April bound

Monday 15th April, 2024

I awoke this morning to a barrage of rain hammering on the windows. Sleepily I opened the iron latch on the windows and watched as a heavy squall, moving under dark leaden skies and pulsing over the town, wetted the bath stone and slate tile roofs that are such a feature of Bradford-on-Avon. Alec Clifton-Taylor in his Six More English Towns (1981) tells us the stone is known as Forest Marble, a type of limestone quarried near Frome and one that has allowed Bradford to reach such a level of conforming beauty. We shall soon be re-publishing a new edition of this out of print book, so you can read more about this interesting town shortly and which for now is the happy HQ of our lives and Idle Country Press. But I digress, how nice to live on a hill! Our view, stretching out over the town, is a true weather watchers delight, and as we are in England, it is one of almost continual interest, albeit currently capricious, but then again it is April. As the scene unfolds and I sit in silence, at the still point of this turning world, my mind speaks those unforgettable lines by T. S Eliot that have given so many, and so often, their first taste in poetry:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain..

Gilbert Spencer, "The Cottage Window" (c. 1937)

There is a certainly a mixing of mirth and melancholy to this month, I think you’ll agree. Something to do with these brief but heavy downpours: the flattening of flowers and shoots freshly emerged; the palettes of greys, browns and unconfident greens, the still bareness of many trees, the sickly yellow of oak leaves before their full glory, drifts of blossom shedding onto muddy pavement and verge alike and the lagging memory of dark nights and the cold receding winter.

And then the sun shines... first real warmth of the year on your skin; ransoms, celandines, anemones carpeting bright woodland floors; birds singing again. I am reminded of the more triumphant lines from Browning: 'O, to be in England, now that April's there’, he’s not wrong is he? There cannot be more lovely places in all the world than late April in England, just before sunset in some copse or woodland, miles from anywhere, and a sea of bluebells stretching away before oneself.  ‘Loveliest of Trees' by Housman brings equal satisfaction but also that whisper of regret, for missing this month when the natural world is all change, is easily done. It reminds me of the anecdote about J. L. Carr, the novelist whose masterpiece was A Month in the Country (1980).  Carr was the headmaster of Highfields School in Kettering, Northamptonshire, from 1952 until 1967.

"His ageing former pupils recalled, as if in a dream, the headmaster who every year had the whole primary school march through a housing estate, past trees in blossom, all 200 of them reciting the Housman poem, 'Loveliest of trees, the cherry now . . .'  Forty years on, to their surprise, they realised they still had the poem by heart.”

Evelyn Dunbar "A Sussex Garden"

To their surprise indeed, how careless we have been in not making children learn the great passages of English literature by rote anymore. To call back from the vaults of your mind certain passages as you go about your life is a true unappreciated joy. We should furnish minds with beauty as well as calculus.

Adrian Paul Allinson (1890-1959), "The Cornish April"

Well, the hours pass, work is done, tea is drunk, the sun returns. In the distance the Horse of Westbury shimmers ghost-white against the dark mass of downs. I sit in the garden at lunch, rewarded in my sloth for not mowing the lawn with clumps of forget-me-nots around my feet; a bumblebee bumps clumsily along the yellow stone wall, inspecting the fissures and fractures and tumbling ivy. Speaking of Browning and education, I watched the excellent ‘The Browning Version’ a few weeks ago, filmed in 1951. A movie really about unexpected kindness I suppose and of change, even if it comes too late. Small acts of kindness, and yes, unkindness can be so very important to us and others in our lives can’t they? Philip Larkin put it wisely, and makes me glad, for now, to have left the garden alone to wildness...

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   

A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   

Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.   

Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   

Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.

The first day after a death, the new absence   

Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind   

While there is still time.

Eric Ravilious, "Westbury Horse" (1939)

Harry James Ault

Monday 15th April, 2024