Autumn

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Melissa Harrison

  Horatio Clare

  Edward Step

  Gerard Manley Hopkins

  Elizabeth Gardiner

  Reverend Gilbert White

  Annie Worsley

  Will Burns

  Caroline Greville

  Thomas Furly Forster

  Sue Croxford

  Thomas Furly Forster

  Kate Blincoe

  Patrick Kavanagh

  Alice Hunter

  Reverend Gilbert White

  Alexi Francis

  Thomas Furly Forster

  Paul Ashton

  William Cobbett

  Jo Cartmell

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Amy Liptrot

  Louise Baker

  Thomas Furly Forster

  Clare Leighton

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson

  Chris Murphy

  Thomas Furly Forster

  Nick Acheson

  Jane Adams

  Reverend Gilbert White

  Will Harper-Penrose

  Daphne Pleace

  Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club

  Ginny Battson

  George Eliot

  Brian Carter

  William Butler Yeats

  Janet Willoner

  Jon Dunn

  Edward Thomas

  Tamsin Constable

  Thomas Furly Forster

  Leanne Manchester

  Helen Macdonald

  Matt Merritt

  Richard Jefferies

  Julia Wallis

  Julian Jones

  Thomas Furly Forster

  Dr Rob Lambert

  Nan Shepherd

  Lucy McRobert

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Adrian Bell

  Sinéad Gleeson

  Dylan Thomas

  Ryan Clark

  Thomas Hardy

  Reverend Gilbert White

  John Lewis-Stempel

  Matt Gaw

  Alison Brackenbury

  Benjamin Myers

  Ted Hughes

  Megan Shersby

  Thomas Furly Forster

  John Clare

  Nicola Chester

  Laurence Arnold

  Imtiaz Dharker

  Neil Ansell

  Thomas Furly Forster

  David Gwilym Anthony

  Author Biographies

  INTRODUCTION

  I have always loved autumn. At primary school I learned Keats’ famous poem by heart; later, I dreamed of being at university and spending Michaelmas term walking through drifts of russet leaves, sunk in romantic thoughts. Again and again I hear from friends that it is their favourite of all the four seasons; that somehow it makes tangible a suite of emotions – wistfulness, nostalgia, a comfortable kind of melancholy – that are, at other times of the year, just out of reach.

  It’s hardly surprising. After all, autumn is the natural world’s gentle memento mori; it’s when the year’s cycle begins to slow as spring’s generative energy and summer’s riotous fruition at last start to fail, prompted by shorter days, falling temperatures and the need shared by so many living things for a period of quietude and senescence.

  Although not all. Autumn is a busy time for saprophytes: fungi, mould and all the million detritivores whose job it is to recycle organic matter so that it may be used again. To me, the process of decay is about life, not death, the year’s spent growth giving rise to the very earth that will propel the following spring. Autumn is a time of new beginnings, too.

  And there’s no rest in the avian world as the second of the year’s great migrations gets underway. Our summer visitors, like the hirundines, the ospreys and many of the warblers head south, and instead we welcome great flocks of wildfowl and thrushes from the north, here to escape colder climes. Passage migrants, too, take advantage of our isles to rest and refuel and keep the hardcore birders busy. Autumn is not a mellow season for all.

  It may yet be fruitful, though. In recent years we’ve begun to rediscover Britain’s rich history of local apple varieties, and many villages now celebrate them in October through the relatively new initiative of Apple Day. And although we may be tied far less to the seasons now when it comes to shop-bought food, going blackberrying remains a pleasure that can only be enjoyed at a certain time of year.

  Autumn in our temperate region is still a season of mists – and of other atmospheric phenomena, too: equinoctial gales, like the great storm of 1987; the first ground frosts; gossamer spiderwebs at daybreak, hung with sparkling dew. The nights cool, and lengthen; summer, if we’ve had one, slowly falls behind us. Festivals like Diwali, Halloween and Bonfire Night light up in different ways the gathering dark.

  When I went to university I found myself too busy in Michaelmas term to drift around outdoors thinking deep thoughts. But in the years since then I haven’t lost my love of autumn – although I’ve come to appreciate the other seasons, too. There’s something so beguiling about the blazing leaves and the rich smell of rot, and the start of a new phase in the circling year.

  Melissa Harrison, Autumn 2016

  In the edges of days, in the confluence of tides, in the unclear lapping and lap-backing of the between-seasons is autumn. It can be obvious, a salute of blazing foliage, or disguised, slipping in behind distractions. In the south, the summer of St Martin ends in November, the brightest summer of all, its colours luminous under the Mediterranean blue, which changes, unblazes, dies down from August glare to soft September. ‘My favourite month!’ I think, in Septembers like that, forgetting that in July it was all going too quickly and that summer should always be wished for ever. But autumn has a summer and a winter. As I fear the latter a little, I love the former much. You find reflections of both at other times of year. Still spring days when the smoke also rises straight can have a little of autumn in them, the trees in half-colours, the blossom yet to break. Stars at evening seen through near-bare boughs could belong to either season.

