Spring

by Melissa Harrison

  Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, 1386–89

  Sitting by the coastal path on the top of Portland, I can trace Chesil Beach along the Dorset coast until it disappears into Devon. The harsh winter landscape has melted away, its grey-churned sea and stormy skies now sparkling with warmth as the sun highlights the turquoise in the tips of the waves.

  Today the bluster is fresh but tinged with something else: excitement. New arrivals are here, promising a great season to come.

  Little terns arrive as early as April and make the great beach their home for the next few months. Their soft white form contrasts with their night-sky mask and pointed wings, making it a handsome bird. This rare breeding migrant has a special place in the heart of Chesil, where it doesn’t need to compete with tourists for its designated patch on the pebbles.

  When they arrive, many simply wait and watch the soap opera play out. It starts predictably: in they come, and there is courting to be done. There’s nothing like a fish supper to impress a female little tern. Chattering for attention and comically sidling up to the female, the male presents his silvery sand-eel gift. There is ceremonial behaviour to be observed; it is an incredibly formal affair. Sometimes the clever females seem to let the males think they are ready to mate, then whip the fish away and head off with a free lunch.

  Eventually, after all the bowing and dancing, they settle down to lay precious eggs on the not-so-cosy Chesil pebbles. Their camouflage is so superb that people have been known to walk right by their nests and not see them. Predators manage to locate them, though: hedgehogs sometimes amble along the beach to enjoy a snack, while a cunning fox may use the cover of darkness to test the electric fence that guards them. Before spring is over, tiny speckled chicks will be tumbling unsteadily around the pebbles, visible only to the keenest eyes. When you see their vulnerability, you hope with all your heart these little creatures will survive the summer.

  But there are even more surprising beach dwellers. On the bright early mornings in spring I spot them – or rather, ever alert, they spot me – and I catch a glimpse of a long-limbed hare as it bounds away down the beach. In the less frequented areas of Chesil they breed and have their young, but they remain a mystery and a glimpse is all you get. It’s reassuring to know that this elusive countryside creature can find a haven here on the coast, away from dangerous farm machinery. There will always be a bit of mystery and oddity to this unique place.

  Melissa Spiers, 2016

  It was a threatening, misty morning, but mild. We set off after dinner from Eusemere. Mrs Clarkson went a short way with us, but turned back. The wind was furious, and we thought we must have returned. We first rested in the large boat-house, then under a furze bush opposite Mr Clarkson’s. Saw the plough going in the field. The wind seized our breath. The Lake was rough. There was a boat by itself floating in the middle of the bay below Water Millock. We rested again in the Water Millock Lane. The hawthorns are black and green, the birches here and there greenish, but there is yet more of purple to be seen on the twigs. We got over into a field to avoid some cows – people working. A few primroses by the roadside – woodsorrel flowers, the anemone, scentless violets, strawberries, and that starry, yellow flower which Mrs C. calls pile wort. When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park we saw a few daffodils close to the water-side. We fancied that the lake had floated the seeds ashore, and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more; and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful.

  They grew among the mossy stones about and about them; some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness; and the rest tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, that blew upon them over the lake; they looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot, and a few stragglers a few yards higher up; but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity, unity, and life of that one busy highway.

  We rested again and again. The bays were stormy, and we heard the waves at different distances, and in the middle of the water, like the sea. Rain came on – we were wet when we reached Luff’s, but we called in. Luckily all was cheerless and gloomy, so we faced the storm – we must have been wet if we had waited – put on dry clothes at Dobson’s. I was very kindly treated by a young woman, the landlady looked sour, but it is her way. She gave us a goodish supper, excellent ham and potatoes. We paid 7/-when we came away. William was sitting by a bright fire when I came downstairs. He soon made his way to the library, piled up in a corner of the window. He brought out a volume of Enfield’s Speaker, another miscellany, and an odd volume of Congreve’s plays. We had a glass of warm rum and water. We enjoyed ourselves and wished for Mary. It rained and blew, when we went to bed. N.B. Deer in Gowbarrow Park like skeletons.

