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Title: Country Notes
Author: Sackville-West, Vita [Victoria Mary] (1892-1962)
Photographers: Westwood, Bryan (1909-1990)
   and Westwood, Norman Charles (1912-2008)
Date of first publication: 1939
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Michael Joseph, 1939
Date first posted: 14 October 2013
Date last updated: 14 October 2013
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1118

This ebook was produced by Al Haines






[Illustration: Cover]




COUNTRY NOTES



V. SACKVILLE-WEST


WITH PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRYAN AND NORMAN WESTWOOD



MICHAEL JOSEPH LTD 26 BLOOMSBURY STREET LONDON W.C.1



[Illustration: Title page]




FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1939



_Set and printed in Great Britain by William Brendan & Son, Ltd., at
the Mayflower Press, Plymouth, in Walbaum type, twelve point, leaded,
on a toned Evensyde paper made by John Dickinson, and bound by James
Burn_




ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Most of these notes have appeared at fortnightly intervals during 1938
and 1939 in the _New Statesman and Nation_, and I would wish to record
my gratitude to the editor not only for his permission to reprint them,
but also for his suggestion that I should write them.  My thanks are
also due to _Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Time and Tide, Travel_, and the
Committee for the Preservation of Rural Kent, for permission to reprint
respectively 'Gardens and Gardeners', 'Circus', 'Tuscany', 'French
Savoy', 'The Kentish Landscape'.  'The Garden and the Oast' originally
appeared in _The Nation_ and _Athenum_, and again I must thank the
editor of the _New Statesman and Nation_ for allowing me to make use of
it.

Finally my warmest thanks are due to Mr. Bryan and Mr. Norman Westwood
for their co-operation and their admirable photographs.



[Illustration: Ash boughs]




  CONTENTS


  A COUNTRY LIFE
  JANUARY
  WINTER COLOUR
  FEBRUARY FROST
  SPRING IN ILLYRIA
  THE FLOWERY SHELF
  COUNTRY SPEECH
  THE KNITTER
  JACOB'S SHEEP
  THE HERON
  THE LAKE
  TROUT
  EARLY HOURS
  THE URCHIN WAKES
  ETERNITIES OF KITCHEN GARDEN
  BETTER THOUGH NOT BIGGER FRUIT
  THE VINEYARDS OF ENGLAND
  SCRAPE
  FLORA AND FAUNA
  FLORA
  FOX AT NOONDAY
  THE ALSATIAN AND THE PARTRIDGE
  BUYING A FARM
  BUYING A MOTOR MOWER
  SMALL BUT VIGOROUS
  A MODEL OF PATERNITY
  ONE AFTERNOON
  BLUEBELLS
  ECLIPSE
  EVENING AFTER ECLIPSE
  MAY
  FARMERS AND BEAUTY
  FISHING
  MORE FISHING
  SHOOTING
  OTHER PEOPLE'S GARDENS
  OTHER PEOPLE'S IDEAS
  STONE TROUGHS
  THE CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW
  GARDENS AND GARDENERS
  GARDENERS
  NATIONAL PARKS
  THE KENTISH LANDSCAPE
  PLANT HUNTING
  ORCHIDACE
  OWLS
  ATHENE NOCTUA
  OWLS BROOD
  CYGNUS OLOR
  PODICEPS RUFICOLLIS
  CIRCUS
  BETWEEN TWO SEASONS
  EELS
  EELS IN ITALY
  THE HOP-PICKING SEASON
  THE GARDEN AND THE OAST
  HUMULUS LUPULUS
  HARVEST
  CORNUCOPIA
  WASTE?
  DEPARTURE
  CONTROVERSIAL TOPICS
  BLOOD SPORTS
  VIVISECTION
  THE ANTI-VIVISECTION ARGUMENTS
  THE CASE FOR THE VTVISECTIONIST
  THE CRUELTY TO ANIMALS ACT--1876
  OCTOBER
  THE GARDEN IN OCTOBER
  SLOE GIN
  FOG
  SYLVA C[OE]DUA
  NOVEMBER
  WIND-MONATH
  FOX-HUNTING
  SUDDEN SNOW-FALL
  TRAPS IN THE SNOW
  A COUNTRY PARTY
  'AND THE STRANGER WITHIN THY GATES'
  GADGETS
  TOOL-SHED
  NOTE FROM ANOTHER COUNTRY: BURGUNDY
  NOTE FROM ANOTHER COUNTRY: FRENCH SAVOY
  NOTE FROM ANOTHER COUNTRY: TUSCANY




