Sensible Places: Essays on Place, Time, & Countryside

Sensible Places:

essays on place, time, & countryside

GMW Wemyss

includes the essays

‘The River’ and ‘The Village’

Bapton Books

Sensible Places: essays on place, time, & countryside

GMW Wemyss

Copyright © 2012 by Bapton Literary Trust No 1 (for GMW Wemyss)

All rights reserved

Published by Bapton Books at Smashwords

Book design by Bapton Books

A minor quantity of certain material has also appeared in similar form in the Bapton Books collections, The Transatlantic Disputations: Essays and Meditations, and The Bapton Books Sampler: a literary chrestomathy

Smashwords Edition, Licensing Notes

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About the author

GMW Wemyss lives and writes, wisely pseudonymously, in Wilts. Having, by invoking the protective colouration of tweeds, cricket (he was a dry bob at school), and country matters, somehow evaded immersion in Mercury whilst up at University, he survived to become the author of The Confidence of the House: May 1940; co-author of The Transatlantic Disputations: Essays & Observation; The Bapton Books Sampler: a literary chrestomathy; and When That Great Ship Went Down: the legal and political repercussions of the loss of RMS Titanic; and co-editor and co-annotator of The Complete Mowgli Stories, Duly Annotated, and The Annotated Wind in the Willows, for Adults and Sensible Children (or, possibly, Children and Sensible Adults).

Contents

About the author

The yearly round

The River

Harvest’s end, Advent, Christmas, Wintertide

The Village (1): Settlement patterns in the UK countryside

Lent, Eastertide, Whitsun, Springtide

The Village (2): A guide for the perplexed

Summertide: the Sundays After the First Test at Lord’s

Autumn and the Harvest Festival

Notes

The yearly round

When does the year begin? Well: that rather depends: on who you are, and where. The Church kalendar – like the academic, which is hewn of the ecclesiastical – begins after the harvest-tide, with Advent, a time of preparation, light kindling and shining forth even as darkness gathers. The countryman’s calendar is governed by the rhythms of the earth, of sowing and of harvest. The angler’s year, the shooting man’s, the hunter’s, all these are in the disposition of God – or Nature, if you fancy yourself allergic to God – even as is the countryman’s. Cities and market towns have their own cycles; villages, another, very much different to theirs. And of course the seasons vary from place to place, even within the UK, even within Great Britain, even within England, even within one county, from valley to downs, from arable to pasture, from woods to fields.... How much more, then, do they differ from nation to nation and realm to realm, across continents and hemispheres; and all of us, nowadays, live in all these seasons as it were at once.

Ours is, it is said, a nearer world nowadays, less vast now than even to our fathers, knit together by news from all over in what is called, mysteriously, ‘real time’; yet it is as vast and spacious as ever it was, to those who have eyes to see it. And real time has ever and always moved to a sprung rhythm: we live at once each of us in his own personal time, and all of us at once in the natural and the man-made year, to clocks and schedules we set and schedules and clocks we do not.

We move, all of us, in sprung rhythm: for our world – whether we conceive it as broad or as cosy – is, not to out-Manley Fr Hopkins, as ringèd and streakèd and specklèd as the cattle of Laban.

I live, to my great good fortune and considerable satisfaction, rurally, in a region variously claimed as South and as West and as South-Western and as West Country, where long my people have lived and died, and which we have in our own small way shaped as the land and the seasons have shaped and moulded us in turn. I am fifty years in age, this Summertide – by a curious coincidence, some six hours the elder of my partner in this imprint, and less than a fortnight the senior of one of our forthcoming authors (apparently it was a vintage year in American and Italian letters, although I cannot of course becomingly comment on British authors born that year...) – and I expect to sleep in my turn in the same churchyard where repose my ancestors.

This suits me well. As shall be seen all too plainly, quite soon enough, I have had the great world, and you ... may have it: it is of little worth enough.

As I observed just before the New Year, in December of 2008:

I begin with an anecdote that will be familiar to everyone who has been an expat for any amount of time. Not at all that long ago, in one of my sadly common and prolonged periods of exile residence in Places That Aren’t the UK, I was in a large ‘supermarket’ (nothing all that super about it, actually) in a provincial city. The local inhabitants spoke a dialect of English – or, rather, as I have long maintained, a dialect of Scots. The supermarket, and the city, was sufficiently large and sophisticated to have a section devoted to ‘ethnic’ and ‘foreign’ foods, and, of course, when one is abroad, apparently ‘British’ is ‘ethnic and foreign’. I was swearing to myself at the evident depredations to the ‘British foods aisle’ (located between the ‘European’, ‘Oriental’, and ‘African’ sections. I was at least able to comfort myself with the reflection that our overseas kith and kindred yet recognise that we are not Bloody Europeans). Shortly before, I had walked past a tiny woman with an untidy nest of grey hair, who was evidently from somewhere in Central America. In my peripheral vision, as I muttered, I saw a tiny, elderly lady with an untidy nest of grey hair, who then startled me by asking, ‘Are you trying to find the British foods, dear?’

I at once realised this was not the same woman. I did not at first consciously remark that her speech was not that of the local population, let alone of Latin America. I stood (the biscuits were on a very low shelf), smiled, and said, apologetically, ‘I’m sorry, I was fussing, rather, wasn’t I. It’s only … well. Some bloody sod’s nicked all the chocolate digestives. Nothing left but the Rich Teas.’

Her face lit up, and her accent – like mine – suddenly deepened. ‘Oh! You’re British, also! Have they really pinched all the chocolate digestives?’

