The end of winter

Starlings seep and hiss from the chimneys. The sun is blinding, low in a blue sky, clouds just a white tinge at the horizon. We haven’t had rain for a while so the fallen leaves crisp as we walk. They are mostly a uniform dark brown now, clumping together in a soggy pulp in damp weather. Tree skeletons and holly leaves catch the sun. Cow parsley leaves push through the mulch. In the short cut that leads to the dene, a tree has been doctored, a cut branch now in logs beneath it. Rubbish has been cleared from around its base and the umbrella that has been there for years, filling up with leaves or snow through the seasons, is gone.

It is almost Candlemas. Another turn in the year, when the first fragile signs of spring appear. Usually I’m ready for the change, but this year winter has barely graced us with her presence. The old crone of the season has wrapped her furs around herself and decided to stay underground, occasionally sending out a few fingers of frost just to remind us she exists. I have hardly worn the warm coat I bought for the season. The frosts have been few and far between. Bulbs began sprouting in December and the birds have been calling loudly. Experts say we may have to say goodbye to winter as the climate warms, and the changing winter is already affecting wildlife.

A robin sings a delicate song. Blue tits chitter and flit between the trees. Two magpies clash over an old nest. A tree has fallen at the side of the bowling green. It is balanced on the fence, roots in the air and branches reaching for the green. The disarray of winter remains: shrivelled berries, ragged leaves, a handful of stinking Iris seeds in their pods. Somehow I had expected more signs of spring, given the lack of winter, but the spring flowers remain firmly beneath the soil and the trees are still naked.

The reeds are spun gold. Skinny fingers of willow drape the pond. It is full of activity. A flock of black-headed gulls roams between water and grass. Mobs of mallard drakes gather around the hens. A moorhen chases another, channelling water across the pond. The air is full of the gentle quacking of the ducks and the low cries of the gulls. People and dogs wander the paths and feed the birds. This is not a winter’s day as we know it.

A few days after Candlemas, winter pays a visit. The old crone whips up a storm of freezing wind, rain and sleet. But it all seems too little too late. In just a few days, signs of spring have appeared. A single pink cyclamen flower brightens the rubble of a wall collapsed by Storm Arwen. Crocuses sprout like small cups of honey and I see my first daffodil. I can’t be sad that spring has arrived, but I am sad for the season lost.

By late February there have been five named storms. Some unlucky areas suffer flooding and power cuts, a few have snow, but there is no retreat from spring. We walk through the cemetery at the tail end of Storm Franklin, the wind a soft roar through the trees. The grounds are full of windfallen trees, large and small. Chaffinches hop among grounded branches. Magpies squabble high up in those still standing. But mostly the birds offer a muted soundscape, as though cowed by the wind.

The light swings between sunshine and gloom. Rain is in the air; later it will rain all night. I hunt for hibernating ladybirds. Since Bug Woman wrote that they like to huddle on grave stones I have looked for them. I’m delighted to find some harlequins huddled in a crease of stone and orange ladybirds tucked into weathered letters.

But here, spring means snowdrops. Enclosed by graves, blanketing the ground under the trees, sprouting in small clumps and shimmering rivers. There are a few purple and yellow crocuses, but they can’t compete with the sheer volume of snowdrops. Luminous and almost transparent when the sun catches them, they are like pools of light. A stone angel boasts a bouquet, but snowdrops quietly adorn the home-made cross left for ‘Joe’. There is no doubt here that spring has arrived. There will be more storms to come. And more uncertainty. We wake the next morning to war in Europe and wonder, yet again, what the future will bring. All we can be certain of is that winter has ended and spring will always come.

Basking

Late May has brought banks of ox-eye daisies and campion to the motorway verges. It has brought sheep and the yellow of rape to the fields next to the veterinary hospital where we go for Winston’s hydrotherapy. A pheasant, statue-still on the banks. Paddocks of horses and foals.

It has brought a fret from the sea that hangs over the river and rolls through town. All weekend, ships sound their horns, the moans echoing in their wake. The park is unmown, freckled with daisies and dandelion clocks. Cleavers climb the fences with sticky fingers. Clumps of grasses and buttercups have been allowed to flower. Tiny cranesbills carpet the foot of the poplar. The woodpecker drums softly – it sounds like the trees are purring. Everything is in that fresh, abundant state of growth, before the straggly mess of late summer.

Before we get there I imagine how the cemetery will be in the soft sunshine of a bank holiday Monday. I imagine the shafts of light between the trees, the dance of flies and the tangle of wildflowers. Others head for the coast. We avoid the crowds for a sanctuary of green and dappled light.

