Life on a Community

There’s a chalkboard in the kitchen, and every morning at 9:30 the volunteers gather around it to find of what we’re going to do that day. Each member of The Community has a specialty—some tend to the animals, some keep honeybees, some look after a specific crop—and our job as volunteers is to help individual members with their work. At this time of year it often involves some variation of weeding or harvesting, but the tasks are varied, and there are many things that need to be done.

Most of the volunteers don’t have much experience doing farm work, although many of them have been here before. There are people here on “working holidays,” people looking to travel and see a bit more of the local color than they would at tourist destinations, and people who are interested in becoming members. I meet an abstract expressionist painter who lives just south of here, a French medical student, and a German salesman who brought his entire family with him. He has been visiting The Community for the past nineteen years. There’s also a writer who “would really like for people not to feel like they’re under the microscope—I’m not a journalist or a formal researcher or anything, just—”

When asked, sometimes it takes me a minute to explain what exactly I am doing here.

Example:

“Where are you from? Car-o-liney?” Then, when I’m asked about my program and some of my professors, I’m told: “It’s a shame lecturers at Universities aren’t known these days.” He says they tend to hide in their ivory towers.

(While we’re at it, here’s a few more examples of British condescension:

“Americans don’t know anything about cheese,” while gesticulating squirting squeeze cheeze on a cracker.

“Who would I know where you’re from?” “Do you know Dolly Parton?” “I do.” “She has a theme park near where I live.” “Does she really?”

“I saw the smugness in your eyes when you were talking about air conditioning.”

etc.)

And then from there I explain the details of the travel fellowship.

On my first day, I wake up at dawn, convinced that I’ve somehow slept through my alarm and I’m already an hour late. The assignment on the board is to help one of the members hack apart a tree that’s growing close to the building. The property is old—it dates back to the eighteenth century—and is pleasantly overgrown with vegetation. A cascade of vines overhangs the entrance to the kitchen, and the beds around the house are a mix of deliberately arranged flowers and shrubs and plants left to grow wild. This becomes a problem when creeping tendrils displace shingles on the roof or roots start to crack the foundation.

Our particular tree is scrubby and only slightly taller than a person, with nettle-like leaves and very hard vibrantly-colored wood, the kind of yellow-green hue that you usually only see on safety equipment and tennis balls. We work slowly with hand tools. While we do this kind of maintenance work over the course of my first week, I start to get the feeling that the plants have a mind of their own. When I’m hacking at reeds and bramble, when I feel the burn of stinging nettles, when thorns tug at my clothing, when a weed breaks in half when I’m trying to pull it up by the roots, I think: “They know exactly what they’re doing.”

* * *

Monday’s task simply says “sweet corn”; we’ll be helping an eighty-two-year-old philosopher with his crop. Within minutes of meeting him, he asks me to “tell him something transcendental” and lets me know that he can tell I’m a guarded soul. He explains that what we’ll really be helping him do is trying to keep rats from eating the corn. He claims to have spotted no fewer than two hundred of them crawling out of their hiding places and terrorizing his crop, gnawing on as much as fifty percent of their daily harvest. (His partner lightly slaps his arm when he says this and tells him not to be so Latin American, although one of the volunteers corroborates that rural brown rat colonies can have up to a couple hundred members.)

We start by walking around the perimeter of a fence line that encircles two coops where The Community used to keep turkeys for their Christmas dinner. This is picked as a likely spot for the rats to hide. We’re told to use our imaginations when looking at patches of flattened grass or gaps in the wire fencing. One of the volunteers is skeptical, but we clear out the tall reeds and brambles that have grown nearly four feet tall in the year the pens have been neglected in the hopes of drawing them out.

In The Blithedale Romance, the narrator, Miles Coverdale, himself a member of a transcendentalist community, doubts that it is possible to be a farmer and a poet at the same time:

It is very true that, sometimes, gazing casually around me, out of the midst of my toil, I used to discern a richer picturesqueness in the visible scene of earth and sky. There was, at such moments, a novelty, an unwonted aspect, on the face of Nature, as if she had been taken by surprise and seen at unawares, with no opportunity to put off her real look, and assume the mask with which she mysteriously hides herself from mortals. But this was all. The clods of earth, which we so constantly belabored and turned over and over, were never etherealized into thought. Our thoughts, on the contrary, were fast becoming cloddish. Our labor symbolized nothing, and left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the evening. Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of bodily exercise. The yeoman and the scholar—the yeoman and the man of finest moral culture, though not the man of sturdiest sense and integrity—are two distinct individuals, and can never be melted or welded into one substance.

