Summer Read online

  6 June 1911

  Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion,

  The Journal of a Disappointed Man, 1919

  It is raw here, even on an early June day. The wind races across the Narrows, the grey stretch of water between the island and Orford Ness. Beyond that, the North Sea brings white waves crashing on to the spit. But the sun is shining and I am cosy in my cabin although the wind beats around it seeking an entrance and sending the small wind turbine into overdrive. I can see an area of shingle from the window, gorse bushes, tufts of seakale, common gulls crouching low and one or two hares. They cower against the wind, wild amber-eyed creatures, huddles of brown moth-eaten muscle and sinew.

  Havergate Island is Suffolk’s only island. It is sheltered from the North Sea within the arm of Orford Ness that extends along the coast for about five miles. The island was walled off 500 years ago to keep the sea out and farmed until the 1930s. After the last inhabitants left it slowly reverted to salt marsh, lagoons and mudflats. It is now a bird reserve owned by the RSPB and accepts two volunteers a week over the summer to carry out species counts and maintenance tasks. I am staying as one such volunteer and have my own cabin.

  I head out early to start the day’s tasks as the tide seeps in among the sea purslane and pink thrift, flooding the salt marsh and the shingle path to Dovey’s hide. The island breathes to its own rhythm. I wear boots against the wet. A few curlews trip along the island’s eastern shore, unfazed by the wind.

  Shingle protests underfoot. There are gulls everywhere wheeling on the gusts like toy kites in a frenetic dance. I am wary, keeping an eye out for the lesser black-backed gulls that circle, then shape to dive; it is not uncommon to get a firm kick in the back of the head, especially in the colony where the noise is a constant ‘Yarh yarh yarh!’ I tread carefully, keeping an eye on the ground as well as on the birds overhead. I negotiate shaggy nests of spotted eggs, some with downy, speckled chicks, taking care not to trample on anything living. The hares look on, forlorn, shifting about the edges like exiles, laying low in shingle dips and hollows or trying to hide in swathes of pink thrift and sea campion among the fragment bones of gorse, reels of steel wire, rusting iron cans.

  At this time of year hares are still breeding, giving birth in hollow depressions in the ground. They have been here for who knows how long, waiting, suspended, as though the winds have cast them here. They tolerate the island and the island tolerates them. These hares have forever in their eyes. Eking out a meagre existence they shift about in search of shelter, vagrants in an uncertain world.

  Today we paint the inside of the main hide. Trousers rolled up, splattered with grey, I inch across the floor, paintbrush in hand. Periodically I emerge to enjoy moments in the sunshine, noticing blue damselflies and red admiral butterflies flitting here and there, taking shelter where they can.

  Evening, and the moon over Orford Ness is round and full, a warm, butter moon. Below, in its light, I can make out the dark shapes of fishermen casting into the rippling Narrows. The hares will be out feeding on grasses and herbs now. At night I sleep and dream reed-lined, silt-laden dreams, drifting channels in my skiff, hugging the shallows, calm and sheltered from a ravaging sea beyond. I wake and the winds are playing havoc with the wind turbine again.

  The next day I count birds on the salt lagoons, shelduck, redshank, dunlin, sandwich tern. A group of spoonbills sift out small fish and crustaceans in the margins. It is a long session with little action on the bare, drawn-out mudflats that extend to the horizon. The pools shimmer in the June sunshine, but the wind chases across them rippling the water, puckering the edges and whistling through the seams of the hide. Mud and channels and a few bead-like shapes of birds. Soon my attention is drawn closer to the hide where, just outside in the grassy tussocks crouches a solitary hare sheltering from the wind, its right side lit up in sunlight. Haunches down, nose cross-stitched, it closes its eyes to the sun in a moment of blissful slumber. Close up it looks softer, smoky-furred and more relaxed. I watch it for a while as it sits motionless. Then it twitches, opens its eyes and sits up. It extends a foreleg exposing its whiter belly fur and patiently cleans, rolling its tongue slowly and methodically down the leg, paw buckled at an angle like a cat’s. It has all the time in the world.

