Even on a chilly February day there is life to be found if you look closely enough. The bare twigs of a hazel in the understorey show tight leaf-buds closely wrapped in rosy sheaths no bigger than grains of rice. Among the twigs a tiny drinker moth caterpillar sits nestled out of the wind. It will have hatched last year and spent the winter in a torpid state, awaiting the green flush of spring leaves to continue growing before it can pupate.
The last stragglers of the fieldfare flocks that came here for the winter are picking at shrivelled hawthorn berries. A family troupe of long-tailed tits are joined by blue tits in their search for insects in the treetops. Apart from the fieldfares’ occasional chatter and the peeping of the tits as they move through the wood, there isn’t much sound other than the breeze in the branches above.
Mosses, lichens and glossy ivy leaves, winding their way around the tree trunks, are just about the only colour amongst the muted winter tones. As the weeks pass, the darker shades will gain vibrancy and new hues will be added to nature’s palette.
By March there is a definite change in the atmosphere. A yellowhammer on the edge of the wood flashes golden in the pale sun, spooked by my presence. I note the first few vivid-green leaf-buds bursting on the hawthorn and a seven-spot ladybird ambling about amongst them. It isn’t so silent now either; a wren trills its crystalline tune from the undergrowth and a robin’s creamy melody floats down from a branch overhanging the path. Looking around on hearing the cough of a muntjac, I see its white tail bobbing as it bounds away between the trees.
High above, a grey squirrel leaps across the divide between one tree and another with a small crash. Although they don’t hibernate fully like other species, grey squirrels tend to stay tucked up in leaf-lined dreys throughout the coldest spells and only emerge on milder winter days to raid their larders. As the weather improves and their stores dwindle they will turn to eating bark and leaf-buds.
The rich, earthy tones of winter have almost gone now. In their place is a carpet of green, interspersed with the odd clump of buttery yellow primroses, dainty purple violets and an occasional delicate white wood anemone, just opening. These are the first of many flowers that will take advantage of the spring sunshine while it can still reach the woodland floor through the bare canopy.
April is when Lady’s Wood achieves its magnificent glory. It is a sensory overload of wonderful things. The stars of the floral show have begun to bloom: bluebells take the stage. In Lady’s Wood they are particularly spectacular as they form an almost complete carpet. In places it is a pure, unbroken blue, like a cloudless summer sky; elsewhere the bluebells become part of a rich mosaic, with greater stitchwort and herb-Robert adding flecks of white and pink. The scent is extraordinary too: sweet and heady, especially in the early evening. At this time of day you might be lucky enough to find a hedgehog snuffling around in the undergrowth or glimpse a fox slinking off in search of its next meal.
Another sure sign that spring is here at last are the many insects buzzing around the flowers. Early bumblebees in search of nectar from the bluebells bend the already nodding flower heads even further towards the ground. On warm days they are joined by the first butterflies of the year, orange tips that flutter into the glades in search of Jack-by-the-hedge on which to lay their eggs.
The pond in the centre of the wood is now host to its annual influx of smooth newts which breed here. From the dead branch of a tree on the opposite side of the wood a great spotted woodpecker drums. Our seasonal visitors have started to arrive for the summer too: one of the first is the chiffchaff, a small brown warbler which declares its presence loudly from the treetops by singing its name repeatedly. It won’t be long now until it is joined by cuckoos, swallows and a host of others.
The promise of sunshine that was whispered at first grows stronger with the lengthening days. Spring will ease into summer and the blaze of colour in the wood will soon be replaced with a tapestry of green as the trees take over once more. The blue will fade as yellow oilseed rape blooms in the fields beyond, and the flurry of activity that signified spring’s arrival will gather pace as summer progresses and the breeding season begins.
Alice Hunter, 2016
The Seafarer (Old English)
Bearwas blostmum nimað, byrig fægriað,
wongas wlitigað, woruld onetteð;
ealle þa gemoniað modes fusne
sefan to siþe, þam þe swa þenceð
on flodwegas feor gewitan.
Swylce geac monað geomran reorde,
singeð sumeres weard, sorge beodeð
bitter in breosthord. þæt se beorn ne wat,
esteadig secg, hwæt þa sume dreogað
þe þa wræclastas widost lecgað.
Forþon nu min hyge hweorfeð ofer hreþerlocan,
min modsefa mid mereflode
ofer hwæles eþel hweorfeð wide,
eorþan sceatas, cymeð eft to me
gifre ond grædig, gielleð anfloga,
hweteð on hwælweg hreþer unwearnum
ofer holma gelagu. Forþon me hatran sind
dryhtnes dreamas þonne þis deade lif,
læne on londe.
[The woods take on blossoms, towns become fair,
fields grow beautiful, the world hastens on;
all these things urge on the eager mind,
the spirit to the journey, in one who thinks to travel
far on the paths of the sea.
The cuckoo too gives warning with mournful voice,
summer’s watchman sings, foretells sorrow,
bitter in the heart. Of this that man knows nothing,
the warrior blessed with wealth, what some endure
who furthest tread the paths of exile.