  Thursday, 15 April 1802

  Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals, published 1897

  The beauty of the view, the first view of the village, coming down by the Brooms this evening was indescribable. The brilliant golden poplar spires shone in the evening light like flames against the dark hill side of the Old Forest and the blossoming fruit trees, the torch trees of Paradise blazed with a transparent green and white lustre up the dingle in the setting sunlight. The village is in a blaze of fruit blossom. Clyro is at its loveliest. What more can be said?

  Sunday, 14 April 1871

  Reverend Francis Kilvert, Kilvert’s Diary 1870–79

  In the city the day was warming up. In the past week spring had fallen like a benediction, the sun warming the grimy pavements, charming weed shoots through the cracks and drawing blind thistles up under the tarmac in unlikely bulges. The grass had begun to grow, re-greening the gardens, the parks and the verges with their cargos of litter and cuckoo spit and grime. Even the waste ground between the old bingo hall and the railway line, strewn with faded estate agents’ boards, rotting sleepers and huge wooden drums once wound with cable, even these abandoned corners were warmed by the spring sunshine and had become rank and dizzy with life.

  On Leasow Road the cherries blushed cornelian or dappled the pavement below with palest pink. Outside some lucky houses magnolias were opening their miraculous, waxy blooms, their fallen petals like slivers of soap on the pavements beneath, bruising to brown with time, and feet. On earthy islets in crazy-paved front gardens specimen roses unfurled new, red leaves, while from verge, bed and central reservation nodded the municipal daffs.

  Now the Somali postman found himself shadowed on his rounds by wood pigeons’ dozy coos, while on sunny afternoons starlings clicked and chattered from the aerials like avian telegraph operators sending news about each street’s coming and goings on the wires. And along the long, unlovely high road the estates were once again jubilant with birds. Robins sang riotously from street lamp, sill and gutter; blackbirds spilled their song down into the tangled yards behind the high-rise blocks. Pigeons jostled the windowsills above grimy shopfronts, and at sunset their assemblies were hosted by the sun-warmed roofs.

  The spring sunshine brought a new mood of optimism everywhere it fell. Workmen left doors and windows open, causing all but the most stubbornly unmusical to fall into step with their radios as they passed. Women, bound by the same circadian rhythm, swapped gloves for sunglasses in their everyday handbags. And at the end of each school day the kids streamed screaming out of the gates, eager not for home and TV, but just to be out, free, in the burgeoning world.

  Melissa Harrison, Clay, 2013

  For countless generations, the cuckoo has been the best-known and most eagerly awaited harbinger of spring. Many of the legends concerning the time of its arrival were connected with foretelling the kind of weather to be expected during the coming summer, information of great importance for estimating the timing and magnitude of the harvest. Before people h
ad calendars, the arrival of the cuckoo was also an invaluable point around which to set the farming programme, as its first appearance varies by little more than a week or so from year to year.

  It was widely held that the cuckoo actually brought the spring weather with it, so if it came with a fine warm spell, that sort of weather would continue. The weather was of vital importance to our ancestors, and many believed that it was decreed and sent by a deity. This deity manifested itself in many different ways all over the world, but in almost every case it needed to be appeased by offerings or sacrifices. Over the years, the regular observance of these rituals grew into the tradition of spring festivals. These would celebrate the renewal of vegetation and the return of the sun, the triumph of life over death and the hopes of a plentiful harvest to come. And the form they often took was cuckoo festivals.

  There were many such festivals in Britain, and one of the last to survive was the Towednack cuckoo festival in Cornwall. This was always held on the Sunday nearest to 28 April, which itself was close to the usual date of the cuckoo’s arrival. The festival was held to commemorate a legend about an old man who grew tired of waiting for winter to end. Impatient as he was, he decided to invite friends to celebrate spring, even though it hadn’t arrived yet. As he lit a large log fire for them, a cuckoo flew out of a hollow log, and was immediately followed by warm summery weather.