  I was taught as a child that you find you are ready for each earth tide when it comes. With the years, and with moving from the south to the north, I have learned how age dreads winter, which seems to last longer every time – and actually is longer where I live now. The yellow leaves of the lime trees, desiccated in August and dead in the gutters, always gave me pause in Verona. So soon?

  In Palermo we swam until November then put on scarves. In Yorkshire we watch the miracles of the trees across the valley, their colours playing like notes across a keyboard, slowly. The hill opposite our windows is close and covered in a complete wood: alders by the beck, and above them sycamore, pine, birch, ash, oak and beech. We observe them pulsing through the spectrum in almost bemused delight until the rain thickens the windows and darkness falls until March. And then autumn is motorway rain and the dirty courts of service stations, greys and greases and the smeared crimson brake lights streaming into junctions, and days that seem to shut themselves down, disgusted and forgettable.

  The names of the northern towns then seem written in heavy autumnal syllables and rain-dark stone. Warrington, Salford, Preston, where the equinoctial skies press down. You wish you were anywhere else. Autumn in New York. Autumn in Rome, Paris, London: the great cities might be made for the season, their towers of lights shining for longer as the months roll darker, and in the cooling mornings the sweet and smoky smells. In one of those offices I once set radio listeners a writing competition: winter without clichés. Autumn would have been much harder.

  ‘Even as a schoolboy I loved John Keats’s ode “To Autumn” for being an ark of the covenant between language and sensation,’ Seamus Heaney wrote. It is the time of richest sensation: the sights and the smells, obviously, and the way its daily varying temp
erature makes the skin hypersensitive; and then there are the sounds – rain, wind, dead leaves; and then its harvest of tastes, from traffic fog to cold clear days. It makes writers of the most pen-averse of us, because we have a need to turn sensation into language. In its brightness, its startling quality, its beauty and its inevitable slide to darkness, it is the season that most resembles human life. The first moment you can remember kicking up leaves is probably fairly contiguous with your first apprehension of death. All humans are in the autumn of their days – that’s life, and the other.

  To the novelist, autumn offers a believable, dramatic, enticing setting: the trick of fiction is to make-believe, and autumn is the story season, a time of migration, equinox, transformation and incident, the things of which fiction is made. And obviously you want stuff to happen: it suggests adversity and change, great boons to any plot. Dickens was a great fan, beginning Our Mutual Friend and Bleak House in London autumns. Angela Carter starts The Magic Toyshop thus: ‘October, crisp, misty, golden October, when the light is sweet and heavy. They stood on the step and waited for the taxi with black bands on their arms and suitcases in their hands, forlorn passengers from a wrecked ship, clutching a few haphazardly salvaged possessions and staring in dismay at the choppy sea to which they must commit themselves.’

  My best writing season starts in September. It is something to do with the new season of work, the real new year when school began or began again, and later, when you return to your office having reaffirmed your vows to be a better employee this time. The ideas come fresh, the sparkle of the days and their drawing in seems to put a fire under them, and the approach of the dark says ‘Haste!’ When I am not bound by teaching or lecturing it is the perfect time to travel, which is one half of writing for me. Airfares tumble, hotels have vacancies, beaches unclutter and lovers steal weekends and take city breaks. If I am work-bound I feed my travel hunger through the windows and with walking: suddenly the country is a mosaic of micro-climates. It is a happy time in the hills of Wales, my true home. Between the flies dying off and the cold closing in, farmers can ease up. If any are going to take a break they will do it between now and November. I love the days with sharp brightness in their breaking, suggestive scents and skies of many blues: pale azure and cool cerulean. E. M. Forster has a lovely description of such a day in A Room With a View: ‘It was a Saturday afternoon, gay and brilliant after abundant rains, and the spirit of youth dwelt in it, though the season now was autumn. All that was gracious triumphed.’

  I may never match that, but at my desk the words come with the quickened rhythm of the world in its turning. The literary calendar puts a spring in things with the reviews of friends’ latest volumes and the new reading crop imparting urgency and inspiration. Or perhaps it is just that the muse is more bird than goddess. She shakes herself and takes wing now, as the hills change tones and no day is a settled thing. In September they are kaleidoscopes of lights and moods. I had an email from the author Niall Griffiths one day towards the end of summer, saying he had detected the coming of autumn in the wind in Wales: ‘Ah how I have missed it!’ he wrote.

  Horatio Clare, 2016

  When does autumn begin? The astronomers, followed by the almanack-makers, begin it in the third week of September, when the day and night become equal in length, and continue it until a few days short of Christmas. Many people are guided entirely by the weather of the year, and find usually that what they had thought to be early autumn is followed by another spell of summer. The rambling naturalist knows that you cannot fix dates to our seasons before they come: that they merge one into another gradually, and that a few miles north or south or the two sides of a range of hills may show a marked difference.

