Sometimes you plan a Sunday of sightseeing and come home exhausted and bewildered. Another Sunday you do nothing at all, and everything seems to come to you. You go to bed that night full of wellbeing and wonder. Such a day was today. I sat most of the time against a haycock. Only once a year, and that when days are longest, are there fragrant couches dotted over the paddock. I chose one facing a walnut tree. Yesterday I overheard a fragment of dialogue: ‘Whoever plants a walnut tree nowadays?’ I was going to tell him I had, but somebody broke in with something else, so my virtue went unrecorded. Sitting against the haycock gazing at its now ample foliage I was aware I had been watching this tree grow for fourteen years. It stands out very verdant against the ash-grey foliage of willows which have grown up behind it.
*
Planting hardwood trees is a form of altruism: but you do get the satisfaction of having started something. After all, the future will get on very well without me, I must face that, but it would not get on quite so well without my walnut tree. Admittedly you have to try to forestall the whims of posterity when you plant trees. I had already suffered the removal of some excellent apple trees from their well-chosen positions in a former abode. For the roots of trees you have planted in a way become your roots. To make a tennis court or a bowling green or a lily pond are some of the many reasons that cause people to cut down trees. Or a fear that a certain tree is going to fall on them. I have known people who have come to a new house gaze every day at a tree growing near that house, until one says in an idle moment, ‘If it blew down it would fall on our bedroom, or Aunt Aggie’s.’ Thereafter they get so that they cannot look at the tree without imagining it falling on them, and feeling that either they or Aunt Aggie are as good as dead while it stands.
*
But I could not imagine my walnut tree being in anybody’s way ever. There were wild strawberries under my hand where I sat: a butterfly on a grass stem gave me an illusion of a sky blue flower. Horses were visible standing head to tail in a pasture. It was their day of rest, too. Yesterday I saw them at work on the grass-cutter. Jet aircraft whistled overhead; a train thundered by; then the sound of the cutter was heard again, as soft by contrast as someone snipping velvet. It laid swath after swath of clover in wavy rows. Already those swaths have the scent of hay, which comes mingled with syringa from the garden hedge and pinks from the border.
Country air on the longest day has one scent which is a blend of many, of beans and hay and garden flowers. Even the wild roses, faint as they are individually, are such a multitude now that they must add their essence. Rows of haycocks in the view are restful and refreshing to watch, firm as heads of hair, and as the sun declines putting on long shadows like veils. Since each was hand-made none is quite like another; there is no monotony as in a field of bales, but such a sense of rural domesticity and order as fittingly crowns Midsummer Day.
A church tower was visible, all shadow one side and light the other. When its bell began to ding amid the calling of the cuckoo and the cooing of pigeons, I was taken back in time to the days of grit roads and horses and sabbath primness, when flowers and gossip were the only village pleasures. Few bikes, no motorbikes, no cars, and very seldom an excursion, and that at horse pace. Well, it has all been superseded. But I personally am stuck at 20 miles an hour. I am allergic to speed; I hate the sensation of it as much as some others crave it. It is quite horrible to me to be rushed through summer England so that I cannot see it – a tantalization amounting to torture. To watch a white line for hours and hours and then say you have been for a tour of the country, seems to me to be about as full an experience as a hen who stays mesmerized by a line to which you have applied its beak.
*
Flowers and conversation are still the best pleasures I know in life. Sitting in the orchard musing on those former contentments, I felt that there was a truth behind them to which country life grew as a bough grows, quaint and crooked, but persistent. I talked yesterday with a man who had gone back to work too soon after an illness. ‘I got tired of walking about, and Mr– wanted a field drained. I like draining. I’ve a good draining spade; it cuts into clay like butter and fetches a spit out clean.’ Another spoke of how many coombs of corn he carried and shot on a heap. He explained how he got the sack across his shoulders, then coming to the heap undid the mouth and let the corn pour out: ‘And you could feel the weight go off you as you stood. ’
*
These are the things men like to dwell with; they were the texture of country life; and sitting in church on Sundays and hearing of the rainbow round about the throne and the seven lamps of fire and the beast ‘that was all eyes within’. ‘What on earth could it mean to them?’ the literal-minded cry impatiently, and well they may who were not actually there in the evening of a summer’s day as candlelight bloomed on the chancel walls, and a strange power emanated from those cadences, as of a truth that presses into life through this rich language as it presses also into life through the multitude of flowers. Gazing at the extraordinary balloon of glistening filaments that the seed-head of the goat’s-beard is, I felt that the visions of St John are no stranger than the forms through which wildflowers pass. Thus angels and weeds, and the corn-carrier who felt the weight vanish from his shoulders like the man in Bunyan’s dream, and the man who went to work before he should because he liked draining, all spoke to me of a principle behind that country life which grew like a bough and was not conceived according to a plan.
Extract from A Countryman’s Summer Notebook
Adrian Bell © 1950–1980
Click here to browse the podcast archive 
Such beautiful language. I escape with a pause. I close my eyes, taste the words, sniff the air and hear the sounds of an English country summers day. Such peace.
Then back to the buffeting angry winds making the wooden houses of Wellington shake and grumble as winter chews its way through fallen trees and drenching rain.
Love your emails – always evocative, always jogging a memory