Indian Summer Notebook

by Henry Williamson

  I am sitting outside my hut. The windows are clean, my bee (you may remember I left her on the silver birch bark) has found her nest. I followed her hang-over flight to a clump of cock’s-foot grass near the Lozenge. She’s safe. Watched by a lizard, I sit idling, clad only in shorts and shoes, while sunlight converts my writing-table fat into food. And vaguely I am wondering about that little heap of last year’s beech leaves, curled dry and brown, in the young green grasses by the path I cut through my acre of weedy rubbish, or nature’s reserve.

  Ah! I am being watched by more than a lizard’s eyes. That cautious gock coming from somewhere in the longer grasses. I recognise it happily, the sentinel call of a male partridge. So there is a pair in the field, after all.

  Slowly, slowly, inch by inch, put on long-distance spectacles. Then raise head gradually while keeping eyes closed. Open them dully. There he is, head erect, on an anthill. On guard.

  It is half an hour after noon. It is the time a cock partridge calls his hen, after prolonged scanning of sky, to feed. Twenty minutes for lunch, then she must return to her nest. That gock means, Do not come yet.

  The sky is clear of crow and hawk, so it must be that I’m in the way. So, slowly into the hut. Keep well back from the eastern window.

  Brown jersey on for camouflage. Take a look at Pertris through the Zeiss monocular glass . . . yes, his head is lower: those egg-thieves, those tree-top watchers the crows, whose eyes are as keen as his and as knowledgeable, are not in the beech spinney.

  It is cold waiting in the hut. My trees, planted in 1930 when I built the hut, have grown tall. All late spring and summer the hut lies within a dark green shade. One needs a fire there when writing, even on a hot day, for the act of imaginative creation draws strength from the body: cold sweats accompany the flow of images being turned into word symbols.

  I turn to the spider, the Empress Arachne. I think of Lenin’s prophecy that the State, when all shall have been achieved, will wither away. The Empress Arachne’s race is run. She has fulfilled herself. Scores of tiny, semi-transparent spiders, her children, have inherited her realm.

  The cock partridge isn’t to be seen. The hen has probably joined him. It is cold in the hut.

  I sit outside in the sun, its benison oozing into my veins, and I see that the beech leaves in the grass have gone. In their place are fragments of sycamore leaves. But sycamore leaves are not like the leaves of the beech, which are pushed off by new breaking buds in spring. Sycamore leaves fall in the autumn, each with its black patch of decay, and soon disintegrate in winter rains. Those are not leaves. Those are the dark brown back-feathers of a hen partridge. So she crept back while I was in the hut and covered the beech leaves with her body; and then, slowly bending her neck in a series of slow movements, had withdrawn one after another of those beech leaves with which she had camouflaged her eggs.

  I watched her, again from the window, making little piles of them, like plates for removal from a table. (Later, when her eggs hatched, she made neat piles of the half-shells, to conceal them while her chicks dried off under her, before she led them to cover in the long grasses.)

  For many days, coming and going down the path, my feet must have passed within inches of her as she squatted there, never moving. Partridges sit tight. Many a hen has been decapitated, body still covering the eggs, before the knives of a mowing machine.

  At four o’clock Pertris was once again watching from his anthill. From the narrow window in the loft of the hut I watched the hen taking brown leaf after brown leaf to tuck them between and over her dozen or so olive-brown eggs, before creeping off to her sentinel lover. A tortoise creeping through the grass.

  And suddenly a screaking cry, and from the middle of the field both birds exploded up noisily, thus to attract attention away from the nest, should any paw’d or wing’d predator be on the prowl. My partridges glided over the hedge into the next field, there to feed on insects and to pluck seeds from grasses gently astir in a susurrating wind coming inland from the sea.

  3

  Blue halls of the wind

  It was one of those mornings when one feels glad to be alive. I wonder if it is generally known how atmospheric variations affect human life, as well as animal life, which includes fish and insects? Look at those clouds of cirrus cumulus, dissolving as one glances into the blue sky, while feeling the heart lifting, seeing the colours of tree, grass, flower and bird to be visibly increasing.

