The morning dawns misty and chill. In the stillness you can hear the sound of leaves falling after the frost: the slow patter of dry horse-chestnut leaves drifting into a pile against the wall of the bonfire yard; the whisper of big soft mulberry leaves, blanketing the ground in front of the Temple. The cockspur thorn, all fizzing sparks of orange and flame and vermilion, has collapsed into a plummy heap, leaving the glowing embers of its red berries suspended in mid-air. Across the garden, the last of the Michaelmas daisies gleam, blue as the smoke of November bonfires. In their native America their country names are ‘frostweed’ and ‘farewell summer’.
It feels like the end of something, but there is also the sense of a beginning, the opening of a new phase in the life of the garden, when the frost gets to work to purge it of disease and decay; when the mixture of compost and manure dug into the empty vegetable beds begins its long process of rotting down and enriching the soil. All year the box clippings and the vegetable haulm, the dead heads of spring bulbs and summer flowers, last autumn’s leaves and this year’s grass, have been layering down into a rich dark crumbly cake from which next year’s plants will emerge nourished and stronger.
In our end is our beginning. Senses grow keener again in the cooling air. There is a return to the transparency of spring. Without the distractions of leaves and flowers, you see the garden as it really is.
This time of year the memories come thick and fast as falling leaves. All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, Remembrance Day and Remembrance Sunday, the first few days of November have always been a time when the boundaries between now and then, between this world and the next, blur like hedges disappearing into mist. Hallowe’en, the eve of All Hallows, gets its name from the Christian festival of All Saints, but its unsettling reputation from the pagan festival of Samhain, celebrated at the beginning of November. Samhain marked the opening of winter, when houses and byres and barns were being occupied again after the long summer absence. Samhain Eve, 31 October, was regarded as particularly dangerous, a time when witches and evil spirits were abroad and had to be placated or outwitted if the coming winter was to be successfully negotiated. The adoption by the early Christian Church of 1 November as All Saints’ Day, and later of 2 November (All Souls’ Day) as a time to say prayers and masses for the dead, seems unconnected with the earlier Celtic festival, though an echo of the propitiatory fires of Samhain may well survive in our enthusiasm for bonfires and fireworks four days later on Guy Fawkes’ Day. In medieval times All Saints’ Day was celebrated with enormous ceremony. In this country the twin festival of All Saints and All Souls is now an altogether more muted affair. Our modern festival of remembering comes slightly later in the month on the 11th: Remembrance Day and the adjacent Sunday (Remembrance Sunday), when we remember those who died in the two world wars and in other conflicts since. The heroes and martyrs of war have now taken the place of the saints and martyrs of old.
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The first words my father learned to read were those of his own name on the war memorial. John Unsworth, 1st/5th Loyal North Lancashire Regiment. Every year on Remembrance Day his mother would take him to see the poppy wreaths being laid on the memorial in Bolton. And every day he would see the same letters on the bronze memorial plaque over the mantlepiece at home, where a mourning Britannia held a wreath of bay leaves above his father’s name. ‘He died for Freedom and Honour.’
Flowers have been rejoicing with us, mourning with us, celebrating with us, for thousands of years. Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century author of Religio medici and The Garden of Cyrus, doctor, botanist and all-round polymath, traced the practice of making wreaths or ‘coronary garlands’ back beyond the Greeks and Romans to the ancient Egyptians, and geographically as far east as ancient India. Wreaths were awarded to victorious generals and conquering athletes, presented to honoured guests and dead heroes, dedicated to the gods or used to lure beneficent spirits. There were wreaths ‘gestatory’, worn about the head and neck; wreaths ‘portatory’, carried at solemn festivals; wreaths ‘pensile or suspensory’, hung at the doorpost in honour of the gods; wreaths ‘depository’, laid upon the graves and monuments of the dead — of which we now regularly maintain only two, the depository wreaths of funerals and Remembrance Day, and the suspensory wreaths of holly which we hang on the door at Christmas. Browne loved the orotund sound and shape of Latinate words. His prose is studded with obscure vocabulary and abstruse allusions, sonorous as an organ blast. His coinages were legion — three new words for the manufacture of wreaths alone: they could be ‘compactile’ (put together), ‘sutile’ (stitched or sewn together) or ‘plectile’ (woven or plaited together); their functions convivial, festival, sacrificial, nuptial, honorary or funebrial; the times of their use vernal, aestival, autumnal or hyemnal (when artificial flowers of brass or horn were used, or — using a technique learned by the Romans from the ancient Egyptians — roses forced into bloom out of season). But whatever the details of construction or the manner of use, the wreath was essentially connective, an intertwining of elements which linked nature and man, man and the gods, binding all together into a common story. And, like a collection of stories, each wreath had meaning, composed of elements both practical and symbolic. Thus convivial garlands included ivy because ivy had encircled the mast of the ship that first brought Dionysos, the god of wine, to Greece; also because, just as the grapevine had sprung from the tip of the mast, its growth controlled by the ivy, so the ivy, it was believed, would prevent drunkenness. Nuptial garlands included myrtle, because sacred to Aphrodite, goddess of love. Funebrial garlands included rosemary, because it was believed to stimulate the brain, thus aiding memory and recollection — a connotation it retained until Shakespeare’s day and beyond. ‘There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance,’ says poor mad Ophelia; ‘pray, love, remember.’
In Bridgnorth a row of scarlet poppy wreaths is propped against the piers of the black-and-white Town Hall, a knot of people standing in front. The clock strikes eleven. Cars and buses come to a halt and switch off their engines. Shoppers along the High Street come out of the shops and stand in silence. People in the side streets, unaware, walk up towards the main street, then fall silent as they reach the corner. A waitress in her black-and-white work clothes, unseen by those on the High Street, walks up Cartway and stands looking on, her tray dangling from her hand; the butchers stand outside their shop in their long striped aprons; the man from the wine shop, wearing a purple shirt, comes out of his shop and crosses the road to stand with the group near the Town Hall, the only moving figure in the tableau. A dog barks in the silence. Then a gust of wind disturbs the fallen leaves, making the British Legion flags flap briefly, and the trumpeter sounds the last post.
The wearing of scarlet poppies and the laying of poppy wreaths on Remembrance Day dates from 1921, though the sheets of poppies which covered the battlefields of France and Flanders had been remarked upon as early as the summer of 1915, the first summer after the war began. An anonymous poem appeared in the pages of Punch for that year which was to be reprinted around the world:
In Flanders fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row …
The old Somerset name for them was ‘soldiers’. At the outbreak of World War I Britain was still largely an agricultural nation, and poppies in all their silky frailty, their scattered petals like drops of blood among the harvested corn, must always have been suggestive of spilt blood and sacrifice, the necessity of death for the continuity of life, the duty to remember. For these are not the poppies of oblivion (Papaver somniferum, the source of opium, morphine and heroin), but Papaver rhoeas, the field poppy, which springs up wherever soil is cultivated or disturbed, each plant producing perhaps a dozen flowers, each flower producing a seed head, each seed head containing thousands of seeds, each seed viable for eighty or a hundred years — waiting for the right conditions to germinate. Like the websites now which enable one to search for the fallen of the two world wars, each site filled with innumerable small facts, each fact inconsiderable in itself, one hardly distinguishable from the next, each biding its time until it is found by the person who seeks it, waiting for the time when it will germinate in the mind, like a poppy seed.
I know that:
It was snowing when he died.
The date was 30 November 1917.
The place: Cambrai.
