A lingering, Indian summer
Suffolk basks in the most bountiful autumn I can remember; but as I turn back to my stalled novel, I try to understand whether a hidden part of me that helps me write might also be holding me back
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There were days in high summer as chill and dreich as October; but in early September came the languid heat of July. Yet there was no mistaking the season: first the barley and wheat and then the peas were harvested, and wood pigeons arose, clattering, from shorn stubble and ploughland. Driving back from the station a few nights into the month I found autumn’s first mist lying low across the watermeadows, illuminated by a yellow, waning moon. “All the months are crude experiments, out of which the perfect September is made,” wrote Virginia Woolf. I love May the best, but September runs it a very close second indeed.
Grasshoppers and crickets still sang from the meadows, verges and village gardens, and after the silence of August the birds began to emerge from moult and made themselves heard once more. There’s no returning to spring’s choruses of song, of course: those performances were all about breeding, and by the end of August all that’s done for another year. But there were contact and familial calls in the hedgerows again, and the robin’s forlorn autumn recitals; here and there a chiffchaff repeated his mechanical notes from a field-edge oak, but with nothing like the mad gusto of May. The swallows are still with us, and twitter overhead; but I see them lining up on the village’s overhead cables and know they’re readying to leave.
In Suffolk the September hedgerows are still footed in late summer wildflowers: yarrow, hedge cranesbill, mallow, white campion, hawkbit, a scattered second round of ox-eyes and the yellow buttons of tansy with its aromatic leaves; but it’s above them that the true glory has been taking place. I can’t remember a year when the hedges have been so burdened with fruit: blackberries, elderberries, bright haws, orange hips and papery hop flowers, the bramble stolons bowing with ripe berries, whole heavy handfuls offering themselves to passers-by, and the birds. There are damsons and fat plums bloomed with silver, and a week ago I found a stretch of hedge clotted with one of the gages: a neighbour has suggested they’re bullaces, but as they’re not ripe yet it’s hard to tell. It is extraordinary, this bounty: it makes me want to laugh with glee. We have become so used to less, to worry and diminishment. After the terror of last year’s record temperatures and months-long drought, this generosity feels so relieving it is almost absurd.
Of course, it’s likely the two phenomena are related. Many plants and trees will have been unable to set seed well or even at all last year: there simply wasn’t enough available moisture to sustain leaves, let alone create fruit or berries. This year’s profusion – presaged by spring’s extraordinary spectacle of blossom (particularly hawthorn) up and down the country – may well have been triggered by biological shock. It occurs to me that producing fruit in abundance is costly, as was surviving the drought, and I hope that the coming winter is kind.
The sweet melancholy of autumn is all about mortality, isn’t it? Winter is coming, no matter a week of 30-degree heat, and everything inevitably tends now towards its own ending. The wheel has turned towards the dark, still point of winter, and we must turn with it. Yet it is that same dark point that lends May its riotous and reborn joy.
Today I read the Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Sara Teasdale’s beautiful lyric, ‘September Midnight’, first published in March 1914. If it speaks to you, I urge you to find out more about her. There is a sense of immanence in her poems about nature, and a constant awareness of death, which only adds to their resonance. Teasdale took her own life in 1933.
September Midnight
Lyric night of the lingering Indian Summer,
Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing,
Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects,
Ceaseless, insistent.
The grasshopper’s horn, and far-off, high in the maples,
The wheel of a locust leisurely grinding the silence
Under a moon waning and worn, broken,
Tired with summer.
Let me remember you, voices of little insects,
Weeds in the moonlight, fields that are tangled with asters,
Let me remember, soon will the winter be on us,
Snow-hushed and heavy.
Over my soul murmur your mute benediction,
While I gaze, O fields that rest after harvest,
As those who part look long in the eyes they lean to,
Lest they forget them.
The blackberries have just kept coming. I’ve been eating them on walks for the last two weeks, popping them into my mouth as I pass and enjoying the differing flavours from one plant to the next (with over 400 microspecies known in the UK there’s a lot of genetic variation). As fast as they ripen and are eaten (or fall) more berries behind them turn from green to red to black and take their place; here and there, new flower buds are even appearing, though it’s surely unlikely they will be able now to set a new round of fruit. Still, they must be eaten by Michaelmas (September 29th), when the devil spits on them – or so the legend goes.
A weekend visit from friends prompted me to pick enough for a blackberry and apple crumble, and to gather extra for the freezer, too. There’s something wonderful about eating something in the middle of winter that you can remember picking, sun-warm, from the plant, whether that’s berries or stewed apples, passata from home-grown tomatoes or the rhubarb in my garden which, like my brown Turkey fig tree, is also overproducing for all it’s worth.
Everything about picking blackberries felt nourishing: heading out and feeling the September sunshine warm on the back of my neck, passing the fields closest to the village, blocks of which are currently planted with a wild bird mix of phacelia (also great for pollinators), sunflowers and millet, then walking slowly along the hedgerows with my eyes peeled for the best bramble banks, peering in and selecting the fattest berries, touching them to judge their ripeness and pulling them gently from their little anchors without bursting the juicy drupes that make up each fruit, and blackening my fingertips. Then the walk home, sucking pips out of my back teeth; in the kitchen, gently rescuing any shield bugs or crab spiders who have inadvertently hitched a lift, and turning them into something delicious for guests, or for later. It felt like connecting to something very simple and very atavistic – which, of course, it was.
I thought about how simple an activity it is, and how much good it had done me, calming my anxiety, balancing my emotions, filling my imagination and enriching my day. Everyone should go blackberry-picking, I thought, rather piously; after all, brambles are a supremely democratic plant, readily accessible in both town and countryside.
