Summer ramblings

25/09/1999

?It is the end of summer, the coming of autumn.? The author of Akenfield and Divine Landscapes reflects on the turn of the seasons in the English countryside ? an essential part of the elusive national consciousness. IN David Gascoyne?s 1936 Journal, the youthful English poet ? he was then 19 ? remarks how foreigners? impressions of his country are naturally strange, and only half-recognisable, like a dream of a place one knows. And he mentions the many descriptions of London by Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Strindberg, Dor?, Van Gogh, and especially Alain-Fournier, whose delight in Chiswick?s flowery suburbs as a young man just before the First World War remains infectious.

Because of frequent literary encounters with the England of such visitors, I carry in my head a lively muddle of foreign reaction to our towns and countryside. Their response to Englishness tempers my own. One of the less conscious reasons why people travel is so that they can inform the natives of the lands through which they pass what they must not fail to see and hear in their own territory. Henry James was the best guide of all in this respect, the American who chose as his mantra Summer afternoon, summer afternoon. English summer afternoon, of course.

This year there has been a long uninterrupted run of such afternoons. Too early for a London appointment, I wander off into Ken-sington Square, that jealously maintained paradise behind Barkers where the trees reach high in lessons of stillness and the creamy fa?ades try to stay civilised, and not shout house prices at the passers-by. There are few of these and not one of them suitably dressed for the architecture, for the temperature this summer afternoon is 80 in the shade. If Mrs Patrick Campbell could emerge from her door or Talleyrand from his, they would step back into their cool halls with surprise. Bare sunburnt girls, old ladies in next to nothing and two gods in shorts with a van which says, Drains unblocked without Excavation. A pub begs its customers to leave quietly so as not to upset the residents. So into Young Street where Thackeray wrote Vanity Fair, borrowing his title from Pilgrim?s Progress. This drift of connection takes me back to Mount Bures near Wormingford, where I live, on the previous Sunday when, immediately after Matins, in comes a majestic chap with a staff and a scallop shell of quiet fixed to his haversack to tell me that he is walking to Compostella to honour St James.

Summer at Mount Bures, the mount being the fosse of a Norman castle and now covered in blackberries. It adjoins the church of St John the Baptist, separated only by all the village graves and a few yards of sward azure with harebells. It is high here, the church, the farm buildings and the brambly mount rising up together to form a complex which might be in Normandy. Behind a soaring hedge rests Mr Chaplin in his productive garden of Eden. Having jangled our church?s two pre-Reformation bells, inscribed Sancte Necolae Ora Pro Nobis and Sit Nomen Domini Benedictum respectively, and having sung four sweet Victorian hymns, he now has this summer Sunday to himself. He beckons to me and encourages me to walk through his runner-bean alleys and into his Michaelmas daisy forest, and even into his new summer-house where, being close on 90, he intends to idle. He lifts up his eyes to the mount down whose sides he slid on mother?s tin tea tray, and the paths he weeded for a shilling a year when I was a boy. I can smell Sunday dinner, and the empty commuter train rattles by in the matchless warmth.

Back at my home, Bottengom?s Farm, I tread on fallen plums as I cross the orchard, releasing their heady rot. Angelic gliders, Chinese-white against the cobalt sky, ride the air currents, and the Suffolk woodland over the river smoulders with heat. As a youth Mr Chaplin worked the mill on this river ? as did the Constables. John painted a picture which he called Summer, Noon but a friend called it The Hay Wain. To be pedantic, the vehicle in the water is a timber cart. But the picture is not about a wagon but that listlessness which arrives at a particular moment on a hot day when the very birds cannot summon up sufficient energy to sing a note and the landscape seems to go giddy and insist that nothing whatever must be done.

And now the summer, officially at any rate, is past. Gone. And I take out of its context my favourite acknowledgement of this fact, The harvest is passed, the summer is ended, and we are not saved. The sad fall of these words has enchanted me since childhood. The editor of Jeremiah 8 from which they are taken has headed them, The Prophet?s inconsolable grief. For what? For the ease with which people fall back into idolatry. What a great poet is Jeremiah! He thinks God should fertilise the fields with their bones; it is all they are fit for. The farm-historian, Arthur Young, witnessed something akin to this, the contents of London?s charnels being taken to Hertfordshire in tumbrels and spread on the land as bone-meal.

Our village fields are already ploughed and tidy. They have turned from silvery stubble to black furrows in a week. No waiting, no hanging about, no aftermath or second coming of what had been cut. Not that anyone notices. No one looks at fields any more. Gardens yes, but not fields.

Many acres of them behind my farmhouse are straggling back into pasture and give a hint of the landscape to come. Our arable world stares nervously at the collapsed beef and sheep world, and realises that when agriculture takes one of its plunges there are no exceptions. The young farmers seem to have come to grandfather?s worries. Who would have thought it? The young farmers come to harvest festival to read the lessons from the Book of Ruth and Christ?s parables, and the biblical words sound less archaic than they did last year. The farming press itself is aghast in disbelief. Incomes halved, incomes fled, though not yet in East Anglia. Here the rented combines and rented ploughs have been returned to their owners, plus vast cheques for their use, and a rich quiet ensues. This latter does me perfectly. I begin to lay out the autumn work and to walk far, sometimes towards the river, mostly nowhere in particular. Just taking this field-edge or that, or the old flight-paths on the American aerodrome and their peripheral service roads, and allowing words their head. For this is how writing is done.

Autumn round here in the Stour valley is a kind of summer until November, when the river mists become chilling and soaking and all but the oak leaves sail down densely, and one is surprised into turning up the heating. But until this happens, the slow-motion senescence of the year permits a meal now and then in the October garden, and winter proper to be put out of our minds. The migrant birds clear off in no time and barn owls make themselves heard. The heart-stopping desolation of their cry cuts across our measurements of time and is the apotheosis of wildness. Sweet Suffolk Owls sang Thomas Vautor.

Thy note, that forth so freely rolls, With shrill command the mouse controls, And sings a dirge for dying souls.

How creatures and plants unknowingly add to our Englishness ? or our Frenchness and the rest! My antennae are so finely tuned that I can smell England the second I emerge from a plane at Heathrow. If there is air like this just beyond customs, what can it be like at Wormingford, I ask myself. There the bedroom window is rarely shut against it and it enters with sun or snow, a national but non-patriotic air which is mysteriously scented with place and I suppose history, and certainly with everything which grows and hoots and wanders on this island.

It is the end of summer, the coming of autumn. The new season?s falling, rotting, and thus aromatic nature creates for me an essence to be found nowhere but in England. By all that is written about it, it should settle me down for the winter, but instead it brings me fully alive. I first smelled it kicking up leaves on the way to school, and still I breathe it in ? my fix, my East Anglian stimulus, until the snow comes.