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A Countryman’s Spring Notebook | Introduction

A Countryman’s Spring Notebook | Introduction

Spring, for many, is a hopeful time of year. As the days lengthen with a warming sun, the natural world stirs with an energy that enlivens us. The immediate pleasure that Wordsworth felt when seeing ‘a host, of golden daffodils’ has been shared by many. For Emily Dickinson, ‘A Light exists in Spring’ that ‘Almost speaks to you’. Shakespeare writes of the arrival of spring as ‘The sweet o’ the year’, while for William Howlitt the season has a ‘freshness that perhaps we have felt only in childhood’. Adrian Bell lived the life of a countryman for sixty years, and his ability to capture and articulate an essence of spring in his work bears comparison with any writer in this tradition.
A Countryman’s Summer Notebook | Introduction

A Countryman’s Summer Notebook | Introduction

‘I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June,’ exclaims Anne Shirley, L. M. Montgomery’s delightful character from the Anne of Green Gables novels. In these Summer Notebook essays, the third volume of the seasonal quartet published by Slightly Foxed, Adrian Bell gives us an idea of what it might be like. Writing across thirty of his own summers, together with his memories of earlier ones, Bell expresses the natural exuberance of the English landscape during the summer months; in particular, the ones he enjoyed in the eastern county of Suffolk, where he arrived as a young man to start a farming apprenticeship in 1920. His subsequent travels around the fields and villages of East Anglia – physically and in memory – result in a rich tapestry of past and present visions, creating indelible portraits of a countryside in summer.
A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook | Introduction

A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook | Introduction

‘There is a fortnight when England seems to have every- thing – the flowers of a northern June and the fruits of the warm south, and that fortnight is now. You can stand in the windless calm of an autumn evening and hear the heartbeat of the countryside.’ Bell’s autumn essays, from which this observation is drawn, evoke a season of colour and activity before the quiet and reflection of winter, and they complete our journey through the year with him in this, the final volume of the seasonal quartet of his Countryman’s Notebook.
Terror from Outer Space

Terror from Outer Space

I was 6,500 feet above sea level in the mountains of Inyanga in what was then known as Southern Rhodesia, lying on my back on the grass and looking up at the stars. They were always unbelievably clear and bright up there, and the first rains of the season had rinsed the dust and the smoke of bush fires from the sky. As always the Southern Cross and Orion’s shimmering sword belt dominated the heavens, but tonight I was looking for something else – something no one had ever seen before. Eventually I saw it – a tiny speck of light, smaller than many of the stars, travelling across the midnight sky. It was October 1957, and the Russians had just successfully launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite.
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An Unlikely Librarian

An Unlikely Librarian

In his 1928 hit, the American singer Harry McClintock conjured a vision of hobo utopia. ‘In the Big Rock Candy Mountains/ All the cops have wooden legs/ And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth/ And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs.’ The song recounts the fantasies of a picaresque American tramp, but its original version presented something darker. Before sanitization for radio, amid the delights of ‘cigarette trees’ and alcohol ‘trickling down the rocks’, it ended with the lines: ‘I’ve hiked and hiked till my feet are sore/ I’ll be god damned if I hike anymore/ To be buggered sore like a hobo’s whore/ On the Big Rock Candy Mountains.’ This fantasy song describes a young man’s initiation into the often brutal reality of the hobo underground.
SF magazine subscribers only
Lockdown with Linda

Lockdown with Linda

‘Now would be a great time to read Linda Kelly.’ The suggestion came from a member of my reading group; the March 2020 lock down had started, and with the group’s discussions banished to Zoom and feelings of isolation setting in, she and I had taken to calling each other regularly for literary chat and book recommendations. In lock down the outside world had become echoingly quiet. Books were needed more than ever to people the inner one and, as my friend had predicted, Linda Kelly’s turned out to be perfect for the task.
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