For the next ten minutes, the old dear (from rural Cheshire, not a million miles from Nantwich) and I nattered away, on topics ranging from the manifest shortcomings of Gordon Brown to the common experiences of expats to Test cricket to the (wait for it) shocking shortage of chocolate digestives. Her husband, also from Cheshire, had been an executive director of a major oil company, and they’d lived in Singapore, HK, California, Texas, and Nigeria, as well as having endured several tours in the Gulf; retirement, even abroad, was clearly sweet to her. And we both noted, with rueful smiles – as others, shopping, paused as they went by, evidently wondering if we’d been hired by the British Council to stand next the tinned Spotted Dick and the HP sauce, and Act English (foreigners, as any Scot or Welshman can and will tell you, at length, if asked, and quite commonly when not asked, do not distinguish between Britain and England) – that the accents that we’d subconsciously dampened whilst around and amidst the natives were back now in full force, and perhaps a trifle over.¹

(Oh – and I don’t care what the quangocrats and local councils say, my pudding was not renamed ‘Spotted Richard’, damn it all.)

I’ve had the great world, and you may have it if you like. For the writer, particularly, the universal inheres in the local. To be at once servant and master to and of one’s own ground is the secular beginning of wisdom. It wants time, as slow and as deep-rooted as itself, to see and comprehend an oak; and the time even of the butterfly is of equal duration beneath the eye of heaven.

In East Sussex, let us say, an old farm sleeps in sun-dapple, its oast-house with its cowls echoing the distant steeple of SS Andrew and Mary, Fletching, where de Montfort had prayed and Gibbon now sleeps out a sceptic’s eternity. The Sussex Weald is quiet now, its bows and bowmen that did affright the air at Agincourt long dust. A Chalk Hill Blue spreads peaceable wings upon the hedge. Easter is long sped, yet yellow and lavender yet ornament the land, in betony and dyer’s greenweed and mallows. An inquisitive whitethroat, rejoicing in man’s long opening of the Wealden country, trills jauntily from atop a wall.

Or awa’ upon Islay, in January, the wind was honed to a cutting edge across the queer flatness of Loch Gorm and the strand and fields ’round. The roe deer had taken shelter in good time and the brown trout had sought deeper waters. An auld ram alone huddled against the wind, that had swept clear the skies even of eagle, windcuffer, and goose. The scent of saltwater rode the wind over the freshwater loch, and the dry field-grasses rattled, and there was the memory of peat upon the air: a whisky wind in Islay. The River Leòig was forced back upon itself as the wind whipped the loch to whitecaps; only the cairn and the Standing Stones stood unyielding in the blast as of old.

For the author as for God, standing outwith his creation, all times are one; all times are now. In mine own country, we accept as due and right – as very meet, right, and our bounden duty – the downs and their orchids and butterflies, the woods and coppices, ash, beech, oak, and field maple, rowan, wild cherry, holly, and hazel, bluebells in their season and willow, alder, and poplar in the wetter ground. We accept as proper and unremarkable the badger and the squirrel, the roe deer and the rabbit, the fox and the pheasant, as the companions of our walks and days. We remark with pleasure, yet take as granted, the hedgerow and the garden, the riot of snowdrops, primroses, and cowslips, the bright flash of kingfishers, the dart of swallows and the peaceful homeliness of house martins, the soft nocturnal glimmer of glow worm and the silent nocturnal swoop of owl.

On late Summertide Sundays shading into Autumn, after service, the gentle sun has long since burnt away the earliest morning’s fog, that had bedewed and bejewelled the first autumnal spider webs in hedgerow and rosebush. The sky is perfect, as blue as the butterflies that adorn each sunny surface fit for basking; the breeze gentle, and the air murmurous with the hum of bees and the drowsy susurrations of wood-pigeon and stock-dove. There are shy, largely unseen bullfinches in the ancient hedge that bounds the pub’s back garden, where it slopes down towards the winterbourne. The ancient turf is sweet underfoot, and God, assuredly, an Englishman today: here, at least, There Will Always Be an England. Just beyond the peaceful, quiet churchyard, the village trails away into countryside: white horses in the chalk, and larks, above, ascending. Sand martins are on the wing above the river and the quarry, thrushes and meadow pipits dart and flutter. Local JPs and the district medico talk of roses and wall-fruit: the good doctor is complaining of his never-ending war against a nearby sett of badgers who have taken his garden’s bulbs as a buffet supper for the third year, now.

The Ringer’s Guild host their opposite numbers from a Cotswold parish and a Berkshire parish; not a few once served in the same regiment, the old RGBW, and its forebears.

Some of the village youths, intent upon seeing the cricket when village XI meets neighbouring village XI and there comes the clash of arms, are trailing back, muddy, damp, and chuffed, with the trophies of a day’s fishing, their long poles casting shadows in the afternoon’s long slant of light that recall the spears of Alfred’s army when Wessex fought the Dane.

And just outside this charmed circle, where the countryside begins, the Ancient ever and always is: the land everlasting, sacred with circles and henges, horse-carven, stream-scrolled and fluted, rich; otters and voles slide into the waters and play in the wild cress, dormice sleep in coppiced bluebell-woods, foxes and deer, nightingales and woodcock, make them their homes in ancient woods of oak and ash, beech and silver birch; and the great bustard once again makes the downs its home.

We live, all of us, in sprung rhythm. Even in cities, folk stir without knowing it to the surge in the blood that is the surge and urgency of season. In being born, we have taken seisin of the natural world, and as ever, it is the land which owns us, not we, the land. Even in the countryside, we dwell suspended between the rhythms of earth and season, weather and sky, and those imposed by metropolitan clocks, at home and abroad.

When does the year begin? No; ask rather, When does it not? For us – all of us – as much as for Mr Eliot, midwinter spring is its own