Pheasants Hatch is precisely the sort of place you would never want to leave:
a shambolic part-Tudor house set in secretive rambling gardens in East
Sussex. Surprisingly, perhaps, this very English place has been an
inspiration for one of our most respected travel writers, the place he has
left again and again to cross the world – from South America to Siberia,
China to Lebanon – allowing the rest of us to vicariously visit areas
probably best avoided in real life.
Now Colin Thubron, 68, is to leave his family home in Piltdown, between
Haywards Heath and Lewes, for the final time. Following the death of his
mother in April, at the age of 97, he is selling the house where he grew up
– but not to just anybody. “I won’t sell to people who are insensitive to
the beauty and atmosphere of the place,” he says. “It’s too distinctive to
let a footballer’s wife destroy.”
It is easy to see why such a buyer might want to make changes. Thubron’s
parents, Evelyn and Gerald, bought the house in 1947 for about £7,000 and
did little to it over the years. The kitchen could do with a makeover,
though with windows on three sides, each with mesmerising verdant views, it
is hard to imagine how it could be much improved.
The rest of this higgledy-piggledy property, with five bedrooms, three
reception rooms, two staircases and various other odd crannies, is similarly
run-down, but equally charming. The oldest part, dating to about 1580, was
originally a one-up, one-down and is now the main sitting room and master
bedroom. The rest was added in the early 20th century, but, as Thubron says,
the house “gets its spirit from the Tudor part”.
There are no power showers or polished stone surfaces. The carpet is worn and
the furniture solid. Everywhere, there is evidence of a love of birds, dogs,
nature and books. The panel on one bath still has a fish mural painted in
1959 by Thubron’s older sister, Carol, months before she was killed, aged
21, by an avalanche in the Alps.
The desk in his boyhood room remains in the position – looking outwards, of
course – where he wrote his first book, Mirror to Damascus, in 1965, when he
was 26. Educated at Eton, he had moved to London and a job in publishing at
19, but had never wanted to be anything but a writer.
“I was naive, and I didn’t understand Islam at all, but I was fascinated by
the layers of urban civilisation you come across in cities like Damascus,
which is reputedly the oldest inhabited city in the world,” Thubron recalls.
“You begin on a long road of understanding, which tends to strip away the
romance and insert in its place something much more fascinating: the
reality.”
Mirror to Damascus was followed by books on Lebanon, Jerusalem and Cyprus.
Then there was a break while he built up the confidence to tackle “the big
countries”: the Soviet Union in the days of Leonid Brezhnev, China, Central
Asia, Siberia and, most recently, a journey along the Silk Road, from China
to the Mediterranean. Thubron always travels alone: not only is nobody else
stupid enough to want to accompany him, he says, the solitude makes it
easier to understand his surroundings: “You are more vulnerable, but more
sensitive.”
His happy childhood in East Sussex proved a source of strength. “This house
gave me a sense of security, which is a necessary thing for a traveller to
have,” he says. “It also gave me a keen sense of the beauty in the world,
which affected my travels.”
As well as the travel books, Thubron has written six novels – among them To
the Last City, set in South America, which was longlisted for the Booker
prize in 2002. “My mother was a collateral descendant of John Dryden, who
was a distant cousin of Jonathan Swift,” he says. “There was a sense the
whole family background was literary.”
Thubron was seven when his parents moved to Pheasants Hatch after a
peripatetic army life. His father was a brigadier, based in India until the
late 1930s; then, after the war, he was military attaché to Canada before
returning to Britain.
“When I was a child, Pheasants Hatch was intoxicating, and a lot of my love of
the beauty of trees and plants was nurtured by this place,” he says. “Even
then, it was partitioned and secretic, so it was great for hide and seek. It
seemed immense, though there’s just 2½ acres of garden. The rest is field
and paddock and so on.” There are about four acres in total.
Thubron’s mother, inspired, turned herself into a plantswoman. In the front
garden, “stolid-looking suburban roses” have been replaced by shrubs, the
gentle backdrop to a magnolia ‘Star Wars’ presented last year by the
National Gardens Scheme to commemorate the 50 years her gardens had been
open to the public. “ ‘Star Wars’ is new, and they thought it would interest
her,” he says. “It flowered earlier in the year and she was just able to see
it.”
Behind the house, cleverly contrived areas flow into each other. There is a
long herbaceous border that leads to a summer house and shields the grass
tennis court from view. “This was just hollyhocks and Michaelmas daisies,
but she planted exotic lilies, lacecap hydrangeas and astonishing Arabian
thistles. She had a feel for the textures and architecture of plants.”
A red garden leads, through a white garden, to a secret garden, populated by
stone fairies and a croaking frog – which became something of a family joke.
“I used to call it the bad-taste garden, so she added the fairies just to
annoy me,” Thubron says. “She put the bench here because she imagined I
might write here, but I never did.”
Thubron’s father, who died in 1992, took his wife’s romantic whims and made
them work. To the side of the house is a formal garden with heartshaped rose
beds, hedged in box, arranged around a pond. It is known as Peacock Court,
after the birds that roamed the gardens, along with four types of ornamental
pheasant and a pair of donkeys. Evelyn was fond of white, and there were
white whippets (usually three), white cats, white peacocks, white bantams
and white guinea fowl, as well as the white garden. She was a nurturer,
“interested in living things rather than objects”, who, at the age of 59,
adopted Thubron’s younger sister, Sarah, now 43.
Thubron lives partly in Philadelphia with his girlfriend, Margreta de Grazia,
professor of English literature at the University of Pennsylvania, and
partly in a large flat in Holland Park, west London. He has inherited his
mother’s love of plants. “I couldn’t live in London without a garden,” he
says. “I have a rather lovely one that looks over communal gardens, then on
to a church, so you might be in Dorset. The first thing I did when I moved
in was replant.”
His writing, too, is rich with references to trees and flowers. When he’s
travelling, if he thinks about Pheasants Hatch at all, it is about the
garden. “In the lands I’ve travelled, there are very few gardens – they are
too parched, too poor and suffered too much change,” he says. “From time to
time, I’ve sought out gardens in rather unpromising places, such as Russia
and China. The Mogul gardens of Kashmir, for instance, and the Persian
gardens of Iran have always had an appeal. A lot of my holiday travel has
been done in northern Italy, whose gardens I love.”
Right now, he is neither travelling nor writing. “My mother’s death and
selling this place have taken a lot of energy,” he says. But he knows it is
right to move on. “If I stayed, there would be the feeling you are hanging
on too much to the past, and I would probably be sad here,” he says. “I
would like to sell to a young family who would love it as my sisters and I
loved it, and would keep the garden as it is.” Footballing families need not
apply.
Pheasants Hatch is for sale for £825,000 with Strutt & Parker;
01273 475411