  PHOTOGRAPHS

  By BRYAN & NORMAN WESTWOOD


  ASH BOUGHS
  ELEPHANT HAWK CATERPILLAR
  THE FIRST CROCUS
  BARE BOUGHS
  BLACKTHORN
  FROST ON THE GRASS
  WHITE PIGEONS ON THE BARN
  PIGEONS
  ICICLES
  'JACOB'S SHEEP'
  THE HERONRY
  THE HERONRY
  LILY LEAVES
  LILY
  PLUM BLOSSOM
  BEECH WOOD
  KITCHEN GARDEN
  STRAWBERRY
  FIGS
  GRAPES
  YOUNG CUCKOO
  HOMESICK SHEEP
  BLACKBIRD'S NEST
  PLANTING OUT
  THE SWAN THAT REFUSED TO TAKE TO THE WATER
  AFTER THE HAYMAKING
  GRASSES
  THE STREAM
  THE BIG PIG
  'COPPER'S' PIGS
  PLOUGHING
  THE GREEK TORTOISE
  OUTLINE OF THE OAST
  SKY
  THE VILLAGE
  FISHING
  SILVER BIRCHES
  ROSES
  HOLLYHOCKS
  THE TUMBLE GATE
  THUNDER CLOUDS
  COTTAGE FLOWERS
  DOG DAISIES
  LETTUCE
  THE WELL
  LLYN OGWEN--NORTH WALES
  LLYN GWERNANT--NORTH WALES
  HOP GARDEN
  OAST COWLS
  EVENING SKY
  THE EDGE OF THE WOOD
  CYGNETS
  SWANS AND CYGNETS
  SWANS IN THE SUN
  MOORHEN'S NEST
  ON THE ROAD
  RED ADMIRAL
  RED ADMIRAL
  DUCKS
  OASTS
  THE BARN DOOR
  INSIDE THE OAST
  HOPS
  CORN
  OATS
  APPLES
  THE OAST LOFT
  GEESE
  THE FARM GATE
  APPLES
  BLACK CLOUD
  THE WOODMAN
  THE WOODMAN
  THE FLOODS
  THE WEIR
  BLUE TIT
  THE BIRD TABLE
  THE LONELY ROAD
  FLOWER-POTS
  FRENCH SHEPHERD
  LA BELLE FRANCE
  OLIVE TREE
  SAVOY COUNTRYSIDE
  VAL D'ISRE
  WINTER IN SAVOY
  WATER FOR THE VINES


[Illustration: Elephant hawk caterpillar]




A Country Life

Living in the country as I do, I sometimes stop short to ask myself
where the deepest pleasure is to be obtained from a rural life, so
readily derided as dull by the urban-minded.  When I stop short like
this, it is usually because some of my metropolitan friends have
arrived to ruffle my rustic peace with the reverberations of a wider
world.  They ask me if I have seen this or that play, these or those
pictures, and always I find myself obliged to reply that I have not.
This makes me appear, and feel, a boor.  Then after this most salutary
visit they drive off, back to London, and the peace and the darkness
close down on me once more, leaving me slightly disturbed but on the
whole with an insulting sense of calm superiority.  They leave me
feeling that I am getting more out of this short life than they for all
their agitations, an attitude of mind which strikes me as intolerably
self-righteous.  How can I possibly justify it?  Should I not believe
that it is more important to concern oneself with the troubles and
interests of the world, than to observe the first crocus in flower?
More important to take an active part wherever one's small activity
would be most welcome, than to grow that crocus?  How, then, to explain
my backwater's deep source of delight?

