From fashion jetset to the dream of a little farm – what could go wrong?

Location proves crucial when considered a foreigner.

We all know someone who has been fascinated with the romantic idea of a little countryside house or a little organic farm at one point in their life. A place that could somehow bring us closer to nature, connecting us to some inner power, helping us achieve that elusive balanced lifestyle.

That was what Lidija Newton had in mind as she moved to the countryside to start what today is a successful smallholding, The Very Berry Farm in East Sussex, England. Since 2011 her small fruit farm has been producing organic raspberries, blueberries, honey, and eggs. She remembers that when she moved in, a few neighbours had welcomed her with flower baskets and well wishes. So how does one go from living the dream to waking up every morning just hoping for a quiet day? One day she might sell everything.

”I have been physically threatened, daytime robbed, verbally offended in so many misogynistic ways and in different levels that I can’t even tell you all”.

While some welcomed her, others placed a board near her gate with the words, ”get the f… foreigners out of our village!” Lidija was driving by that sign for almost three weeks wondering who they were so angry with in this village? Until somebody pointed out that it was her. That was only the beginning of her battle near Battle.

Lidija first came to the UK from Croatia 32 years ago to study English at Brighton Polytechnic, now The University of Brighton. She remembers how cold and windy it was and how she absolutely hated it. She soon moved to London and started working as an au-pair, as many international students would do back then. It didn’t take her long to get involved in fashion, designing, selling, and working in various events with other designers and collaborators. It was the 90’s, a time like no other to be in London and in the fashion industry. You could find her and her creations at a store she shares with a friend on Portobello Road in London or Ibiza during the summer. “It was a fun job to have, meeting interesting people. It allowed me to be young and free to a certain level while still working towards my goals”, Lidija says.

It was 2007 when I first met Lidija. She was living in a beautiful, quite magnificent house at the Brighton Marina with her dog, Sky. At first, I could not see her working in the fields wearing Welly boots on rainy and cold English days. But I must say that when she did, she wore some unique pairs from renowned fashion houses. Lidija has that slim figure, often typical of those who work in the fashion industry on those days; luckily, it is her natural anatomy. A fragile figure with long platinum blonde hair and pale skin like many people from East European countries. The only thing that would contrast with that delicate figure was the robustness of her giant 3-year-old Malamute, Sky, which gave her the final motivation and drive to pursue her dream. She now recalls the thought when she would have a bantam farm one day, ”all I had was this picture of my dog Sky and me, outside Waitrose with this organic chicken bag.”

”All I have was this picture of my dog Sky and me, outside Waitrose with this organic chicken bag”.

Lidija had always been an urban girl, travelling around the world searching for new experiences and culture. She lived a few years in Japan and travelled extensively in South Asia and the US. Then something changed in 2004 when she brought home a cute little Malamute puppy. She realised that a pet requires 100% commitment. A responsibility that she was keen to have, expanding her world to a new level. She remembers several of her friends saying that she would run back to London at the first opportunity to go to Selfridges, one of her favourite hobbies. But she didn’t miss it; actually, she says ”I enjoy the long countryside walks with the dog, the freedom and all those things. And I was still going to work at McQueen (Alexander) in London on occasion. I thought I was getting the better of both worlds”. Following her friends’ advice, she began looking for a place that could give her a small farm experience before committing to a more significant investment. She then moved around, from Hampstead Gardens Suburbs to South England in search of the perfect location for her little romantic farm, looking for a place where she could grow her garden surrounded by chickens and other animals. Today, she knows that some of them, like ‘Mr’ Foxes, can kill all her chickens, geese, and ducks, ‘Mr’ Black Crow can steal her eggs, and the lovely rabbits can eat all the early flowers that later would become the fruits she intends to sell.  

It was when she moved to Brookland, Kent, later in 2007, when she first learned about the possibilities of having a fruit farm. She soon realised everything on sale was too big and overpriced for her budget, but found a temporary house, that she visited several times to make her mind up about the differences from where she was coming, with a big, fenced garden amid a few glasshouses producing raspberries, and grounds perfect for Sky. Around Christmas time that year, the property owner John, who also manages a raspberry farm, asked Lidija why she wanted to have a chicken farm? He invited her to come with him to his glasshouses and told her, ”look at my raspberries, my babies are going to sleep, they are dormant, they sleep through the winter. Tomorrow I am on a plane to Brazil for two and a half months, returning in February to then, take care of them again”. She knew he had a point. With animals she would have to wake up every single day to feed them, even on Christmas morning. Nonetheless, she says laughing, ”seems that chickens always will be in my life. They like me. They are constantly checking if I am okay”. She ends up with both fruits and animals. Following his suggestions and advice, she started looking for a field to build her farm from scratch—a much reasonable and affordable choice.

