The air is cold. The last owls call softly in the ebb of night. The drenched leaves are drab, the blossom limp, the grass grey with dew. A thin film of light is forming upon the surface of the garden. Rooks caw in the lifting sky. One by one the songs of birds shine through. Hedge sparrows, robins, blackbirds, thrushes, wrens, sing with growing vehemence and power. The air moves, and slowly rises, is translated into light. Starlings run over the wet grass, their flesh-coloured feet dark-webbed with moisture. The black swallows are conjured into blue. The immense cloud of sapphire light that is the sun moves up into the eastern sky. A forest of shadows falls suddenly across the shining lawns.
The first cuckoo calls in the hollow air of the owls. Bullfinches glow in the white hawthorn blossom. I cycle through the waking town, leaving the gold and silver garden-voices of the blackbirds and thrushes, rising up into the singing blue of the skylarks. Moorhens call from the roadside ponds, their red and yellow bills parting the reeds, their black and white tails flashing and vanishing. The trailing boughs of the weeping willows are slender, arrowy, like slow green rain arrested. A wren sings, and drifts down like a sharp brown leaf, shivering with the force of his trill. The hoarse calling of young starlings mingles with the answering harshness of the adult birds as they bring food to the gaping beaks. The introspective pines are dark with unsurrendered night.
The shadowed farmyards swoop and rise through an endless undulation of swallows and martins. A pied wagtail dances his dark feet upon the puddled water, seizing the first insects in their low bewildered flight. Maned by the morning mist, a sleeping shire horse stands. Mushrooms have grown beneath him, wandering upward where his feathered hooves have shone. A dead mouse dries in the sun, carried high in the jaws of a roan-wet stoat. A sudden breeze shivers through the flowing barley, and the poplar leaves patter and shine. The running hare has eyes of sunlight. A kestrel rises slowly from the dead branch of an ash. His small shadow circles out above the steaming fields. He gleams and fades, glinting like a golden cross.
The aromatic constellations of cow parsley glimmer like a white mist in the meadows and the grass verges. Goldfinches sing in the cottage gardens, like a tinkle of chilled wine. The wallflowers have a warm and smothering smell, entranced with bees. The village sky is cold with the sharp blades of hurtling swifts. The song of a greenfinch ripens among the apple blossom. The votive churchyard yews are slow to assume the sun.
The day has drifted down from the pure height of the morning, and the first white shower clouds move slowly through the sky. The road lifts, and the air suddenly changes. Long fields and orchards reach out to the horizon. Distant hills fringe the great circle of the earth and sky. The wide-spaced brown and yellow farmhouses rise slowly from the upland plain. Each one is overshadowed by its ivory cloud of horse chestnut trees in blossom. The trees are visible far off. They are a dim white haze that grows larger as I approach, but does not come any nearer. They have an overhanging look, like slow white smoke declining. The darkness between the boughs is bleak and wintry. The dark green leaves droop as though they were already dying, but the white flowers stand erect, pagoda-like, priested by bees. The duck-paddled mud of the farmyards, the feathered ponds, the wing-creaking barns, the mossy roofs, the curtain-fluttering windows big with sky: all are shadowed and borne upward by the slow-burning horse chestnuts aspiring into clouds.
The road shines across the flat land. The farms sink slowly down till only the white smoke of their blossom remains. In the darkness of memory the majestic horse chestnuts will rise again, monumentally still, standing like phantom white stallions above the fallen air of the empty stables.
Tall elms tower over the narrow lanes and at the edges of the wide fields. The air seems to move perpetually in those dark trees, rising into the high branches, floating the black rooks upward. Cock pheasants strut in the green corn, arrogant-coloured, copper-bronze. They stamp the arrows of their footprints down into the damp earth, and their scaly toes lift tiny fragments of soil that fall and glitter in the sun. The corn is as soft to the touch as a breeze moving gently against the fingers.
