Summer Read online

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Melissa Harrison

  Edward Thomas

  Anon.

  Annie Worsley

  Thomas Furly Forster

  Caroline Greville

  Reverend Gilbert White

  Thomas Hardy

  Jennifer Garrett

  Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion

  Alexi Francis

  Sir Edward Grey

  John Tyler

  Richard Jefferies

  Thomas Furly Forster

  Alexandra Pearce

  Julia Wallis

  Nicholas Breton

  Vivienne Hambly

  George Eliot

  Thomas Furly Forster

  Matt Adam Williams

  Simon Barnes

  Edward Thomas

  Olivia Laing

  Jo Cartmell

  Laurie Lee

  Janet Willoner

  Thomas Hardy

  Jacqueline Bain

  W. H. Hudson

  Emma Oldham

  Reverend Gilbert White

  Nick Acheson

  Alice Oswald

  Kate Blincoe

  Kenneth Allsop

  Michael McCarthy

  Thomas Furly Forster

  Charles Dickens

  Jan Freedman

  James Common

  Clare Leighton

  Georgia Locock

  Mark Cocker

  Benjamin Zephaniah

  Zach Haynes

  Thomas Furly Forster

  Dawn Bradley

  Philip Larkin

  Miles King

  Paul Evans

  John Green

  William Morris

  Lucy McRobert

  Esther Woolfson

  Reverend Gilbert White

  Samantha Fernley

  Thomas Furly Forster

  Alan Wright

  Edward Step

  Katy Bell

  Mary Webb

  Julian Beach

  Nicola Chester

  Ebenezer Jones

  Richard Adams

  Megan Shersby

  Thomas Furly Forster

  Norman MacCaig

  Ronald Blythe

  Alison Brackenbury

  R. F. Langley

  Rhiannon Bull

  Thomas Furly Forster

  Leigh Hunt

  Author Biographies

  INTRODUCTION

  If spring is all about looking forward, and autumn about dying back, summer surely is the present moment: a long, hot now that marks the sultry climax of the year. Roughly bookended by haymaking and the grain harvest, it is a time of fruition and plenty, of promises fulfilled. Spring’s generative riotousness slows and ceases, and a stillness settles over the land.

  For many people summer is a time of leisure: days at the beach, or picnics in parks and gardens; long, fair-weather country walks. Often it feels too brief, or comes in instalments: we pine for the six solid weeks of sunshine we believe we always had as a child. But in wanting to recapture those days we risk missing the days we still have – because what is that wish but a wish to be a child again, loosed from school, loosed from the house, and barefoot on the grass? Those elysian summers, polished to dazzling brightness by the flow of years, can never be recaptured; but we have this summer, however imperfect we as adults may deem it, and we can go out and seek it at every opportunity we find.

  I hope this collection from The Wildlife Trusts inspires you to do just that. Like its companion volume, Spring, and the two that will soon join it, Summer features material submitted by members of the general public as well as new pieces by established nature writers, poetry, and extracts from classic works of literature. Here you will find glow-worms, and cuckoos ancient and modern; jaunts on sun-dappled rivers, and hobbies hawking for dragonflies; there are diving gannets and rare cliff plants; butterflies, sea-gooseberries, city gardens and the summer stars.

  Haymaking and harvest are still key events for our farmers, but they’re very different occasions now than they once were. No longer is the labour of a whole village required to scythe, rake, ted, pitch sheaves to the wains and build the ricks; no longer do women and children glean the stubbles after. Many communities are losing their connection to the land; our countryside itself has changed, too, no longer timeless but subject to alteration and loss. Summer is no longer what it was – not because we have grown up, but because we have lost perhaps half the wildlife we shared the world with when we were young.

  It is not too late to turn things around, though, and The Wildlife Trusts are working to do just that. We can all play our part, by learning about the plants and animals we share the UK with, loving them for the joy they bring into our lives, and protecting the places where they live. Summer should be about abundance: it is our job to make sure we can hand down abundance to our children, for all their summers to come.