We’re greeted by blackbird song, high up in the trees. An undertone of wood pigeon and the chirrup of magpies. The mournful vibrato of a robin. A crow approaches, feathers accented with white and very tame. He is joined by others. I’ve seen people leave seed here, along the path by the chapel and these crows are obviously used to people leaving them food. They follow us some way along the path.

The cow parsley is almost as tall as us. Drifts of bluebells mingle with pockets of buttercup and campion. We walk overgrown paths bathed in green and patches of grass laid to meadow. The sun plays over the grave markers, casting some in shadow and highlighting others with pools of light. We bask in the tranquillity of dappled sun and untrodden paths.

When you think nobody will ever like a story of yours again; when you think you’ll get nothing but rejections, it’s then that a little good news comes. You begin to doubt the worth of your words, as you tout them from place to place, imagining them a little more jaded, a little more dishevelled as they are studied and turned away. But then suddenly, someone likes what you’ve done, and then it seems altogether better than you remembered. Often, rejection comes in threes, but this week it was successes. A story that made the longlist for inclusion in a prestigious literary journal. A story to be published in another journal. And a story longlisted, then shortlisted, then winner of the runner’s up prize in a competition.

I wrote The Carousel at my local writers’ circle, following a prompt where we were given a number of ‘things’ to write about. It came almost fully formed, a short story of 500 words. I’m pleased to announce it has won ‘runner up’ in the Retreat West quarterly themed flash fiction competition. One of the prizes was to have it professionally recorded by a sound artist. If you have 5 minutes, click on the link to listen to (or read) the story, but be prepared, it’s a creepy one….CLICK HERE TO READ THE CAROUSEL

Firsts

Spring is a season of firsts. The first crocuses. The first snowdrops. The first daffodils. A piece of tangled waste ground offers the season’s first coltsfoot flowers, lemon discs among frazzled grass. I see my first bee on the edge of the park, frantically seeking nectar, a day after the spring equinox. The hawthorn leaves are unfurling. Daisies and dandelions scatter the grass and crocuses have given way to lesser celandine. There are other firsts throughout the year – the first snow, the first leaves turning – but no season offers as many firsts as spring.

On the eve of the equinox I have my first Covid vaccination. My wife and I visit the local sports centre and have our jabs together. It is quick, friendly and efficient. We walk home light-footed, stickers on our jackets proclaiming we’ve been vaccinated. That night I dream vividly. I am standing at the edge of a canal in a perfect, purple dawn. The landscape is luminous, as it often is beside water at sunrise. Water and land seem to seep into each other so I can’t be sure which I am walking on. I am filled with peace. Later, some tiny birds have been caught in a spiders’ web and I have to gently brush strands of spider silk away from their feathers to set them free – I wake not knowing if I succeeded.

The cemetery is shades of green and yellow. The crocuses are all but gone now, but the daffodils are in full bloom: clumps and trails and sunbursts in and around the graves. I see my first primroses: less abundant and less showy than the daffodils, they form delicate clusters close to the ground. I find a handful of wood anemones and a single spray of snake’s head fritillary. A few early bluebells stipple the ground and pink blossom droops from a group of gracefully spreading trees.

There is a soundscape of birdsong. The great tit is the star of the bird choir, in volume if not tunefulness, with others as a quieter accompaniment. Magpies chirrup high up in the trees. I see a crow in the long grass, a pair of collared doves silent in a tree above, a trio of woodpigeons resting on a grave. Most of the birds are busy in the canopy, staking claim to territory and perhaps building the first nests of the season.

Spring’s firsts never lose their charms. I have seen fifty springs but I still thrill at the first flowers shooting through the soil, the sound of a renewed dawn chorus and signs of new life. Every spring is the same and every spring is different. We can rely on the return of those same firsts, but we will never experience them in quite the same way. The lengthening days give us hope and energy, but I think it is also the profusion of firsts that stir our vitality at this time of year.

The first of our lockdown restrictions are lifted today. We are following a timetable that suggests we will be back to some kind of normality by the summer solstice. Nothing feels much different at the moment. I find it impossible to believe that in a few short months this will be over. I imagine us like children emerging from the pandemic, eyes squinting in the sunlight. I hope we approach it with childlike wonder, rather than teenage rebellion. Those first hugs. Those first outings. Those first holidays. They will be the foundation of a what might be a better future. I hope we savour them.

Glowing

We crunch and rustle along pavements of copper leaves. The sky is filled with diluted denim clouds, the sun a foggy disk slightly brighter than the sky. A strong breeze agitates the leaves. We walk past the war memorial, scattered with curled leaves, the shapes of old wreaths ingrained into the stone by dirt and lichen. Past the stone mason’s studio, where brand new tombstones await epitaphs. Through the iron gates and stone frontage of the cemetery.