  Perhaps because the cuckoo arrives at a time of year when many different sorts of spring festivals take place, there are quite a few amusing stories about the bird’s involvement in the festivities. In Herefordshire, it was said to make a beeline for Orleton Fair on 23 April, where it would buy a horse to sell at Brompton Bruan Fair. In Worcestershire, they claimed that the bird never missed Tenbury Fair on 20 April, and was never heard after Pershore Fair on 26 June. The reason given was that the bird would buy a horse at Pershore then ride away for another year.

  Traditional annual dates for the arrival of the cuckoo are different all over Europe. In the South of France, it was said that the cuckoo’s song would be heard during the festival of the Feast of St Benedict (21 March). If it had not begun to sing by 25 March (Annunciation Day), then it was assumed the bird must either have been killed or have frozen to death. In Normandy it was expected to arrive on 1 April, while in parts of Germany the peasants looked for its arrival on the feast of St Valerian and St Tiburtius (14 April), the same day as the nightingale was expected. In the north of Norway its arrival was fixed for 1 May, the feast of St Philip and St James.

  By far the most elaborate of the folk ceremonies constructed around the arrival of the cuckoo took place in Pragança in Portugal. Here, a cuckoo was captured and set on a cart with two old ladies, one of whom was spinning and the other weaving. The cart would then be paraded through the streets with an escort of three hundred horsemen.

  Another well-known aspect of cuckoo lore was the belief that the bird was able to foretell the future. In Yorkshire, children used to play a game in which they danced round a cherry tree singing:

  Cuckoo, cuckoo, cherry-tree,

  Good bird, prithee, tell to me

  How many years I am to see.

  Each child would then take it in turns to shake the tree, and the number of cherries which fell was said to correspond to the number of years they would live. A similar tradition existed in the west of Scotland, where it was thought that the number of calls a cuckoo made the first time it was heard predicted how many years the hearer had to live.

  Peter Tate, Flights of Fancy: Birds in Myth, Legend and Superstition, 2007

  In one little corner of Berkshire’s Moor Copse the ground flora is putting on as varied a display as one might see in a shop window, as if preparing for a one-stop field guide photography session. The show begins just a few paces in from the wood’s edge, where I lose myself in a reverie of petals and sunlight.

  This is the sort of British wildwood I love. The endless, primordial wildwood of myth and legend is, of course, long gone (if it was ever here at all) but there are pockets of forest here and there that retain a sense of timelessness. To delve into these woods is to enter another realm where sound and weather and seasons differ from the world outside. The pace of superficial change in a single wood during springtime can be startling; but take the long view and walking in the woods can be like tapping into deep time: a faraway place unchanged from spring to spring and from age to age.

  This is the disorientating magic of the woods, for in reality woodland need only have been around for 400 years to be classified as ‘ancient’, and only fourteen patches or so in the entire country are larger than a square mile. The here and now of woodland Britain is certainly not what it was – even as the cycling of the seasons feels misleadingly eternal.

  Still, almost nothing marks out those seasons like plants. As the year turns, their full glories exist mostly in potentia: a bud, a stem, a seed, a dry frame of twigs, all waiting for the tilt of the earth’s axis to point them once more towards the sun. With each nightfall and sunrise we lean a little closer. The appearance of small, delicate flowers is one of the first signs that the year is truly waxing, that light and colour are returning to overwrite the comparatively subtle, monochrome hues of winter.

  This time two years ago the light and colour of the plants at Moor Copse was still, to me, an abstract haze. I barely knew the name of a single wildflower. The list of plants of which I know very little is still lengthy, to say the least, but after a few years of slowly accumulating knowledge I’m at least able to greet the more common woodland flowers, like a gathering of old friends. For who could remain a stranger when faced with such full-colour glories? The yellows of celandine, primroses and archangel; blues and purples from the orchids, violets and bluebells; the bright pink of ‘red’ campion; whites of anemones, stitchwort, sorrel and ramsons; and the fresh, cool green of wood spurge.