I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally
renewed evidences of the determination to live.  That is a truism when
said, but anything but a truism when daily observed.  Nothing shows up
the difference between the thing said or read, so much as the daily
experience of it.  The small green shoot appearing one day at the base
of a plant one had feared dead, brings a comfort and an encouragement
for which the previous daily observance is responsible.  The life
principle has proved unconquerable, then, in spite of frost and winds?
The powers of resistance against adversity are greater than we thought;
the germ of life lies hidden even in the midst of apparent death.  A
cynic might contend that nothing depressed him more than this
resoluteness to keep going; it depends on the angle from which you
regard this gallant tenacity.  For my own part I find a singular solace
in the renewal and reality of even the most monotonous of natural
processes; I welcome the youth of the new season, whether it comes with
the first lambs to be born in a snowstorm or with the new buds of the
hornbeam pushing the old brown leaves off the hedges.  If you have a
taste for such things, no amount of repetition can stale them; they
stand for permanence in a changing world.


[Illustration: The first crocus]


[Illustration: Bare boughs]




January

Rimbaud wrote a famous sonnet about the characteristics of the five
vowels, A was black, E white, I red, and so on.  This somewhat precious
conception might be extended to the months of the year.  January, to
me, is a large pewter plate stained with the reflection of a red
sunset; and no doubt others will have their own ideas.

I do not like January very much.  It is too stationary.  Not enough
happens.  I like the evidences of life, and in January there are too
few of them.  It is true that you can find buds on the hazels, and that
the small leaves of the wild honeysuckle are already formed and green,
but that means very little since everybody knows that the honeysuckles,
like the lilacs, seldom close down their business.  It is also true
that snowdrops and some of the narcissi are coming through the ground,
but somehow this does not give me the same pleasure as it would in
February.  I do not like either plants or children to be precocious.
As for the tulip leaves which this year have appeared long before they
ought to have been seen at all, no gardener could view them with
anything but concern.

On the other hand, the true beauties of January are welcome--the bare
trees, the wild, wet sky, even the cart-ruts full of water, and the
sea-gulls settling on the plough.  It is very much the month for a
country walk.  The small streams are so angry, that even the most
exiguous trickle has turned into a minute brown waterfall.  Twigs swirl
as they are rushed towards the sea.  Broken branches lie in disarray,
giving a careless air to our trim rides; the wood-pigeons' old nests at
the tops of the trees make dark untidy blobs as they nakedly sway.
Damp and dishevelled, January is the month for thick shoes, a dog at
our heels, and the wind in our faces.




Winter Colour

The dog-wood has seemed more brilliant than ever this winter, perhaps
owing to the fact that it has nearly always been wet.  Dog-wood, like
porphyry, gains in intensity from being wet, and to see the red
dog-wood at its best you should sweep suddenly round a bend on a rainy
evening with the headlights of your car streaming across it.  Then the
glistening stems, naked and red from base to tip, stand up like a
phalanx of savages bathed in blood.  Descriptions of plants usually
sound so much better than the reality, but it is not possible to
exaggerate the startling effect of _Cornus sanguinea_ seen in the right
light.

A little winter-flowering tree the oddity of which cannot be
exaggerated either is the witch-hazel.  The dark brown twigs look as
though some child had amused itself by tying them up with bunches of
yellow ribbons, and then snipping the ends short.  The little bunches
flutter all the way up the stems, each secured at the base by a maroon
button.  There are no leaves at all; the twigs are quite bare save for
the numerous yellow stars.  Like the wintersweet, the witch-hazel has
the faculty of growing in so delicate a design that one might believe
them both to be possessed of a sense of drawing as fine as their
countrymen the Chinese, in a spare precision that exactly suits the
brown earth and grey skies.  They have more than stylisation: they have
style.

