PERCH HILL : A NEW LIFE

Adam Nicolson

Published by Penguin Books

One summer night at the end of the 1980s, Adam Nicolson was walking back from a dinner in Mayfair, in central London, to his home in Hammersmith when he was set upon by three youths, sprayed with ammonia, dragged into an alleyway and robbed. In the aftermath of the attack, Nicolson came close to a breakdown. His life was a mess. He had left his wife and was living with another woman. He was worried about the impact of the break up of his marriage on his three children. His business had failed. A writer and journalist by trade, he found himself unable to write. His finances were a disaster.

The solution seemed to find a refuge, somewhere outside London, somewhere in the country where he and his new lady, Sarah Raven, could find peace and somewhere to write. They scoured the southern counties of England. Eventually, they found a place on the edge of the Sussex Weald, ninety acres of farmland, hidden away at the end of a country lane. It was called Perch Hill, and it lay just down the valley from Rudyard Kipling’s home at Bateman’s, an ideal setting for a writer. It was financial madness to buy it, but they went ahead anyway.

Nicolson was not a countryman by birth or experience. He had a deep love for the English countryside but it was an abstract, idealised, literary love. Perch Hill is an account of his education into real country living. He had to learn about trees and about timber; he had to learn about haymaking; he had to learn about sheep and lambing; he had to learn new skills and new trades. Above all, he had to learn about rural society where the relationships he encountered as landowner and farmer were on a wholly different basis from those he had experienced as a city-dweller in London.

This is the story of making Perch Hill work, as a home, as a business and as an inspiration. And one of the main reasons for its success is Adam Nicolson’s openness and honesty. He is not afraid to confess the mess his life was in when he found Perch Hill. He is not afraid to relate in considerable detail his comic gaffes and his failures of understanding and imagination as he struggles to come to terms with rural life. But in the end, after the gaffes and the failures and the misunderstandings and difficulties, Perch Hill is a story of inspiration and hope – the discovery of a new life.  

Laurence Bristow-Smith
British Consul General