Where three roads meet, there is a small grove of slender larches and Scots pine. Sometimes a chaffinch sings here, or blue tits call, but there are no nests. Pine cones lie in the lane throughout the year, cryptic and strangely beautiful, like the symbols of an unknown language. They are shattered to fruitless seed by the pressure of passing traffic. Within the grove there is always a smell of sun-warmed resin, whether or not the sun is shining. The spirit of this place is elusive, it escapes into the surrounding air. Yet something breathes upon the edge of vision, like rain beginning. It touches the senses lightly, then departs. At a distance the grove seems to have entity, the self-possession of a single tree. But go in, and at once the wholeness leaps apart, fragmenting into more than individual trees. In spring, the grove smells of summer; in summer it smells of other summers, of the past. It is always beyond the present heat.
Skylarks sing in the shining haze of blue above the cornfields. They spiral up, hovering high and small, clinging to the sky with trembling wings. For five minutes they are bent to the wind, tense and tightly strung. Then they sink down, falling slowly towards the green earth that rises to meet them. A foot above the field they skim and flutter, making the corn fan out beneath. Suddenly they drop down, and are hidden. But soon they are running forward again, unable to be still, rising into the climbing flight of their song, their endless exaltation.
An avenue of limes appears in the upland plain. There is no gate. I turn in from the road, and the way between the spreading trees is damp and narrow, covered with fallen branches, nettles, and dead leaves. At the end, where there should be a house, the sky descends. Only rubble remains. The air smells of nettles and brick-dust. The morning light has gone. The ruins sink deeper under the gloom of the massed clouds.
Slowly the rain begins, the sky dissolving into smudgy grey, green light falling over the dark elms. I shelter in the untouched barn. The bales of hay and straw are stacked high, a nebulous glow, a soft yellow shining that fades up into prickly dusk. The cold smell of the rain drifts in, mingling with the musty, ancient smell of the barn. The lower half of the open door bangs shut in a sudden gust of wind and rain; the upper half becomes a square, framing the brilliant elms, the changing, rainsailed sky. The gleam of the bales rises in the greater darkness, like a breath of candle-flame. At the western end of the barn, constellations of dazzling light pierce through chinks in the dark boards. The flow of light from the doorway washes the wooden beams and posts till they shine like stone. The rain-cloud hangs above, as though it would enter; then it moves eastward, and blue sky appears. The rain drills heavily down upon the roof. A swallow strikes in through the wet air of the doorway, igniting the darkness with a sudden flare of blue. It swoops, and rises to the rafters, feeds its young in their clinging nest, swoops, and flies out into the rain.
Swallows and martins twitch endlessly through the rainlit air between the barn and the shrouded trees at the edge of the field. The harp-shaped elms are inhabited by the wind. They have a life of their own out there, cold and strange and glistening, like huge birds. Here in the barn, all is sleepy. The sparrows’ chirping voices are bright nails in the dry grain of the air. Nothing changes but the shape of my own thoughts.
The chance of the rain has sent me into this barn, a place I would not otherwise have seen and to which there may never be any reason to return. I possess a sudden freedom. I have entered an illumination like the sculptured moonlight of a dream, a cave within the vagary of the streaming day. These things around me, in their unguarded plainness, have now an ethereal beauty, as though they shone in the momentary revelation of the lightning flash.
The floor of the barn is simply the dry earth, uneven, crusted hard, drifted with a film of dust, spilt grain, crushed hay, the distillation of forgotten summers. Sparrows fly down and feed close to my feet, their eyes gleaming as they glance up at me. A distant blackbird sings, a vista of endless orchards opening through the reflection of his voice. Up in the darkness of the roof, the rain murmurs. The elms have lost their light. They look huddled and disconsolate now, their branches parting to reveal the brilliant duck-floating eye of a pond. A wet starlight of cow parsley shines in the green flow of the grass at the roots of the tossing trees. Slowly the sky takes shape in the flooded farmyard, blue and white water clouding over the brown earth.
Wind-wrenched, the half-door staggers open. The sun shines suddenly, spearing the water with a blade of light, printing black shadows. The rain seems to die away upward, shrinking back into the whiter clouds. I go out, and stand in the rain-fretted hollow of the sunlit air. I look back into the barn and see, for the first time, a white owl perched on a high beam. Its closed face has an implacable calm, dream-webbed, the perfect mask. It seems to breathe through a snorkel, being itself submerged, far down below the surface of the day.
