Above me shone Orion, my best-loved constellation, covering the whole heaven with his proud stride, and, glittering beside him, hung his sword. Many other stars shone all round, but none so bright as he. These celestial sentinels, watching over distances far beyond our ken, awake in one an eternal confidence. I remembered the Bethlehem shepherds, who kept watch over their flocks by night, and yet had spirits free for star-gazing. They guarded their sheep none the worse for that.
The star canopy was still spread above me when I reached home; and when I put out my light and opened my bedroom window, there was Orion, still watching. Thoughts from him seemed to stream down upon me.
My mind passed from those shepherds of nearly two thousand years ago, to a man living on this island in this very autumn, who also had an all-day job, and, like the shepherds, his all-day included all-night. He is an inshore fisherman; and because many of the deep-sea fishermen are now catching mines (a kind of fish which is more than “ticklish’’), men like Mr. Ellis are busier than ever, and they produce a far larger proportion than before of the fish we eat in this country. But the eyes of this fisherman were not glued upon his lobster-pots and fishing-nets. He remains, what he was before, an amateur astronomer. So nightly, throughout the war, he has continued to search the sky. Then, on the 12th of November in this year of 1942. he, as usual, turned his telescope heavenwards. He saw a wonder. A new star shone brilliantly out. Till that night, it had never before been seen by man, though it may have existed, invisible to us, for millions of years. Such a moment has occurred in the life of very few men. To witness the birth of a star! How immeasurably wider one’s universe would become after that apparition! Even
“ Stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific,”
might envy this
“Watcher of the skies
When some new planet swept into his ken’’;
for the discovery Nova Puppis did not bring into our sphere a new ocean to be fought over.
Mr. Ellis carefully noted the exact position of his discovery and the hour when he made it, and he immediately telegraphed these to the Observatory at Greenwich. Within a few hours, the existence of the new star was also reported to Greenwich from Sweden, so the find was doubly proved.
There is to-day, in some quarters, a return to the old custom of consulting astrologers, in order to learn what they think of the immediate future course of the war. How jejune such probing seems to be in face of this flaming new Creation which will blaze in the sky for who knows how many aeons!
So it must have seemed to Mr. Ellis, who nevertheless couldn’t help remembering that in June 1918 another new star, Nova Aquila, had also been discovered. Did that presage the end of the last war, which took place five months later? The last thing which such a man as Mr. Ellis would wish to do, would be to harness his own breath-taking discovery on to a date in history; yet the idea did occur to him. It occurred, and passed through his mind, leaving his own star to shine for ever in his consciousness. Come what might, in the future, for him, he knew that he had found his star.
On the night of my birthday, two months later, I lay in bed and watched Orion very slowly moving through space—a space vast enough for his passage to be unimpeded by however many new stars might be born in the heavens. Such are the major happenings in the universe of which we are a part. We too move in the world of Orion and of Nova Puppis. Mr. Ellis moves consciously in it. His kinship with the stars is a part of his daily life, and this must surely put all earthly happenings into their true perspective. Yet we, who only read about his great discovery, must surely be uplifted by it too. We go on living our workaday lives, and so does he; but I, for one, felt that to know that day, as one swept a room, that there was a new light in the sky, must surely do something to “make that and the action fine”.
All fishermen are not astronomers, nor are all war-workers, miners, munition-makers, wardens, or members of the Home Guard. And we all sometimes find ourselves, our backs bent over some rather exhausting piece of work, with, sounding in our ears, the ancient and restless question: “Watchman, will the night soon pass?” We are misled if we think that the answer is written in the calendar or on the wrist-watch. We are wiser not to trouble over the actual date of that answer, but, instead, to watch Nature working beside us, regardless of our questioning. Mr. Ellis has his telescope to “take his mind off” his work, but all Nature-lovers can call on the same source for the strengthening which comes from change of scene and interest. We need not even go so far as to “ask of the stars in motion’’:
“Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And out benumbed conceiving soars!—
The drift of pinions, could we harken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.
“The angels keep their ancient places;—
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangéd faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.”
I have found that the happiest way to carry on in the war is, not to worry about any immediate effect of what we are actually doing, but to do it as well as we can, and then to look away and watch nature all around, slowly reaching her effortless and sure fruition. That is the complete change of air and scene which we so often think we must have. There is no repose like the realisation that one’s little daily drudgery is already a part of something beyond itself. That was the climax of Dante’s vision of the Paradiso:
But yet the will roll’d onward, like a wheel
In even motion, by the love impell’d,
That moves the sun in heaven and all the stars.
For indeed we can rejoice in the sight of Nature at work, even without looking so far as to the place where new stars are born.
