Spring

by Melissa Harrison

  SPRING

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Melissa Harrison

  Annie Worsley

  George Orwell

  Reverend Gilbert White

  Edward Thomas

  Shamshad Khan

  D. H. Lawrence

  Thomas Furly Forster

  Jo Sinclair

  Adelle Stripe

  Alexi Francis

  Edward Step

  Alan Creedon

  Reverend Francis Kilvert

  Alice Hunter

  Anon.

  Dylan Thomas

  Rob Cowen

  Thomas Hardy

  Caroline Greville

  Kenneth Grahame

  Thomas Furly Forster

  Kate Long

  Richard Jefferies

  Sir John Lister-Kaye

  James Common

  Felicia Hemans

  David North

  Thomas Furly Forster

  Miriam Darlington

  Clare Leighton

  Jo Cartmell

  H. E. Bates

  Vijay Medtia

  Jane Austen

  Ryan Clark

  A. E. Housman

  Peter Cooper

  Reverend Gilbert White

  Will Cohu

  Elliot Dowding

  Robert Browning

  Richard Jefferies

  Stephen Moss

  Thomas Furly Forster

  Ginny Battson

  Geoffrey Chaucer

  Melissa Spiers

  Dorothy Wordsworth

  Reverend Francis Kilvert

  Melissa Harrison

  Peter Tate

  Chris Foster

  R. D. Blackmore

  Sue Croxford

  Edward Thomas

  Alison Uttley

  William Shakespeare

  Katie Halsall

  Charlotte Brontë

  Nicola Chester

  Gerard Manley Hopkins

  Sir Edward Grey

  Reverend Gilbert White

  Mary Russell Mitford

  Paul Ashton

  Philip Larkin

  Lucy McRobert

  Author Biographies

  INTRODUCTION

  It is a moment of quickening, of rebirth. The old, lovely story: life surging back, despite everything, once again. However spring finds you – birdsong, blossom or spawn – it is a signal: the earth turning its ancient face back to the sun.

  For me it’s snowdrops, fat black buds on the ash trees and the blackbird’s first song that tell me spring’s arrived. I live in a city, as more and more of us do these days, and so the signs seem even more precious, even easier to miss. Each year I seek them out, anxiously, ardently: each year I feel the same atavistic joy as the green world starts to grow and the birds breed.

  On these temperate isles we have been bound to the seasons since time immemorial, dependent on the circling year and its ancient pattern of growth and senescence. That our homes are warm and bright all year round, that we can eat what we want whenever we like, are recent developments in evolutionary terms: no surprise, then, that we have not lost, in a few generations, our deep connection to the changing year. Spring’s quickening still quickens us, whether villager or urbanite, farmer or commuter. It’s in our bones.

  And the seasons roll through our literature, too, budding, blossoming, fruiting and dying back. Think of it: the lazy summer days and golden harvests, the misty autumn walks and frozen fields in winter, and all the hopeful romance of spring. Sometimes, as with Chaucer’s ‘Aprill shoures’, the seasons are a way to set the scene; sometimes they are the subject-matter itself – but there’s magic in the way a three hundred-year-old account of birdsong, say, can collapse time utterly, granting us a moment of real communion with the past.

  Although that sense of changelessness is now, sadly, an illusion. Our busyness, our industry, have altered the world’s climate, shifting the timing of many natural phenomena and interfering in natural events that have been happening for millennia. We are also witnessing a widespread, sudden decline in wildlife on these islands, which is changing our experience of all four seasons. And so it is more and more important today that we engage with nature physically, intellectually and emotionally, rather than allow ourselves to disconnect; that we witness rather than turn away, and celebrate rather than neglect.

  This book, the first in a new series from The Wildlife Trusts, is an attempt to do just that. A collection of writing both classic and modern, and from all corners of the country, it mixes prose and poetry dating back a thousand years to tell the story of spring’s yearly progress across these islands, and remind us of all we have not yet lost. Most excitingly, I think, these four books feature new writing by members of the general public as well as by established authors, adding up to a fittingly diverse range of voices that sing out the season’s joy.

  ‘Nothing is so beautiful as Spring’, wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1877. He was right.

  Melissa Harrison, Spring 2016

  In the Northwest Highlands of Scotland, wildlife and landscape are as defined by light and wind as by geology, vegetation and people, and by the yearning for brighter days as the long winter months pass.

  Here, on a small croft by the sea, winters are deep and dark, stormy, cold and fierce. There is no easy way out of winter. Its cold, hard grip is periodically loosened when strong, warm, westerly winds blow in from the Atlantic and then our mountains, snow-clad and proud, lose their glistening blankets. Snowmelt waters unite with the tepid storm rains and churn down towards the sea, noisily lighting up the frothing burns and flooding lochans. Fierce squalls batter and pound, whipping up bird, beast, tree, leaf and sea, while rushing snatches of cloud, shower, rainbow and sunbeam paint our hills and croft fields in kaleidoscopic colours. When the winds pause again, hazy, moisture-laden airs diffuse sunlight through pale-lemon and grey veils, and smoothe waves into quicksilver and opal slickness. In these brief remissions of citrine lull and cobweb-light breezes, a sense of expectation grows, along with a discernible shifting of the light and subtle extension of the days. Winter is ending.

