Country Moods and Tenses

by Edith Olivier

  Perhaps scents are the most subtle of all the pleasures of summer evenings. As the flowers vanish in the dusk they return to the air in fragrance, thus finding their way to the most spiritual of the senses. Honeysuckle, mignonette, wallflowers, tobacco plants, roses, lilies and jessamine breathe again from their invisible beds. There is the pungent smell of a small herb trodden underfoot; or in the dark avenue, the scent of the lime blossoms becomes intoxicating. No sound of distant church bells over the meadows has a greater power to evoke the memories of childhood than have these sweet faint garden scents.

  Autumn nights begin with harvests and harvest homes, and they bring their own scents too. These are homely workaday smells—the smell of dead leaves swept up and burnt, or that smell of burning weeds which carries behind it a long lazy trail of blue smoke, its colour fading and its scent strengthening as night falls; Autumn evenings are filled with country activities. Bell-ringers practise for Christmas, and boys shout in the street, pushing Guy Fawkes on an old barrow. They let off squibs and send bonfires blazing skywards. In Honiton on the fifth of November they used to roll burning tar barrels down the steep village street, with a startling effect of wild and primitive gaiety. In early autumn, some of the most famous country fairs take place; and they, too, fill the air with the light of oil flares, and the ugly stimulating music of merry-go-rounds. In autumn evenings, the stars come out more quickly than they could do in the lingering summer dusk. In fact there are nights when you can’t see the sky for the stars. Then there sweep up the famous November fogs, very different things in the country to the yellow, soot-laden, eye-irritating stuff to be met with in London. These country fogs are white and wispy. They gather in the hollows and float about on the high ground; but only rarely are they thick enough to prevent a star here and there from breaking through.

  As the autumn deepens, country evenings become indoor affairs. The sportsmen are “home from the hills”, bringing the smell of corduroy and wet leaves; and family parties gather round the fire to roast the little English chestnuts which have fallen from the trees—too small to be really worth roasting, and yet too sweet to be left outside. The difference between English and Spanish chestnuts is very like the difference between country and town. The town chestnut is a more important thing; but the country product is more fun. In my childhood, we ate English truffles too, and no one can deny that these equal, or even excel, the truffles of Perigord. But in my part of the world, at least, the truffle dog is now an extinct breed, and as we haven’t yet trained pigs to forage for us, that autumn delicacy must remain a memory. But even without truffles, autumn in the country is the season for feasting, and all over England people can live on the country round. Venison, grouse, wild duck, partridges, pheasants, snipe, woodcock, hares and rabbits—all fall into the pot; and squires and keepers, beaters and poachers, gypsies and squatters dip into it while the stars burn on in the autumn night.

  Winter nights have a wild clear beauty. Stars glitter through the frosty air, and the snow on the ground shines almost as brightly as the moon. Village people are well aware of the feet that there are light evenings during only half of each month. They stay indoors on dark nights, and fix their club dinners and other entertainments for the week of the full moon. During the dark fortnight you can nowadays hear the wireless from most houses as you go down the village street. Father sits at home, listening, with his pipe in his mouth: the elder son manages to find his way to the pub; while mother mends and darns as she does all through the year, though she says that in winter she seems to have more time for it. Nowadays, no church bells ring the old year out. We must wait till the end of the war before we hear again that lovely clanging cadence. Then I hope the sirens will have ceased to sound, for no one surely will wish in future to herald a new year with that plaint so laden with woeful associations.

  Spring nights are shortened at each end by the miracle of bird song. As February advances the evenings sparkle with the wet whiteness of myriads of snowdrops in the grass, and, overhead, the clear separate notes of thrushes and blackbirds which fall with a clarity like snowdrops too. The sheep begin to wear their bells again, and as they wear them the chords ring out which the shepherd has been collecting year by year at many fairs. He judges, criticises and improves his carillon till the harmony reaches his ideal. Later in the spring the climax of the bird song is in the early morning. The first birds wake the sun. They call him out of bed, and as he slowly and grandly comes up the sky the whole chorus bursts out to meet him. Individual songs are lost. The air is full of a tangle of sound, which somehow preserves a celestial harmony.

  Across the happy variety of these country nights the Nazi foe has thrown his totalitarian blight of sameness. A black-out is the true emblem of the Nazi onslaught. It substitutes for Nature’s ringing of the changes the dull roar of aeroplanes overhead: the autumn weed burning and the Guy Fawkes bonfires must give place to the horrid glare of fires destroying homes, churches and hospitals. No more may the cowman go from shed to shed carrying his hurricane lamp from which there shines a tallow candle. The lantern might call down a Hun. Instead he must keep an electric torch in his pocket till he enters the byre, and then must tend the mother and her calf by its light, which he has carefully shaded with “at least two layers of paper”. Country roads have suddenly become dangerous for walkers. Village people seem unable to believe that the motor driver cannot see an unlighted figure on the road. Bicyclists have been forced to learn this by fines, but the foot passenger has not yet realised that he now forms part of a stream of traffic, and so he must conform to the traffic laws. He still thinks that all the world knows that he is Jim Jones going home at his usual hour—an hour which is naturally known to all his neighbours; and the faintly lit car from the outer world makes no impression upon him till it has him under its wheels.