Such economy makes the Christmas roses look tousled and undistinguished
as they cower beneath the umbrella of their leaves, but strip all
leaves away, and then, in a clear glass, the separate flowers stand out
in purity, ice-green and white like blown anemones.  It is a very
definite improvement on nature, to deprive some flowers of their
leaves.  The common white syringa, which one ought to call
philadelphus, becomes quite a different thing under such treatment;
great branches of it in a tall vase look unrecognisably like some rare
white almond; and the wild crab-apple of the hedgerows, its shell-pink
blossom clinging against the bough hoary with grey lichen, achieves a
delicacy that the furnished bough never possessed.  But best of all are
the winter flowerers which have discovered this secret of elegance for
themselves without submitting to such vandalism.


[Illustration: Blackthorn]



[Illustration: Frost on the grass]




February Frost

Some mornings and evenings lately have enjoyed an extraordinary beauty.
The early frosts have glittered as white as a fresh snowfall, bushes
and hedges have been looped with silver threads, and the rime on the
tall trees has turned them into frozen fountains.  There has been a
motionless quality about these mornings, through which the bird-song
has chinked as clearly as breaking glass.  Under a pale blue sky the
white pigeons wheel like a squadron in formation, white no longer, but
blue in the shadows and gold where the sun catches their wings.  The
Chinese fix little devices on to their pigeons, which in flight give
off a faint music like a multitude of tiny olian harps.  Even without
this pretty artifice, there can be few sounds lovelier than the silken
swoop of wings as they settle, and their contented cooing almost
persuades one to believe that the day is warm.  Their pink feet make
the frozen grass blades bend; bowing and prinking, they peck delicately
for grains, then at an unseen signal they are in flight again, to
settle this time in a colony on the tiled roof of a barn.


[Illustration: White pigeons on the barn]


There is still a film of ice over shady stretches of water, so thin
that by midday the breasts of the ducks cut with a brittle tinkling
sound through it like miniature ice-breakers in formation.  By the
evening it has closed up again, and now reflects the large
lemon-coloured moon in a trance of breathless stillness.  Mist rises
from the valley, a cold white mist, cutting off everything but the tops
of the trees.  A solitary swan sails in plumed ghostliness, round and
round in the only patch of water left open to him.  All else is quiet,
shrouded for the long hours of the night which are to follow.


[Illustration: Pigeons]




Spring in Illyria

The talented author of _Peking Picnic_ once wrote a novel called
_Illyrian Spring_.  I thought it not one of her most successful works,
if she will forgive me for saying so, but it remained settled in my
mind for her descriptions of the flowers which leap from the rocks of
the country we now call Dalmatia.  I remember those passages at least
once a year when my heart is torn between the desire to go south and
the desire to remain in England.  This moment occurs at any time
between March the first and the end of April, and it coincides with the
recollection that the Mediterranean flora must be beginning to put on
its best.  On a dead grey day, when nothing seems to be stirring and a
small sour wind is mourning across the fields, I find myself seized
with a desire to steal the motor car out of the garage, drive myself to
Dover, and embark on the first vessel which will put me within reach of
the sunny flowery shores.  All this, without saying a word to anyone.
Just to disappear.  To disappear suddenly, without any explanation.  To
go away; to vanish; to abandon all one's responsibilities and
commitments; to live for a month given up to the pure pursuit of visual
beauty.  How great that beauty can be, how lavish that floral
explosion, no one needs to be reminded who remembers the ruins of
Greece pouring with wild flowers, the slopes of the Lebanon, the craggy
coasts of Illyria.

The truth is that we all make the mistake here of expecting spring to
arrive earlier than it means to.  The first buds and blossoms cause our
hearts to run ahead in an anticipation which will not be fulfilled for
at least a month later than we begin to expect it.  Spring, in England,
in a normal year (if such a thing exists) does not ostensibly show
itself until the second fortnight of April.  These occasional,
deliciously tender days are the fairest of the year's delusions, though
from year to year it is impossible to remain wisely sceptical.  The
first mild sunshine, the first morning with the missel-thrush singing
on the topmost branch, and we are instantly persuaded that these things
have come to stay.  Thus although from December 1st to March 1st I can
cheerfully endure the discipline of the English winter, comforting
myself with the old belief that such harshness is good for the soul and
compensated by the naked beauty it brings to those who have the eye to
see, yet by March 1st I grow impatient.  Surely spring should not delay
so long, when one has only to go elsewhere to find it?