The rubble of the fallen house has not been changed by the rain. There is a feeling of enclosure here, as though the dust of the walls still hovered in the drying air. This dust was a Tudor hall, timbered, angular, dark-windowed, facing the avenue of limes and the generations of horsemen riding home. The planted bushes and flowers of the garden are hidden deeper each year by the encroachment of thorn and bramble, by the shining victory of grass. A bullfinch alights on a stem of ash. The dense brick-red colour of his breast is reflected as a faint orange glow in the wet grey-purple of the ash bark.
Hidden by the elms of the pond, there is a small orchard of plum and apple trees, untouched for many years. The wind-fallen fruit is scanty and sour, and is eaten only by the birds. The grass is long, sere, and uncut, sighing with a fretful whiteness of wild chervil. The trees slant and twist upward. Their boles are grey and mossy. The place is quite unpossessed now. It has sloughed off the human presence. It seems to be too late for growth here, too soon for decay. It is beyond the reach of human love. Bullfinches call among the uncertain blossom. A blackbird sings. A surface has formed here; there is a bloom upon the air. A willow warbler flits from tree to tree, its song descending; but it does not stay. Nothing stays. A lurking jay flies through, and close by a cuckoo calls. Swallows touch the outer sky, but do not come any nearer. The light seems to be draped from tree to tree, like cobwebs that have been undisturbed for many years. The fruit may be sour and small, but the orchard itself has ripened. It is like a sphere of sequestered light and air. In time to come it will fall or be destroyed. But to-day it hangs in its own rich mellow ripeness from the suspending sky.
I go back to the road. Woodpigeons fly up from the trees, hundreds of clattering grey birds turning mauve as they rise into the sunlight, their white wing-bars and white-ringed necks gleaming. Then the sun is clouded over, and the woodpigeons turn black. Dark nets of distant rain trawl slowly through the light. The far hills are the colour of grey sea. Golden dandelions glow in the wet grass. I cycle through the gleam of rain and the reflections of white clouds. The green verges shine beneath the burnishing wings of the swallows. The ashen scent of the may mingles with the fragrance of the drying road.
In the corner of a field, penned in by hurdles, a pig sleeps upon straw. Its big floppy ears cover its eyes, like shading hands. It has the unreal appearance of something that has been discarded, like a blotched and bursting bolster. Its nose twitches, its ears question the silence; then slowly life rumbles back. But this does not alter the stranded, sacrificial shape, the look of helplessness.
Above the pig, a turtle dove rests drowsily upon a hurdle. A yellowhammer sings in the hedge, turning his brilliant buttercup-yellow head from side to side. The long ears of a hare are waking in the field. The hare casts about among the furrows, creeping slowly over the big brown clods, dragging its back legs stiffly forward. One large eye, the dark pupil visible in the clear light, watches me unwinkingly. It is raised above the level of the fawn face, bulbous, fearful, and very remote. There is no sign that it can see me. The hare seems to grovel, placating the earth, close to it, clumsy in movement, as though something had been broken, in body as well as in spirit. When I go nearer, it sinks small. Its tall ears bend, and slowly decline. Then it is off, lifting over the furrows lightly, spurting away in little puffs of brown earth, thudding deep into the long grass of the pasture, into what it does not yet know will be a hiding-place.
The still distances of the upland plain are slowly hidden by trees, and I come to rich meadows where cattle graze. The deep chrome-yellow glow of the buttercups is so dazzling that the eye cannot focus on an individual flower. Speedwell rises through the grass, like blue flood-water. A magpie swaggers and sidles among the buttercups, and his shape is faintly reflected in their liquid yellow shining. His white markings glisten in the sun. His head and back and wings are stained with the vivid colours of ink, black, blue-black, or blue. As he moves, they flicker with rainbow gleams of green and violet.
