The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,6
when they moved in or moved out. But it took some time to see the garden. So many weeks, so many walks between the whitish chalk and flint hills up to the level of the barrows to look down at Stonehenge, so many walks just looking for hares—it took some time before, with the beginning of my new awareness of the seasons, I noticed the garden. Until then it had simply been there, something on the walk, a marker, not to be specially noticed. And yet I loved landscape, trees, flowers, clouds, and was responsive to changes of light and temperature.
I noticed his hedge first of all. It was well clipped, tight in the middle, but ragged in places at ground level. I felt, from the clipping, that the gardener would have liked that hedge to be tight all over, to be as complete as a wall of brick or timber or some kind of man-fashioned material. The hedge marked the boundary between Jack’s fruit and flower garden and the droveway, which was very wide here, bare ground around the cottages and the farm buildings, and nearly always soft or muddy. In winter the long puddles reflected the sky between black, tractor-marked mud. For a few days in summer that black mud dried out, turned hard and white and dusty. So for a few days in the summer the hedge that ran the length of the garden that Jack possessed with his cottage was white with chalk dust for a foot or so above the ground; in winter it was spattered with mud, drying out white or gray.
The hedge hid nothing. As you came down the hill with the windbreak you could see it all. The old rust-and-black farm buildings in the background; the gray-plastered cottages in front of them; the ground or gardens in front of the cottages; the emptiness or no-man’s land in front of the cottage grounds or gardens. And beside Jack’s garden, Jack’s hedge: a little wall of mud-spattered green, abrupt in the openness of the droveway, like a vestige, a memory of another kind of house and garden and street, a token of something more complete, more ideal.
Technically, the gardens were at the front of the cottages. In fact, by long use, the back of the cottages had become the front; and the front gardens had really become back gardens. But Jack, with the same instinct that made him grow and carefully clip (and also abruptly end) that hedge beside the droveway, treated his garden like a front garden. A paved path with a border of some sort ran from his “front” door all the way down the middle of his garden. This should have led to a gate, a pavement, a street. There was a gate; but this gate, set in a wide-meshed wire-netting fence, led only to a wire-fenced patch of earth which was forked over every year: it was here that Jack planted out his annuals. In front of this was the empty area, the no-man’s land between droveway and the beginning of the cultivated down. Jack’s ducks and geese had their sheds in that area, which was messy with dung and feathers. Though they were not penned in, the ducks and geese never strayed far; they just walked back and forth across the droveway.
Hedge, garden, planting-out bed for annuals, a plot for ducks and geese; and beyond that, beyond the ground reserved for the other two cottages, just where the land began to slope up to the farm’s machine-cultivated fields, was the area where Jack grew his vegetables.
Every piece of ground was separate. Jack didn’t see his setting as a whole. But he saw its component parts very clearly; and everything he tended answered the special idea he had of that thing. The hedge was regularly clipped, the garden was beautiful and clean and full of changing color, and the goose plot was dirty, with roughly built sheds and enamel basins and bowls and discarded earthenware sinks. Like a medieval village in miniature, all the various pieces of the garden Jack had established around the old farm buildings. This was Jack’s style, and it was this that suggested to me (falsely, as I got to know soon enough) the remnant of an old peasantry, surviving here like the butterflies among the explosions of Salisbury Plain, surviving somehow industrial revolution, deserted villages, railways, and the establishing of the great agricultural estates in the valley.