He was a baker, twenty-one when he marched away to war. He had only just got married. Her name was Alice. I remember her soft white downy cheeks, her breath on my face; an impression of rounded arms and a small, soft, rounded body; a tiny, whistling, breathy little voice like a laugh. They were together for only three weeks. He sent two embroidered cards home from the front, one inscribed in pencil ‘With Best Love to My Darling Wife’, the other ‘Love from Daddy XXXXXXXXXX’. They called the child John, after his father.
Such was the scale of the casualties that the decision was taken not to repatriate the bodies. During the war, the dead were buried by their own or other units, or sometimes by the enemy, close to the front line. Afterwards, the bodies were gathered together by the Imperial War Graves Commission and re-interred in a series of large new purpose-built cemeteries designed by the architect Edwin Lutyens. The decision not to repatriate the dead meant that there was no body for grieving relatives to bury, no grave in the churchyard beside which to mourn. It was as if they had all simply vanished. And with that realisation came the fear that, unnamed, unacknowledged in their own country, the dead might in time be forgotten. In what was an unprecedented outpouring of public sentiment thousands of plaques, pillars, statues, obelisks and memorial crosses were erected by subscription in streets, schools, factories, banks, universities, churchyards and on village greens everywhere, listing the names of the dead like school registers of stone from which everyone was absent — workmates, colleagues, schoolfriends, those big lads at the back of the class longing to be outside and getting on with their lives — gone for good now. And around the monuments, in place of the bodies, people planted flower-beds, memorial gardens, gardens of remembrance.
Back at Morville I watch Michael walking across the Church Meadow to tend the grave of his sister. She died more than fifty years ago, at the age of four. He comes every week, carrying his shears, to clip the grass. Then Helen comes to put fresh flowers on the grave of her father, and Joyce arrives to change the flowers on Ernie’s grave and to tell him all the news — still married after all this time — this act of tenderness, this act of tending the flowers, clipping the grass, a metaphor of remembrance, of keeping the memory green.
Some of the earliest private gardens of the ancient world were funerary gardens. In Ancient Greece, cemeteries were divided into family plots, walled precincts planted with trees and shrubs and flowers, with wells for watering. Often there was a pavilion for dining, too. I like that: dining with the dead. We British tend to be shy of our dead, yet one of the most natural and powerful functions of gardens, both public and private, is to act as the repository of our memories. As early as 1916 the Graves Registration Commission (the precursor of the Imperial War Graves Commission, now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission) sought advice from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, about plants for the new cemeteries. Later Edwin Lutyens’ colleague, the gardener Gertrude Jekyll, was commissioned to design the planting. At Lutyens’ suggestion, each gravestone was to be of white Portland stone, uniform in design, and one of the aims of Jekyll’s planting was to prevent soil being splashed up on to the white gravestones in wet weather. A gentle gesture in such a brutal setting. She chose a mixture of simple English cottage garden plants such as columbines, pansies and white thrift, to give a feeling of ‘home’, taking care that the planting in front of each gravestone should not obscure the inscription. The thrift was a particular favourite of hers. She raised it in her own garden in Surrey for transport to France and Flanders. According to the poet Geoffrey Grigson, the name means ‘that which thrives, is evergreen’. But in the Victorian language of flowers, as Jekyll would have been well aware, thrift also means ‘sympathy’.
Yet many of the dead had no grave at all: the bodies of 34,710 of the estimated 150,000 British casualties at the Battle of Arras were never found; of the 419,654 casualties of the Somme, the bodies of 73,357 were never recovered. Some had simply been blown to bits; others, buried in temporary burial grounds, had been pulverised as the front line swirled back over them. And in the panic and chaos that followed the German counter-attack at Cambrai, men simply lay where they fell and were trampled into the mud.
I look at my hands, the nails still black with soil from the garden. They are my father’s hands, wide and strong, gardener’s hands, piano-player’s hands. They even have a cropped finger, like his — my father’s lopped by mill machinery, mine the result of a car accident. Are they his hands too, I wonder, my grandfather’s? I never found the war memorial in Bolton with his name on it (many smaller memorials, as perhaps his was, have been lost along with the buildings that once contained them), and for a moment my grandfather seems as elusive as ever, as absent from my life as he was from my father’s. But then I think again of his hands, young hands, white with flour, kneading the bread. How soft they must have been. And now my father’s hands in old age, smoking a cigarette, the bent finger trembling a little; and my hands, tending a garden, keeping the memories green.
In 1997 my parents came back to Shropshire, nearly sixty years after they first came here, running away from dead-end jobs in dying towns. In the interim they had wandered from Lancashire to Somerset, Somerset to Lincolnshire, Lincolnshire to Leicester-shire, Leicestershire to Gloucestershire, Gloucestershire to Oxfordshire. Now the village they were living in had lost its shop and its regular bus service, and my father, forbidden to drive after a series of small strokes, was walking four miles each way to do their weekly shopping. He was also doing all the cleaning and washing, my mother having fallen prey once more to depression and entrenched psychosomatic illnesses. Just before Christmas the local hospital telephoned, expressing growing concern. The strokes had affected my father’s memory; they weren’t sure how much longer he could cope. He had, they said, expressed a wish to return to Shropshire. ‘What do you feel about that?’ they said.
We had kept in touch, just about, over the previous thirty years, by Christmas cards and telephone calls and the occasional visit. And we had even, briefly, lived in neighbouring villages, when they moved to Oxford just before I left for Dublin. But this would be uncharted territory for all of us.
The new bungalow was on a corner site, with a large new raw triangular garden bounded by two long brick walls and a stream along one edge. I bought great quantities of rambling roses from my friend Lindsay Bousfield, collecting them late one night and arriving at the bungalow long after dark. I was determined to get the roses planted, by the light of the street lamps if necessary. ‘Go home!’ Pa said. ‘You’re doing too much.’ ‘I have to get them in,’ I said. ‘Go home!’ he said. How we fought! Eventually, exasperated beyond endurance, I said, ‘Do it yourself then’ — and instantly regretted it, knowing he could not. ‘It’s an act of love,’ I said. ‘An act of pride,’ he said. We were both right.
It was the year of the Hale-Bopp comet. Every evening as I put my tools away I could see it in the western sky — the rounded, glowing head with its streaming curve of a tail, swinging in from outer space. It passed closest to the Earth on 22 March, heading for its appointment with the Sun on the first day of April. For eight weeks it was brighter than magnitude 0, brighter for longer than any other comet seen in the past thousand years, at its brightest brighter than any star in the sky except Sirius. Then it plunged back into deep space, receding until it was no more than a pinprick in the night sky. Over those few weeks we planted the white philadelphus that had perfumed the summers of my childhood, the white double lilac we both remembered outside the bedroom window in Somerset, the lavender brought back to him from my garden as cuttings of cuttings of cuttings taken so long ago from his own garden, Housman’s wild cherry tree, and the Michaelmas daisies where the Peacock butterflies had basked in that sandy Lincolnshire garden.
We both know that this is Pa’s last garden. But it is his garden. Almost every time he returned from shopping he would bring a plant or a new rose, subverting my carefully colour-themed borders with brilliant pink and red hybrid teas. Privately, I fumed. But he was right: his brilliant jolts of colour spiced up my too-tasteful arrangements; his yellow climbing hybrid tea flowered on and on, long after my understated ramblers had shot their bolt. And my mother loved them. He bought a garden bench, and she took to sitting outside in the sun while he fiddled about, weeding the beds with his old fire axe or using the flat side of it to whack in a stake. Then one day he inexplicably set the tea table as if for a dozen visitors, with sliced apples, peeled oranges, buttered bread — plates, tea cups — mounds of cake — chairs ranged around the room. Who was he expecting? Whose company did he crave? Was he remembering his grandmother, the aunts of his childhood, Edith and Belle and his favourite aunt Jenny, the old Belmont days? For there was no one else — years of moves and fallings-out had seen to that. In the end only me and the kindness of strangers: the carers and social workers whose patience seemed inexhaustible; the new neighbours who sent Christmas cards with ‘Best wishes from Mabel at No. 6’, and ‘All the best from Jack at No. 7’.