Bindweed trumpets wind and bloom along the clipped privet. A few hogweed flowers have not yet withered. Clumps of grass finger out of the dead leaves. The base of a shattered tree hosts a massive crop of fungi. A squirrel, who may have been feeding on it, streaks past and up a neighbouring tree. But there is another squirrel in the grass who hasn’t yet spotted us. Her companion chitters a warning and soon both are beyond reach.

There is still a lot of green in the cemetery, but those trees that have turned are showpieces. Horse chestnuts and maples and lindens and beeches. Yellows and bronzes and coppers and reds. They are beacons of light nearby and in the distance as we walk.

A mischief of magpies crowds on top of one of the graves. There are at least ten of them and I wonder why. When we get closer I see it is planted with a fiery-leaved rowan, still laden with berries. The magpies are feasting on those that have fallen. They aren’t alone. A couple of jackdaws hop nearby and a mob of crows, one of whom nonchalantly grooms himself on top of a gravestone. There are gulls too. One of them eyes us from the top of a tall tombstone. Others squabble and squawk in a rowdy flock. Some of them have the traces of juvenile plumage and I wonder if these are teenagers looking for trouble.

There are points of communion in every special space. Here in the cemetery, there is the fallen tree where fungi grow. The graves that bloom with snakeshead fritillaries. The place behind the chapel where bluebells and cow parsley froth and hoverflies shimmer. In autumn, it is the place of the three maples. They stand in a row, in a slight clearing. Leaves like butterscotch and lemon and honey glow on their branches and form golden pools on the ground. Cow parsley leaves and tiny saplings poke through the leaves. There is a small, dead tree beneath the canopy, gnarled and bent, wrapped in a tendril of ivy. A broken tombstone, its stone cross laid gently against its base. Standing beneath the three maples, the sun gilds the leaves and takes you to another place.

We leave the gilded shelter of the three maples and walk up a narrow path. The sound of a bird singing makes me pause, because until now I have heard only the rough sounds of corvids and gulls. Listening carefully, I realise it is the full song of the blackbird, but sung so quietly that you would not hear it if you weren’t stood next to it. I look up, into a holly tree and immediately see a male blackbird perched there. For a few moments we look at each other and I hear the song again. It isn’t the bird I’m looking at that is singing, but another higher up in the tree. I wonder why it is so quiet. Perhaps I have stumbled on some secret thing. I listen for a few moments then leave them in peace.

There is a funeral about to begin at the crematorium. Two female vicars in billowing vestments stand at the door. A handful of masked guests wait outside. We pass quickly, to the shelter of a towering beech, its trunk like elephant skin, its boughs trailing petticoats of autumn hues. I think of our early morning dog walks, when the sun is just peeping above the houses, bathing the park in golden stripes of light. We wander out of the cemetery on a path of shining beech leaves. The sky is still grey. We are expecting storms this week. But the fire of autumn is glowing within me.

Fences

Halloween is the day when there is neither past, nor future, only between.  Before the year turns, I have a notion to re-visit the green places of my past.  I step out into a breezy day, leaves rustling in spirals on the pavements, rays of sunlight bursting through grey cloud.

My past has been fenced off, built over, locked away.  We were urban children, grown on a Council estate, but there were always patches of green, hints of the wild.  The ‘res’, the ‘cut’, the ‘back field’, these were the edge-lands on our doorsteps.  Our lives as children were lived along these tracks and in these spaces.  The walk to school and back, the trails between each others’ houses.  The green spaces for playing, exploring and hanging around.

The first of two reservoirs, at the top of the street where I used to live, is a trapezium of grass tangled with purple clover and dock.  The gate is locked.  Perhaps it always was, but we got in anyway.  I always found the reservoirs puzzling and slightly mysterious.  How could a field contain a reservoir of water?  I never quite believed they were what they were supposed to be.  There is an old stone building, stamped 1901, which must have been some kind of access or pump house.  It is boarded up, painted with graffiti, art deco railings rusting around its roof, rubbish and weeds littering its steps.  There is talk about building houses on top of the reservoir, squeezing yet more dwellings into one of the last green spaces.

There was a park once, where the newest houses on the estate have now been built, an open space with swings and climbing frames.  The ‘back field’ is still there.  It was once just a ragged patch of land behind houses, with waist high meadow.  Now it is a water-logged square of shorn, vivid grass.  I disturb a posse of blackbirds in the shrubs at its edges.  I wonder how much it is used, and for what.  It seems unlikely that it is ever allowed to become as overgrown as it once was.

But my sycamore is still as I recall it.  The only tree I remember as an individual from my childhood, it stands on the corner, arcing over the road.  When I first read To Kill a Mockingbird it was this sycamore that I pictured when I read about the gifts left in the tree.