  Some of our bird visitors left us before we began to think of autumn; but when the last of the swifts have gone, the lapwings flock and the starlings move to some other district, we know the season is about to change, and we watch for signs like the thinning of the limes, the yellowing of the elms and the browning of the beeches. As a rule, these changes are gradual; and there is still much of summer shown by the flowers and insects when the wild fruits are getting their tints of ripeness and the early fungi are beginning to appear. So, we know that our ramble in any direction will be full of interest.

  Today, let us take the common, whose varied surface, broken into knolls and hollows, with thickets and copses and a few rills, should afford us a number of things that are likely to interest us. As we look away to the birchwood in the distance, the ground colour is mainly purple from the broad sheets of heather and purple heath that cover the layers of gravel. The lines of gold that come between are due to the flowers of furze – but not the common furze, whose great, thick bushes bear very few blossoms just now. The present display is chiefly that of a distant plant, the dwarf furze, not half the size of the other: and instead of making a fine show in early spring, it withholds its smaller flowers until midsummer is passed, but then keeps going until near the end of the year. It is not half the height of common furze, and many of its long, spreading branches keep close to the ground, so that we have to be wary in walking if we would avoid having our ankles stabbed by the firm, sharp spines. Often, the dwarf furze seems to show fondness for the company of heather, as it does here.

  The blackthorn bushes are becoming noticeable again, for many of them are covered with fruit and promise a heavy crop of sloes later on. Their black skins are coated with the waxy ‘bloom’, which gives them a dull, bluish tint, and protects them from fungus attacks. Country folk will tell you that the fruit is not fit to gather until the frost has been on them; and for this reason they know them as winter-picks. Here is one of the bushes almost leafless, but not from the natural fall. We were along here a few weeks ago, when this bush was covered with hundreds of the striking caterpillars of the figure-of-eight moth, of which only a few remain: the others have crawled to the ground and become chrysalids. Judging the few that are left, you can imagine what a sight the bush made when there were hundreds of the caterpillars spreading, in full view, over it; yet, nobody else seemed to notice it. As you see, the caterpillar is quite showy, each ring having on the back a blue-grey patch with a yellow centre and four small black spots. Among the remains of dead leaves and twigs, on the ground below, there is a number of oval cocoons, in which the pale brown chrysalids are waiting for their emergence as brownish moths about October. The name is made plain on looking at the forewings, where there is a more or less clear 8 marked in white.

  These bright yellow composite flowers, which are dotted freely all over this dry part of the common, are those of the long-rooted cat’s-ear, one of the commonest of our weeds; but how it got its name is hard to say. It is one of that group of composites that, like the larger dandelion and the hawkweeds, have all the florets strap-shaped and with nothing to make the species distinct at a glance. We have to consider several details before deciding what is the plant’s name. In this case, we note that the leaves all spring from the top of the long tapering rootstock, forming a rosette. These leaves, of which there are many, are long and narrow, with the edges scalloped or cut into pointed lobes with the tips pointing towards the root: they are bristly above and below. From the centre of the rosette rises the straight flowering stem to a height of a foot or more, branching at the upper half, each branch ending in a bright yellow flower-head an inch and a half wide. There are no leaves from the stem, only a few small bracts. Some of the earlier heads are now in fruit, crowned with a tuft of fine pale brown feathers which will carry away the beaked red-brown fruits.

  Edward Step, Nature Rambles: An Introduction to Country-lore, 1930

  Hurrahing in Harvest

  Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise

  Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour

  Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier

  Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

  I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,

  Down all
that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;

  And, eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a

  Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

  And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder

  Majestic – as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! –

  These things, these things were here and but the beholder

  Wanting; which two when they once meet,

  The heart rears wings bold and bolder

  And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

  Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877

  Within minutes of starting work on the field side of our garden I’m joined by No. 26. She lays her broad, steamy wet nose on the top of the wall separating field from garden, and breathes encouragingly at me.

  No. 26 is a Friesian heifer. Unlike the competitors in the Miss World contest, these candidates wear their numbers as ear tags, and No. 26 is hoping that I shall come up with a titbit, or hold down another elder branch for her. If I do, a thunder of hooves brings No. 22, similarly hopeful, or even No. 18, who is rather timid.

  I like cows, especially Friesians. They are such shameless minders of other people’s business, and gather inquisitively at anything that’s going on. Initially, they press uneasily around the fringes of the large field behind our cottage, giving the impression that they would prefer to be somewhere else. Their eyes roll, and they bellow in voices of studied tragedy, perhaps at the state of the grass, which is rank.

  Looking out across the brown grass of the top field – grass which to my ignorant eye must be almost uneatable for the herd which grazes it – I ponder the quantity of nourishment there can be left in it, what’s left being bitten to the quick. A farmer’s wife tells me that the shortage of moisture in it increases the food elements the animals are getting. I hope so. Otherwise it all looks like a long day’s work for very little reward.

  And I wonder again why these animals tend to bunch together as they eat. For them in their shadeless field the heat must be intense, and be increased by each other’s proximity. Yet here they come, towards this house, heads down, ears and tails constantly waving, steadily chewing away. One or two have stepped aside a few paces, but the rest have stayed close, head to tail, jaws keeping up their continuous champ champ champ.