He began to confuse my mother with his mother, me with his adored half-sister Doris; lost track of the date; offered you tea six times in an hour forgetting that he had made a pot ten minutes ago; would throw the carers out of the house or refuse to let them in.
But then I would find him sitting on the edge of my mother’s bed reading to her from Eliot’s Four Quartets, the bit from ‘The Dry Salvages’ that ends ‘Not fare well, But fare forward, voyagers,’ his battered paperback copy of the text spidered over with his annotations from the Bhagavad Gita, from Heraclitus, from the Catholic liturgy, from Plato.
Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow that widens behind you,
You shall not think ‘the past is finished’
Or ‘the future is before us’ …
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.
T. S. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’, 1941
Sometimes the old photographs would temporarily re-establish the link between past and present. The memories would come up to the surface, weedy and dripping, like iron boxes attached to an anchor chain which together we pulled from the depths of his life. How he had been raised in a household of women, in a town of women, where every one of them had lost a son, a brother, a husband, a father. Pa loved women: it was men he had trouble with. How Alice fell pregnant again by a married man who lived in the big detached house opposite the row of cottages where they lived. How the child, a girl, was initially given up to its father’s wife, to be raised as their own, but after a time Alice had reclaimed the child and fled into the backstreets of Bolton. How they lived in one upstairs room with a sheet slung under the ceiling to catch the cockroaches that fell on your face as you slept. How the children had one pair of boots between them, otherwise went barefoot. How she scrubbed the floors of public houses to make a living. When a Christmas present was a penny orange, a breakfast treat the top of an adult’s boiled egg. Her married lover pursued them. When Pa was old enough he threw him out of the house, tumbling downstairs in a flail of arms and legs.
Sometimes the boxes would open. At other times they stayed obstinately shut, the locks rusted into immobility, the keys lost. I would prompt him with memories of my own, memories of his memories, memories of his retellings of the old stories told to us as children long ago when we would still listen, and now told back to him in old age, our two memories entwined like a ship’s cable. I hardly know now what is his memory and what mine. Did he as a small child see the body of the young girl who drowned herself in the big pool, her white nightdress wet against the black stones like the wings of a drowned swan? Or was it a dead swan he saw which reminded him of the story of the young girl? Or did I, listening, see the drowned girl at the water’s edge, beautiful and white in the dark water like a dead swan? Except that the fragments of Pa’s memories which exist in my memory are just that: fragments. Unlike my own memories, which are blurred around the edges and in which I can, if I try, deepen the focus or shift the viewpoint so that other things come into view around the central image, my memories of his memories are small and bright and hard-edged, like pieces of china dug up in the garden. Try as I might, I cannot see any further round them. That’s all that there is.
One morning I found neat squares of paper all over the house with his name and address written on them, as if he were afraid of losing himself between one room and the next. ‘Oh, he’s full of disappearing today,’ said my mother. For years he had played the part of the eccentric professor, feigning deafness, deliberately mishearing what you said in order to repeat it back to you with great comic effect. Now, as language slid away from him, he played the part in earnest, his linguistic constructions sometimes hilarious, often beautiful, a surreal kind of poetry. Struggling for words as we watched the lunar eclipse together in September 1997, he coined his own description of the shadow of the Earth moving across the disc of the Moon: ‘the moon-bite — the moon-beams — oh you know! The dustbin in the moonbight’.
Are we less human without our memories? Less ourselves? Or more so, like people on a beach, divested of their clothes?
Comet Hale-Bopp last came our way about 4,200 years ago, travelling on a vastly elongated orbit from the frigid realms of deep space to within a few million miles of the Sun. Long-period comets like this are thought to have their origin in the Oort Cloud, a grouping of small objects ejected from the inner solar system and enclosing it like a shell more than a thousand times further out than Pluto. Halley’s Comet seems almost neighbourly by comparison: its source is the Kuiper Belt, just beyond Neptune. It reappears every seventy-five years or so. Short-period comets like Halley’s are thought to be among the most ancient objects in the solar system, formed at the edge of the proto-planetary disc when it first began to cool. The head of a comet is composed of ice (frozen water, frozen carbon dioxide and other frozen organic substances such as methane), with specks of carbon dust, rock and metal together making up a ‘dirty snowball’ which starts to melt as it approaches the sun. As it melts, traces of dust are left behind, specks no larger than grains of sand; ordinarily invisible in the blackness of space, they flare up and vaporise when the Earth’s orbit next encounters them. We know them as shooting stars. The comet itself may not return for hundreds or even thousands of years, but the shooting stars remain, like a memory, visible traces of our brief encounter with this being from another world.
Cascades of shooting stars (or meteors, to give them their proper name) recur on the same dates each year. Halley’s Comet is the souce of the Eta Aquarids of May and the Orionid meteors of October. Comet Swift-Tuttle is the source of the spectacular Perseid meteor shower each August. The source of the Geminid meteors of December is Phaethon, a ‘dead’ comet named after Phoebus Apollo’s headstrong son who tried to drive the chariot of the sun and was sent plunging to earth by Jove’s well-aimed thunderbolt.
Mankind has been recording the passage of comets for hundreds, even thousands, of years. The Chinese may have recorded the passage of Halley’s Comet as early as 2467 BC. By 240 BC it was being regularly recorded by Chinese, Japanese, Babylonian and Persian astronomers. In 1066 its appearance in the skies over England was recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; it was woven into the Bayeux Tapestry as a dramatic foreshadowing of the death of King Harold. Halley himself observed the comet in 1682. Applying his friend Isaac Newton’s new planetary theory of closed gravitationally bound orbits, Halley postulated a single comet with an elliptical orbit and a period of seventy-six years which would account for recorded cometary sightings in 1607, 1531 and 1456. If he was right, the same comet would reappear in the winter of 1758–9. Halley himself did not live to see it, but the comet reappeared on Christmas Night 1758, just as he predicted.
Accurate prediction of anything — whether the return of a comet or the date of Easter — depends upon accurate records being kept of the past. But while the sun, moon and stars provide a ready means of calculating the forward passage of time in terms of lunar months or solar years, the means of calculating backwards year on year is less obvious. Some agreed starting point has to be found. The Romans reckoned the past in years ab urbe condita — from the founding of the city of Rome. The ancient Greeks dated past events by genealogies — in the third year of the reign of such-and-such a king, or in the year when so-and-so was high priest; later by Olympiads, held every four years. Christians date years from the birth of Christ, Muslims from the Year of the Prophet’s Migration. Parliament and lawyers still work by regnal years.
I reckon dates from the year I began the garden. Like a comet swinging in from outer space, in the ninth year after I began the garden, in the forty-sixth year of the reign of Elizabeth II, in the year that Tony Blair came to power, six months before the death of Princess Diana, in the year that Comet Hale-Bopp amazed the world, my father came back into my life.
When Arthur Blayney died in 1795 he left Morville to Henry, 8th and last Viscount Tracy — the widowed husband of Arthur Blayney’s and Arthur Weaver’s other cousin, Susannah Weaver — and through him to Susannah’s daughter Henrietta. Henrietta succeeded her father in 1797, and the following year married her cousin Charles Hanbury, who took the additional surname of Tracy in recognition of his wife’s superior fortune. Although Morville held out the promise of a springboard into Liberal politics for both Charles and his younger son Henry, it is unlikely that the Hanbury Tracys spent much time in residence here — Bridgnorth politics had in any case always been dominated by the Tory faction, led by six generations of the Whitmores of Apley (there is a local saying which dates from this time, ‘All on one side, like a Bridgnorth election’) — and Henrietta’s fortune was soon being laid out in the creation of a vast new neo-Gothic mansion at the Tracy seat of Toddington Hall in Gloucestershire.