In 2010, she found a 19th-acre field in Ninfield. A small village and civil parish in the Wealden District, not far from Bexhill-on-Sea and Battle, in East Sussex. Composed of three fields with 3 small ponds, which were used to keep a few horses from time to time. An uneven ground that resembles a valley, starting from the corner of the village all the way down with plenty of areas that could and were gracefully transformed by her throughout these 11 years.

There is where she began her new life, on a rustic landscape enjoying the long walks with her dog near a big reservoir. Everything was exactly how she imagined. Everybody was very welcoming and helpful, or so she thought. Then she moved to Ninfield, where she is now. She shares this memory, ”people would say to me, OMG this is the girl I met from Croatia, asking me billions of questions, not letting me go; instead of WTF, you are from Croatia, we don’t want foreigners here!”, which now prevails on her thoughts every day.

Nothing could prepare her for the challenges that location would add to the hard work that would come. As it turns out, the challenges of the land are much easier to overcome than the challenges of your local neighbours.

I remember having visited her just a few weeks after she had bought the land. One of my many visits. She was still living in Brookland this particular visit, and we travelled around 45 minutes to Ninfields. A journey that she had done every day with Sky for several months. I was astonished to see all she accomplished in such a short period. In a few weeks, she had already received hundreds of plants to start her business and was deciding the best area to plant them in the field. Someone was helping her with the fence around the property where Lidija had done as much as she could herself, to the point of having her hands almost permanently damaged. She remembered asking the worker how everything was going, which he would reply first that her tits were looking good that day!

She would be there with Sky all day, on those raw fields, planning everything she needed, moving things around, and making phone calls from her office, which was really her car. There was an old barn in ruins that today is a beautiful, functional, and well divided new barn with plenty of space to store all her equipment, an office, and a cosy area. Everything had to be built from scratch: electricity posts, an irrigation system using one of the natural springs, 10 polytunnels, and many other, as she would call ‘little projects’. She pauses for a moment, takes a deep breath, and tells me that ”it was a very quick learning curve of how to navigate in between the things that I have to do, the ones I have in mind and the things I need to do to survive”.  

”It was a very quick learning curve of how to navigate in between the things that I have to do, the ones I have in mind and the things I need to do to survive”. 

It would take several months until she had permission to put a static caravan on the site that allowed her to stay for 10 months of the year while waiting for other planning permissions. A new planning application was necessary for everything she wanted to do. She noticed it would take her a lot longer to be approved in contrast to her local neighbours’ applications. As an example, one of her neighbours, the son of a good man from the area bought the land next door several years after her. He had a tractor and could do things himself, whereas Lidija was told by a council member that she, a woman, could not do the same, even though she had a tractor and was doing it all for many years. This neighbour’s planning was approved in approximately 3 to 4 months, with a few changes from his initial application, while it took her over a year only to deal with her planning conditions. She says sadly ”I watch around my village, people doing things, and everything was so easy, but I can’t put a post on my farm without having 20 letters of complaints to the council. In 10 years living here, I had 5 or 6 visits from the council, saying that somebody sent a letter complaining that I am doing something illegal”. 

She remembers in the early days that someone sent a letter to the parish council objecting to her application for more polytunnels. She felt offended because nobody ever came to ask her anything. She called the lady in the parish council, saying ”I have no problems with the objecting, but I do have a problem you are objecting without meeting me”. She now knows that she should have been much stronger in the way she dealt with it all. Compromising, believing that she would be accepted in the community, proved to be the wrong approach. As a result of this phone call, she received a visit by several parish council members at once. She then explained her project, the differences in the quality of the fruit inside the polytunnels against the outside ones in taste, on the final market price, and gave them a few fruits to taste. She laughs, remembering that one of the ladies immediately asked if she was trying to bribe them with those fruits. One of many times she experienced this kind of hostility towards her.  ”It is not that they don’t trust me privately, public I am told constantly in my face”. 