  Melissa Harrison, Summer 2016

  Now day by day, indoors and out of doors, the conquest of spring proceeds to the music of the conquerors. One evening the first chafer comes to the lamp, and his booming makes the ears tremble with dim apprehension. He climbs, six-legged and slow, up the curtain, supporting himself now and then by unfurling his wings, or if not he falls with a drunken moan, then begins to climb again, and at last blunders about the room like a ball that must strike something, the white ceiling, the white paper, the lamp, and when he falls he rests. In his painful climbing he looks human, as perhaps a man looks angelic to an angel; but there is nothing lovelier and more surprising than the unfurling of his pinions like a magic wind-blown cloak out of that hard mail.

  Another day far-off woods in a hot, moist air first attain their rich velvet mossiness, and even near at hand the gorse-bushes all smouldering with bloom are like clouds settled on the earth, having no solidity, but just colour and warmth and pleasantness.

  The broad-backed chestnuts bloom. On the old cart-lodge tiles the vast carapace of the house-leek is green and rosy, and out of the midst of it grow dandelions and grass, and the mass of black mould which it has accumulated in a century bends down the roof.

  The hawthorn-bloom is past before we are sure that it has reached its fullness. Day after day its warm and fragrant snow clouded the earth with light, and yet we waited, thinking surely tomorrow it will be fairer still, and it was, and the next day we thought the same and we were careless as in first love, and then one day it lay upon upon the grass, an empty shell, the vest of departed loveliness, and another year war over. The broad grass is full of buttercups’ gold or it is sullen silvery under a burning afternoon sun, without wind, the horizon smoky, the blue sky and its white, still clouds almost veiled by heat; the red cattle are under the elms, the unrippled water slides under sullen silvery willows.

  The night-haze peels off the hills and lets the sun in upon small tracts of wood – upon a group of walnuts in the bronze of their fine, small leaf – upon downland grass, and exposes blue sky and white cloud, but then returns and hides the land, except that the dewy ground-ash and the ivy and holly gleam; and two cuckoos go over crying and crying continually in the hollow vale.

  Already the ash-keys hang in cool, thick bunches under the darker leaves. The chestnut-bloom is falling. The oak-apples are large and rosy. The wind is high, and the thunder is away somewhere behind the pink mountains in the southern sky or in the dark drifts overhead. And yet the blue of the massy hangers almost envelops the beechen green; the coombes and the beeches above and around their grassy slopes of juniper are soft and dim, and far withdrawn, and the nightjar’s voice is heard as if the wind there were quiet. The rain will not come; the plunging wind in the trees has a sound of waterfalls all night, yet cannot trouble the sleep of the orange-tip butterfly on the leopard’s-bane’s dead flower.


  Now the pure blooms in the sandy lands, above the dark-fronded brake and glaucous-fruited whortleberry, the foxgloves break into bell after bell under the oaks and the birches. The yellow broom is flowering and scented, and the white lady’s bedstraw sweetens the earth’s breath. The careless variety of abundance and freshness makes every lane a bride. Suddenly, in the midst of the sand, deep meadows gleam, and the kingfisher paints the air with azure and emerald and rose above the massy water tumbling between aspens at the edge of a neat, shaven lawn, and, behind that, a white mill and miller’s house with dark, alluring windows where no one stirs.

