started to ring. She put out a hand to steady herself.
‘Bloody hell’
‘Exactly. But keep it to yourself, old boy. No point ruining the day. Still . . . you’ve got to feel rather sorry for poor old Fairley-Hulme.’
Four
Douglas leant back in his chair, sucked ruminatively at the end of his ballpoint pen and gazed at the densely covered pages of plans in front of him. It had taken him several weeks, working long into the evening, but he was pretty sure he’d got them right.
He had based his ideas partially on a mixture of the ideals of the great social reformers, a kind of utilitarian blueprint for living, and something in America he’d read about – a more communal way of doing things. It was pretty radical, admittedly, but he thought it might work out rather well. No, he corrected himself, he knew it would work out well. And it would change fundamentally the face of the estate.
Instead of the huge herd of Friesians – the rules and regulations about which, since the introduction of the Common Agricultural Policy, his father had repeatedly complained could turn a sane man into a raving imbecile – a hundred acres would be turned over to a self-supporting community. The participants could live in the derelict tied cottages, doing them up themselves with timber from the Mistley wood. There was a water source near there, along with old barns that could be used for small numbers of livestock. If they got in craftsmen, artisans, they could even start a studio down there, sell their pottery or whatever, perhaps giving back a small percentage of the profits in return.
Meanwhile the four fields on Page Hill, the ones currently turned over to sugarbeet, could be divided into smallholdings to allow local people to grow their own vegetables. There was a growing market for home-produced food, an increasing number of people who wanted to ‘get back to nature’. The Fairley-Hulmes would charge a minimal rent, and take food as partial payment. It would be like a return to the tenanted farm, a return to the ancestral ways of the family but without the feudal attitude. And the scheme would be self-supporting. Perhaps even profitable. If it worked really well, the surplus money could be ploughed into some other project, perhaps an educational programme. Like one that taught the delinquents in town something productive, perhaps about land management.
The estate was too big for one man to manage. He had heard his father say so a million times, as if Douglas himself were not quite man enough to be included in this. There was the estate manager, of course, the head herdsman and the farmhands, the gamekeeper and the odd-job man, but ultimate responsibility for what went on belonged with Cyril Fairley-Hulme, a responsibility he had held now for almost forty years. And this responsibility no longer simply meant the running of the land, it meant complex calculations involving subsidies, which had meant more machinery, less diversification, more chemical weedkillers and fertilisers. All of which had left his father muttering unhappily that if he had to grub up any more hedgerows he might as well sell the animals, turn the estate into one of those American-style arable farms and be done with it, while his older men, those who had learnt to plough with horses, speculated that, forget animals, at this rate there’d be no need for humans.
The brief period of self-examination that had followed his meeting Athene had made Douglas realise he had never felt truly comfortable with the idea of inheriting the Dereward estate. It didn’t feel earned somehow: in an age when nepotism and feudalism were dying a slow death, it didn’t seem right that he should take on this self-aggrandising mantle, that he, not yet out of his twenties, should assume a right to the estate and responsibility for the lives of all who depended on it.
The first time he had broached this with his father, the older man had looked at him as if he were a
‘Bloody hell’
‘Exactly. But keep it to yourself, old boy. No point ruining the day. Still . . . you’ve got to feel rather sorry for poor old Fairley-Hulme.’
Four
Douglas leant back in his chair, sucked ruminatively at the end of his ballpoint pen and gazed at the densely covered pages of plans in front of him. It had taken him several weeks, working long into the evening, but he was pretty sure he’d got them right.
He had based his ideas partially on a mixture of the ideals of the great social reformers, a kind of utilitarian blueprint for living, and something in America he’d read about – a more communal way of doing things. It was pretty radical, admittedly, but he thought it might work out rather well. No, he corrected himself, he knew it would work out well. And it would change fundamentally the face of the estate.
Instead of the huge herd of Friesians – the rules and regulations about which, since the introduction of the Common Agricultural Policy, his father had repeatedly complained could turn a sane man into a raving imbecile – a hundred acres would be turned over to a self-supporting community. The participants could live in the derelict tied cottages, doing them up themselves with timber from the Mistley wood. There was a water source near there, along with old barns that could be used for small numbers of livestock. If they got in craftsmen, artisans, they could even start a studio down there, sell their pottery or whatever, perhaps giving back a small percentage of the profits in return.
Meanwhile the four fields on Page Hill, the ones currently turned over to sugarbeet, could be divided into smallholdings to allow local people to grow their own vegetables. There was a growing market for home-produced food, an increasing number of people who wanted to ‘get back to nature’. The Fairley-Hulmes would charge a minimal rent, and take food as partial payment. It would be like a return to the tenanted farm, a return to the ancestral ways of the family but without the feudal attitude. And the scheme would be self-supporting. Perhaps even profitable. If it worked really well, the surplus money could be ploughed into some other project, perhaps an educational programme. Like one that taught the delinquents in town something productive, perhaps about land management.
The estate was too big for one man to manage. He had heard his father say so a million times, as if Douglas himself were not quite man enough to be included in this. There was the estate manager, of course, the head herdsman and the farmhands, the gamekeeper and the odd-job man, but ultimate responsibility for what went on belonged with Cyril Fairley-Hulme, a responsibility he had held now for almost forty years. And this responsibility no longer simply meant the running of the land, it meant complex calculations involving subsidies, which had meant more machinery, less diversification, more chemical weedkillers and fertilisers. All of which had left his father muttering unhappily that if he had to grub up any more hedgerows he might as well sell the animals, turn the estate into one of those American-style arable farms and be done with it, while his older men, those who had learnt to plough with horses, speculated that, forget animals, at this rate there’d be no need for humans.
The brief period of self-examination that had followed his meeting Athene had made Douglas realise he had never felt truly comfortable with the idea of inheriting the Dereward estate. It didn’t feel earned somehow: in an age when nepotism and feudalism were dying a slow death, it didn’t seem right that he should take on this self-aggrandising mantle, that he, not yet out of his twenties, should assume a right to the estate and responsibility for the lives of all who depended on it.
The first time he had broached this with his father, the older man had looked at him as if he were a
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