  Later I learn that the hares suffer most in the winter, especially when storm surges from the North Sea breach the sea walls of Orford Ness and inundate parts of the island. Then the hare population can plummet. But it soon bounces back – the wardens are confident of that. In time, though, the sea will reclaim the island and there will be permanent losses. Birds can fly elsewhere when the sea comes, but the hares will be gone.

  Alexi Francis, 2016

  Of all bird songs and sounds known to me there is none that I would prefer to the spring notes of the curlew. I have seen the bird finish its notes on the ground after alighting, but I have not observed if it ever gives them without any flight. As a rule the wonderful notes are uttered on the wing, and are the accompaniment of a graceful flight that has motions of evident pleasure. The notes do not sound passionate: they suggest peace, rest, healing, joy, an assurance of happiness past, present and to come. To listen to the curlews on a bright, clear April day, with the fullness of spring still in anticipation, is one of the best experiences that a lover of birds can have. On a still day one can almost feel the air vibrating with the blessed sound. There is no rarity about it where curlews breed: it is to be heard through long days in April, May and far into June. In autumn and winter curlews resort to estuaries and the seashore, and the call note is melancholy: but even at this season on a mild day one may be surprised to hear a single bird give a few of the joy notes, just enough to revive memory of the past spring and to stir anticipation of the next one.

  A yet more common and widely distributed pleasure is the spring flight and note of the peewit. It is a real joy flight accompanied by cries of joy: the seeing and hearing of it for the first time in the early months of the year are something longed for and welcomed, as is the first song of a blackbird. Some one in the wholesale trade in birds for food, explaining that pewits were of no use after an early date in the year, said, ‘The birds are of no use after they have begun to lap.’ I suppose, therefore, that the name lapwing is suggested by the joy flight in spring. At other times, the peewit gives an impression of plaintiveness.

  The peewit or lapwing is a beautiful bird, much praised by farmers for consuming pests on their fields, but it has the misfortune to lay eggs that are an unrivalled delicacy, and these are taken in vast numbers for the English market, not only in this country, but in the breeding-grounds abroad. For many years I have not seen at Fallodon the vast flocks of pewits that used to visit us in autumn and winter, and which were probably composed largely of foreign birds.

  The golden plover, when served on a dish, is so like the peewit in body that it can be distinguished only by the absence of the hind claw. When alive it is very different in appearance and flight. It ‘yodels’ very pleasantly in the spring. The call note heard frequently in autumn and winter is a single very plaintive whistle.

  Redshanks in the breeding season have notes that may also be compared to yodelling; they utter these in a very conspicuous joy flight. Every bird seems to have something that is song, or corresponds to song, in the nesting season. Such is the ‘screeling’ of swifts as they fly about a village in the late evening; the conversational warbling of swallows as they sit on some perch or convenient place in the sun; wagtails have their little songs, and something of the sort is to be observed with all our common birds. One sound that was common in my boyhood has sadly diminished. The voice of the corncrake is now seldom heard in many places where it used to be common. No one can assert with truth that the sound is melodious; it is in fact very harsh; but it used to enliven many an early summer night in the field adjoining the garden at Fallodon, and I regret that it is heard there no more. Occasionally there is still a corncrake to be heard farther off, but both here and about the Hampsh
ire cottage the bird has in my recollection become rare as a breeding species.

  Two other common, but very peculiar, joy sounds shall be mentioned in detail. One is the ‘churring’ of the nightjar: a most soothing sound, continued for long periods without a break. No one unacquainted with it and hearing it for the first time would guess that the noise was made by a bird at all. It is of that class of stationary, soothing, continuous sounds, such as the hum a threshing machine, or the noise of waves on the shore heard at a distance, which dispose us to sit still and listen indefinitely.