  As the sun sinks low each late-winter day, the ground, bleached pale, reflects the dying light and for a few short breaths turns pink and purple, as though the earth itself knows that spring is coming. Growing midday brightness is flanked by this surreptitious, dwindling luminosity, when hill, sky and sea merge in opaque diffuseness. Making the most of these tranquil interludes, birds call out, chattering and gossiping, organising each other and arranging feathers in accordance with the latest fashions. Along the shore, waves are viridian, hanging low and large, thumping slowly down in champagne froth and lacy spray. The otters play through the foam and surf with such unfettered joy that we know, even in moments of doubt, that spring is on its way.

  In February such gentle days are brief. Winds soon return: ‘It’s not time yet!’ they shout, ‘not time yet for spring!’ No sweet murmurations here: birds are hurled about and, with skill and heart-bursting endeavour, they soar up only to be tossed across the fields like old, dry leaves.

  But slowly, steadily, light grows in strength, and there comes a day when it finds the nooks and crannies of the fields, sneaking in between tree trunks and delving into shadowy recesses in byre and croft house. And suddenly a golden glow filters deep through retinas into minds, so bodies shift, heads lift, hearts beat more swiftly, lungs fill, change is sensed.

  Soon longer, mad March days arrive with lofty bright blueness and energetic risings of thin white clouds. White-topped, sparkling waves call out to one another, and in their headlong rush to the shore whip up fizzy delights, cappuccino foam. In the dunes, machair grasses nod and dance, trying to catch the breezes. Above the whirling of air and waves comes the sound of joyous voi
ces, euphoric, unrestrained: the first skylarks are pitching lungs, hearts and minds in unison with the sea.

  Other pre-equinoctial days are not so effervescent and succumb to biting cold, icy crystals and glistening beads of snow and hail. There is a lowness to the landscape then: across the fields, the tufted grasses are still bleached blonde and sodden, heathers gnarled and frizzled to burnt umber and remnants of bronze bracken fronds are scattered here and there. And yet this squishy, pale mat of grass is gradually being absorbed back into the slowly warming earth, its job of protecting soil, fungi, bacteria, worms and hibernating insect larvae during winter now done. Here and there bright green shards appear like livid swords, piercing the mesh and tangle. In this still-dampened-down world, little pathways are visible: Lilliputian highways and low-ways for secret furry scurryings; neat spiralled entrances to dew-covered, spider-webbed dens, some only a finger’s width, thresholds to the undergrass byways of voles, shrews and mice, safe from raptor camera-lens vision.

  Above, another highway: gulls and terns gather and bustle, shouting their greetings in the early morning airs as they follow the same route along the river as it meanders through the croft fields down to the sea, like a school run. They gather on the glistening sands or bouncing waves, shrieking and clamouring, organising last year’s youngsters in frowzy brown and grey groups. And when the business is done, the register complete, up they soar to follow other indiscernible airy trails.

  But soon there comes a day when a heart-warming yellowness spreads across the croft land. Not the pale bleachings of winter and not yet the vibrant, vernal greens of full spring. A sudden yellowing. Lemon ice-cream mist and melon-gold haze. A gift of warmth and sun has tickled awake marzipan-scented gorse flowers and creamy catkins. Suddenly there are yellows everywhere: sunlight is illuminating fuzzy pineapple-yellow bumblebee bottoms, golden-breasted songbirds and grapefruit-yellow cowslips.

  At the woodland edges, the royal purple finery of birch branches is slowly being replaced by livid lime brightness. Winter-bare larch branches are being outfitted in bushy costumes as needled tresses sprout in jade and green and, at last, the solemn brown buds of ancient oak trees are opening, burnishing branch tips lightly and joyously in copper. On the peaty moorland, dark russet and chocolate stems of bog myrtle are painted bright orange as their flowers burst open with scents so fragrant and resinous that they are at once uplifting and healing.

  In the heady, scented airs and currents, even when this lemon posset of spring newness is hurled about yet again by biting winds and snow flurries, the sap-rising rush of change is upon us, light-impelled, undeterred. And, above it all, the choruses of larks and cuckoos, undaunted by the frowning, still-winter-white-tipped mountains. Spring has arrived in the Highlands.

  Annie Worsley, 2016

  Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own fashion, which is to emerge from a hole in the ground, where he has lain buried since the previous autumn, and crawl as rapidly as possible towards the nearest suitable patch of water. Something – some kind of shudder in the earth, or perhaps merely a rise of a few degrees in the temperature – has told him that it is time to wake up: though a few toads appear to sleep the clock round and miss out a year from time to time – at any rate, I have more than once dug them up, alive and apparently well, in the middle of the summer.