And so now my spirit roams beyond the confines of the heart,
my spirit over the sea-flood;
it wanders wide over the whale’s home,
the expanse of the earth, and comes back to me
eager and greedy; the lone flier cries,
incites the heart to the whale’s way, irresistible,
across the ocean’s floods. And so to me
the joys of the Lord are warmer than this dead life,
lent on land.]
Anon., c. 975. Translation by Eleanor Parker, 2014.
First voice (Very softly):
To begin at the beginning:
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloe-black, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows’ weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.
Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glowworms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jolly, rodgered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.
You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing.
Only your eyes are unclosed, to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep.
And you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the darkest-before-dawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride.
Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional salt slo
w musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row, it is the grass growing on Llareggub Hill, dewfall, starfall, the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.
Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats, sucking mintoes, fortywinking hallelujah; night in the four-ale, quiet as a domino; in Ocky Milkman’s loft like a mouse with gloves; in Dai Bread’s bakery flying like black flour. It is tonight in Donkey Street, trotting silent, with seaweed on its hooves, along the cockled cobbles, past curtained fernpot, text and trinket, harmonium, holy dresser, watercolours done by hand, china dog and rosy tin teacaddy. It is night neddying among the snuggeries of babies.
Look. It is night, dumbly, royally winding through the Coronation cherry trees; going through the graveyard of Bethesda with winds gloved and folded, and dew doffed; tumbling by the Sailors Arms.
Time passes. Listen. Time passes.
Come closer now.
Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night. Only you can see, in the blinded bedrooms, the combs and petticoats over the chairs, the jugs and basins, the glasses of teeth, Thou Shalt Not on the wall, and the yellowing dickybird-watching pictures of the dead. Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams.
From where you are, you can hear their dreams.
Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood, 1954
At 4.21 in the morning, the earth turns enough towards the light that the sky over the sea at Orford Ness begins to change. The darkness thins – slowly, slowly – shifting in shade from black to deepest blue, like Indian ink diluted drop by drop. A few yards from the shore, where swell meets shingle, a robin stirs in a hazel. It blinks and opens its throat. A blackbird follows; then a thrush. The birdsong grows by the minute, washing across Britain, fizzing, burbling and bubbling, spreading west, north and south over the still-black hedges, fields, woods and gardens like a bow-wave ahead of the coming dawn.
Fifteen minutes later it floods through Yorkshire and passes my window. A blackbird on the TV aerial of a terrace opposite threads its own thick, liquid notes into the air, waking me. I turn over and try to sleep again, but it’s no good. Listening to the ripples of notes, my mind flits with nervous thoughts. In a few hours I will tell my dad that I am going to be a father.
We pull on our walking boots a little after eight o’clock, as arranged a week ago. Dad’s car is parked up on the road beside the meadow and the old railway at the edge of town. ‘It’s a good time to be out,’ he says, unbuckling his seatbelt. I’m not sure whether he means the hour or the point in the year, but he’s right in both cases. It’s early March and the promise of spring is everywhere. As he zips up his jacket and checks his camera, I breathe in the familiar smell of the slick, mossy trees that overgrow the sidings. Black branches reach into the silver morning; below are tangles of under-bramble, gloomy, brittle – but there is a faint trace of warmth in the air too. The earth is shrugging off its exoskeleton; I sense the ground stirring. Spoon-shaped foxglove leaves push through the dead foliage. Hawthorn buds split as limbs run with fresh, green blood. Catkins hang from willows.
‘Ready?’ Dad asks. I turn and nod. How will he react? That’s what’s on my mind. It’s all above board, respectable – my wife and I are married; we share a happy home – but our income is not what it could be. Should be, perhaps. Being a writer requires surrendering financial security and living commission to commission. It often feels like being in permanent suspension, permanently waiting for the barren season to turn into one of plenty. Dad knows this too, and I worry he is going to tell me that providing for a child is more important than any artistic endeavour. I worry he’ll say it’s time to knuckle down and find a safe job. Like he did. And I worry I won’t be able to disagree with him.
For a while we walk in silence. Then Dad speaks. He says it’s strange to think that he lived only a couple of miles away from here after he and my mum divorced. I’ve often thought the same when walking these ancient, meandering tracks; wondered even whether one might snake off through the fields to emerge by his old front door. And I’ve wondered too what I’d find if I took it. But when I ask if he ever came to this place back then he shakes his head. ‘Nope,’ he says. I understand why. The river at the bottom of the track is a thick arm thrown around the town’s unruly urban edge. The wild margin between the two appears rough, unloved, inglorious; appears, that is, until you wander into it. Then it turns into something else. An extraordinary place, unchanging – and ever-changing.
Along the holloway are further signs that winter is leaching from the land. Primroses bloom on the banks. Rabbits have thrown up soil for new burrows; it spills ochre-red over a collapsed wall and lacy trails of ivy, goose grass and miniature nettles. Crab apples and hazels explode with blackbirds. Males jump about in front of each other like fencers looking for a first strike. Dad stops by a gap in the screen of trees to raise his camera and take a view of the open field and pylons beyond. But my eyes automatically search the ground, for it was exactly here a few weeks ago that I found – and lost – the ring.
