But that was in the future. Now he was in a sheep barn on lambing watch, reading Housman and Clare by the light of a Tilley lamp. He had been attempting poems, almost entirely about landscape and weather (the shoebox poems) that even he found tedious. There was no poetry to be had in sheep, or even lambs for that matter. (“The little shivering gaping things”—he had always been repelled by Rossetti’s “The Lambs of Grasmere.”) Cows yielded nothing but milk. Not for Teddy, Hopkins’s “skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow.” “I worship Hopkins,” he wrote to Nancy from somewhere south of Hadrian’s Wall. “If only I could write like him!” He was always cheerful in letters, it seemed like good manners, when in fact he was in despair at his own cloddish verse.
Izzie came to visit him, briefly, staying in a hotel on Lake Windermere where she stood him an expensive dinner and plied him with alcohol and questions to “lend some authenticity” to Augustus Becomes a Farmer.
The year turned quickly. The early apple harvest in Kent gave birth to an ode to autumn that would have shamed Keats (“The apples, the apples, rosy and fair / not yet touched by the fingers of frost…”). He was not yet ready to renounce either poetry or husbandry and boarded a ferry at Dover, a new unsullied thick notebook in his bag. Disembarking on the foreign soil of France he headed due south, for the vineyards and the grape harvest, thinking of Keats’s beaker of blushful Hippocrene, although the Hippocrene was in Greece, not France, wasn’t it? He hadn’t considered Greece. He rebuked himself for the (large) omission from his itinerary of the cradle of civilization. He rebuked himself again later for having missed the wonders of Venice, Florence and Rome, but at the time he had been happy to sidestep the rest of Europe. In 1936 it was a troubled land and Teddy felt no need to experience its political upheavals. In later years he wondered if he had been wrong, if he shouldn’t have faced up to the evil that was brewing. Sometimes it takes just one good man, Ursula said to him during the war. Neither of them could think of an example from history, “except the Buddha perhaps,” Ursula offered. “I’m not convinced by the reality of Christ.” There were plenty of instances where it had taken just one bad man, Teddy said gloomily.
Perhaps there would be time for Greece. After all, his deadline (“a year perhaps”) was self-imposed.
By the time a late Sauternes harvest had finished he was “as brown and strong as a peasant,” he reported in a letter to Nancy. His French, too, had gained the coarse fluency of the peasant. After a day’s picking he was ravenous and gorged on the huge evening meals that the domain provided for their workers. At night he pitched the old canvas tent in a field. For the first time since his childhood at Fox Corner he slept the dreamless sleep of the dead or the innocent, helped by the copious amounts of wine that accompanied meals. Sometimes there was a woman. He never wrote a word.
For the rest of his life he would be able to close his eyes and conjure up the sight and smell of the food he had eaten in France—he had relished the oily garlickyness of the stews, the artichoke leaves dipped in butter, the oeufs en cocotte—eggs baked in the oven inside huge beef tomatoes. A saddle of roasted lamb quilted with cloves of garlic and sprigs of rosemary, a work of art. These were tastes that were foreign—in every way—to the bland English palate. Cheese, sour and strong; the desserts: flaugnarde with peaches, clafouti with cherries, tarte aux noix and tarte aux pommes and a Far Breton—a kind of prune custard tart that to the end of his life he dreamed about eating again and never did. “Prunes and custard?” Mrs. Glover said doubtfully when he returned.
Mrs. Glover left Fox Corner soon after Teddy’s return, driven away perhaps by his requests for French regional cooking. “Don’t be silly,” Sylvie said. “She’s retired to live with her sister.”
Then there was breakfast, of course, taken at the big table in the domain kitchen. Not the gruel-like porridge ladled out at boarding school or the unsurprising egg and bacon of Fox Corner. Instead he sliced open half a freshly baked baguette, wadded the inside with Camembert and dipped it into a bowl of scalding strong coffee. He forgot all about this way of greeting the day when he returned home and then, decades later, when he was living in sheltered accommodation at Fanning Court, it came back to him suddenly and, inspired by the richness of the memory, he bought a baguette from Tesco’s (“baked on the premises”—yes, but from what?) and a small round of unripe Camembert, and poured his morning coffee into a cereal bowl rather than the usual mug. It was not the same. Not at all.