[Illustration: Icicles]




The Flowery Shelf

Yet there are special considerations which reconcile me to the
necessity for staying at home, and which indeed would make me reluctant
in some ways to take my departure.  These considerations are focused on
a long narrow shelf in a cold greenhouse, where pans of diminutive
Alpines are coming into flower.  Here, at least, is a place where I can
pretend that the year is a month older than it actually is.  Very soon
this shelf will be a solid pavement of colour.  Already the earlier
saxifrages are in flower; bright pinks and yellows much larger and more
exuberant than the squabs of grey tufts which they so successfully
dwarf.  The whole point, I think, of the Alpines, as of certain people,
is that in the rare moment of their blooming they transcend their tight
habitual personality.  They have something of the quality of the
habitually silent reserved person who suddenly and without any warning
exposes himself or herself in a single phrase of self-revelation, brief
but beautiful.  One knows it will not endure, but one has seen the
light.

The light that the little Alpines expose is rare and exquisite and
delicate.  For that reason alone I maintain that they ought to be grown
under glass.  No one could possibly dislike forced flowers more than I
do, but Alpines grown under glass in a cold house cannot be said to be
artificially forced into flower before their time.  One is merely
protecting them from the smashes of rain and the splashes of mud which
would destroy their particular beauty.  The sensitiveness of Primula
Winteri, for instance, battered by winds and rains, the mealy powdering
of its leaves, the tenderness of its lavender petals--where would all
these things be, delivered harshly to our winter weather?

The nicety, the extreme fragility, of these small things recalls the
art of that great craftsman--great in a small way--the Russian Faberg.
He made jewelled flowers of jade, coral, quartz, and pearls to adorn
Edwardian drawing-rooms.  An artist, he worked his small conceits in a
manner suited only to the offensively rich people able to buy them.  I
am told that Faberg plants command a high price in the market to-day.
I would not exchange one of them against one of the real little pans I
have flowering cheaply in my cold Alpine house.

Out in the open, too, life is stirring.  There are two blackbirds so
intent upon making a nest that I scarcely worry them when I pass.  The
ring-doves cut past me on wings sharp as blades.  They go scything
through the air in a manner to slice off the almond blossom.  So gentle
and yet so sharp.  Then they settle and coo, amorous as the spring,
tender as a girl newly in love.




Country Speech

How much one regrets that local turns of speech should be passing away!
There was a freshness and realism about them which kept the language
alive and can never be replaced.  Imported into prose they become
fossilised and affected, for, accurately reported though they may be in
those novels of rural life of which one grows so tired, the spontaneity
and even the accent are lacking; imported into poetry, they instantly
sound like the archaisms of a poetic convention.  If I read the phrase,
'The cattle do be biding in the meads', it gives me no pleasure at all,
but if a cowman says it to me (as he once actually did) it fills me
with delight.  I like also being informed that the rabbits are
'interrupting' or 'interfering with' the young trees; at least, I do
not like the fact, but the way in which it is conveyed does much to
mitigate my annoyance.  I resent the mud less when I am told that the
cows have 'properly slubbed it up'.  Then sometimes comes a proverbial
ring: 'He talks too much, talk and do never did lie down together.'  I
do not see where we are to find such refreshing imagery in future,
unless, indeed, we look to America where the genius of the vivid phrase
still seems to abide.




The Knitter

I have a friend who knits.  She sits on the floor, the firelight
glancing on her hair, her tartan scarf thrown over her shoulders.  She
and the wide brick fireplace and the clicking needles and the balls of
wool heaped on the floor beside her, would compose a complete
Dutch-school picture, were it not for the tartan scarf which suggests a
crofter's cottage.  She, oblivious of such objective considerations,
continues to knit.  She does not care whether she looks Dutch or
Scottish; whether she fits into the tiled interior rosy as a pippin, or
into the shieling.  Nor do I care either.  All that I know is that
whenever she condescends to visit me, she, with her scarf and her
wools, adds colour to the warm evening hour, when it has grown too dark
to go out and one sits over the fire and talks.

