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Song at the Beginning of Autumn
Now watch this Autumn that arrives In smells. All looks like Summer still; Colours are quite unchanged, the air On green and white serenely thrives. Heavy the trees with growth and full The fields. Flowers flourish everywhere.
Proust who collected time within A child’s cake would understand The ambiguity of this – Summer still raging while a thin Column of smoke stirs from the land Proving that Autumn gropes for us.
But every season is a kind Of rich nostalgia. We give names – Autumn and Summer, Winter, Spring – As though to unfasten from the mind Our moods and give them outward forms. We want the certain, solid thing.
But I am carried back against My will into a childhood where Autumn is bonfires, marbles, smoke; I lean against my window fenced From evocations in the air. When I said Autumn, Autumn broke.
I have loved Elizabeth Jennings’ poetry since I was a teenager, and unlike some of my other youthful passions, my feeling for her work remains. I love her cool metaphysics, her sharp psychological insight, the discipline she brings to structure and form which only just contain the emotion that so often, with her, is expressed only in the final line. My childhood autumns too were ‘bonfires, marbles, smoke’, but it’s only now, in middle age, that I feel the chill – as well as the thrill – of the ‘thin / Column of smoke’ which proves that ‘Autumn gropes for us’.
And it is autumn now. Before I flew to Greece, at very the start of September, ‘all looked like summer still’ in Suffolk – although (truth be told) I had found ripe haws and guelder berries, a hazelnut – still green – and even a small conker, and could feel the ‘rich nostalgia’ of the coming season, one which always vies with spring for my favourite time of year.
When I flew back a few days ago it was to a cold snap. The temperature had fallen by ten degrees and while the big trees were still green, they looked tired. The man who comes once a week to the village with a van full of fresh veg to sell told me that the ground had been white when he set out that morning. Yet it was only a couple of days since I was on a wooden sailing boat watching Aegean dolphins cresting clear blue waters. It felt like an impossible change of gear.
It proved to be only a brief presage of winter, a warning of what’s to come, enough to slow my dahlias but not wither them, enough, no doubt, to see the first orders for firewood put in at the local timber yard. Today the skies are blue and the sun is warm: all (almost) looks like summer still, and sounds like it, too: a chiffchaff was singing from the trees near the river, sounding not unlike he did when he first made landfall, back in March. And yet, look closely and there are rosehips and green hop bines in the hedgerows; tune your ears and you’ll hear the hum of several thousand ivy bees attending to the first of the flowering ivy tods. At the supermarket I found that the rich tang of manure had settled over the whole of my local town: autumn is muck-spreading season, ready for the next round of crops to be sown.
Out walking my old ways to see what had changed while I was away I met a neighbour on his tractor, his adult son walking ahead, a covered trailer towed behind. He stopped to chat, shouting over the sound of the idling engine to ask how I was, whether I was working hard, and when I’d next like some lamb: he keeps a small flock – a project for his son, really: he has a learning disability and the sheep are his absolute pride and joy. As he drove away with a final wave and the trailer passed me in the hedge I saw six hoggets peering out between the ventilation slats and realised where he was taking them. I knew them as little lambs - we all did, in the village. I also know how lush and green their field was, how they were never separated from their mothers, and how assiduously my neighbour’s son made sure his little flock had shelter, water and hay.
The wild bird mixture sown in blocks around the village is in its second autumn now and less rich in seeds than it was in its first. Still it attracts flocks of chaffinches, goldfinches and sparrows, as well as the scarcer farmland birds like yellowhammers and linnets; I see kestrels above these blocks regularly, too, hinting at their richness in voles and other small mammals (I rarely see kestrels over the weedless wheat and barley fields, which are far more inhospitable, with few places to hide). Then, on my return loop the lane was edged in sudden white blossoms stretching almost to the horizon: something had suddenly bloomed while I was on holiday. Oilseed radish, I’m almost sure: a nitrogen-fixing cover crop used to improve the deeper layers of the soil, perhaps in response to the dreadful flooding we had earlier in the year.