In 1814 they sold Morville to their neighbour Sir Ferdinand Richard Acton of Aldenham, and for the next sixty years the house was let piecemeal to family and employees of the Actons: to Henry Acton in the 1820s; to the Actons’ land agents in the 1840s and 1850s; to the Rev. Nicholas Darnell, who ran it ‘as a place for the education of the sons of Catholic gentry’ in the 1860s.
Then in 1873 the tenancy was taken by Joseph Loxdale Warren, lawyer by profession and District Registrar of his native Market Drayton; in retirement, a Justice of the Peace and member of the Board of Guardians; a very Victorian patriarch. His wife Mary Ann had borne him seven sons and seven daughters. The boys went out into the world. Joseph became a barrister, Albert went into the Church, George Gordon into the army. Charles was ‘shot through the heart, whilst advancing to the relief of his countrymen beseiged in the Residency of Lucknow on September 25th 1857’. The seven girls remained at home. They never married. When their parents died, they stayed on at Morville, growing old together. They outlived the nineteenth century and the Empress-Queen herself, the first motor cars and the horrors of World War I, Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon and Eliot’s ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, the Jazz Age and ‘The Waste Land’, dying one by one: first Josephine Martha, then Wilhelmina Christian, Lucy Ann and Mary Lisette, Henrietta Matilda and Georgiana Mary, until finally only Juliana was left.
It must have been in 1925 or early 1926 that Lady L came to visit the last two Misses Warren, Juliana and Georgiana. (Georgiana, known in the family as Mary, died the following spring.) Perhaps they came for Georgiana’s birthday, in early September. Lady L and her grandmother drove over from Dudmaston in the pony and trap. Juliana would have been eighty-two, Georgiana eighty-one. Lady L remembered them as Edwardian ladies, with upswept hair and long skirts. I imagine them ranged outside the front door as if posed for a photograph, the faces a little bleached out by the sun, one of the sisters with her hand raised to shield her eyes, Lady L’s grandmother sitting in the trap holding the reins, Lady L, a leggy girl in a white frock, standing to one side. They frown in concentration, with gaze oblique, averted from the glare. The edges of everything are a little blurred by the light, and I imagine spiders’ webs everywhere, those webs you only get in autumn, gold filaments strung from tree to tree, from tree to grass, falling through the air like willow down in spring.
They are all here in the churchyard, seven stone crosses with an eighth for Fitz, the youngest son, and an obelisk to commemorate the other boys, presided over, in death as in life, by the monumental presence of Joseph Loxdale Warren, several sizes larger than all the others.
The Victorians were the first post-modern gardeners. They pillaged the past for styles: for Elizabethan knots, Italianate urns, Gothic ruins, Moorish arches. Their gardens were gaudy, gorgeous and hideously expensive to maintain; cutting-edge and nostalgic, sentimental and technologically advanced, all at the same time. They relied on vast quantities of half-hardy plants culled from all over the Empire, raised indoors, bedded out and then thrown away at the end of the season; on tons of coal and acres of glass; on platoons of gardeners to stoke the furnaces and hand-pollinate the peaches; on squadrons of nurserymen producing flowers that were ever bigger and ever brighter.
All this was anathema to William Robinson, a contemporary of Gertrude Jekyll. Like her he was an early advocate for the use of hardy plants in gardens. But unlike Jekyll with her usually placid demeanour, Robinson was famously hot-tempered. At the age of twenty-one, already in charge of the greenhouses in his first employer’s garden at Ballykilcannon in his native Ireland, he is said, after a quarrel with his superiors, to have quenched the greenhouse fires and thrown open the windows to a freezing January night. Robinson believed in plants that could take care of themselves, especially bulbs, herbaceous plants, shrubs and trees, all of which had been neglected in the Victorian craze for bedding. In 1870 he published an extraordinary book — revolutionary even today — called The Wild Garden. At first more a manifesto than a manual, it underwent a series of revisions and new editions as he continued to experiment with natural groupings of hardy plants, intended to be left to naturalise in semi-wild settings. While the early editions stressed the use of native British flowers, later ones included more and more hardy exotics such as peonies, lilies and North American plants like Michaelmas daisies, golden rods and compass plants (Silphiums), which he had seen in the wild on a visit to America in the year of the book’s first publication. He also shared with Gertrude Jekyll a new enthusiasm for wild roses, shunning the over-large over-brilliant products of the breeder’s art in favour of the native roses of Europe and the new species roses which were beginning to arrive in England from Asia.
For Joseph Loxdale Warren I decided to make a formal Rose Border, stuffed to the brim with nineteenth-century bourbons, portlands, moss roses and hybrid perpetuals, searching out roses that could be trained up wires and along ropes, on tripods and posts, pegged down, bedded out, grafted as standards and clipped into pyramids. In Victorian gardens, plants as well as gardeners were expected to know their place.
In contrast, William Robinson’s Wild Garden was the sort of garden Miss Juliana might have liked, a place where rambling roses were allowed to trail out of trees, or were left to heap themselves up like briars or sucker into thickets, where ‘pruning, or any other sort of attention after planting, should not of course be thought of.’ I think of her left alone, the garden gently sinking into decay around her: the brilliantly coloured carpet beds grassed over to save the work of the garden boy, the unpruned espaliers growing monstrous and humorously hump-backed, the pony who pulled the lawnmower put out to grass, his leather boots hung up for good. So for her I planted wild roses from all over the world, and beneath them masses of scented white Narcissus poeticus from Greece; drifts of blue Camassia lechtlinii from the woods of North America; clumps of sky-blue Iris sibirica, tall Campanula lactiflora and gawky primrose-yellow Cephalaria gigantea from the Caucasus and Siberia; inulas galore. I let the grass grow long and watched as it was colonised by native blue cranesbills, speedwell and yellow rattle. I mowed curving paths through it, overhung with lady’s lace and wild roses. And I thought of her long skirts brushing the dew in April, her shoulders dappled with rose petals in June, her sleeve yellow with hazel pollen in spring. Perhaps she might even have kept bees.
In November now the rose-hips are spangled with frost, gleaming wet on the sides facing the sun. R. moyesii, like scarlet flagons; R. villosa, like deep-red cherry tomatoes; R. roxburghii, spiny as conkers.
A change in the weather: wind from the north-west, engulfing the house like a tidal wave, crashing down the chimneys and putting out the fires, sinking us fathoms deep. The house recoils from the impact, doors and window frames rattle, curtains sway in the draught. I have never known the house so cold. I put the shutters up early.
Next morning I go up the garden to survey the damage. I fear for the old pear tree. Buffeted by centuries of gales, it already leans away from the wind, its crown shattered. I find silver birch twigs littering the Plat, a wire snapped in the tunnel, one of the pots of box blown over and the pot shattered. But the pear tree is still standing. It’s a misconception that trees fall in the direction in which they lean. Things are strongest where tested most.
Manual labour had a pivotal role in St Benedict’s monasteries. The day was divided into study, work and prayer, the times and proportions varying according to the season. Between Easter and 1 October the monks spent their mornings after Prime until the fourth hour at whatever work needed to be done; from the fourth hour until Sext they devoted themselves to reading; from Sext until None they were allowed to rest on their beds in silence; then between None and Vespers they were to return to their work. From 1 October to the beginning of Lent the monks read until Terce, after which they worked at their assigned tasks; then after None they were to return to their reading. ‘When they live by the labour of their hands,’ said Benedict, ‘as our fathers and the apostles did, then they are really monks.’