  Early purple orchids, indeed any orchids, are a particular revelation to the novice student of sylvan botany. Something so architecturally remarkable, picked out in deep pink and purple, is not supposed to unfold from the dank cool of the leaf litter. Surely nothing this exotic could persist in the British countryside. Or consider the wood anemone, bright morning star of the forest floor. There’s almost nothing else in nature so crisp linen-fresh, so purely white. Other whites are path lights guiding the way to a feast for all the senses, whether the deeply pungent garlic scent from a drift of ramsons or the apple-skin-and-rhubarb sourness of a wood sorrel leaf I nibble on as I walk.

  Many of these are as easily seen in banks of undisturbed, mature hedgerows, in the dappled light of oaks and ash and a diverse understory. This is telling. Today’s woodland is a risky place for a wildflower: over-shaded or over-browsed, it is a place either over-managed for plantation or under-managed to the point of neglect. Are wooded road verges and old hedges going the same way, lost to convenience, tidiness or cost-cutting? It took a walk through a carefully tended Wildlife Trust reserve to see such a fantastic display of spring flowers, but surely we should see dazzling riots of colour wherever we look at the height of spring?

  Flowering plants are species as wild as any bird or butterfly, and it isn’t possible to conceive of spring without them. Perhaps the rewilding of each of us, each wood, and even spring itself, should begin with wildflowers, freeing the new-old spirit of the season that persists in fragments to burst out into every corner of the countryside.

  Chris Foster, 2016

  Meanwhile the work of the farm was toward, and every day gave us more ado to dispose of what itself was doing. For after the long dry skeltering wind of March and part of April, there had been a fortnight of soft wet; and when the sun came forth again, hill and valley, wood and meadow, could not make enough of him. Many a spring have I seen since then, but never yet two springs alike, and never one so beautiful. Or was it that my love came forth and touched the world with beauty?

  The spring was in our valley now; creeping first for shelter shyly in the pause of the blustering wind. The
re the lambs came bleating to her, and the orchis lifted up, and the thin dead leaves of clover lay for the new ones to spring through. There the stiffest things that sleep, the stubby oak, and the saplin’d beech, dropped their brown defiance to her, and prepared for a soft reply.

  While her over-eager children (who had started forth to meet her, through the frost and shower of sleet), catkin’d hazel, gold-gloved withy, youthful elder, and old woodbine, with all the tribe of good hedge-climbers (who must hasten while haste they may) – was there one of them that did not claim the merit of coming first?

  There she stayed and held her revel, as soon as the fear of frost was gone; all the air was a fount of freshness, and the earth of gladness, and the laughing waters prattled of the kindness of the sun.

  But all this made it much harder for us, plying the hoe and rake, to keep the fields with room upon them for the corn to tiller. The winter wheat was well enough, being sturdy and strong-sided; but the spring wheat and the barley and the oats were overrun by ill weeds growing faster. Therefore, as the old saying is, –

  ‘Farmer, that thy wife may thrive,

  Let not burr and burdock wive;

  And if thou wouldst keep thy son,

  See that bine and gith have none.’

  So we were compelled to go down the field and up it, striking in and out with care where the green blades hung together, so that each had space to move in and to spread its roots abroad. And I do assure you now, though you may not believe me, it was harder work to keep John Fry, Bill Dadds, and Jem Slo-comb all in a line and all moving nimbly to the tune of my own tool, than it was to set out in the morning alone, and hoe half an acre by dinner-time. For, instead of keeping the good ash moving, they would for ever be finding something to look at or to speak of, or at any rate, to stop with; blaming the shape of their tools perhaps, or talking about other people’s affairs; or, what was most irksome of all to me, taking advantage as married men, and whispering jokes of no excellence about my having, or having not, or being ashamed of a sweetheart. And this went so far at last that I was forced to take two of them and knock their heads together; after which they worked with a better will.