Think, for instance, of this year’s harvest. Practically the whole of the man- and woman-power in the country had already been taken into the War effort, either on the battle-field, on the ocean, in the air, or in the factory. The farms were terribly short of labour. Farmers took off their coats and worked harder than ever. Old men came back into their own, proud to know that the fields where they had worked “from a boy” were still in need of their feeble but experienced hands. Land girls and schoolboys brought youth and gaiety to the harvest fields. And Mother Earth responded as never before. In spite of our permanent gibes at the uncertainty of our weather, it was proved that the English soil and the English climate do understand each other, and get on very well together. It was little short of a miracle that the harvest of 1942, worked by emergency staffs, and temporary staffs, and amateur staffs, should have been a “ record” one.
Said a neighbouring farmer to me this autumn:
“We have had the greatest harvest within the memory of man. And more. It has been the greatest harvest, time out of memory. It is the richest harvest that England has ever known. When we speak of ‘ the memory of man’, we mean the memory of our fathers and grandfathers, of men whom we ourselves have spoken to, or whose experience has come down to us by word of mouth. That generally means about a hundred years, or a little more. Back to the early nineteenth century. Till then, English harvests had always been very far below our average to-day. Modern methods of culture have immensely increased the productiveness of our soil. A ‘record’ harvest before ‘ the memory of man’ meant a very small fraction of what we had this year. That is what we English soil has done for us while we are all working short-handed.”
To let one’s mind dwell upon this does not hinder our everyday work. It merely reminds us of our countless invisible fellow workers. Plague and blight may be enemies who may sometimes invade our fields and gardens, but “they that be with us are more than they that be with them”.
This year, the leaves stayed golden on the beeches till early in December. It seems a small thing to remember when such stirring events were also taking place. Mr. Churchill reminded us that “November is usually a month of fog and gloom’’, but that this year it was “a month
in which our soldiers and sailors and airmen have been victorious, in which our gallant Russian allies have struck redoubtable blows against the common enemy, in which our American allies and our kith and kin far-off in the Pacific have also seen their efforts crowned with a considerable measure of success. A great month, this last month of November.”
Yes. It was a great month; but while the blood flows faster at the recital of these gallant deeds, it is still memorable that the crimson and copper of the beeches were around us till after the end of what had been in no sense, this year, “a month of fog and gloom”.
I always read the paragraphs called “ The Course of Nature’’, which appear in The Times once or twice a week. They prove the existence of many people who still watch Nature with curious and understanding eyes, and for whom “her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace”. I think these are the wise people, nor need they necessarily be the idle and unpractical. They, like Mr. Ellis with his telescope, have possibly got “ a full-time job” as well; and, like him, they see life in its true proportions. They may be Home Guards, or fire-watchers, or wardens, but their work does not prevent them from hearing a new bird sing, or from catching the scent of a flower which blows earlier than its time.
Because I had also observed it, I was particularly interested in the many writers who, in all parts of England, had heard the spring song of the thrushes quite early in the past autumn. They wrote from Lancashire and Cornwall, from Wiltshire, Surrey, and Sussex, from Hampshire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxford. All these songs were both intermittent and recurrent. After a night of deluge in October, my own garden had been startled by a sudden joyous gush of thanksgiving. It was the song my thrushes always begin in the week round Christmas Day. Then came a silence of a week or so, before the same songs began again. These out-of-season songs were so unusual and striking that they were noted down by bird-lovers in all those scattered districts. And some of these same observers had detected the scent of the winter heliotrope many weeks before it was to be expected; while, in Scotland, the late summer flowers, like dahlias and nasturtium, bloomed on till they were met by the early spring arrivals.
That is the happiness of living in this place, and indeed in any country place in England to-day. We are not cut off from the life-and-death struggle of our country, for has not this been called “a war of little groups’’, in which the Home Guards and the housewives take their place behind the aircraft and the tanks? Yet we still live on in our own homes, and if other homes are like mine (as I am sure they are) it is still possible for a visitor to say, as he enters our doors, “ Here, one can hardly realise the war”. And that is perhaps the best thing we can ever give to the strangers within our gates.
So the colour of the trees still matters to us, and also to our lodgers. It has mattered to us—spring, summer, autumn, and winter—all through the past three years; and, as for the winters, it must be admitted that the war ones have been very hard. They really might have been planned by Hitler. Yet, in spite of that, now they have taken their place among the visual memories of a lifetime, what rare effects of beauty some of them are found to recall! There was that marvellous Sunday morning when the rain froze as it fell, and the trees were suddenly hung with tinkling icicles, chiming with little ghost-like echoes of the church bells which had long been silent. There are no icicles to-night, and there are no bells; but “there’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise the wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother.’’
Copyright
First published in 1943 by B T Batsford
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Copyright © Edith Olivier, 1943
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Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady Page 11