Experience shows, however, that it is entirely possible to be a philosopher and a laborer. As we work, the member we were helping would occasionally pause and ask us an abstract and high-minded question: whether the natural state of humanity is flux or stasis, or the difference between an artist and an artisan, or if we as a species are predisposed to antagonistic action.

(So far, my main encounters with antagonistic action in the UK is that it’s my habit to veer to the right to make way for someone on the sidewalk, but here people tend to veer to the left.)

We spend two days hunting rats unsuccessfully. We clear out the pens, and then our boss storms into the coop, stomping on the straw-covered floor and shouting, “Rats, come out!” No rats come. The volunteer who informed us of the size of rural brown rat colonies lets us know that when farm workers wore bell bottoms they would tie string around their calves to keep rats from running up their pant legs.

When we’ve finished searching the pens, we investigate one of the wood piles. There are a number of them of varying sizes around the community, including a stack rough-hewn trunks. This will be fed to “The Dragon” in winter, a hulking green device that burns biomass and supplies some of the rooms in the community with heat. We find a number of potential tunnels in one of the piles and plug them with logs, but the next day even more corn is taken.

You may ask, why not poison the rats?

The Community was formed in the mid-seventies, and I believe the impetus for their founding was similar to the many other back-to-the-land communities that popped up around the same time: they were socialists and protesters, exhausted from the sixties, who felt that retreat was the best option. However, although it was considered a “middle class fad” at the time, the goals have shifted heavily from explicitly political retreat to ecological sustainability and organic farming. So in the case of the rats, they did decide to put poison by the chicken coops (another likely spot), but the poison is slow-acting—it can take up to two weeks for them to see any results. And after the decision is made, you can hear some of the members discussing the consequences, wondering whether or not the poison will travel up the food chain (at least for this type of poison it doesn’t seem to be the case). There’s a general reluctance to kill anything here. You make your peace with the spider on the rim of the sink at one in the morning. They don’t use pesticides or herbicides, and they rarely make use of any large-scale mechanized farming equipment. They try to disturb the land as little as possible, and are working to disturb the land even less.

In my time here, I’ve come to appreciate how vibrant and complicated everything is. Even in the midst of the heat and drought, the land provides abundantly. We’re just managing small pieces of it, nudging the system in certain directions, folding it back into itself. After they’re culled from the garden, the bodies of weeds serve as mulch for the crops. “They’ve taken nutrients from the soil, and it’s only fair that they give it back.” At this time of year, almost all of the food we eat is produced here. There’s sweet corn, beets, carrots, cabbage, tomatoes, aubergines, French beans, blackberries, and raspberries. Things I’ve never encountered or heard of as well, such as green gages, which are fruits the size of a large grape with a pit in the center. Purslane is sometimes plucked from wheelbarrows full of weeds and used in salads. We eat almost all of our meals outside with mismatched plates and cutlery. Food scraps are composted, and no one uses napkins.

In the case of lost corn, they are not interested in fighting back aggressively, scorching the earth to get rid of the pests. The rats have not abated, and they may be in cahoots with pheasants. By the second week, it’s decided to harvest as much of the corn as possible (rather than only retrieving a barrow-full or two a day) and to chop down the stalks when we’re finished.

The member in charge of the sweet corn is largely accepting of this result. Although it seems frustrating for him to give up so much of his crop, he notes that this is also one of the biggest yields they’ve ever had. And even a discarded stalk has value: once we hack them down, we feed them to the cows. They literally gallop when they see us coming.

After we harvest the corn, we shuck it (a word I taught them), and sometimes scrape the kernels off the cob. Most processing work needs to be done indoors, however, especially for anything sweet. Otherwise, you’re besieged by wasps.

Throughout most of the year, they’re useful at controlling the population of insects and spiders, but now the queen has effectively closed the hive in preparation for her hibernation, and thousands of wasps are belligerent and out of work. Their main pastime is to get drunk off the fruit of the land, either by swarming around apples and pears that have been pecked by birds, alighting on rotten fruit that has fallen off the tree, or swarming around us when we’re chopping something at a picnic table. A tiny bacchanalia that plays out around our humble labor.

* * *

Established in the mid seventies and composed of around fifty current members, The Community is one of the oldest and largest farms of its kind in the UK (excluding religious communities like the Bruderhof). The exception might be the Findhorn Foundation up in Scotland, which has significantly more members, but is also more commercialized. Visiting Findhorn often involves attending an expensive retreat. This community is very much a functional farm, and there’s little “profitable” activity here; excess produce is left outside the gate for £1 per bag.