The footpath leads to a wood in the middle of the meadows. It is an intense, concentrated place, where the bright green leaves of ash and sycamore and willow are sombred over by the inner core of shadowy cypresses and firs. The wood is crossed diagonally by a broad green ride that curves from corner to corner. The grass is damp and shiny, and is never cut. The sun does not reach down to it, for the ride is enclosed by lines of tall Douglas and Noble firs. The branches of these great trees have never been lopped. They trail to the ground, they touch and entangle. They have an atmosphere of decay, a charnel breath, as though they were hung with huge bats cloaked in their inverted wings. They are unmoving, unchangeable, possess by a green dusk that is like a moss growing upon the light. Elders have risen beneath, from seeds that have fallen in the droppings of roosting starlings. There are many stinging nettles, shaped like the first above them. The ground is soft and spongy with dead leaves. Under a dark Noble fir there are three large cones. They are heavy, and cold, with a mineral density, as though they had been formed in the strata of the leaves. The bark of the tree is hard and rugose, as enduring and impervious as rhinoceros hide. Here in the shadowed wood I seem to have lost the day. I have stepped into another season, which is neither winter nor spring. It is as though a Victorian summer had been embalmed here for a hundred years.
A single Douglas fir, broken at the top yet growing still, like the shattered mast of a ship become a tree again, reaches far up into the light. Its highest branches shine above the other trees, like a palm above the sea. Thirty feet up, pressed close to the bole of the fir, a long-eared owl is perching. It is a wooden shape, rigid, stretched-out, looking too thin and gaunt to be an owl. It is like a tall, upright cone, a growth of the tree. The tufts of feathers, which look like ears, are erect, vertical, very close together on the top of its head. Its eyes are open, looking down at me. In the fir shadows, they shine with a deep honey-coloured glow, a rich golden-orange. Seeing it has been discovered, the owl turns and – without noise or effort – sinks suddenly down into darkness. There is a displacement of air among the shadows, an adumbration of wings. Bullfinches are calling beyond the dark fortress of the firs, in the lost present. A blackcap’s song has a bubbling, swift-running radiance, like fish-scales flashing. There is a sound of mobbing, of scolding birds pursuing an owl. It is very far off. It seems to come to me through the growth-rings of many years, as though I were standing at the heart of a tree.
It is a relief to emerge into the warmth of the late evening sun, to leave the subterranean light, the oppressive swamp-dusk of the firs. The ride crosses a plantation of small larches. There is a smell of recent rain. The wet green larches shine with the songs of birds. Somewhere a cuckoo calls, a beautiful monotony of sound floating to silence on the marisma of the bluebells. The pure green song of a willow warbler descends from a larch, a bright cascade of notes drifting down through the daffodil richness of a blackbird’s pondering voice. There is a line of tall trees at the end of the ride. A bronze light shines in the brilliant green of the oak leaves. A moorhen calls from the cloudless blue of a pond. The song of a blackcap rises from the marshy undergrowth of the brambles. It is like a small white fountain rising, an ascending curve of hurrying notes that rushes upward to end with a sudden flourish, like the sun flying through water.
As I return to the road, the sky darkens with cloud, and the slow summer rain begins. The sunlit brightness of the wood moves away into a smoke of blue shadow. The dark horse chestnut leaves are harsh with rain, and a cold wind rises, battering the icons of the blossom.
The road leads to a hill, and the plain below is hidden in the grey wake of the rain-clouds. There is nothing beyond. The day is over. The white may smells only of the rain.
I cycle downhill, freewheeling under the low branches of the dripping trees, falling slowly through the caves of green spray and the flowing blue flight of the misty swallows. The breathless smell of the woods surges through the wet air. Green fields stream up and meet above my head.
The fine rain is like a cloud of twigs parting endlessly in front of my face. Strange distorted trees stride past. I plunge deep into the darkness of the valley: wet stars, owls calling, the forlorn bark of a fox. The white parsley flutters at the wheels. There is a prickling of black swifts in the grey river sky. The Lombardy poplars have grown tall with night. I am lost in the shining forest of the rain.