  I have not seen much of nightjars, but I had one curious experience, though not a joy flight or sound. It was evening, early in September; I had been sitting for some time at the foot of an ash tree that stood solitary in the middle of broad water-meadows. I noticed a bird fly from the branches above me, take something on or near the grass, and return to the tree. This action it repeated several times, and it took little flights about the tree. It was a nightjar, and I enjoyed the opportunity of watching it; for the bird was flying all about me and yet was unconscious of my presence. The bird was silent till at length in one of its flights it passed quite close to and saw me. So near was it that I could see it see me. It give a piercing shriek, such as I had never heard before from any bird, and flew straight away out of the meadow. For a moment when it discovered me its head had turned in my direction, and the shriek seemed to be uttered at me. It suggested not so much fear as rage and loathing: as if the bird was suddenly aware that, unknown to it, a human eye had been watching it, when it believed there was security and privacy. The wife of Candaules, when she knew that the eye of a man not her husband has covertly seen her disrobing, can hardly have felt more horror and indignation than was expressed by that nightjar’s shriek.

  Sir Edward Grey, The Charm of Birds, 1927

  It is a cool early summer’s evening on a grassy hillside beneath a wood, and in the leaf litter beneath a bramble patch a small beetle larva stirs and sets off in search of what will be her last meal. Looking rather like an elongated woodlouse, her segmented charcoal-grey back is marked with pale yellow spots down either side and as she walks she repeatedly curls the tip of her tail under her body, pressing it against the ground to propel herself forwards. Even in the bright moonlight her tiny eyes are all but useless, leaving her largely oblivious to anything going on more than an inch or two away. Indeed her universe barely extends beyond the tips of her stubby but sensitive feelers, constantly twitching as she swings her head from side to side, touching and tasting her way through the leaves. Yet these are all the senses she needs to follow the trail of her prey and after several patient hours of hunting she finds her target: a large snail grazing lazily on a fallen leaf, its yellow shell banded with brown like a humbug. Undaunted by its towering bulk, many times larger than herself, the larva carries out the kill with surgical precision, gingerly stretching out her neck and using her hollow, scimitar-shaped jaws to deliver a series of delicate and carefully placed nips to the edge of the snail’s foot, each time retracting her head to dodge any retaliation. Each bite injects a minute dose of a powerful toxin that simultaneously paralyses and tenderizes her victim. For a creature whose staple diet consists of slime-coated slugs and snails she is scrupulously clean and, reluctant to sully her feet by touching the snail’s skin, she clambers on to the shell, clings to the rim and waits for the poison to take effect. The snail tries to flee, the larva riding on its back, but to no avail and when it finally succumbs the feasting can begin. Two hours later, when the larva finally abandons the empty shell, her skin is taut and bulging at the seams. She will not need to eat again.

  Now she must seek out a safe refuge, a crevice in the soil or an abandoned worm burrow, where she can rest undisturbed as she prepares to enter the next stage of her life. Having chosen a suitable retreat she lies curled and motionless for two whole days before wriggling out of her old skin to reveal the pupa within. At first the surface is pink and yellow, like some sort of confectionery, but soon it darkens to a dull olive-brown. Another week passes in apparent inactivity, but beneath the surface her body is being completely but invisibly dismantled and rebuilt. Then one evening she will quietly shed her skin for the last time and emerge in her final, adult form.

  When the last sunset colours have disappeared from the sky and the grassy slope beyond the brambles has faded from greens to shades of grey, the beetle makes her way to the surface and begins to climb slowly up a grass stem. As she does so a truly remarkable thing happens. From the tip of her tail a brilliant lime-green light shines out across the colourless hillside. She is a glow-worm! With neither wings to fly nor jaws to feed, her life has now become a race against time. She must use her light to attract a mate and then lay her eggs before the energy reserves that she had saved up during her two years as a snail-eating larva are exhausted and she starves to death.

  Silently she continues her display: a cold, steady, almost unnatural light. Sadly her eyesight has hardly improved with age, and in any case she keeps her head hidden within a fleshy hood, so she will never know quite how beautiful she really is. If she is not successful this evening she will have to return to her underground shelter and repeat her performance the next night, and the next. But tonight she is lucky; within an hour she has a visitor.