All of the members live together in an old, sprawling building that has been added to significantly over time. In the eighteenth century, it was a private residence, first a moderate manor hall, then expanded to something larger because the owner had twelve children. After that, it became a convent, which is what it remained until the Second World War. This is the portion of its history I hear the most stories about, especially the sharp (often brutal) class distinctions between the higher and lower ranks. Lower-ranked nuns lived in small cells with slits in the doors to monitor their activity. There was a network of bells between the rooms that allowed senior nuns to summon others to their rooms. In the chapel, the choir benches for the abbess had two heading systems underneath. The bench for the novice nuns had none. The conditions were poor enough to inspire a book about a nun fleeing her captors.

Then, after the war, monks arrived who: “partied for twenty years and then left.” Brewing was a big part of what they did there. Sometimes artifacts from their time still show up when community members till the fields.

And of course things have changed further since the building became a community. Decisions for the whole of the community are made by consensus, but everyone has a large degree of autonomy over “their” part of the building. So things like hot water heaters and central heating arrived piecemeal. Even in an intentional community, people have their limits for how far they will trust the other people there, for what they are willing to risk or give up.

As a volunteer, I get a good sense of what day-to-day life is like here (at least in the summer), but I’ve only heard hints of the broader social dynamics.

I’ve been told things like: “If you hang around here long enough, you’ll have plenty of material for a novel.”

Conflict is supposed to be mediated by a third party, but feuds can last for years, and sometimes the situation resolves itself when one of the members decides it would be better to leave. I don’t know enough to speculate further—even on the scant details I’ve learned, and it isn’t the place of this blog to make conjectures about what things are really like here. You’ve probably noticed that I’ve been pretty coy about a number of aspects of The Community. I was asked not to include its name or the names of any of the members or include pictures. Some of this is for basic privacy reasons, especially for the children who live here or for people who work in healthcare and don’t want their address publicized. But it’s also to make sure the experience is as “true” as possible, even if it means leaving out certain details in this blog.

Besides, I’m much more interested in witnessing the day-to-day life of the place than trying to uncover some “dark secret” about what it’s “really like.” Conflict seems inevitable among groups of forty or fifty people living under the same roof. And it’s to the community’s credit that it’s persisted as long as it has and that there are people interested in moving here—including young people and families with children. There are few comparable models in the States. Most communities dissolve.

I wonder how much of their success has to do with the fact that it’s not a closed system. While much of what happens here is done communally—meals are eaten together, for instance—not everything is. People have one or two aspects of the The Community that they’re in charge of and they manage these tasks more-or-less independently. In the evenings, members disperse to their own units. Children attend the local school. Most people have jobs in the area. And while much of the food they eat is produced there (including milk, cheese, and meat: animals are slaughtered and butchered on site), they don’t shy away from purchasing outside goods, especially in the winter. (“We don’t want to live off exclusively potatoes and kale.”) It’s been a difficult summer between the heatwaves and drought, but there’s not visible panic about low yields the way you might expect if a poor crop meant starvation come winter.

* * *

“Are there any ghosts here?”

“You’re asking the wrong person. I’ve felt things here, but I haven’t seen the kind of physical presences that other people claim to have encountered.”

We’re standing in the kitchen sharing a bottle of wine that has been given to us by one of the members after we helped him disassemble a tent and relocate a massive cast iron fire pit.

If there are any vengeful spirits here, it may have been because of the irreverence the original members dealt with anything religious on the property. When the founders first moved in, they gutted the chapel. It’s now used as a playroom, with children’s toys strewn across the floor while a religious mural watches from the shadows on the far wall. There are other reminders that we’re in a former Convent: stained glass can be found in lots of unexpected places. And there’s an air of gothic gloom, especially when you start to notice all the cobwebs that can be found along the high ceilings. It’s “the sort of house that must have children, many flowers, open windows, and little vistas of bright things, to make it seem a joyous home.”

And it does have all these things. During the first week, there are more than a dozen children running around. And while much of the house is off limits to me as a visitor, I often stumble into unexpected beautiful spaces. A large room with bay windows and pink walls, a staircase with a skylight that leads to a section of the house where members live. Tonight especially it’s lively, with multiple pots of food bubbling on the stove and pre-war jazz playing on the speakers. It’s the French medical student’s last night and she’s making the entire community beef bourguignon. She and another volunteer had to peel an entire bag of potatoes for the gratin. All throughout the evening, people approach her to compliment her on her dish.

It’s in these moments that I really get the appeal of living here, what draws people to this lifestyle. And even outside of the dramatic gestures, people can be surprisingly generous. Most of the members drink tea, which is set up at a station in the kitchen, but one of the members is always offering to share French press pots of coffee that he makes from his own beans. I’ve been given homemade elderflower champagne. I’ve been shown family heirlooms, a handwritten playlet from the late nineteenth century passed down through one of the member’s family.

You can see why people come back, you can see why people stay.