se. There was something more to this place than being ours – a sense that it could be a source of emotional protection through a reconnection with nature. It was hard to tell if that feeling arose from the beauty, the silence or, perhaps, from its secret-seeming location. Or if the field might resonate with the invisible histories of other creatures who had strayed there before and left traces of their lives. The land is deep: soil covers clay, clay covers glacial till, till covers chalk. Under that there are lakes of undisturbed, ancient water.

But whatever the source of that peacefulness, the field was also an unexpected way for us to connect as a family. I wasn’t used to having conversations about nature with my son. When we spoke, it was usually about things like his work, or money, Marley or Shiloh. Nor had I ever imagined that we might share something as significant as a piece of land. Yet there we were, discussing its ownership, the pH of the soil or where to drill a bore hole – having ideas about cultivating vegetables, or botanical remedies maybe. Or even – the most exciting thought – an edible forest. We were growing an alternative future.

Visiting the field three or four times a week, Asher’s enthusiasm for food production grew quickly. Deliveries of books on working with clay-rich soil were stacking up at the barn; packets of organic seeds forming neat rows on his kitchen windowsill. Tools were delivered: spades, forks, and a hand-push tilling implement that was supposed to drive a way through impacted ground. With naive confidence, he mapped out an area on the lower end of the slope where he would grow lettuces, carrots, beetroots, kale, spring onions, kohlrabi, radish – enough of each variety to test which plants would thrive. The ground, however, was set in its ways. Thick lumps of grass and thistle were rooted into a soil system that had long been undisturbed. We soon realised that tugging, digging, hoeing, and raking were going to be fruitless in relation to the scale of the project that he envisaged: fifty square meters of finely tilled earth growing thirty neat rows of veg. Someone would need to help construct these beds. Someone else would be required to drill a well. The well would need a pump, and the pump would need power. This project was going to be dependent on local goodwill and more money.

Of course, it wasn’t long after buying the field that we realised that our sanctuary was used by others. Dog walkers and ramblers would pass by, usually people who’d lost the public footpath or were in the habit of walking there anyway. And, to my relief, they were usually friendly, curious about where we came from and how we were planning to use the land. Kris, a local falconer was a frequent visitor, often popping over for a chat about the deer nuisance or to give advice on second-hand fencing, sometimes swinging a dead rabbit for his captive golden eagles. One day a man strode out of the woods wearing a Davy Crocket hat, carrying a rucksack strung with the tails of foxes, squirrels, and badgers. He liked to clean up the roadkill, he said, give them a good send-off. Our field-neighbour Ollie began to put up make-shift shelters in his hazel thicket. The timid beekeepers came and went. Jess, a Dutch woman who’d bought a piece of woodland, loved to talk to us about her rewilding project. Even Cam, who’d put up the hostile warning signs, was talkative. He wanted to know what we were going to do with the place. Right now, I’m looking to grow vegetables, Asher explained. And my mum’s planting trees up there, indicating the top end of the meadow where I’d started to stake out an orchard. Probably apples, plums, gages, I confirmed. Nice, Cam said. Well, come over for a drink sometime, he added, disappearing into the woods. Oh, by the way, I run a pigeon-shoot, he called back. Thursdays to Saturdays. Hope it won’t disturb you, man.

Cam was always matey with Asher. I later discovered that in his fantasy shooting lodge there was a hardboard cut-out of a nineteenth century Black boy serving cocktails and that Cam went to Africa to shoot big game. It wasn’t long before my nerves were tested by the sounds of his bullets whistling through the trees, the smell of gunpowder lingering on the air a few meters from our plot. It’s more frigging dangerous than Hackney, Asher scoffed.

But he was soon to meet someone who was going to enhance the plot. Going to the field one morning Asher saw a farmer ploughing a field, crunched his car to a halt, and waved at him to stop. Curious, I imagine, that he was being hailed by a dreadlocked stranger, Andy pulled up and listened to his needs: someone to plough a veg patch, get rid of the thistle, top the long grass. The following week, heavy metal blaring from the cabin, he rolled his tractor onto the field. Together they ploughed a fifty square meter section at the bottom end. The Rasta with a Tractor, Andy laughed after Asher drilled his first strip. What you going to do about irrigation? he asked. You’re going to need a bore hole.

And that’s how we met Max, the man who came to drill our well. After selecting a spot at the bottom of the slope, his crew came over with a primitive rig that drove a weighted iron cylinder into the ground. With each blow they extracted a capsule of geological history, first red clay, then grey grit, then chalk. At the end of a long day a spray of cloudy water finally shot from deep underground. My heart sank later, though, when I discovered that we’d disturbed rains that may have fallen when neandertals walked there – when Suffolk was joined to Europe by Doggerland – water that might be tens of thousands of years old. We had disturbed the past.

Before long, Kris the falconer and his wife Dee agreed to help with creating the veg beds. Kris had detailed knowledge of the local wildlife and loved to give an impromptu lecture on trees or birds, Dee always smiling beside him. Andy said we had to top the grass, and pull up the thistle with its tap root. They all thought it amusing that Asher was so insistent on organic methods. You’ll be weeding that thistle for ever, you know, Andy smiled knowingly.