But as I followed the thought a little further, I realised how much of my joy in nature – something we often consider to some degree to be innate – has actually been learned. Although someone else might come back with the same number of berries, the experience might very well feel tiring, germ-ridden, full of nasty bugs and prickles, an unnecessary risk to clean clothes or simply boring, or a bit pointless, especially when cleaner, fatter berries may be found in the shops. As a nature lover it’s easy to dismiss these differing experiences, or to somewhat patronisingly assume that with a little instruction others would quickly come around to the beliefs and principles that seem to us so obvious, and which we hold so dear.
What I thought about, as I walked home, was classical music, perhaps even opera. Despite having learned piano as a child, despite working at a (dance) music magazine for many years and having a long history of seeing music performed live at gigs and clubs, despite how central music is to my life, and listening to it every day, I cannot find my way in to classical music – much less the type with singing. An experience that I know to be incredibly enriching to other people, with genuine benefits for mood, spirit and soul, just doesn’t have the same effect on me, because I have no context for the sounds I’m hearing and have developed no neural pathways that fire pleasurably as I take it in. I don’t really know what a theme or a movement is, and can’t hear the way different parts of a classical piece relate to one another. Put simply, I don’t know how to listen to it.
When I go out for a stroll, I’m walking into an unfolding story that I have come to understand. From the crops in the fields to the sounds of the birds, the effects of the weather and the time of year to the geology under my feet, I can parse the natural world around me so that its detail and complexity emerge from what might otherwise be simply background. And understanding my place in that story, with its varied cast, produces positive emotions honed by decades of good experiences. I grew up in a family that loved being outdoors, and although I experienced the ‘teenage dip’ in nature connectedness common to many people, it was there to return to.
More importantly, I’ve had the good fortune to be able to order my life in such a way as to keep deepening my relationship with nature – not just by accumulating more knowledge, or through reading, but experientially, through the positive reinforcement of ongoing daily practice, the opportunity for which is affected by all sorts of factors including health, money, upbringing, how safe and welcome you feel (or are made to feel) in natural spaces, and the sheer lottery of whether there is anyone loved and trusted around to draw you into a relationship with the natural world. Biophilia might, as many believe, be innate; but it may also be latent unless awakened.
Of course, there are good things that accrue to anyone from time spent in nature, from vitamin D to lowered blood pressure and a reduction in stress hormones; but the deep emotional, psychological or perhaps even spiritual benefits that can seem to me so obvious and available are not something that can simply be switched on, but the product of a relationship that must first be kindled in childhood and then deepened over time. Today it’s very easy – almost natural, frankly – to live in a world where nature is only ever a distant concept, something to evoke guilt, perhaps, or even fear, but of no tangible interest or benefit to one’s daily life. It’s also easy to live in a pro-nature bubble and assume it is the norm.
Not everyone feeds the birds, or notices butterflies. Not everyone watches Autumnwatch. Not everyone knows what we’re losing, or even feels the loss. People fill their worlds with all sorts of other things – richly imagined computer games, sport, even opera – that are likely just as enriching. Finding a way to invite those people to connect emotionally with nature, even as we move towards crisis, is a huge challenge. I don’t know how to do it. I wish I did.
News
I’m currently up in the Lake District enjoying a few days’ fell-walking after an exciting (and stressful, and exhausting!) few weeks. But on August 19th I was at the wonderful Green Man festival in Wales, in conversation with Marchelle Farrell. I can’t remember a more enthusiastic and supportive crowd – if you were there, thank you so much for every cheer, laugh and whoop.
I took the opportunity to announce that I am developing an app (as you may by now have heard!). Called Encounter, it will be a free (and ad-free) guided nature journal that lives in your phone, aimed at boosting nature connectedness whether you live in the heart of a UK city or the English countryside. I’ve never made an app before, so the learning curve is going to be extremely steep, but going by the feedback we’ve had, enthusiasm for the idea runs strong, so I think it’s going to be a really rewarding journey. If you live in the UK and think it sounds like a good idea, please go to www.encounter-nature.com and sign up for updates and an invitation to become a beta-tester. Thank you.
The engineers at Green Man were kind enough to record my conversation with Marchelle; you can listen to part of it on the surprise, bonus, last-ever edition of The Stubborn Light of Things podcast. It was wonderful (and surprisingly moving) to revisit the podcast, two years on from the original broadcasts; it was also a great opportunity to work with my web guru Nicholas Mark at Handpressed again, and with Peter Rogers, audio producer, composer and the voice of Gilbert White. If you need a website created sustainably, or any audio edited, they both come heartily recommended by me.
I’m proud to have now reviewed two of this year’s Booker longlist: the breathtakingly moving Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry and, at the start of September, Paul Lynch’s dark and dystopian Prophet Song. For pleasure, I’ve been dipping in an out of M John Harrison’s maddening (and brilliant) anti-memoir, Wish I Was Here, as well as an advance proof of Caspar Henderson’s magical A Book of Noises. Prompted by a piece in the Guardian I also re-read Jo Ann Beard’s The Boys of my Youth without quite finding in it the resonance it seems to have accrued for others since it first came out, and I’ve returned again to Miles Richardson’s Reconnection: Fixing Our Broken Relationship with Nature, which may well prove a touchstone as I work out how to build the Encounter app.
My next Times Nature Notebook comes out on September 23rd, so hasn’t yet been filed. I expect I’ll write about Cumbria’s breathtaking landscapes, though. How could I not?
In the last issue of Witness Marks I promised to say something about the unconscious mind and creativity, and that’s what I’ll be discussing below the fold. If you’d like to sign up to become a paying supporter, I’d love to have you. There’s even a free week’s trial, so you can read it, decide if you like it, and cancel if you don’t.
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