  June puts bronze and crimson on many of her leaves. The maple leaves and many of the leaves of thorn and bramble and dogwood are rosy; the hazel-leaves are rosy-brown; the herb-robert and parsley are rose-red; the leaves of ash and holly are dark lacquered. The copper beeches, opulently sombre under a faintly yellowed sky, seems to be the sacred trees of the thunder that broods above. Presently the colour of the threat is changed to blue, which soiled white clouds pervade until the whole sky is woolly white and grey and moving north. There is no wind, but there is a roar as of a hurricane in the trees far off; soon it is louder, in the trees not so remote; and in a minute the rain has traversed half a mile of woods, and the distant combined roar is swallowed up by the nearest pattering on roof and pane and leaf, the dance of leaves, the sway of branches, the trembling of whole trees under the flood. The rain falls straight upon the hard road and each drop seems to leap upward from it barbed. Great drops dive among the motionless, dusty nettles. The thunder unloads its ponderous burden upon the resonant floor of the sky; but the sounds of the myriad leaves and grass-blades drinking all but drowns the boom, the splitting road, and the echo in the hills. When it is over it has put a final sweetness into the blackbird’s voice and into the calm of the evening garden when the voice of a singer does but lay another tribute at the feet of the enormous silence. Frail is that voice as the ghost-moth dancing above the grass so faithfully that it seems a flower attached to a swaying stem, or as the one nettle-leaf that flutters in a draught of the hedge like a signalling hand while all the rest of the leaves are as if they could not move again, or as the full moon that is foundering on a white surf in the infinite violet sky. More large and more calm and emptier of familiar things grows the land as I pass through it, under the hovering of the low-flying but swiftly turning nightjar, until at midnight only a low white mist moves over the gentle desolation and warm silence. The mist wavers, and discloses a sky all strewn with white stars like the flowers of an immense jessamine. It closes up again, and day is born unawares in its pale arms, and earth is for the moment nothing but the tide of downs flowing west and the branch of red roses that hang heavily laden and drowsed with its weight and beauty over my path, dripping its last spray in the dew of the grass.

  Edward Thomas, The South Country, 1909

  Sumer Is Icumen In

  Sumer is icumen in,

  Lhude sing cuccu!

  Groweþ sed and bloweþ med

  And springþ þe wde nu,

  Sing cuccu!

  Awe bleteþ after lomb,

  Lhouþ after calue cu.

  Bulluc sterteþ, bucke uerteþ,

  Murie sing cuccu!

  Cuccu, cuccu, wel singes þu cuccu;

  Ne swik þu nauer nu.

  Pes:

  Sing cuccu nu. Sing cuccu.

  Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu nu!

  [Summer has come in,

  Loudly sing, Cuckoo!

  The seed grows and the meadow blooms

  And the wood springs anew,

  Sing, Cuckoo!

  The ewe bleats after the lamb

  The cow lows after the calf.

  The bullock stirs, the stag farts,

  Merrily sing, Cuckoo!

  Cuckoo, cuckoo, well you sing, cuckoo;

  Don’t ever you stop now,

  Sing cuckoo now. Sing, Cuckoo.

  Sing Cuckoo. Sing cuckoo now!]

  Anon, 13th century. Translation by the British Library.

  In late springtime the evening sun leaves a residue of light and brightness on sea, loch and river waters. Nights, still dark and starlit, become thinner somehow, and watery. Evenings lengthen, end-of-day airs are white and turquoise, amber and rose, insect-humming and bird-filled. Winter still lingers in small patches here and there on our tallest mountains, while sharp, wild weather systems blow in angrily from the Atlantic and test the strongest hearts, temporarily banishing spring with gales, battering rains and flooding. But in between these challenges, the earth continues to warm, sunlight is richer and wildlife responds with considerable gladness: birdsong is exultant, plant colours are vibrant, scents potent, creature business is determined and busy.

  The yellowness of spring is steadily replaced by vivid greens. Unbridled growth is scented. First the sun-burnished bog myrtle, heady and intoxicating. Then a vibrant, sharp smell, like a new-mown lawn and so redolent of sugar and lemons it feels good enough to drink. All around the croft the green mantle, with sudden bursts of sap along stems and leaves, is responding to the call of sun and warming air. And through the rising scents push beetles, iridescent, dressed in black, turquoise, bronze, and in shimmering purples, reds and greens. Everything, it seems, like the larks ascending across the fields, is awaiting the sun.

  Cuckoo calls echo across the valley in late spring, cocooned by the sinuous coastal hills here on the edges of the west coast. Their gentle ‘cuck-oo’ and harsher chortles are frequent for a few weeks, numbers bolstered by the great variety and density of potential habitats in fields, riverbanks, coastal machair, hill bogs and scraps of woodland. Little birds are busy, of course; they rise in cloudy clusters of song and chatter, squabbling and feeding, and draw in the larger hunters – raptors in grey, brown, white and gold livery swoop; furred and cunning night stalkers prowl.