Many people did value what Lidija was doing and supported her, but the feeling of being considered an outsider, a foreigner as she had heard so many times in those years, never went away. Even when she opened her gates during the village festival and allowed visitors to park on her field, she recalled that the first thing she overheard when arriving at the party was why and what she would want in return. Yes, she did want something; she wanted to be accepted as part of the community. But the reality is that after 20 years, she was forced to realise that she was not a Londoner but a foreigner.

She always tried to take things in the best way possible. She remembers contracting a man from nearby to do a few jobs that she couldn’t handle. For some specific jobs, she has no other option than contract a man, and on this occasion, she laughs and tells me that “this man’s wife uses to come all the time to check on him. I started to think that she was moving in. Until someone explains to me that the lady was worried that I would run away with her husband. Of course, I was a single woman, a foreigner, and obviously, I was after their husbands! I soon realised that being a charming, semi pretty girl in the countryside is not a bonus, understanding then why many ladies in the village were very unfriendly towards me”. For the record, Lidija did have a boyfriend working abroad and her farm dream strained the relationship. But even after she started to date a ‘local’ tree surgeon from Hastings, an English single man, things didn’t change much at all.

Looking back on her previous experiences, everybody was so welcoming. But there were so many episodes, such as when she had to pay a lot of money because someone dodged the water meter prior to her contract or started to use her electricity post without permission. Or when she was told by one of her clients that she didn’t need to lie if she didn’t want to sell honey to them! After a quick investigation, she found out that the bee man, with whom she had a deal that he could use her land in exchange for coaching her on the bee craft and sharing the honey, was the one selling honey around after had told her that for some strange, natural reason, there was no honey that year—using her property name. Because she believes that people should be kind to each other, she often chose not to take further legal action.

Things got worse in 2016, when Sky passed away, which had an enormous emotional impact on her. At the same time as the Brexit vote. Suddenly she became part of the country’s debate, being told how she should not be entitled to NHS or other benefits. That her children, the ones she doesn’t have, should not be allowed in the same schools and so on.

”I now know that I am never not going to be a foreigner. And I am never not going to be a woman. So, I am fighting a no-win battle here, and I can’t live like that anymore. I left my DNA here. This, nobody will ever take away from me. I learned how much I am capable of doing. I built this farm from nothing. I can survive”.

The turning point was later in 2019 when she finally received the planning approval to build her house. Which, because of the agriculture tenancy statutory, it wouldn’t be much bigger than the static caravan she was living in. And, shortly after the good news, a new complaint letter made by her next-door neighbours arrived. This time against her new dog, Storm, a Tatra Shepherd breed she got later in 2017. She specifically chose this breed not only because of how cute they are but because of their protective instincts. While Sky was lovely and would welcome everybody, Storm can be up all night and will bark at the slight sign of intruders, alerting her when someone is at the gates when she is working down the polytunnels or feeding the chickens at the other corner of the property. Unfortunately, there were many times when tools would disappear from the fields. People would come inside the property as they wish or attempt to break into the barn, but not since Storm’s arrival. Soon she was visited by an officer, who first praised how well she spoke English, but then was told Storm had to be indoors after 10 pm.

For many years I saw Lidija working hard pursuing her dream and had witnessed many of those terrible situations. I always wondered when enough would be enough! Those latest events really affected how she took care of herself, her dog, animals, and safety. For the first time in her life, she had to look for medical help to cope with everything after feeling depressed and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In her words, ”I now know that I am never not going to be a foreigner. And I am never not going to be a woman. So, I am fighting a no-win battle here, and I can’t live like that anymore. I left my DNA here. This, nobody will ever take away from me. I learned how much I am capable of doing. I built this farm from nothing. I can survive”.

“The story is just over here. I might still end up having chickens”.

Lidija Newton

Lidija is now selling the property and looking forward to a new start, hopefully in a more welcoming area similar to the one she found when she started this journey. However, after thirty-two years in England, as many other foreigners have done as a result of Brexit, she is planning to move back home to Croatia. She is petrified, but at least she knows what to expect and how to do everything she dreams of and will not be called a foreigner. “The story is just over here. I might still end up having chickens”, she says.

Video and images © J A Neto