  Down in the valley stream I know the waterflies are swimming up as nymphs, to split their pellicles and rise as winged creatures into what must be for them a paradise. Their mouths are sealed, they will need neither food nor drink; their year of underwater life is over, now all is for love, a flight into the azure afternoon, a sunset dropping of eggs on the shining surface of the river.

  When the atmosphere lightens, what we call a rising glass, the nymphs hatch on the surface of the stream; trout rise, too, from their heaviness, for fish with their swim-bladders are most sensitive to air pressures.

  In close thundery air, which affects you and me, trout lie torpid, as though suffering, on the bed of a river. When the air clears, up rise the nymphs of Olive Dun or Pale Watery, and whether you are a fisherman or not, you will be sharing the general lifting of the spirit, for the pressures upon the body always affect the mind.

  And larks arise, the chaffinch sings in the hawthorn, turtle doves send their throbbing notes of love across the valley, the heart lifts with the clouds, and soon the vapours, metaphorical and physical, are gone. And the blue-stained air is without flaw.

  Such was the morning when, without premeditation, I left my desk and walked outside and threw off my jacket and sat upon the grass. My shirt joined the jacket, and my vest by the gate through which I passed without any idea of where I was going or care for what I had been writing.

  Over the hills and faraway, the sea, cerulean, fused with the sky. And gulls flying high, as though without aim, restless, turning about, stalling, flapping this way and that, as they criss-crossed the sky.

  For this was the morning of the ants. For miles around, from every nest, the winged females were rising on the warm air. Trillions of ants. What made them all rise up and shine together, on those new wings? Scientists call it super-sensory perception: they receive the impulse, they fly up for love, borne into the blue on rising air. And those returning shed their wings, and start another colony underground.

  And the green woodpecker will come to my field for them, uttering his yallery-greenery cry, yaffle-yaffle-yaffle, to announce his arrival. And drop his extraordinary little all-white cylinders, each one perfectly shaped, to dry in the sun. If you break one of the little cartridges with your fingers you will see that they are composed entirely of ant-skeletons bound by pure lime.

  Now it is the turn of the rooks. They seem to have gone mad. They are twirling and cawing in the dome of the sky, rising on thermals and then hurtling down with wings closed and cawing and croaking for the joy of being alive.

  I must explain that every rising column, or bubble of air as gliders call it, that bursts upwards causes a down-draught. In a black thunder-head charged with static electricity this can be very frightening if you are up in a glider.

  I have a son, John, who, seeing a black bombard of a cloud approaching one summer day, got into the air and soon was being carried up in tight circles amidst the flash and crack of lightening until he was above the 27,000-foot contour, his wings icing up and he wearing only a tweed jacket and flannel trousers, and when he came down he had broken the British height record and all he could say to me was: ‘I think I could have gone higher if the controls had not been frozen.’

  Later he told me that the noise was terrifying, the up-draught was probably 100 m.p.h. and his fear was that if caught between the up and down air-rushes his wings might have been torn off. A boy of understatement from his earliest years.

  Jackdaws were now joining the rooks in the upper air. They too were croaking deeply, they weren’t after
ants like the pale gulls, they were simply sporting. The sky had let down its hair, and its winged children were for the time being freed from economic necessity, and all its fears and anxieties. And my spirit went up with them.

  The buzzards from Spreacombe Woods in the valley were now aloft. Five were sailing on broad cleaver-shaped wings serenely above the tumult. Nothing disturbed them. In ordinary workaday times rooks and crows would harry them, for the buzzard is slower in his sailing, circling flight than the dashing, cursing crows that snarl after the mewing hawk, with his nearly five-feet wingspread.

  Afternoon came. I lay in the grass, free and uncaring. The moon rose up, I wandered home to my hut. And towards midnight I heard such a muttering and chortling that I went outside in pyjamas and walked through the dew to watch a prolonged ragged flight of rooks and jackdaws passing low over the beech spinney, flying from the east.