Before long a neat enclosure of tilled soil was ready to take the first drilling of seed. Next, an irrigation system was put in place. Max built a small hut over the bore hole to contain the pump. This was powered by two solar panels that drew water from the aquifer into a tank from which a tough hosepipe stretched to the beds. Shiloh took a liking to watering and made it his job to check the moisture of the soil. Marley was in his teenage social media world but the pandemic had, paradoxically, created a time of safety for him that he remembers with nostalgia. Their stay in Suffolk, which we’d expected to last two weeks, had turned into two months. Life in London was becoming a forgotten idea.

Then, on May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered. Shock ricocheted around the world as videos of this shameless lynching fed through the media. The Black community was on high alert, galvanising its response. Asher’s work then as an inclusion consultant sprang back into action. On the field he was checking his phone every few minutes. By night he networked for hours as he – like so many in the Black community and beyond – determined how they should react. He was enraged, exhausted. Shadows appeared under his eyes and his cheeks sagged in weariness. He dug the ground with rage. Raked it with sorrow. But as he tiredly watched his sons being free in the sun and his veg seeds starting to sprout, he decided that the field was something he could share with others in the African-Caribbean community – to see this project as an act of rebellion. Of restorative justice.

To counter the issues of landownership and access in England, a Black-led collective, Land in Our Names1, was formed in 2019 by Josina Calliste and Dee Woods. Their aim was to ‘organise toward collective ownership and land stewardship by Black and People of Colour, to heal the colonial-rooted trauma that has separated us and continues to extract from the land.’ They are part of an ever-widening campaign to create equality in relation to the land, seeking to ‘address racial justice inequalities around farming and growing food in Britain’[2]. For people of African-Caribbean descent such as Josina and Asher, such barriers are profoundly felt. They are descendants of people who were torn from their lands in West Africa and placed into enslaved labour by English businessmen who burned their energy for profit. They say they feel the consequences of that rupture: observed, judged, urbanised.

It wasn’t until I was writing this piece and delving more deeply into the relationship between colonialism and the English soil that it occurred to me to explore the origins of Shrubland Hall – the neighbouring mansion and estate that once enveloped our field. With the National Trust’s 2020 report admitting that ninety-three of their properties had ties to colonialism and historic slavery, could we have strayed into a landscape with a more complex racial history than I might have first imagined?

Today, Shrubland Hall is almost derelict, an eerie mansion with a crumbling orangery and blank windows. Until recently, however, it was a grandiose monument to colonial prosperity and power, lavishly remodelled by the Middleton family who owned the estate from 1788 to 1882.[3][4] In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this politically potent dynasty spent vast fortunes on luxuries such as cascading Italianate gardens, pavilions and galleries. But this property was not developed in isolation. It was part of a portfolio of estates they collectively owned: Crowfield Hall[5] in Suffolk and Crowfield Plantation in South Carolina[6] – each being a grandiose echo of the others. Unsurprisingly, there is no reference to the rice and indigo plantation in the Wikipedia entry for Shrubland Hall, nor the fact that this family’s wealth was funded by the labour of the enslaved Native American and African men and women – over three thousand five hundred people over the course of two centuries. Neither is there any mention that the extended Middleton family of Shrubland Hall was also one of the most influential in founding of the Confederacy of the southern slave states.[7]

As the summer went on and the seeds sprouted into crops, Asher’s vision of a field consolidated. He planned to focus more specifically on growing vegetables such as chillies, spring onions, thyme, and spinach that are used in African-Caribbean cookery. He envisaged a meeting space near where he lives in Hackney, where young people could learn about growing, and perhaps educational trips to the field. He could see a potential business in veg boxes. He would lay a cultural claim to this land. He would call himself the Roots Farmer.

The weeks of sunshine and gardening continued until September 2020 when he, Marley and Shiloh returned to London. The schools were reopening, and new realities had to be faced. Meanwhile, as the days drew in, I started to source the bareroot trees for my orchard. They would be planted in winter when their roots would have time to establish before the next growing season. Scots pine, cobnut, hawthorn would follow. Over the winter Kris and Dee set to work on constructing no-dig veg beds, layering cardboard, topsoil, and compost into neatly filed strips. Cam died. The shooting stopped. The leaves fell quietly from the oak trees exposing new views across the county. We knew we would all be back in the spring when the cycle would begin again, this time with greater experience of horticulture, and with new Suffolk friends – with a deeper understanding of what it means to engage with this land, to unsettle its history and make something new.

***

Jane Ryan founded Confer, an organisation created to facilitate communication between different schools of thought in psychotherapy. She was its director until her retirement in 2022. Jane’s essays focus on personal stories woven with ideas from psychoanalysis. She is the editor of How Does Psychotherapy Work and What is Normal? (with Roz Carroll).

Jane lives in Suffolk.

The photo at the head of this essay is courtesy of the author.

Notes and references

[1] Jumping Fences, Land in Our Names, 2023: https://landinournames.community/projects/jumping-fences

[2] The Collective, Land in Our Names, 2023: https://landinournames.community/the-collective

[3] Suffolk County Council, Black and Asian Sources in the Suffolk Record Office, 2011

https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/28484965/2011-09-06-19-black-history-bw-suffolk-county-council#google_vignette

[4] Historic England, Shrubland Hall.

https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1000155?section=official-list-entry#

[5] Pearson, W. C. The Middletons of Crowfield Hall, Afterwards of Shrubland Hall, co. Suffolk: Proquest:

https://www.proquest.com/openview/682651a3c4095279/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=16475

[6] South Caroline Plantations, Crowfield Plantation: 2019. https://south-carolina-plantations.com/berkeley/crowfield.html#3

[7] https://www.middletonplace.org/history/