I was in bed that night, almost asleep, when my phone gave a gentle chime: my AuroraWatch app was predicting significant activity, the Northern lights potentially visible from anywhere in the UK. Many people have seen the aurora borealis this year but I haven’t yet been lucky. After a moment’s debate with myself in the pitch black of my bedroom I got up, pulled on jeans and a jumper, and headed out into the silent village in slippers and coat.
It was coming up to midnight, and only one house had a porch light on; with no street lamps for miles, the only other light came from the stars themselves and a low half-moon. Overhead the Milky Way was flung like a scatter of white paint from Pollock’s brush, its arc disappearing behind the low roof of my cottage.
I turned off our little lane to climb the grassy path to the church, which sits, as many rural churches do, on a rise, safe from floods and so that its tower can be seen from far and wide. The moon picked out the pale lichen on the gravestones while rustles in the dry, end-of-season undergrowth spoke of the invisible persistence of busy little lives. Owls called from several directions: mostly tawnies, but distantly, from the watermeadows, came the long shriek of a male barn owl.
Peering north, perhaps the night sky was slightly greenish, if I squinted and applied rose-tinted spectacles at the same time. In my pocket, I switched my phone to red mode so as not to disrupt my night vision, balanced it on a fence post and took a few photos to see if any electromagnetic activity would show up better on the screen. Distantly, I heard the church clock in the next village tolling twelve.
Back in bed I put it down as another failed attempt. But those ten chilly minutes hadn’t been entirely wasted. What I thought about, as I fell asleep, was the dark village huddled under starshine, as owl-haunted as it has been for many long centuries, surrendered to its humble night life and bounded by ancient fields.
News
A precious finished hardback of my guided nature journal, Homecoming, has arrived, beautifully illustrated by Amanda Dilworth. Look, I even made a Reel! It comes out on November 8 and you can pre-order it at geni.us/HomecomingHB.
Speaking of gorgeous books, look at this absolute beauty, below. As some of you will know, Adrian Bell is one of my very favourite rural writers: his books about East Anglian life between the wars were a direct inspiration for All Among the Barley. Like me (except with far more farming knowledge) he wrote nature columns for the papers, and the wonderful Slightly Foxed Editions have been collecting them up into gorgeous little hardbacks, one for each season of the year. I find his writing utterly beguiling and I think these books make wonderful gifts.
My own most recent Nature Notebook for The Times was about harvest and harvest mice, solitary wasps making loud chewing noises in my log pile, and the dangers of nature identification apps. You can read it by clicking here – it’s sometimes behind a paywall, sometimes not. I can’t quite figure it out.
And finally for now, just a brief word about A.S. Byatt – brief, because where do you even start, let alone end? A few days ago I went to her memorial service at St James’s Piccadilly and sat among hundreds of writers she helped, inspired or was friends with, and as we listened to the tributes from her friend Isobel Armstrong, her editor Jenny Uglow, the professor of neuroscience Morten Kringelbach, the potter and writer Edmund de Waal and the novelist Lawrence Norfolk; as we listened to extracts from her books read so brilliantly by Samuel West and heard her voice, too, from interviews on the radio, I felt so lucky just to have been alive at the same time as she was, to have inhabited a bit of the same century as someone with such a mind.
On the day after she died, in November 2023, I wrote a short series of tweets about having met her, and how kind she was (and what a fool I made of myself). They’re here.
In the next section of Witness Marks I’m hugely excited to bring you a Q&A with the writer, poet, mentor and tutor extraordinaire, Tania Hershman. Co-author of Writing Short Stories: A Writers' & Artists' Companion, Tania has a PhD in creative writing inspired by particle physics, and is someone who seems to me to absolutely fizz with ideas, ideas she somehow allows herself to play with rather than be frightened by (whereas I can often be utterly petrified by an idea!).
As she launches Unbox Your Words, a “monthly writing adventure” and community full of writing prompts, provocations, and inspiration, I asked her about something a lot of us struggle with: giving yourself permission to make things. She’s such a warm and insightful writer, and I find her perspective hugely inspiring. I hope you do, too.
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