  These birds had gone over Exmoor, simply for the hell of it, a great concourse of the Corvidae, and were now returning to their roosts – the rooks in Pickwell Wood just inland from the sea, and the daws to their holes and ledges down the cliffs of Baggy North Side.

  And as I walked about the field, the moon cast my shadow before me, and I saw again that phenomenon, a sort of ring of light about the shadow of my head, which Richard Jefferies had mentioned in one of his books . . . Jefferies who also wrote, ‘The hours when the soul is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we truly live.’

  4

  Robbie: an innocent who became friends with a hare

  While I was with a team ‘filming’ at my old home, Shallowford, by the Bray (which is the river of Salar) I was being watched by a small dog which had the look of a terrier about him, with the markings of a foxhound. The dog, which appeared to be young, stood still, just watching, outside the gate of the deer park. It belonged to the wife of Farmer Slee, a smallholder who lived in the lodge.

  A fairly remote spot, Shallowford. One would think that a strange van arriving – of unusual shape – might at least cause a young dog to give one bark. But no. This animal showed a quiet and alert interest, while continuing to stand still.

  When the filming, with my friend Kenneth Allsop, was over I asked Mrs. Slee about the dog.

  ‘Robbie is quite old, over twelve years, but everyone says he looks like a puppy. He came to us because his old owner knocked him about a lot. You’ll feel the bumps in his ribs, where they mended. Robbie still curls up in a corner, afraid of our boots. We’re trying to find a home for him.’

  Robbie rode back with me to my hilltop field. Whenever he saw a walking stick in anyone’s hand he cringed away. It took a year to wean him from fear, before he could stretch out before the fire, and not turn an eye backward when I stepped over him to put on a log.

  The only sign of his age was a suggestion of white hair about the muzzle, and his yellow teeth. If he saw another dog he made straight for it, even big dogs such as Alsatians. His tail vibrated, he showed no fear. They were soon friends racing over the grass, chasing and being chased.

  Now I have been told in the past I am not a dog-lover. In theory yes, in practice no, said my friends. I was too self-absorbed, too withdrawn, always thinking about my books, often harassed, distraught. In early life I had found harmony from home by escaping into woods and fields and by streams, usually alone, blissfully being what my father called ‘the wild-boy’.

  That wonderful life-giving existence from which later was drawn, as water from a well, the essence for my earliest books, ended with a strange romantic merging into another world of the light of day displaced, of starlit nights not of owl-cry but of Plutonic gloom and terror; and yet of romance, as when I had discovered mystery in the woods of my boyhood. I would stand and stare on the battlefield greatly interested in this new world of iced shell-crater, frozen corpse, and flare of no man’s land.

  So while I was not a dog-lover, I had some sort of correlation with this Jack Russell-foxhound cross, with this extraordinary small dog which had been kicked and beaten and been made so afraid in its young years that it appeared not to have grown up, and with a sort of innocence which made it directly aware of the potential feelings of animate objects outside itself.

  Was it too fanciful, I wondered, to think that Robbie, through his transcendental experiences, had become an innocent? For he seemed to know that we did not like to kill anything in the field, but live and let live. Thus he became friends with a wild hare which had its forme in the long grasses – left in the middle of the field as a nature reserve.

  Once I saw Timid Wat the hare chasing Robbie through the hedge; then over the bank at the other end of the field came Timid Wat, chased back by Robbie. In the midst of the circling, doubling and reversing Timid Wat jumped sideways and Robbie turned and led Hare a dance across the next field. Of course Robbie knew that Timid Wat was a friend of mine. And also, he had beautiful manners.

  And what a nose for scent! After one mid-August day when rain had fallen, the adjoining field of twenty acres, much grazed by sheep, by midnight was studded with mushrooms. Soon after dawn I was there with a basket and when I’d got enough for breakfast I hid from Robbie. He was huffing and snuffing down a mouse-hole in the field, upwind from me by a hundred yards. I remained flat on my back in the tall yellowing grasses and thistles, and never moved, except to raise my head slightly so that I could watch him.

