The Merry Month
The chestnut is the first tree to cast a green shade. For the first time for eight months I experienced a desire to move into that shade – to cast a clout; no, clouts. It is a fact of practical interest to gardeners that no sooner do trees start into life than they begin to shed things. We think of spring in terms of increase, but in fact trees begin to dispense with things just as soon as they begin to put things on. The steps to my garden house are littered with what look like husks of oats, baked and swollen: they remind me of the steps of a corn exchange on market day. There are also red-plush tassels lying about, as though someone has been playing havoc with nature’s upholstery. This debris has dropped from the poplar tree. There are rooks up there also, feeding young. The things that fall on my head from that tree: husks, red tassels, broken eggshells . . .
*
Already indoors we have experienced this shedding – the golden dust where the jar of willow-palm stood, which annually provokes the remark, ‘Palm is pretty, but . . .’ as the overblown buds are carried away, still shedding incense in little puffs at the slight jar of each footstep. There has been the azalea, the treat of a February shopping day, the bright relief from the dull jobs of getting one’s hair cut, buying notepaper, helping one’s wife choose a garment – ‘something sensible for the house’. The azalea looked like a tree in miniature with blooms too big for it. It loved the winter fug that we loved. It stood, fresh from the shop, looking very perfect. It stood thus for a week; then, without warning, dropped a full and perfect bloom. Not one petal as a presage, not the rich disintegration of a rose, but a whole bloom intact. It shed its fine flowers one by one, and now it looks unhappy to be indoors, dishevelled, half inclined to die, half inclined to strive to put on new leaves.
*
The previous winter I had a cyclamen, which I treated as instructed by a friend with green fingers, leaving it in a corner of the garden all summer. When I disinterred it in the autumn, hoping for another glorious winter blooming, the corm collapsed into a thimbleful of dust. Sic transit . . . But they have a trick, I’m told, who sell these things, whereby the bulb perishes. But then one is told so many things: there is always a Hidden Hand; it keeps our indignation warm. The things that go on in flour mills; the dire admixtures with substances that give dogs hysterics, and therefore what do they give us? And the lack of keys to sardine tins, with resulting lacerations, damage to domestic relations (‘All right, you have a go. Look out, you’re spilling the oil’). Elections might be fought on such issues.
*
‘Depraved May’, T. S. Eliot called it. That seems to me to be going too far, even though a temptation to sun-worship may compete with church bells on a glorious Sunday morning. Summer-mindedness comes on us suddenly. The seasons may merge into one another, but this switch-over from putting up with life to a mental basking in it happens in an hour. You hear a willow-warbler for the first time, or you see that the chestnut tree is hung with plumed green tents of leaves, and suddenly you are in a state of grace. This used to come over me vividly as a boy: there was in addition the ecstasy of casting off the suffocating impedimenta of the Edwardian schoolboy on the first day of the holidays.
*
The month of May brings its joys and its cares, from boating to blowing. By blowing I do not mean brassband practice, though this has its place; for there occur at odd hours strange noises which, I think, is somebody practising a trombone, which will sound very well in the full band, but by itself suggests that some indeterminate creature is in urgent need of help. In fact that trombone suggests the very trouble that May brings to farmers, since science produced the perfect milk-producing fodder in rich leys. The cows go out on to this clovery sward, gorge themselves, swell up with wind and die, unless the farmer can stab them in time and deflate the ballooning stomach. Which is not so pleasant a morning occupation as it must have been to watch milkmaids washing their faces in dew.
Yes, it’s a ticklish time, is May on scientifically run dairy farms. At a local cattle show the other day, I should say that ‘blowing’ took precedence of butter-fat percentages as a subject of conversation. In the old days we saved ourselves all this anxiety, indeed every kind of mental effort. We even had a date handed down from our forefathers – 15 May. Come 15 May cattle were turned out to grass, wet, fine, gale or snow: and they trampled about knee-deep in buttercups, looking idyllic and spoiling half the grazing, but never getting blown. And there they stayed until the pasture became baked brown, and the milk yield dropped to vanishing point, and it was all act of God.
*
It is 12.30 p.m. Three young men have rowed upstream to the riverside inn. I learn that they are students given a day or two’s holiday before examinations. They have surprised three young women friends of theirs who are on a week’s holiday here on a cruiser. The young women are delighted and have invited them to lunch on board. Here is a little comedy of life – the undergraduates drinking their ale in the bar parlour, the young women buying supplies in the store opposite; a jovial sign-language and laughter exchanged across the street through open doors. Sunshine, the twinkling river: now all are aboard the one small row-boat, and making an erratic progress downstream to their cruiser – youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm, and two uproarious oarsmen in between. May-time, youth, crimson tassels scattered on the grass. Cuckoo!