  Gradually the woodlands are becoming more shaggy and luxuriant. Leaves are opening with colour-shifting, wind-trapping, sunlight-catching, bird-sheltering and magic-making speed. Willow, with pale shimmering leaves. Birch, whose silver-purple bark is now hidden by cascading sap-green foliage that churns in the breeze. Spruce has new, teddy-bear-fuzzy emerald growth which looks velvety, good enough to cuddle, and not at all prickly. Scots pine, tall and stately, has thick, phthalo-green needles and up-thrusting, bright new growth, each finger pointing to the heavens like da Vinci digits, whose bases are decorated with rings of peachy florets, shooting custard-yellow spores into the atmosphere with every caress of wind or perch of bird. And mighty oak, leaves sprouting later than all the other trees, coppery-tinged and crinkly-still, waiting for full summer to arrive before proudly opening and turning rich green.

  Meadow grasses at last begin to rise sunwards and croft fields slowly become studded by constellations of bright yellow buttercups, eye-bright white daisies and creamy clover. Like the myriad stars in a winter night sky in the north, they herald the approach of summer. They are quickly covered by fluffy-bottomed bumblebees who exude busy, buzzy joy as they work.

  Along the shore the lengthening hours of light bring a new shimmer and shine to the landscape. Days are calmer, the sea glows and across the coastal grassland the delicious scents of growth, earth and life are in the air. Birds are busy, rushing to and fro, piping, whistling, trilling and whooping with parental determination, picking, sorting and gathering: fluff, grass, stem, frayed rope, dried seaweed for nest-building and architectural display. Though oystercatchers, bright-beaked and sharp-eyed, still sing songs of winter wildness and loss, ringed plovers gently whistle tales of sand and foamy seas, both nesting by stealth, hidden among the cobbles and pebbles of ochre-red Torridonian sandstones, green-grey Lewisian gneiss and white quartzites. Overhead the bonxies pass by, silent, hunting.

  Although the land is warming, ocean waters are still very cold and generate sea mist, the haar, on windless days. Then curiously, as edges melt away and the sea becomes shore becomes sky, sands begin to glow in otherworldly orange. Wa
ters rustle quietly in the gently breathing non-wind. Such stillness is intoxicating and infectious, and very curious. All along the shore birds gather, heads tucked, bodies still, predator alongside prey. The quicksilver sea stretches, horizonless, while overhead is white too, just a glimpse of pale blue here and there. This is an edgeland, a transitional, singular space, a place of magic and metamorphosis, a summer-in-waiting. As the tide turns the breeze begins to dance, waves awaken, slurping as though still thick and made of mercury. They begin to rise and then break scattering like star-studded fishermen’s nets. A skylark rises first, calling out across the now-melting mist, the shore sleepers are roused and suddenly rush about as if caught red-handed midcrime. Up they fly, soaring then swooping, calling out loudly until, in a matter of minutes, they are all, mist and bird, gone, and the sun is shining.

  Nights too are shortening and lightening. The exultant dawn chorus is preceded by a voice, flawless and joyous. The song thrush, as summer approaches, extends the waking hours like no other bird; the first to rise, the last to settle, singing of life and growing things, of earth and sky, of light, warmth and joy.

  Across the croft fields and along the riverbank in the calm mornings of late spring tendrils of whiteness remain in the damper hollows. The sun is warmer now, its former brittleness is liquefying. But on one windless day, the white mists of dell and sheltered shore seem to grow, not shrink.

  Midges! Suddenly these sparkling midge-clouds break and then merge again like the murmurations of starlings. Then, diving through them, up and around, lustrous and spellbinding, are swallows. Higher and higher they soar, feasting on the wing in swooping, tumbling dances. Summer has arrived, at last, in the Highlands.

  Annie Worsley, 2016

  Cherry Prunus cerasus, a summer fruit. The early madock Cherry blossoms in March, the other sorts in April and May; the madock is ripe, on a warm wall, by the middle of June; the black heart, white heart, and Kentish Cherry early in July; the morella in August; the small black Cherry in July and August.

  Thomas Furly Forster, The Pocket Encyclopaedia

  of Natural Phenomena, published 1827