Yes, it is already autumn. Every morning a gossamer snaps against my forehead as I go out into my garden. Every evening some spider thinks, ‘This door will never be opened again’; and promptly at nine a.m. his night’s work is ruined, as I go up into my summer house: it rends with a small almost sticky crackle that I now come to expect.
I looked out of my window when the dew was heavy and the sun’s rays oblique; and to my surprise I saw that my free-growing garden was in reality enmeshed in a fairy cocoon: a subtle envelope, like a breath of fog, veiled grass, bushes and even the tall-standing trees. Every September day is born in a caul. The night must be a teeming silence of little scuttling legs. The output is quite fabulous, past the feats of leprechauns. Yet mostly dead leaves and chaff and thistledown seem to be caught in these webs, and the occasional moth, like a dead leaf.
*
There is a certain quiet, a certain agitation. The quiet may be in part illusion, laid on the mind by the sedative adjectives of Keats, by mists – and fruitfulness and noonday shadows blue as twilight. The agitation is real enough. We are beset in our waking dream by strange clamours, remote but dangerous. It is the crowd being swayed by Antony’s funeral oration; it is an aroused, a surging nation. It is the rooks. They are gathering again.
The swallows, that were like aerial skaters, each bent on its own parabolic figure, now are seen in tight, skittering groups, chattering and hitting the water. A cock pheasant on the lawn and a rook at the top of a tree in my garden engaged in a syncopated duet; the cock crowing with that stutter which reminds me of that forgotten motor horn, the klaxon – the rook cawing in answer. They continued for several minutes, crow answered by caw, the rook surprised by the pheasant, and the pheasant surprised at finding himself on a lawn.
There is a look of ruination about the harvest fields, due to the downpours. Once, as I hacked to a meet, a farmer gave me a vivid description of the last day of the Army manoeuvres of 1913. It was July, the corn stood ready for harvest. Up and down this road we were on had strutted generals and monarchs from all parts of Europe: the Kaiser was one of them. A massed attack of infantry came up through hundreds of acres of standing corn, and left it flat. The compensation was very handsome; and the Kaiser had been given his object lesson, which unfortunately he failed to learn. The sight which that farmer conjured up to me as we rode to the meet of hounds, I recalled yesterday in looking at a field of oats laid so flat that weeds were already creeping up over them. The weather, unlike the War Office, pays no compensation.
In other fields, oats stood in shocks that had matted together with green patches of sprouting grain. There were the black tents of bean shocks, contrasting with the pale sheets of still uncut barley. Never have there been so many different shapes in the landscape of harvest. As well as the traditional shocks of corn, there are straw bales, piled in groups ready for carting, like the ragged beginnings of towers which some child has attempted with his toy bricks. There are also hay and straw done up in rolls, and built into something like shocks of rolls, quite a new shape. And there are still to be seen the brown bun-shapes of coils of field peas. For days, four men, two horses and two traditional iron-tyred harvest wagons have been carting these peas, about 25 acres of them, in between days of rain and days spent turning them to get them dry enough to cart once more. I passed the field at 7.30 last night, and they were still at it – the Suffolk mares, the pale blue beautiful wagons, the men pitching and loading quite in the old style.
*
At the other extreme, combine harvesters were pouring their grain straight into trailers and leaving the straw tied in bunches behind them. Across these variations of corn harvest floated a midsummer scent, the scent of acres of flowering aftermath of red clover, destined for seed. To complete and complement this picture of harvest fields inhabited by new combines and ancient wagons, are villages where modern bungalows with picture-windows mingle with old houses with diamond panes, newly rethatched. The declining sun outlines with a sharp shadow the cut patterns of the thatch near the roof ridges. This man-made East Anglian landscape is full of man-made shapes, of metal, bricks and straw; and one village boasts an inhabitant who has had the ambition to carve the name of his village in topiary above his garden hedge – and has pretty well succeeded.
It is autumn, too, by the number of leaves that blow in and litter my summer-house carpet, which itself is rather like an old deciduous leaf in tone and texture. When the leaves completely cover the carpet, and themselves become my carpet, I feel quite medieval in here, thinking of my ancestors who littered their chambers with rushes. But by then it will be winter. There is a stove. I can light candles and live with shadows. Candle-flicker, fire-flicker. How great a part shadows played in my imaginative life as a child; a whole population of grotesques on walls and ceiling. Then a German silent film called Warning Shadows acted as a catharsis for all my generation, the last of the shadow-children, before electricity and its static blaze.
Then I beguile the long evenings with certain other fallen leaves of time which have come to rest in here; my father’s volumes of newspaper cuttings dating from 1895 onwards. Yellowish, and green (the Westminster Gazette) and pink (the St James’s Gazette, was it? I know it wasn’t the ‘Pink ’Un’!). Here I read of a bear that escaped from a zoo, and strolled into a fancy-dress dance, and was taken for a guest. The shock of discovery that there wasn’t a man inside his skin was electrifying. The bear, however, was enjoying the music: even after the band, too, had fled, the newspaper records that he continued ‘to execute a pas seul, with ragtime variations’, alone on the floor.
Extract from A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook
Adrian Bell © 1950–1980
The Real Person!
Author Mrs. Ainee C. Beland acts as a real person and passed all tests against spambots. Anti-Spam by CleanTalk.
I took great comfort in having received this Slightly Foxed newsletter because some of what is stated is how I had been feeling of late with regards to the change in temperature and this new season approaching but not fast enough; I only wish that my autumn signage had not fallen off the hook . . . for it is a blank hook now waiting for something if not that Happy Autumn signage; oh my ‘quell coincidence’. I am not a poet; nothing like Adrian Bell but he so merits this post and I am thankful that another has the right wording. Thank you Slightly Foxed for making my end of this day better.
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Author Pauline Beaton acts as a real person and passed all tests against spambots. Anti-Spam by CleanTalk.
I am devastated that this might be the last Adrian Bell book that you publish for us. They are such gems, ‘such stuff as dreams are made on’ indeed. Still, one consolation is that with the changing seasons, I can go back to his Winter, Spring and Summer notebooks and reread them.
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Author Harry acts as a real person and passed all tests against spambots. Anti-Spam by CleanTalk.
Great bear story