  With his large wings, protected by dark, leathery wing cases, he hardly seems to belong to the same species. Unlike her he has a pair of enormous many-faceted eyes, like two ripe blackberries, that almost engulf his head and allow him to spot the female’s beacon from the air as he patrols the bank, so that he can drop down and land beside her. But like her he is unable to feed and time is too short for niceties, so formal introductions and courtship are virtually nonexistent. No sooner have they met and recognized each other by their respective scents than mating begins, the male’s only nod to intimacy being the occasional gentle caress of the female’s back with his antennae. Before long the pair are joined by another male, and another, all jostling and shoving, intent on prising each other from the female’s back. Meanwhile she, apparently unimpressed, sets off back to her shelter, carrying her passengers with her. After two years spent pursuing snails and just one night of freedom, she will never again shine her light nor leave her den. By dawn she will already be depositing the first of her eggs, each glowing faintly in the darkness of the burrow, and within days of laying the last one she will die, empty and exhausted, never to see them hatch into the next generation of snail-hunters. This same performance has been played out over thousands of summers in countless meadows, woodland glades and hedgerows across Britain. The glow-worm’s intense green light must surely rank as one of nature’s most charming and magical sights, so bright that it is hard to believe that it could be made by any living creature, much less a humble, otherwise drab and unexceptional beetle. I still have vivid memories of my first childhood encounter with that light and even now, nearly half a century later, the moment of discovery of the first glow-worm of each summer is every bit as special, a small but treasured milestone in the passing of the year.

  John Tyler, 2016

  There is a slight but perceptible colour in the atmosphere of summer. It is not visible close at hand, nor always where the light falls strongest, and if looked at too long it sometimes fades away. But over gorse and heath, in the warm hollows of wheatfields, and round about the rising ground there is something more than air alone. It is not mist, nor the hazy vapour of autumn, nor the blue tints that come over distant hills and woods.

  As there is a bloom upon the peach and grape, so this is the bloom of summer. The air is ripe and rich, full of the emanations, the perfume, from corn and flower and leafy tree. In strictness the term will not, of course, be accurate, yet by what other word can this appearance in the atmosphere be described but as a bloom? Upon a still and sunlit summer afternoon it may be seen over the osier-covered islets in the Thames immediately above Teddington Lock.

  It hovers over the level cornfields that stretch towards Richmond, and
along the ridge of the wooded hills that bound them. The bank by the towing-path is steep and shadowless, being bare of trees or hedge; but the grass is pleasant to rest on, and heat is always more supportable near flowing water. In places the friable earth has crumbled away, and there, where the soil and the stones are exposed, the stone-crop flourishes. A narrow footpath on the summit, raised high above the water, skirts the corn, and is overhung with grass heavily laden by its own seed.

  Sometimes in early June the bright trifolium, drooping with its weight of flower, brushes against the passer-by – acre after acre of purple. Occasionally the odour of beans in blossom floats out over the river. Again, above the green wheat the larks rise, singing as they soar; or later on the butterflies wander over the yellow ears. Or, as the law of rotation dictates, the barley whitens under the sun. Still, whether in the dry day, or under the dewy moonlight, the plain stretching from the water to the hills is never without perfume, colour, or song.

  There stood, one summer not long since, in the corner of a barley field close to the Lock, within a stone’s throw, perfect shrubs of mallow, rising to the shoulder, thick as a walking stick, and hung with flower. Poppies filled every interstice between the barley stalks, their scarlet petals turned back in very languor of exuberant colour, as the awns, drooping over, caressed them. Poppies, again, in the same fields formed a scarlet ground from which the golden wheat sprang up, and among it here and there, shone the large blue rays of wild succory.

  The paths across the corn having no hedges, the wayfarer really walks among the wheat, and can pluck with either hand. The ears rise above the heads of children, who shout with joy as they rush along as though to the arms of their mother.

  Beneath the towing-path, at the roots of the willow bushes, which the tow-ropes, so often drawn over them, have kept low, the water-docks lift their thick stems and giant leaves. Bunches of rough-leaved comfrey grow down to the water’s edge – indeed, the coarse stems sometimes bear sings of having been partially under water when a freshet followed a storm. The flowers are not so perfectly bell-shaped as those of some plants, but are rather tubular. They appear in April, though then green, and may be found all the summer months. Where the comfrey grows thickly the white bells give some colour to the green of the bank, and would give more were they not so often overshadowed by the leaves.