At the very beginning of 1936 he was invited to spend a few
days in that same village with his friend Richard de la Mare.
He confided to his hosts that he felt stale and had outgrown Devon
and they suggested he moved to Norfolk and the next day took him
to see a farm for sale a few miles up the coast. Henry immediately
determined to buy the property, and so he became the owner of
Old Hall Farm, Stiffkey on the north Norfolk coast in the autumn
of 1936. The farm was about 250 acres, a lovely looking place
with its chalk grassland slopes, hangers of woodland, its marshes
and water meadows; but as a farm it was about as run down as it
could be. He had not bought the huge Old Hall itself and his plan
was to rebuild some old cottages for the family to live in. In
the following spring, he and his brother-in-law, Robin Hibbert,
went to Norfolk and camped on the farm whilst they began the horrendous
task of renovating the roads and the derelict cottages, and the
family moved in just before Christmas 1937.
The whole business was the most dreadful struggle. HW was inexperienced
but had very firm ideas about how he wanted his farm to be run.
His ideas were too progressive for the slow old-fashioned country
ways prevalent at that time and place and he was very impatient
with those who would not immediately do things exactly as he insisted.
THE STORY OF A NORFOLK FARM tells the struggle of its reclamation.
With almost religious zeal the hilly farm was dragged from dereliction
to high quality; it being seen by HW as a microcosm of the struggle
emerging in Europe.
The locals mistrusted him and as war broke out, his well-known
belief that Hitler was essentially a good man who wanted only
to build a new and better Germany, and his allegiance to Oswald
Mosley and the BUF, whose agricultural policy was naturally his
guiding star, had him branded by the locals (totally falsely)
as a spy, with wild tales of signals to the enemy. In June 1940
he was arrested briefly under the 18B regulations but after spending
a weekend in a cell at Wells police station, with no evidence
whatsoever against him, he was released. But HW did not repent
and went his own way regardless, convinced he was right. An allegory
of those years can be found in THE PHASIAN BIRD published in 1949
about a beautiful phoenix-like pheasant which arose in splendour
but was shot and destroyed by black marketeers and spivs.
Weekly articles in London newspapers and in the Eastern
Daily Press kept things afloat financially but the constant
deadlines to be met on both fronts took their toll in irritability
and depression.
Particularly, Henry found the struggles on the farm interfered
too much with his writing. By the end of the war he was exhausted
physically and mentally, and his marriage was under great strain,
complicated by the birth of a further daughter in February 1945.
He decided to sell the farm, now A1, and with the war over, in
October 1945 the farming venture ended.