That’s what I like best about gardening: not the thinking about it or the designing of it, the talking about it or the admiring of it, but doing it. Doing everything and anything in the garden, from the hardest task to the most menial or the most boring, doing the work as a daily routine, not just when you want or what you want, not just in spring and summer when the weather is good, not just when it’s pleasant, but now, in the cold and the wet.
Did you think it would be easy?
You are not surprised at the force of the storm —
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:
he whom they flee is the one
you move toward …
Summer was like your house: you knew
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.
The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.
Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have …
Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Dich wundert nicht des
Sturmes Wucht’, from The Book of Pilgrimage,
Part II of The Book of Hours, 1903, translated
by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
Now you see it: the garden and the tasks stripped bare, the hard labour. This is what it is all about: soil and manure, spade and pruning knife.
*
The hours of daylight are short now. I dress in thermal vest, dungarees, flannel shirt, sweater, two pairs of socks, boots, knee pads, gloves, hat, body-warmer, wax jacket. People say there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes. But it all depends on what you’re doing. As the old assistant gardener at Dudmaston said, dressed in the same tweed jacket he always wore, ‘No wonder you be cold, you got too many layers on. You want to keep moving instead.’
In the Books of Hours the activities for November and December are Slaughtering Beasts, Roasting Meat, and Baking Pies. The villagers slaughtered their beasts in autumn because there was not enough green stuff to feed the animals through the winter. With the introduction of turnips in the mid-seventeenth century as a late-summer field crop sown on the stubble, many more beasts could be overwintered; but in the medieval period, once winter set in, the beasts’ diet would grow steadily more meagre, and their flesh make poor eating. Killed in autumn, they would be plump from grazing the ‘aftermath’ (the new growth made in late summer by grass cut for haymaking), and for a short while there would be fresh meat for everyone. I think of Reg, our local butcher, my husband’s best friend. A huge, laughing man with a chest like a barrel and a temperament to match, Reg came into our lives almost the first night we arrived at Morville. Presiding over the pool table in the pub across the road, he challenged Ken, the incomer, to a game of pool. On this occasion it was Ken who won, but honour demanded a return match, a match that has gone on being played in pubs and bars on both sides of the Channel now for twenty years. Slaughtering an ox, roasting a pig, baking pies — this would have been daily fare for a medieval Reg, who feeds half of Shropshire with his pies. Pork pies are his staple, but he makes black puddings, faggots, brawn and chawl; spiced beef and pickled tongue; game pies in fluted oval moulds, made from venison, pheasant, rabbit, hare, pigeon, wild boar; gleaming strings of sausages made to half a dozen different recipes; dry-salted home-cured hams and flitches; and a raised pie of potatoes and cream and tarragon that would make a grown man weep.
It is Advent Sunday. Four weeks to Christmas. Staff and patients from Park Attwood Clinic near Kidderminster arrive to walk the Turf Maze. The patients have a variety of life-threatening, life-impairing illnesses. They bring candles, and at dusk each walks the maze, alone or with a carer, carrying a lighted candle. By the time darkness falls, the centre of the maze is a blaze of light.
People have been coming to visit the garden almost from the beginning: the people who come back year after year just to see how it is all progressing; the children from the village school who come each year and run round the maze in a shrieking, laughing file (‘Where’s the tramp, miss?’ they tease, remembering the night two neighbours stole up the garden and turned the water-filtration unit into the figure of a tramp with an old hat and boots); the local people who pop in to catch the tulips or the roses or the hellebores; the people who were children here, and remember scrumping apples from the orchard or camping out in the Brownie House before the garden was even begun; the groups of blind people and the groups from the inner cities having a day out; the families on holiday; the WI ladies on their summer outings; the retired people studying local history or archaeology or the history of gardens; the visitors from the Netherlands, Switzerland, America, Japan; the old people rediscovering the scents of their childhood; the young people finding a secret corner for a kiss and a cuddle; the horticultural societies, the garden clubs, the flower-arranging ladies. It has always felt like a communal effort, a shared project.
There is a moment in the service of Compline, the last of the Hours, when each of those present silently examines his or her conscience. Gardening has its own share of vices as well as virtues, and Advent is a good time to take stock, not only of garden (all those scribbled notes of things to remember for next year) but of gardener too. Advent, like Lent, used to be kept with fasting and abstinence, a time of reflection in preparation for the coming birth at Christmas. The vicar wears purple in recognition of the sombre mood. And so I ask myself, Why after all did I do it?
Pride, defined as the inordinate sense of one’s own superiority, was traditionally placed first of the Seven Deadly Sins, because it was regarded as being the sin of Satan and the fallen angels, and thus historically as the first sin of all. Pride is the gardener’s sin par excellence. Who has not felt a surge of pride when they say for the first time, ‘Oh, we are in the Yellow Book’ or ‘We are opening for the church this year’ — better still to be able to boast, ‘We had 357 visitors and the grass was squashed quite flat!’ Pa was right. I wanted to make a beautiful garden for him because I loved him, but also because I could.
Covetousness too is the gardener’s sin, the inordinate longing for a material possession — for the blackest of black hellebores, the rarest of snowdrops, the latest plant introduction — and Envy, that uncomfortable feeling of displeasure and ill will towards someone whose garden is grander/larger/more beautiful/more expensively maintained than ours. Neither Covetousness nor Envy is any respecter of age or gender. Lust, on the other hand, is principally the female gardener’s sin, for there are many more of us than them. How we lust after strapping young gardeners who come with their own tools and smile on us kindly when we bring them a cup of tea.
Then there’s Gluttony — oh yes! — this one’s mine too: I’m the sort of gardener who plants half a dozen varieties of leeks, the same of potatoes, unfeasible quantities of soft fruit, a dozen different sorts of peas and beans, when a modest one or two would do. And Anger, I hold up my hand to this one as well: poor Ivor! coming up the garden with tinsel in his hair on the last day of work before Christmas, to find me in a fury because a frost was coming and the pots of tender lavenders were still out in the garden in their summer places.
That first hard frost always catches me out. Sloth, the last of the Seven Deadly Sins, is my special sin. I’m a laissez-faire sort of gardener, preferring to let the garden take its own course. In July and August I am capable of abandoning it altogether, and in September and October I drift around as if summer would never end. Under its old name of accidie (from the Greek, meaning ‘negligence’), it was characterised in the writings of the mystics as spiritual torpor or depression, later as a state of restless inability either to work or to pray. Sloth is more than mere procrastination. The concept of time being sanctified by use is fundamental to the Hours: to waste it is to waste our most precious asset, time upon this earth. This does not mean we should everlastingly be working in our gardens. Simply sitting and enjoying the garden is not doing nothing: it is the attentiveness of which the Hours speak. To watch time passing, noting the changes month by month, day by day, hour by hour — to live, as Thoreau said, deliberately — is a sort of sanctification in itself. It is Indifference which is the real sin.