  So the dark nights pass—dark with a new inhuman darkness although it is made by man. Morning comes slowly, for a perpetual “summer time” has carried the night an hour forward. A few figures grope their way down the dark street towards the church, where the early Communion takes place in almost complete darkness. The great church near my home has a new beauty and holiness at this early hour. Above the High Altar the apse soars full 70 feet over the Sanctuary into the roof. The great high building is still lost in darkness at eight o’clock in the morning. The worshippers grope their way to their seats by the light of three veiled lamps. The two candles on the altar seem a very long way off. They touch the figure of the priest, and then, by some kind of miracle, they throw their tiny gleam sheer up into the apse upon which there is a colossal mosaic figure of the Lord in Glory. The faint light does not illuminate His Face, which remains in shadow, but it touches the tesseræ of broken gold behind it, creating a large and vaguely outlined nimbus.

  There is great beauty in this unexpected effect and also there is a world of romance. But, still more, there is the reminder that above the horror of a new heathendom the beauty of holiness remains untouched; and the shadows in the church cannot reach the glory which surrounds the Head of Christ.

  THE SECOND MOOD

  IMPERATIVE

  1 The Weather

  Whether the weather be cold,

  Or whether the weather be hot,

  We have to weather the weather

  Whether we like it or not.

  THOSE WORDS WERE WOVEN ROUND THE BORDER OF A carpet made in the Wilton carpet factory early in the last century. They express a part of the countryman’s attitude towards the weather, but there is more to be said about it than that. He accepts what is sent without rebellion, treating the weather as he treats all forces of Nature; but he knows that this force must not only be accepted: it must also be studied.

  Two girls, who worked under me in the Women’s Land Army during the last war, made great friends with the labourers on the farm. They told me that while the men were at work they were never silent. They talked all day. I asked what they talked about.

  “Always the same thing. The we
ather.’’

  In the social life of towns, talking of the weather indicates a cowardly collapse into the slough of despond. It suggests that the talkers can find no subject in common, so they tacitly agree to fill the minutes they must spend in each other’s company with something in which neither pretends to take the smallest interest.

  But in the country, everything depends upon the weather; it means the countryman’s living: his occupations subject him every day to its vagaries: his sports and pleasures are made or marred by it. The weather must always be to him a subject of supreme interest and importance.

  The very clothes worn in the country proclaim this, for they must be, first and last, weatherproof. This is the one thing which the rich townsman or woman knows about, the country before setting foot in it. The woman appears on the first morning in a disguise betraying openly her natural doubt and her unconquerable fear of what the weather will do next. A tough Harris tweed, gingerbread in colour, and smelling strongly of the bogs from which it originally issued, firmly grips the body, kept to the waist by a stiff leathern belt. Over this is worn a Burbery overcoat, colour rather pale mud; and both these garments are riddled with pockets enough to carry a day’s rations, in case the party should be marooned in some completely barbarous and inaccessible stretch of country. Thick woollen stockings, knitted in that “ useful” cable pattern which imparts a psychological fortitude to the legs, terminate in wonderful high boots, warmly lined within, and crepe soled without. Tremendous and expensive gauntlet gloves conceal the elegant natural shape of the beautifully manicured hands; and the head is bound in a gaily coloured handkerchief, protected in its turn by a mackintosh peaked hood.

  Ordinary country people, though their clothes are not so expensive, are also never very far from their mackintoshes, and they often carry an umbrella; while the country labourer hangs a sack over his shoulders and fastens a strap round the legs of his trousers a little way below the knee. This latter, however, is to protect from adders as much as from wet. Once well protected no weather is so bad when you are in it as it seems to be when you look at it through the window. Sir Henry Newbolt was right when he sang:

  Caught in a copse without defence

  Low we crouched to the rain-squall dense;

  Sure, if misery man can vex,

  There it beat on our bended necks.

  Yet when again we wander on

  Suddenly all that gloom is gone:

  Under and over and through the wood,

  Life is astir and life is good.

  Well is it seen that every one

  Laughs at the rain and loves the sun.