I’d been walking at dusk when, through the same hole beside the oak, I glimpsed a roe deer creeping along the far side of the field. Kneeling on the newly ploughed soil, I watched it feed, ears twitching, until it slipped soundlessly into the wood. Then, as I braced to push myself up, I felt something under my hand: a piece of metal on the edge of a clod of turned earth. Free of dirt it looked like an old ring, damaged by plough blade, flattened and dull. There was no jewel or intricacy, just what – in the half-light – passed for two clasped hands rendered crudely in the metal. I jumped up excitedly and, as I did, hit my head on a low branch, causing me to drop the ring back into the black soil. And despite searching until it was dark, I couldn’t find it.
Standing here again, I think of how it came to be lost. I imagine a labourer at harvest time, red and dust-flecked, pushing it on to his sweetheart’s finger as they sit looking westward, drinking the weak beer she’s brought him in a stoneware jar. Perhaps the ring was always too large and, years later, it slipped from her sweaty knuckle as she helped load sheaves of wheat into a cart. Perhaps it was thrown at him in disgust. Or perhaps as an old man he buried it here as an act of remembrance – marking the place where long ago a promise was made.
I look up. Above the fields now the sky is still pale but lightening. Rooks yak-yak from the wood. Dad is still lining up the photograph: ‘I can’t really capture it,’ he says. I push through the gap to join him, clear my throat and find my voice. ‘Dad. I want to tell you something.’
As they leave my mouth, the words send a ripple of emotion through my body, a wave that I watch wash from me to my father. And I see his face crack and shift from surprise and concern to grinning; his eyes widen with delight and shock. ‘But that’s fantastic news,’ he laughs. ‘Fantastic!’
His reaction is so sudden and instinctive that it makes me well up. ‘You can’t tell anyone yet,’ I say. ‘It’s too early.’
‘No, no, of course.’
‘Promise?’
‘I promise.’
The rest of the walk is a confusing blur of outside and inside worlds. Whatever we look at or start talking about, the conversation soon slips back to the baby. Dad stops intermittently, smiles and exclaims things like: ‘It is wonderful. Really. I’m delighted.’ Never does he mention money or jobs; instead he tells me how I’ll be a great father and that I should spend as much time I can with the baby when it comes. ‘I worked too hard sometimes when you and your brother were small,’ he says. ‘I wish now I could have been out here more, in places like this, with you both. Maybe I got the ratio wrong.’ I’ve never heard him say anything like this before. I feel a strange sense of openness and I tease him that he can babysit any time he want
s. ‘I will,’ he says. ‘I want to.’
It’s not until we’re back at the start that I realise how liberating it feels that he should be so enlivened by this secret he’s carrying. There is fresh blood in his bones. And while I wait for him to change his shoes, I take in the hawthorn growing over the sidings, the opening buds and the foxglove leaves. The trees on either side of the old railway are alive with song and made even more beautiful by the way their highest, thinnest twigs amass in vein-like clusters, lit by an egg-yolk sun. They look like bees’ wings, poised and primed for flight, trembling in the soft breeze. Everything is brimming with possibility. Everything is pointing forward to what is to come. And isn’t that the way with spring? It feels sweeter even than the highest summer day because it arrives while winter still holds the earth. Like the birdsong washing over Britain in the pre-dawn, spring emerges from the dark.
Rob Cowen, 2016
A Backward Spring
The trees are afraid to put forth buds,
And there is timidity in the grass;
The plots lie gray where gouged by spuds,
And whether next week will pass
Free of sly sour winds is the fret of each bush
Of barberry waiting to bloom.
Yet the snowdrop’s face betrays no gloom,
And the primrose pants in its heedless push,
Though the myrtle asks if it’s worth the fight
This year with frost and rime
To venture one more time
On delicate leaves and buttons of white
From the selfsame bough as at last year’s prime,
And never to ruminate on or remember
What happened to it in mid-December.
Thomas Hardy, 1917
March, and the sap is rising. Sparrows fly past the window bearing nesting materials, and the woods that lie a short stroll from home are luring me once more. Eythorne, this small Kent village, is not so different from many others, perhaps distinctive solely for the countryside that surrounds it. I stand looking at the pockets of woodland from the bathroom window as I brush my teeth. I could be there in ten minutes, I’d like to be there at once, but I have to get dressed. It’s not that we stopped walking that way through the colder months, only now there’s a new urge to step out and witness all the rapid changes, to see what’s being proclaimed from small yet confident beaks across the gardens and down the lanes. Just days ago a light frost covered the lawn and wood smoke billowed from chimneys here, a scene held in a pale watercolour wash of winter. Soon my seven-year-old sees me pulling on my boots and grabs her pink binoculars. It’s 6.30 a.m., and the sun is out. I scribble a note for the rest of the family – Gone to the woods – I know they’ll understand.
Spring Page 4