One year I had still not planted the hyacinths and tulips and narcissus in the Canal Garden by mid-December. I had delayed and delayed while I planned the planting scheme on paper, then spent days laying the bulbs out on the grass — two thousand of them in an intricately composed pattern of mingled colours and heights and times of flowering, six rows to each plate-bande, no two flowers of the same colour or type next to each other, each row stepped in height, the two tallest rows in the middle, the two shortest on the outside, exactly as directed in the eighteenth-century gardening books (except that, in 1710, there would have been a dozen gardeners to do it) — then broken off planting in order to go to a lunchtime pre-Christmas drinks party at the Hall. I emerged mid-afternoon to a weather forecast of −6°C for that night. Pride (too grandiose a scheme), Greed (too many bulbs), Sloth — they are all here. Hyacinths frosted at the root fail to thrive. And these were rare hyacinths, wonderful hyacinths, old intricate recurved doubles and tall slender singles, brought all the way from Alan Shipp’s National Collection at Waterbeach near Cambridge, where I had chosen them the previous March, walking the field and annotating Alan’s stock list with size and form, colour of stem and scape, shape of petal and tube. And now they were going to freeze solid. The trenches were already dug, six inches deep and six inches wide, one either side of each plate-bande. It was half past three and the light was already failing. With three torches (one in the trench, one on the grass, one in my hand) I set to work, shuffling along on my hands and knees. I could feel the temperature dropping as I worked. At −1° the grass started to crunch under the heel of my hand; by −3° the bulbs were glued in place by the frost, the grass growing crisp and white by the light of the torch; by −5° the cold was pinching the sides of my nostrils as I breathed. I was still working at nine o’clock. But I did it. I finished. And then, as I leaned back on my heels to stretch my aching back, a shooting star sprang across the sky from Gemini all the way to Orion, a single flashing arc. If I hadn’t been there, at that moment, hadn’t lifted my eyes at that precise instant, I would never have seen it.
The next morning the tide of frost has lapped right up to the house. By midday it has melted in the sun, and the garden is green again. But white frost-shadows linger behind the hedges of the Plat, and on the steep north-facing side of the hill the ridge and furrow shows whitely all day — a reminder of the glacier that once ground its way down this valley. I look back, back up the valley, to where the ice came from. We know that the ice has been here before and that it will come again, sooner or later. It is buried in our collective unconscious, expressed in myth and folk memory — not only those frost fairs on the Thames, those Christmas-card images of mail coaches axle-deep in snow, but imaginary lands where it is always winter and never Christmas, the lands of the Wicked Witch of the North and the Ice Queen, the last home of Frankenstein’s monster and the stronghold of the warrior-bears of Svalbard.
The cold has returned more than once already: during the Little Ice Age (reckoned to have lasted from about 1500 to the 1920s), glaciers in the Alps and Scandinavia engulfed pastures, fields and even farmhouses. Hundreds of thousands of people from Norway and Sweden were displaced: between 1860 and 1890 alone a quarter of the Swedish population emigrated to the USA. Conditions further south were characterised by bitterly cold winters, cold wet summers and crop failure; broadleaf trees began to die. And yet the Little Ice Age was just a blip in longer, deeper, colder oscillations. We are in an interglacial period at the moment. Notwithstanding global warming, the ice will return, and sooner rather than later if the North Atlantic conveyor switches off.
I watch the frost-flowers grow, silently unfolding their icy fronds across the windowpanes of the hall, blooming unseen behind the shutters in the sitting-room. The water of the Canal freezes hard. Pa is in hospital. Every night on my return from visiting him I walk up the garden to break the ice to stop it cracking the stonework. The first night I can do it with my heel. A couple of nights later I need the sharp edge of a spade. Eventually only a sledgehammer will do, hefted right up over my head. When I finish, my good tweed coat is stiff with frozen water splashed up from the Canal, icicles hanging in my eyes from my frozen hair.
Each morning I fetch a new box of apples from the fruit store for the birds. They devour them greedily, feeding on the soft pulp, hollowing it out and leaving the skin with the central core attached, like so many lost hearts scattered about the lawn.
Pa died in the little Community Hospital at Ludlow. There is a special ward there, devoted to the care of people with degenerative brain conditions. Outside the windows of the ward, Sister Joyce has made a whimsical little seaside garden, looking down to the tower of Ludlow parish church, where Housman’s heart is buried. There are three candy-striped chalets, and wooden cutout seagulls, and a treasure chest spilling out glass jewels and old coins and handfuls of seashells on to the wet soil of this land-locked county. It’s a good metaphor for memory, of those almost-forgotten seaside holidays, those old photographs we all hoard, the journey many of the old people on the ward had already embarked upon, sailing away from the moorings of their lives. Two weeks before Pa died, he wrote one last letter, meticulously dating it and giving the hospital as the return address. Sister Joyce gave it to me after his death, unsure as to whom it was addressed. The letter is written in red ink on two small pages torn from a notepad. It describes a journey across a dark landscape which seems to have echoes of the moors he knew as a boy. It begins, ‘Dearest Mum …
… the country is strange + difficult in a large way. Doris has been with me most of the time which has been very pleasant. We had quite a little difficulty getting through one gate or another but managed quite well … Just at the moment the day is very closely clouded over — lots of clouds. We are hoping to go further soon. The day is getting darker + darker than ever. We hope you are better and better and we hope the day will get better. Sorry to the dangerous sustained to everybody. All love and believe our love to you all. God bless you both. DAD
Looking out at the garden on the last day before he drifted into a haze of morphine, he suddenly said, ‘It’s going to be a lovely day tomorrow.’ ‘Oh, have you been listening to the weather forecast, Pa?’ I said, amused. ‘No, that’s my prediction,’ he said.
*
In an interview given to the New York Times in 1998 Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, formulated the now famous proposition that we are all composed of the dust of long-dead stars. When the Milky Way was formed, about ten billion years ago, it contained only the simplest of atoms, hydrogen and helium. Then the first stars formed, and the building blocks of life — carbon, oxygen and the rest of the periodic table — were created from hydrogen and helium through the nuclear fusion that kept the stars shining. In time these stars ran out of fuel, exploded into supernovae, and threw all the atoms back into space. New stars gradually condensed out of the debris. One of them was our sun with our group of planets orbiting it. All the atoms there are — you, me, the garden, Pa — were once inside a star, and will be again.
After he died I found a tape of Sonata No. 2 in G minor by Georg Muffat (1653–1704), still in place in his cassette player. He had recorded it from the radio, but had forgotten to switch off the machine at the end of the concert. The tape ran on after the music had finished and the radio had been switched off. I listened to the silence on the end of the tape — thinking of him sitting there silently, reading or lost in thought — hoping to catch the sound of his breathing, the creak of his chair. But there was nothing.
It has been a long day. I get up and open the door to have one last sniff of the garden before going to bed. The clock strikes the three-quarters as I stand looking into the dark garden and I think of the Warrens, all tucked up in their single beds in their pin-tucked nightdresses listening to the same two notes: the clock, installed by them in memory of their parents in 1890; chiming the bells that rang for Pat and Arthur’s wedding, the same bells that tolled for poor Arthur Weaver; in the tower that the monks of Morville built, the same tower that was surrendered by Robert, the last Prior of Morville, in 1540. Everything coheres. The house reverberates slightly as I push the heavy door to in the curved door frame, the sound echoing into its furthest reaches. My footsteps sound on the boards as I cross the hall and sit down again by the fire, which is still flickering in the dark. I’ll just sit until the fire is finished. It’s too good to leave. Gradually the small sounds of the fire die down. There’s the soft collapse of a log, then darkness all around. I sit and listen to the silence.
That’s the other thing I really like about gardening: the silence. Not that silence out of doors is ever really silence. But absence of words, space for the thoughts to come. A silence that allows you to listen.
The maze at the centre of the garden is a unicursal maze. Puzzle mazes — the sort of maze with a choice of paths and in which one can therefore get lost — are a Renaissance concept. The unicursal maze in contrast has a single path that leads inevitably to the centre, and because the outcome is never in doubt, there is no need to conceal it by high hedges. Throughout history and prehistory the pattern has always been the same. Found in prehistoric India, classical Rome, the Egypt of Cleopatra, pre-Columbian America, medieval Scandinavia, the Celtic lands of western Europe, at many times and in many lands around the globe, seemingly spontaneously arising in cultures with no cultural connection with one another, carved on stone walls, laid out on the ground in rocks and boulders, inlaid in marble pavements, woven into basket-work, cast on coins, cut out of turf. In medieval Europe it came to be associated with the Christian’s path to salvation.