The ‘cuts’ were narrow paths between.  Each was the length of a street.  A narrow lane beyond the back garden fences.  A pathway between houses and the reservoir.  Small slices of nature, bordered by trees and plants.   But no one will be travelling those paths again.  They are blocked at each end, locked behind spiked metal fencing.  I stand looking between the bars, yearning to walk the old path again.  But within the fencing, nature has taken advantage.  Brambles, grasses and small saplings have reclaimed the path.  They have become liminal places but not human places.  On this still autumn day, they are peaceful pockets of green behind the bars.  Who knows what happens within the fences while the people aren’t watching?

The bordering reservoir has been fenced off too, metal spikes above the wall.  Fences and fences.  Adjacent, my old school has been demolished and re-built with yet more of the ubiquitous railings.  There was a time when a farmer’s field lay opposite the school.  I still remember the feel of the ploughed furrows under my feet.  The old hawthorn hedgerow is still there, now backing onto houses.  It is a reminder of a past when there were spaces to explore and everything wasn’t locked up tight.  It is half-term and the children are on holiday from school, yet I haven’t seen or heard a single child during my walk, only the ghostly footsteps of those who have left childhood far behind.

I cross the busy road to get to the cemetery and leave the fences behind.  Here there are meandering paths scattered with leaves.  Tilting headstones rooted with ivy.  A laburnum like an umbrella sheltering graves.  The foliage is still mostly green, but maples appear like pools of light in the distance.  A large leafless hawthorn has berries like fairy lights.  A giant beech is a beacon beckoning me along the path.

My ritual tonight is all about stripping back and letting go.  I am letting go of the year just gone, and all the years that have gone before.  The past is a familiar place, but not always a comforting one.  I have witnessed again the way the world never stands still.  The fences represent a changed world – one in which it seems necessary to fence children in and fence others out.  But fences are no barrier to memory.  Once, small feet traversed this landscape without impediment, and the imprint of their passage is part of the landscape still.

Bursting

The cemetery is at its most luminous in late spring and autumn, the key hinges of the year.  In autumn, the cemetery hums with the colours of turning leaves.  But now, in late May, it brims with the lace of cow parsley and a tide of bluebells.  Spring has not come quietly.  It has burst, all of a sudden.  The cow parsley is so tall that the graves hide amongst it, or only peek over the blooms.  The vegetation has the untidy lushness of late summer.  The energy is playful and busy.  A robin strikes something, a snail perhaps, on the edge of a grave, crows caw and rattle, blackbirds sing.

Hawthorn is in full blossom, leafy tresses daubed in clotted cream.  Horse chestnut flowers thrust upwards like snowy Christmas trees.  Sunlight plays between the trees, pooling in clearings and shafting through the canopy.  Light pours through the windows of the chapel, so that, seen from the outside, it is a transparent arch of illumination.  Scores of tiny flies dance in the air and hoverflies hover under the trees, seemingly motionless, like tiny baubles catching the light.  Most of the abundant dandelions have finished flowering, and there are waves of clocks like grey lollipops.  So much potential, the seeds of next year already on the wing.

My creativity has followed the pattern of the spring.  Low key at first, it has now burst open.  Like the landscape, I’m enjoying a creative spurt.  My novel and stories are out for submission, dispersed like dandelion seeds,  in that sweet moment of possibility when something good might happen to them.   I have revisited the first novel I wrote, revising it to correct those niggles I have never been quite happy with.  There is another story on the go and I have joined a writer’s circle.  At times like these writing feels easy.  Words fall into place and stories present no barriers to being told.  Fallow periods and the panic of creation is forgotten.

On a rare rainy day, I see my first swallows, two of them, darting and swooping over a roof top, switch-backing from one direction to another.  I can’t see any insects but they have obviously found something to hunt.  In the dene, the burn chatters and gurgles past miniature forests of yellow flag, thistles, cow parsley and purple comfrey.  The avenue of lindens is so lush it has become a tunnel of leaves.  There are swallows here too, but only a couple.  And more flies.  A particularly delicate creature flutters up into the trees before me, slowly, on spectral lacy wings.

There is so much to see that I don’t know where to look, so much born and being born, so much potential.  And yet life is fragile too.  In the park, early one morning, I witness a vicious scrap between crows.  The two resident sentries of the park noisily mob another close to the tree where they are nesting.  They fight, beak to feather, then resort to dive-bombing the stranger, swooping so close I hear the crack of wings across its back.  But it is too late, the interloper has stolen an egg and proceeds to devour it, one small life that won’t be born.

Among so much growth, it is hard to imagine this fragility, yet there are concerns that this year there have been fewer insects, fewer migrating birds.  When the rain falls, the tiny creatures disappear; when the sun comes out, there they are again in their hundreds.  I wonder where they go when the sun hides its face.  Perhaps they are poised, just like inspiration, waiting for the conditions to burst into life.