7 May 1955
Silence
How rare a thing is silence: how few in this world today are so placed that they can ever hear nothing. We have everything – from television to wrapped bread in slices – everything but this: that on an evening in May a man may experience that complex murmur which is nature falling asleep, without the crooning of someone’s radio or the explosions of motor engines. Nature’s is a silence made up of innumerable stirrings, even as light is the sum of all colours.
A hare leaps on to the field path and sits a moment with ears cocked; then bounds away with enormous agility that is yet utterly silent. There is an odour so complex it would be worth travelling far out of cities infested with diesel fumes just to smell it, even if a man were blind and deaf, lacking any other sense. There is the smell of growing grass mingled with hay where the verge has been trimmed and the sun baked the trimmings. There is both the smell of green barley and of straw laid out for cattle. The cattle, Red Polls, tear the rich ley in the dusk, and the odour of bruised green and of straw – the smell of spring and the smell of farmyards – mingles from under their hooves. There is also the faint fragrance of a remnant of kale in flower, glowing yellow, seeming more vivid as the light fails.
*
Partridges call, willow wrens chatter. There is the cuckoo distantly, and then the sudden curfew of the owl, twice repeated. After which the voices seem sunk to a whisper. It is as though small private anxieties of partridge and water-hen will not be quite allayed. But the darkness is heavy on the small bird brain, heavy as a drug. ‘Where is she?’ ‘Where is he?’ ‘I am on the eggs – where are you?’ ‘Here.’ ‘Where?’ ‘Can’t see any more. Can’t move till morning now.’ The night lays a stilling hand on them all.
I sit quite still. The silence holds me. Very far away a man calls to cows. And far away a cow moos. It is a long and desperate moo, but it is many farms distant from the voice of the man who called. I hear him call again: ‘Come up!’ And again.I think he will have to go and fetch those cows.
*
The outlines of the trees, rounded now with leaves, melt into one another. All the distances become darkened. Yet still there is light. There is a rent in the clouds, and the ragged edges are coloured like a map of El Dorado. Directly above me the moon is a substantial slice of silver and slips through the clouds. The Red Poll cattle have come near and are standing puffing and inquiring of me who I am, what I am, with soft regurgitations. Is the reason of their existence only that in eighteen months from now they shall be eaten, assimilated into humanity, ministering to some city man’s Sunday afternoon lethargy? It seems so. Yet meanwhile this kingdom of the moon and dew is theirs, this meadow – which is more than we men have who go to sleep in boxes from whose windows little is visible but other boxes, and all the boxes filled with the blaring of smaller boxes.
Hark. There is the nightingale.
The goal of nature is man, it is assumed. But I prefer my father’s view, that nature may yet supersede man with a wiser being, whose basic amenities will not require so much of this earth’s miraculous soil to be sterilized under concrete, and who will not shut out the stars from his sleep.
Man is the artist – that is his uniqueness: he can create. Yet one beam of sunlight on the printed page or the painting subdues his fire. Beside nature even his greatest works are dead – or if they live, do so by virtue of giving us eyes to see the reality, which the artist has despaired to represent – the flesh-tint as fleeting as youth, a petal that cannot last an hour.
*
The other day a friend was telling me how he planted some apple pips in a pot and watched them shoot. While he told me this, his radio was playing Beethoven’s Leonora Overture. I listened half to him and his apple pips, and half to Beethoven. The wonderful Beethoven – but the apple pips gradually swelled. There was a stirring trumpet call as the little hairs which the pips had sprouted felt their way into the earth. With a crash of brass they grappled it, and by the leverage of those few hairs each seed-husk stood upright on a green stem. Then came a shimmering passage of violins, as my friend told me that he put his pot of seedlings out on his windowsill, for now it was spring; and he watched them taking the showers. Every drop hit the tiny leaves like a ball of lead. It rolled off, and the leaf sprang up, to be hit by another. Up and down danced the leaves, fragile but resilient.
*
The Leonora Overture was drawing to its close. Still he held me watching in mind with him those pin-sized seedlings that were the life-force inside his apple pips, day by day, chord by chord. There were rainbows he would not have seen but for watching them bobbing in the showers. And then – these were the final chords now, and I could hardly hear him through them – and then, ‘I turned to answer the telephone one morning,’ he said: ‘and when I looked again the seedlings had gone. In three minutes – after all those weeks – a family of sparrows had taken every one.’
‘You have been listening to the Leonora Overture by Beethoven, played by . . .’
Now, whenever I hear the Leonora Overture I shall see sprouting apple pips, and blossoming trees that never were.
26 May 1956
Extract from A Countryman’s Spring Notebook
Adrian Bell © Archant Community Media Limited 1950–1980
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