  When he realised that I was gone, he stood in his usual watching stillness, staring north. After a minute or so, he changed his stance to stare west, whence the wind was blowing. Then he stared south. And finally east, while I held myself unblinking. Then he trotted north to the thorn-grown bank, climbed up its slope and disappeared into the next field.

  I lay in the grass, enjoying the early morning sunshine. Always my idea of bliss has been to lie on my back in the sun, close eyes, and float in spirit into a thoughtless realm. I lay there, hidden in the sere grasses of late summer, among the thistle cardoons soon to break into floss and each seed to float away under its parachute, while flocks of goldfinches twittered as they feasted.

  I became a little anxious about Robbie. He was away a long time; then turning my head slightly I saw him sitting a yard away, looking at me. His foxhound blood had told him what to do: to make a circular cast and work up across the wind until he got my scent, and then follow it up wind.

  They say a dog’s age, comparable with a man’s, is in the ratio of seven years to one. So Robbie was 98 years old, still young and fully aware, sensitive, never putting a foot wrong, as delicate as a roe-deer.

  One day I saw signs of Robbie’s unease. The vet said it was incurable: that it would grow worse, he would suffer; there were other considerations. He should be put down. A hard duty fell upon me.

  For one whole morning I stood near him in a field, and when he had dug hard at a mouse-hole and his snout was well down and Robbie was blowing down it, wuff as though to drive the field mouse into the open, his eyes closed against the dust, I fired. He never saw me, he never knew he was hit, he lay quietly on his side, as though to sleep.

  And today he still sleeps, under the pines along the eastern edge of the field, and a rhododendron grows from his grave.

  5

  Now the summer slips away and the sun goes down

  After toiling up the steep and sunken lane, almost enclosed by brambles and over-arching trees, I come to the sky-line and, suddenly, all is changed. There, far away and below, lie the Burrows, an area of sand-hills beside a sea-coast spreading away to the distant estuary of the Two Rivers, marked by the slim white tower of the lighthouse.

  And the sea lies under an autumn sun to the horizon’s curve. West of Hercules Promontory, as the Romans called the long rocky coastline of Hartland, lies the Atlantic, open to far Labrador. Drink in the sea-wind, absorb the azure of ocean fused with the sky. And turning to the south again, greet the hills of Dartmoor, a darker blue rising 40 miles away as the falcon glides.

  In my young days I walked from this north coast of Devon t
o Dartmoor, and beyond to the Channel and round the coast to Sidmouth and thence to the Severn Sea and by way of footpaths above the red cliffs of Somerset back to this old-time haunt of mine, spread out below, the Burrows.

  How still it is, how lonely on this hill. A wood lark sings somewhere on the stone wall. Those notes, they have a dying fall, as though for summer’s requiem. All is so still.

  The Burrows, wind-carved and wind-wrecked by the south-westerly gales, despite the hold of deep-rooted marram grass . . . The winter winds will soon be raving over the seashore, those level sands now smoothed by the lapsing tide.

  East of the Burrows lie the Pans. Here on a soil holding brackish water grows the first vegetation of the land proper. Worthless to the farmer, the Pans remain in their primeval state. Here one sees many wild flowers, mosses, rushes, and dwarf willows – every kind of wild flower known to grow in England is to be found either on the Pans or the Burrows. There is the rare adder’s-tongue fern; the club-headed rush which grows only in one other place in Britain. And the Great Sea Stock.

  Beyond the Pans, a glint and gleam of the dykes, which carry fresh water from the hill-springs for cattle to drink as they graze rich grass which fattens them; a soil now deep, it is alluvial, silt accumulated during past millenia by the Two Rivers which begin as threads of water on the Great Kneeset, part of that blue hump along the southern horizon.

  Taw and Torridge flow, each through its own valley and meet again in the estuary, by that white stalk of the lighthouse, which is my destination today; I, now free of the constrictions of the writing desk, once again ready to be instructed how to live by ‘the great earth-smitten dandelion of the sun’ of youth; I am in the company of Brother Wave and Sister Air.

  So to the footpath down the hill, to the Burrows, that place of magic, of freedom, of restoration from the world which is too much with us.