  At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes look abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature. It is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-coloured semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet-rings, and which I think is called a chrysoberyl.

  For a few days after getting into the water the toad concentrates on building up his strength by eating small insects. Presently he has swollen to his normal size again, and then he goes through a phase of intense sexiness. All he knows, at least if he is a male toad, is that he wants to get his arms round something, and if you offer him a stick, or even your finger, he will cling to it with surprising strength and take a long time to discover that it is not a female toad. Frequently one comes upon shapeless masses of ten or twenty toads rolling over and over in the water, one clinging to another without distinction of sex. By degrees, however, they sort themselves out into couples, with the male duly sitting on the female’s back. You can now distinguish males from females, because the male is smaller, darker and sits on top, with his arms tightly clasped round the female’s neck. After a day or two the spawn is laid in long strings which wind themselves in and out of the reeds and soon become invisible. A few more weeks, and the water is alive with masses of tiny tadpoles which rapidly grow larger, sprout hind-legs, then forelegs, then shed their tails: and finally, about the middle of the summer, the new generation of toads, smaller than one’s thumb-nail but perfect in every particular, crawl out of the water to begin the game anew.

  I mention the spawning of the toads because it is one of the phenomena of spring which most deeply appeal to me, and because the toad, unlike the skylark and the primrose, has never had much of a boost from poets. But I am aware that many people do not like reptiles or amphibians, and I am not suggesting that in order to enjoy the spring you have to take an interest in toads. There are also the crocus, the missel-thrush, the cuckoo, the blackthorn, etc. The point is that the pleasures of spring are available to everybody, and cost nothing. Even in the most sordid street the coming of spring will register itself by some sign or other, if it is only a brighter blue between the chimney pots or the vivid green of an elder sprouting on a blitzed site. Indeed it is remarkable how Nature goes on existing unofficially, as it were, in the very heart of London. I have seen a kestrel flying over the Deptford gasworks, and I have heard a first-rate performance by a blackbird in the Euston Road. There must be some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of birds living inside the four-mile radius, and it is rather a pleasing thought that none of them pays a halfpenny of rent.

  As for spring, not even the narrow and gloomy streets round the Bank of England are quite able to exclude it. It comes seeping in everywhere, like one of those new poison gases which pass through all filters. The spring is commonly referred to as ‘a miracle’, and during the past five or six years this worn-out figure of speech has taken on a new lease of life. After the sorts of winters we have had to endure recently, the spring does seem miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and harder to believe that it is actually going to happen. Every February since 1940 I have found myself thinking that this time winter is going to be permanent. But Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead at about the same moment. Suddenly, towards the end of March, the miracle happens and the decaying slum in which I live is transfigured. Down in the square the sooty privets have turned bright green, the leaves are thickening on the chestnut trees, the daffodils are out, the wallflowers are budding, the policeman’s tunic looks positively a pleasant shade of blue, the fishmonger greets his customers with a smile, and even the sparrows are quite a different colour, having felt the balminess of the air and nerved themselves to take a bath, their first since last September.

  Is it wicked to take a pleasure in spring and other seasonal changes? To put it more precisely, is it politically reprehensible, while we are all groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird’s song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenomenon which does not cost money and does not have what the editors of left-wing newspapers call a class angle? There is no doubt that many people think so. I know by experience that a favourable reference to ‘Nature’ in one of my articles is liable to bring me abusive letters, and though the key-wor
d in these letters is usually ‘sentimental’, two ideas seem to be mixed up in them. One is that any pleasure in the actual process of life encourages a sort of political quietism. People, so the thought runs, ought to be discontented, and it is our job to multiply our wants and not simply to increase our enjoyment of the things we have already. The other idea is that this is the age of machines and that to dislike the machine, or even to want to limit its domination, is backward-looking, reactionary and slightly ridiculous. This is often backed up by the statement that a love of Nature is a foible of urbanised people who have no notion what Nature is really like. Those who really have to deal with the soil, so it is argued, do not love the soil, and do not take the faintest interest in birds or flowers, except from a strictly utilitarian point of view. To love the country one must live in the town, merely taking an occasional week-end ramble at the warmer times of year.

  This last idea is demonstrably false. Medieval literature, for instance, including the popular ballads, is full of an almost Georgian enthusiasm for Nature, and the art of agricultural peoples such as the Chinese and Japanese centre always round trees, birds, flowers, rivers, mountains. The other idea seems to me to be wrong in a subtler way. Certainly we ought to be discontented, we ought not simply to find out ways of making the best of a bad job, and yet if we kill all pleasure in the actual process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves? If a man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine will give him? I have always suspected that if our economic and political problems are ever really solved, life will become simpler instead of more complex, and that the sort of pleasure one gets from finding the first primrose will loom larger than the sort of pleasure one gets from eating an ice to the tune of a Wurlitzer. I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and – to return to my first instance – toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.