  But when the labourers talk all day of the weather, their view is practical rather than poetic. Every activity in the country is rooted in the weather; and the agriculturalist or gardener watches the weather portents as carefully as the stockbroker studies the international money market, or the racing man the form of horses. The countryman’s weather knowledge is direct and first-hand. It is also generally reliable, although a logician would probably not agree that his conclusions were legitimately derived from his premises. But even in pre-war days, when the wireless kindly forewarned us every evening of the approaching weather, the wise farmer generally cut off before that piece of information. He preferred his own forecast. The science of meteorology is not, so far, an exact one, and labourers have not been surpassed as prophets. They still can discern the face of the sky, as the old roadmender does who works outside my gate. One day he confidently (and correctly) declared that the weather would not change “till thik there coach and horses do turn round and come back”.

  I anxiously inquired when Charles’ wain would perform this manœuvre, and I learnt that it would be “ not afore a month or more”.

  He was right as usual. In every part of the country there are points of vantage from which the natives know that because a certain distant object has suddenly come into view the weather is “on the work”, and will now be wet (or fine) for a specified length of time.

  Many people other than farm labourers know that if the wind changes after dawn, following the course of the sun, the day will be fine; while the wind “backing” is a sign of bad weather—wind and rain. Most people, however, fancy that the secret of the morning mist can be read equally easily, and they think that a misty morning must mean a fine day. The countryman knows better. He knows that there are mists and mists. When the mist rises suddenly, leaving a clear space near the ground, the rain is sure to come down almost at once, while a slowly dispersing mist means a beautiful day to follow. This is true at all times in the year, but especially in September, when morning mists are so common in water meadows.

  Dorothy Wordsworth’s description of a foggy spring morning suggests no weather forecast, but it has the beauty which belongs to her close and loving observation of all in Nature. She says:

  “A thick fog obscured the distant prospect entirely, but the shapes of the nearer trees and the dome of the wood dimly seen and dilated. It cleared away between ten and eleven. The shapes of the mist, slowly moving along, exquisitely beautiful, passing over the sheep. They almost seemed to have more of life than those quiet creatures. The unseen birds singing in the mist.’’

  That last touch is peculiarly typical of Dorothy’s sensitive genius.

  There are many forecasts as to days which are fateful for future weather. Everyone knows about St. Swithin, but the jingle about Candlemas Day is not so universally known.

  If Candlemas Day be fair and bright,

  Winter will have another flight:

  If Candlemas Day be dull and dour,

  Winter has gone to return no more.

  And where the wind is on March 21st, there it will stay for another six weeks.

  Some weather portents can only be recognised by a trained ear. Before a storm, there may sometimes be heard, high up in the trees, a short, sharp movement of wind, which flutters the trees into a curious succession of distinct taps. The men say, “the wind do blow ’oiler”, and they know that the strange sound is always followed by violent rain.

  After a long drought the birds sometimes lose patience. They feel they can bear it no longer, and they have their own way of deceiving the worms who have stayed so long underground. They imitate the noise of falling raindrops by tapping on the earth with their bills. This trick is sometimes successful, and the worms thrust their heads through the ground, to be at once gobbled up by the cunning sportsmen.

  Birds and animals have many habits which indicate the coming weather to a wise watcher. If the partridges are still flying in coveys on February 1st, it foretells a late spring; if they pair as early as the last week of January, the season will be an early one. Pheasants crow in the night to warn of the approach of bad weather, but lately they have decided that German bombs are as bad as tornadoes. They are extremely sensitive to the sound of a coming raid, and can hear, or feel, the fall of a high-explosive bomb quite twenty miles away. Then at once they lift up their voices in shrill chorus.

  Cows are great weather prophets. “When my old cow do swing ’er tail like she’m doing this marnin’, we’m bound to ’ave a starm afore night”, said the old cowman to me; and as he drives his cows into the field early in the morning he always knows if the weather is threatening or not. If it is, they stay huddled together in a group near the gate. On the other hand, when they know that it is going to be fine, they stroll leisurely right away across the pasture, to moon about in the neighbourhood of the farthest hedge.

  In Westmorland, the cows lie on the ground when it is going to rain, and the farm men say that this is in order to keep themselves a dry spot on the grass to rest on later in the day.

  Cats have curious weather tricks; but they are such capricious beasts that you have to know your cat before you can believe it. If a cat washes nothing but her face it means that it is going to be fine; but if she carries her paw back over her ears, bad weather is coming.

  I here use the word “bad” in the sense in which it is use
d by those of us who want to play out of doors. The worker on the land only asks that it shall be seasonable, for then it will suit his crops. He welcomes equally a peck of dust in March, a sharp April shower and the bright sun of May, as long as they do not step over into each other’s domains. The weather, like the rest of the world, should keep in its place.

  2 Birds and Beasts and Insects

  IF A CENSUS COULD BE TAKEN, IT WOULD BE FOUND THAT THE human population of the country is terrifyingly outnumbered by the birds and beasts and insects. Humanly speaking, the population of villages is very small indeed; but around this little and diminishing, though self-important race, numberless birds, beasts and insects live their lives, pursue their ends, enchant us with their songs, annoy us by their stings and attract us to the chase.