One more day of clear, if frozen, sun | A Countryman’s Spring Notebook

Adrian Bell

The yew tree appeared as wafers of snow to our waking eyes, when March dawned. The rest of it was lost in darkness. The prospect of March is usually (as Johnson said of a friend’s second marriage) ‘the triumph of hope over experience’. A visitor brought us some daffodils that had been raised under glass: ‘daffodils that take the winds of March with beauty’. Although these had never felt a breath of wind, they seemed to create a magic breeze about them, by their petals flung back from their jag-edged trumpets. Their perfume filled the room with spring, after our winter of scentless maidenhair and helichrysum.

Our own daffodils spend most of March in bud – a promissory display while the east wind blows. But I begin to be careful where I tread. In the laudable act of turning over a heap of composted leaves I found I had been standing on two peeping clumps. A two-boot area of broken-necked daffodils is a small disaster on the first of March. These were only bent, severely bent.

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After a winter of fires, we praise the sun, our guaranteed smokeless fuel, as it rises every day higher over a perspex roof to warm my old pub settle in a sheltered nook. One more day – just one more day of clear, if frozen, sun, and the forsythia in here will burst into bloom. One wall of this shanty is literally held together by forsythia, which has crept through every crevice and festoons its interior. Herein already is an eager budding, unfolding points of pink and red which will fan out to be green leaves. A rooted sprig of rosemary is breaking into its starry atoms of bloom.

That pub settle, once a favourite seat of horse dealers, and the ghost of some placid nag which this former stable housed, form a harmony of influences to my mind. Simply to have been alive before the fatal internal combustion engine was invented, to imagine that is a sort of therapy. It is difficult to think oneself back into those days of my childhood, and try to focus on that traffic of horse buses, hansoms and drays loaded with bales of hay, on which latter I have even seen the driver sprawled asleep, while the horses negotiated a London crossing, obedient to the policeman’s arm.

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When I walk down narrow Blyburgate, Beccles, or any other such old street, two or three huge diesel trucks roar by, and the resultant state of the atmosphere renders me almost incapable of breathing for some minutes. To think that people once complained of the smell of horses.

Yet formerly people travelled far and fast. Keats, staying in Winchester, received a letter posted in London the day before. Three letters went to and fro between himself and his Fanny in a week, and only horses to pull them. Will such regularity be achieved by a ninepenny 1971 post?

And what of the happy wanderers of those days; such walkers as Borrow, Wordsworth, Coleridge? And later, W. H. Davies the poet supertramp? The beloved vagabonds, what has happened to them? An old neighbour now dead spent his honeymoon on a cycling tour of Devon in 1906. Another friend, comfortably off but an anti-motorist, liked to travel on a bicycle as lately as the early fifties. But by then, he told me, you were not made welcome at a starred hotel if you arrived on a bicycle. You were looked down on, as one who could not afford a car. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘as soon as they saw me hot and dusty, and my bicycle, they began to doubt if they had a vacant room.’

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What provision is left for bona-fide wayfarers, whom the first whiff of spring once made restless, not for package tours, but to be on the rolling English road again on their two feet? I wager they saw more in a day’s journey than their grandchildren do sitting their way through Europe. Their poets have left us the proof of it. ‘Allons, the road is before us!’ cried Whitman. It is death that is before us today, if we set foot on the broad highway, and the green roads have been churned by tractors.

What has happened to the ‘walking tours’ that my parents and their friends enjoyed? From Oxfordshire to the Wye Valley in one wonderful week in 1910. My father brought me up to be a rambler. Every Monday (his day off) we tramped the countryside of Surrey. During the summer holiday we walked miles through Hampshire, Dorset, Sussex, following the example of the poets. We took ‘the Roman road to Wendover, By Tring and Lilley Hoo’ at about the same time as Rupert Brooke did.

There is wind in the twilight;
in the white road before us
The straw from the ox-yard
is blowing about.

says the Message of the March Wind, by William Morris.

‘Henceforth I ask not good fortune; I myself am good fortune,’ my father quoted, one sharp bright morning, as we stepped off an open-topped tram and plunged into beechen paths beyond Croydon, and roamed all day lost in a brook-threaded countryside. And I duly, at 12 years old, enjoying a cottage tea, considered that we indeed ourselves were good fortune.

Footpace is still the only way to move and live with the senses all awake. Read W. H. Hudson. It was still the England he roamed that we roamed, the England of notices before steep hills: ‘Dangerous to Cyclists’. Now crash barriers are required on roads straight and level and wide.

The era of the open road reached its zenith with the invention of the pneumatic-tyred ‘safety’ bicycle, just before the car and lorry pirated the peace away. Its monument is that anthology compiled by E. V. Lucas at the turn of the century, entitled The Open Road. Herein is gathered the inspiration of many minds wayfaring through this once blessed plot, from the time of Shakespeare to the Georgian poets. I return to its pages every spring. But it did not used to be so nostalgic.

Extract from A Countryman’s Spring Notebook
Adrian Bell © 1950–1980


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