The unicursal maze unites the most ancient of land-shaping impulses and the most modern, leapfrogging the centuries from the Bronze Age to the Space Age. It completes the cycle from life to death, from denial to acceptance, from ignorance to knowledge. Seven rings, seven circles, the path twisting and turning, repeatedly doubling back on itself. Sometimes it feels as if you are going in the wrong direction, but always in fact tending in the right direction. Bringing me here, to Morville; through Pa’s gardens, to the making of a garden here and now; to a place where at last I could become rooted, gaining a purpose that my life never had before, gaining a sense of self that I never had by paradoxically first surrendering it, hand and eye, brain and heart, body and soul, merged with the heat and smell and sounds of the garden.
She did not cry for him. Perhaps after a lifetime of tears there were none left to shed. At his funeral she read Coleridge’s translation of Mignon’s song from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, turning slightly towards the coffin, reading from his copy of Coleridge’s Collected Works:
Know’st thou the land where the pale citrons grow,
The golden fruits in darker foliage glow?
Soft blows the wind that breathes from that blue sky!
Still stands the myrtle and the laurel high!
Know’st thou it well, that land, beloved Friend?
Thither with thee, O, thither would I wend!
She survived him by two years.
When she died, we scattered their ashes together into the wind over Wenlock Edge. Not farewell, but fare forward, voyager. Skyrockets and stardust, Pa; onwards and upwards.
It is St Lucy’s Day now, 13 December, and the days are imperceptibly beginning to draw out again. The children from the school are rehearsing their Nativity play in the church. Though the solstice is not until the 21st, from now on the sun will set a minute or two later each day. There is no net gain in daylight hours for another week, as the sun will go on rising later until 30 December. But it feels like a turning point, a first small turning towards the light.
It is no coincidence that St Lucy’s feast day is placed at the darkest time of the year. Before the reform of the calendar it coincided with the solstice:
‘Tis the yeares midnight, and it is the dayes,
Lucies, who scarce seaven houres herself unmaskes …
John Donne, ‘A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day’
Her name means ‘light’, from the Latin verb lucere, ‘to shine’, which also gives us the word ‘lucid’ (clear, understandable), and ‘pellucid’, that which allows light to pass through it. In Scandinavian countries her day is still kept with candlelit processions led by the eldest daughter of each household, wearing a wreath of lighted candles upon her head. In her last days, my mother used to say, ‘I am grateful, dear, for all you do for me.’ And I am grateful too, Mum. For being alive. It’s been wonderful. Thank you.
*
Just before Christmas that year I went to listen to Handel’s Messiah in Hereford Cathedral and, driving back over the Clee Hill in the dark, long after midnight, the car window wound down to prevent me falling asleep at the wheel, I became aware that the ice had melted, that a softness was flooding the land. And when I got back to Morville, and switched off the engine and stepped out of the car, there was a bird singing in the silence, pouring its heart out into the darkness of the garden. I stood and listened, breathing in the warm dark. I didn’t know what a nightingale sounded like, but the bird’s song was so piercingly sweet that I felt sure that it must be a nightingale. A nightingale in December! Even when I looked it up next morning and discovered that it could not have been a nightingale, that in winter nightingales migrate to warmer climates than ours; even when I read that a number of other birds do sing at night in winter, including robins, wrens and even song thrushes, for me it will always be a nightingale. Nightingales in December.
The word ‘Compline’ comes from the Old French complie (from the Latin completa, said with a long ‘e’) in the sense of ‘it is accomplished, complete’. It is the last of the Day Offices, said before retiring for the night. The mood of Compline is of facing the dark, of acknowledging the fear of the unknown, but now with love and confidence. In the form used by tertiaries, Compline includes the serene Nunc dimittis, the Canticle of Simeon: ‘Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.’ Our lease runs out in August 2008. We’ll go and make a garden by the sea, we said. But Ken went sooner than that. My husband didn’t garden. He cooked instead. But he saw the point of the garden. He understood — and continues to understand — why I can’t bear to come in until long after dark, why I spend all my money and then borrow more, why I am always exhausted, always late for everything, never want to go on holiday. Once we did go away, to Paris in winter. We climbed up to the Sacré Coeur. I wanted to light a candle, and we walked round the dim interior of the church, looking at the plaster saints, each with their votive offerings. Then my husband saw one with very few candles in front of it. ‘That one,’ he said. It was St Joseph, patron saint of understanding husbands.
‘Go and make a new garden somewhere else,’ said Mirabel. ‘Don’t cling to the past.’ But will I be able to go quietly, to leave it all behind? The white roses and the autumn-tinted trees, the winter nights and the summer dawns? Moonrise and starshine, pear blossom in spring? All the hopes and the joys and the memories?
What happens if I stay? Will there come a time when I can no longer ‘cope’ with the garden — with its labour intensive plates-bandes and hundreds of pots of tulips, its thickets of roses to prune and miles of edges to cut? The word implies a dichotomy between me and the garden which I do not feel. There’s more than one way to make a garden. As I grow older, the wild roses press against the outside of the yew hedges; the long grass whispers to me. A garden is a process, not a product. It’s not a still life; it changes all the time. Perhaps I will gradually retreat from the garden, as I imagine Miss Juliana doing, giving it more and more say in the decisions about what goes where, playing a game of grandmother’s footsteps with it as I peer over my shoulder to see what it’s up to now. I made a garden out of a field, gradually expanding into it over the space of twenty years. Perhaps when the time comes I will hand it back to the field, a bit at a time, welcoming the wildness in, returning it to nature. That’s the beauty of a garden made of compartments. I’ll start with the Cloister Garden, letting the little patches of embroidered turf and beds of herbs morph into the wildflower meadow they always wanted to be. I’ll let the New Flower Garden become a wood, where self-sown wildings rub shoulders with their imported transatlantic cousins. I’ll mow paths through the garden, so I can see what’s happening, but they’ll be narrower paths, without edges, like the paths made by the badgers and the voles, tunnels merging into the surrounding greenery. I’ll cut the hedges once a year to save my neighbours’ blushes, and I’ll prune the cordon apples in summer, but I’ll give up pruning the roses. I’ll let them grow into beautiful tangles like the wood in Sleeping Beauty, their thorns protecting the garden from outsiders and prying eyes until at last someone new comes along, like Sleeping Beauty’s Prince, to wake them once more from their long sleep.
Or not. No garden is for ever.
Last year the window in the big bedroom was taken apart for repairs. It had only ever opened an inch or two at the top, and last summer the room was stiflingly hot. When we dismantled the frame, the lower sash was found to have been nailed shut. We pulled out the nails and threw up the sash, letting in the breeze and the fresh air. The window stood open all that long hot summer, while the sash was being repaired. By the time the window was reassembled the nights were already growing cooler, and a mist of cold condensation would appear on the inside of the panes in the morning. But the presence that had looked out through the nailed window, who had stood there, warming the windowpane with the soft pulse of their breath, was gone, evaporated into the morning air, vanished out into the garden at last.
