There is an air of fulfilment and rest in the landscape and brooding weather of October. It is like a ghost of summer evening all the time; the faint spears of shadow, the sun’s shield tarnished and hanging low, and under the trees, instead of shade, pools of their fallen colours. The fields, being mostly stubble, have still the straw-gold light of summer, but the ploughs move there, as in the very afterglow of harvest, and the earth is gradually revealed again that has not been seen since spring. Other men are at work cementing and closing in the gains of the year against the weather turning enemy. The thatcher mounts his ladder many times with his burden of straw, roofing the corn built to be its own storehouse: over the hedge, the spade of the man earthing up the root-clamp is visible at moments; with regular rhythm it appears suddenly, slaps a slab of grey clay upon the straw, and vanished for another, till the long hump is a fort against frost, neatly moated, too, where the earth has been cut out. The hedger is there also, defeating the hedge in its summer attempt to usurp a yard of the field all round; it is still warm enough for shirt-sleeves, working, and he is a summer figure yet. The farmer, with his gun and dog, is walking the stubble for partridges before they get too wild, to prove to himself that he has not lost his aim since January last, nor his dog her nose. As to the city man his tennis-racquet as he takes it down on a summer’s evening, his business done, so to the farmer his gun in the evening glow of autumn. He goes out with it, but for survey of his fields as much as to shoot. He never closes both eyes to his job. The eye he doesn’t aim with is seeing that another harrowing is necessary here for wheat.

All the harvest the men have been working as one gang in the fields, but now they are apart at different jobs again, working alone all day, many of them, observing different meal-times; labourers having dinner at one, ploughmen at two-thirty; the cheerful fellowship of the summer is over, and its many voices. No coloured pinafores in the fields either, fluttering like blown petals, for the children have gone back to school. There the youngster of thirteen sits immured, learning to spell, but dreaming of how he drove two horses and a loaded wagon in the hot days, which he considers the only work worthy of a man such as he. His teacher finds him obstinate and dull.

Adrian Bell, Silver Ley, 1931