Great Dixter
June 27, 2008
June 27th, 2008
I remember the January drive back from the airport. I was nearly bursting with excitement to be coming home after a year away. First job had been completed, changing the car tyre with my father on a rather grey day in the Heathrow airport car park. Whilst the rain inevitably found its way through my unsuitable clothes, it never touched my core. Seeing my sister, and mother and father for the first time in such a long time, and after such an incredible journey; the weather’s most hostile of conditions wouldn’t have stood a chance against the infinite happiness and warmth that I radiated. We set off, car swelling with love, around the motorway and then down the most beautiful roads I’d ever known.
I’m not sure what this piece of writing is. It’s about the place that I live and also where I grew up. A dedication, fan letter, a recognition. I don’t know. I know I need to write it.
Seventeen years earlier or thereabouts, amidst a bout of fever, I peeled myself off of the remaining mattress on an all-but-empty floor and drove with my family to what would be our new home. Not a move far away, but I had left all that was familiar. This is not an obituary to where I’d lived previously however, for the transition could not have been sweeter.
For me, as a boy, a cottage on the grounds of the Great Dixter estate became home and I’d like to describe some of the things which that encompassed. How its many facets, its people and nooks and persuasiveness influenced and made me.
At that age, Dixter was the grassy parking area for cars. Its large stack of composting hay was very quickly transformed into a goal. Countless evenings, spent sometimes with friends, sometimes on my own, kicking a ball around until it was too dark to go on, or exhaustion got the better of me. Just thinking about it, I can feel the welcome dampness of cooling grass on my back, at dusk, laid outstretched with my head rested upon the ball. A few quiet moments after enormous energy expenditure. Perhaps I would walk over to the turf pile and check up on the toad which I knew resided in one of the hollows. Then back through the nursery and into our house.
I moulded to Dixter, and it to me. Cracking the ice in the same puddle with my foot each day in winter on my way to school, and then avoiding it, thawed, on my return. Hearing the largest carp-come-goldfish sucking against Lily stems in the Horse Pond, waiting long enough amongst giant Gunnera leaves for it to emerge and then watching it glide across the water, iridescent as the sun shone on its back. Dixter was both snow topped topiary and returning from my paper round on a sunny Saturday morning with a milkshake in hand. It was frantically running through the gardens looking for our escaped dog, only to find him, tail wagging, amongst a group of affectionate Germans or whoever happened to show fondness and be visiting that day. Or drinking a peaceful cup of tea with my mother with our feet on the wood stove before leaving our cottage in the morning. It was waving to the nursery staff through the potting shed glass as I walked by; a chat with Fergus which may or may not have developed into a stone throwing competition, depending on availability of good stones; seeing Christopher and saying hello with an early shyness amidst Tulip and Dahlia’s growls and despite the dogs looking most put out by my presence.
As I grew older things inevitably changed, school became college and then university, and priorities and thought concepts evolved to those of a young man. Dixter became the rather complicated place to reach after a night out with friends. A base for the university holidays where I could relax after long summer job hours. It was the start and finish point of an early morning or evening summer run with Aaron or a quiet late night walk around the gardens with my girlfriend, holding on to her as she wasn’t familiar to the stones and walkways and openings in the dark. It was a chat with Christopher in the Yeomans Hall in which he said I should call him Christo rather than Mr Lloyd, pulled me up on indecisive chains of thought, or perhaps firmly guided me back to more assured ways of terming them. And wandering back through the gardens to the cottage not knowing it was he that had really put the idea of going to India in my head until a couple of months after I had touched down in New Delhi.
I’d describe the party held at Dixter for Christo’s death as one of the most impacting and beautiful things I’ve ever been a part of. My sister Alice and I made a pact beforehand that despite sadness we would make it a party as it was intended. We both drank a good amount of wine, and sat in the fireplace in the Great Hall as the smoke rose up the giant chimney and out into the daylight. We absorbed the eclectic good natured scene provided by his friends, felt the line between sadness and happiness blur and let the emotions mix. Sitting on the york stone ledge looking out onto the topiary lawn we shared a cigarette. It was the brightest of days and the first of the year with real warmth in it. Being near to one another, we didn’t need to speak too much about Christo’s death. Ours was a mourning of familiarity, and in some ways of a figure of security. But the feelings we quelled were far more than just that. Spending such a chunk of our young lives, not only with Christo as a neighbour, but in his very environment, I am sure that things we may never have discussed with him due to our adolescence, had somehow been transcendentally inherited by us. I like to think of it as though every affectation he had on the micro world that is Dixter reached us in some way whether it be a hello, his dogs barking at the gate, the vibrancy of a new season of colour or my father recounting what he had said after returning when the alarm had sounded on a windy night. Sitting there, I hoped that the sentiment of whatever that concoction of sadness, happiness and wholesomeness was that I felt, had been passed back to him in the only partly worded manner that it had reached me.
* * *
Since returning in January, I have been living back at Dixter and working here, where huge efforts are going into maintaining the place for its historical importance, horticultural benefit, and fundamentally for future generations of people to enjoy. I said at the beginning that I didn’t know the direction of this piece of writing. I think it has emerged as something relatively simple. It is really only an expression of the appreciation of my life, and the people and beauty and spirit that have comprised to make my home home. I intend to go to Spain to live and work whilst learning the language in the near future. It holds a degree of uncertainty, although overcoming it is not as hard as one may think, nor is leaving Dixter, in fact I’m certain that all those facets that were woven into my youthful foundations here are the reason that I can. And writing this as the sun rises above the oasts and its rays flood through the cottage window, I feel sure that I’ll be back here again.