It’s going to be a green Christmas. The garden is all green and gold, lush grass and low winter sun, full of the wingbeats of birds. A young thrush bathes in the Round Pond, fluttering its wings and dashing the water into the air with its beak. Down in Bridgnorth, the blackbirds feast on the rowan trees of the supermarket car park, eyeing the crowds of shoppers who at half past eight are already making their way to the Christmas Eve market. The stalls in the High Street are piled high with gargantuan leeks and carrots, potatoes as big as yams, knobbly green walking-sticks of Brussels sprouts. The shops overflow with whole cheeses, enormous turkeys dangling by their legs, vast pink-and-white smoked hams suspended from the ceiling. There are mounds of holly and mistletoe, gleaming jars of pickled red cabbage, home-made Christmas pudding and slabs of moist dark Christmas cake. I have lost a family but gained another. Here’s Pat and Ian and Arthur, already returning from the market as I make my way up. And Reg, doing a roaring trade on his stall, selling pork pies with apple, pork pies with cherry tomatoes and spring onions on top, reaching over the tops of people’s heads with carrier bags and change. There’s a fellow beekeeper in the queue outside the baker’s. John’s wife Brenda waves in passing, her arms full of shopping. One of the flower-arranging ladies from the church pauses to exclaim about the weather: ‘The daffodils are up already!’
In the Books of Hours the book itself is often portrayed, open on its owner’s prie-dieu, or perhaps held by the Virgin, surprised by Gabriel at the Annunciation. But of all the figures portrayed in the landscape of the Books of Hours — from sheep-shearer and cow-man to vintner and serving woman, butcher and farm labourer to woodman and swineherd — there is one figure missing: the hand that writes or illuminates the text — the copyist, the patient chronicler, writing it all down, passing it on, down the centuries. The literal meaning of the ‘transmission of texts’ is a handing over, a handing on, like stories, like my mother’s Book of Hours, like the plants in a garden, passed hand to hand, planted in new soil where they will grow and thrive, like Miss Jekyll’s thrift. When I worked in the Old Library at Trinity College, with its barrel vault and tiers of books twenty-six shelves high, I once had a vision of the library as thousands upon thousands of people, ranged on the shelves, feet outwards, like one of those Continental cemeteries where the coffins are slotted horizontally into walls; and everyone was talking, thousands of different voices, male and female, old and young, telling their own stories. As I have tried to tell the stories of the people here, of the land and how it came to be as it is; of the garden and how it came to be made; of me, and how I came to Morville, and why I am as I am.
When I get back from town Les and Nick have already brought the tree, all sixteen feet of it, a rustling fragrant giant, its freshly cut stem still sticky and oozing with resin. I manoeuvre it into position in the hall, then go out to fetch greenery from the garden: long graceful trails of big-leaved Irish ivy to make the Christmas garland for the mantlepiece, and shorter, stiffer trails of ordinary Hedera helix from the garden wall; armfuls of tree ivy with their black angular poppy-seed heads, and branches of holly, covered with brilliant scarlet berries; pungent fans of blue-green juniper, snippings of silver variegated holly from the standards in the plates-bandes, fronds of yew trimmed from the big trees by the garden gate. Gradually the house fills with wet green resinous scents. And last of all, as dusk falls, a great globe of mistletoe, cut gleaming gold from the wet black branches of one of the old apple trees in the Orchard, ceremoniously brought indoors and hung up in the hall.
A last-minute dash then to deliver Christmas cards — to Ivor across the road, and Wilf down at The Lye; to Bridget at Acton Round, John and Brenda at Aston Eyre, to Dan down in Bridgnorth — with a drink or a chat or a mince pie with everyone, and then back home to decorate the tree, winding trails of ivy round the trunk, and wedging branches of juniper and red-berried holly to fill in the broad gappy branches at the bottom; sprays of tree ivy to fill the gaps between the smaller branches further up; little white candles at each tip. Then the ivy garland, bound round and round with golden chain and studded with sprigs of holly and black ivy berries, lifted into position above the fireplace. And finally the holly wreath, completed on the stroke of midnight, and hung up on the door to welcome Christmas in.
I light the candles in the windows: two fat golden candles made of the beeswax from the hive, one for each window, to burn every night from now until Epiphany. Then I put my coat on and walk up into the garden. Across the Church Meadow light is streaming from the church out on to the gravestones. The Evangelists are counting heads. Soon they will be balancing their books for the year: the Bell Fund and the Building Fund, the receipts from the May Fair and the Harvest Supper, totting up the births, marriages and deaths; who lived, who died, who came, who went, who got married, who ran away with the milkman; writing their final reports. I wonder what they will have made of me, those parish-pump chroniclers of Morville? What have they made of my macaronic cobbling together of Latin and English, elegy and farce, science and fancy? This jumble of fragments tossed together like the made-up ground of the garden, this blackbird’s nest of cobwebs and sheep’s wool, this day in a life, this life in a day? Reading their version, will it be found that I have romanticised, like the makers of the Books of Hours, with their romantic pastoral version of a fading feudal world, a world that even then scarcely existed any more? Would they even agree among themselves?
The constellations wheel overhead. Here is Orion, the Hunter, striding across the sky with Sirius the Dog Star at his heels, in nightly pursuit of the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades. Here is Ursa Major — the nymph Callisto, beloved of Jupiter, transformed into a bear through Juno’s jealous rage and caught up into the heavens by Jupiter to save her from the hunter’s spear. Over there Cepheus and seated Cassiopeia, side by side, unlucky parents, condemned nightly to reiterate those boastful words that brought down upon them Poseidon’s anger; and their daughter Andromeda stretched upon the rock, forever menaced by Cetus the Sea-monster, nightly rescued by forever-young Perseus, striding the sky with the Gorgon’s head swinging from his belt. And there on the western horizon, where the hill touches the sky, is Pegasus the winged horse, born from the blood that spurted from the Gorgon’s severed head, unfurling his huge wings across the great steppe of the winter sky; as he leaps upwards his hoof strikes a rock, and out gushes a spring, the spring of the Muses, the perpetual wellspring of story.
Listen.
In the tower the voices of the bell-ringers call to one another once more. The ring has been restored and there’s a new team now: Anthony and Harriet, Sharon and Sophie, Ian and Alison.
‘Look to.’
‘Treble’s going.’
‘She’s gone.’
The bells peal out across the dark land, over the village and the Hall, over the stream and the meadow, pealing down the years.
Grandsire Doubles for Miss Juliana, Cambridge Surprise for Arthur Blayney, Kent Treble Bob Minor for the Arthur Weavers and their wives — pealing down the years, ringing out the old, ringing in the new — Reverse St Bartholomew for George Smith, Stedman Doubles for Frances Cressett, Plain Hunting for Prior Richard.
Disturbed by the clangour of the bells, a barn owl flies low over the village. It’s so dark now that only he can see the grassy platform of the abandoned road behind the church, the copperplate of the eighteenth-century gravestones, the gaping mouth of the lych gate; the bell pits at Aldenham, the old stone quarries on the hillside, the line of the old mill race; Miss Bythell’s road, the line of the eighteenth-century turnpike, the faint swell of the Roman road. On white moth-wings he swoops low over the garden, banking over the swirl of the maze, the pale squares of the knots, the arches of the cloister. His reflection is caught briefly in the Canal, among the branches of the old pear tree, which towers up into the night sky and down into the dark water beneath, like the axle-tree of the universe, joining past and present, present and future.
‘That’s all …’
‘Stand.’
They are ringing down now, faster and faster, round and round, the reverberations from the bells setting up reverberations in the stonework of the tower, until the whole bell chamber is singing with stone and metal. Then one last chime from each of the six bells: Treble, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Tenor — ‘Peace & Good Neighbourhood’, ‘Prosperity to this Parish’ — the harmonics dying away in the tower, the multicoloured sallies looped up again on the pegs on the wall.
After the clatter of departing boots on the tower stairs the silence surges back. In the darkened church the goose-feather quills scratch on, writing someone else’s story now.