Talks....  There is the snag.  One cannot, I find, talk to a knitter.
Conversation may seem to be going in that greased, easy way essential
to all good conversation; starting hares too lavishly to follow them
up; allowing pauses for rumination; bursts for sudden eagerness;
digressions, returns, new departures, discoveries of rooted creeds or
new ideas--sooner or later the challenge is bound to come: "Don't you
agree?" or "What do you think?"  "Yes?" says the knitter, startled but
polite, "seventy-five, seventy-six--just a moment till I get to the end
of my row--seventy-seven, seventy-eight--yes," she says, looking up
brightly, "it's all right now.  What were you saying?"  But of course
one has forgotten or no longer cares.

All the same, everyone who wants to add a coloured domestic touch to
that pleasant idle hour which comes between tea and dinner should
engage a permanent knitter, dumb if necessary but ornamental.  There is
something soothing to the nerves about the monotony of the long needles
travelling up and down the line; something satisfying to the eye about
this primitive craft so closely allied to netting and weaving.  A
lace-maker rattling the bobbins on her pillow would make too much
noise, and the whiteness of her work would jar too crudely on the hush
and dimness of the room.  The knitter with her wools, curled up beside
the fire, is precisely what is needed.  So long as you do not expect
her to talk.




Jacob's Sheep

My occasional annoyance with this particular knitter is tempered by the
fact that she uses the wool spun from the fleeces of my own sheep.
This gives me a self-supporting feeling, especially as I live in the
district which was once the centre of the cloth industry in England.
Moreover, my sheep are peculiar sheep; splotched and horned, people
usually take them for goats at first sight.  They have a most romantic
ancestry, for not only are they supposed to be descended from those
flocks--ringstraked, speckled, and spotted--which Jacob increased by
such remarkable pre-natal methods in the land of Laban, but other
picturesque legends also enter into their history.  In actual fact,
nobody seems to know anything about them at all, and a high authority
whom I consulted suggests that they now appear to be in existence only
in this country, rather a sad fate for animals whose origin has been
variously attributed to Syria, Portugal, North Africa, Zululand,
Persia, Egypt, and Barbary.  It is also related that the Crusaders
brought them from the Holy Land; and that they arrived in England via
Spain, either wrecked on the coast of Ireland with a ship of the
Armada, or were, less dramatically, presented to George III by a lady
named the Marquesa del Campo de Alange.  This version, however,
undoubtedly refers to the breed of Spanish merinos and not to Jacob's
sheep at all.  Merinos do not thrive in our climate, even under Royal
patronage; Edward IV, who imported three thousand from Spain, had
already failed to make a success of them.  Jacob's sheep, on the other
hand, thrive and multiply; the ewes habitually give birth to twins and
even triplets; their enormous fleeces safeguard them from cold and
damp; they are said to be hardier than our native breeds.  The old
gentleman who has charge of my small flock here has a pleasing theory
about them: he is persuaded that they come from a mountainous country
and that they stand for preference on the emmet-heaps as the nearest
thing they can find to a mountain in Kent.  As he is old enough to
remember ploughing the fields here with a yoke of oxen, he ought to
know.

[Illustration: 'Jacob's sheep']

In May or June, after shearing, we send the sacks of wool to the
Highlands to be cleaned and spun.  A bundle of sample colours comes
back, which I have learned to call a swatch.  Skeins (which I have
learned to call cuts) are the next thing to arrive, dyed to our
requirements.  Wound into balls, they are heaped into great baskets
till the knitter wants them, a warm harvest of gaudy fruits.  Since our
correspondents in the north treat their affairs in a leisurely way,
suggesting that the spirit of bustle has not yet infected Inverness,
the autumn is usually well advanced before this luxuriance can be piled
in a corner of the room.  The orange balls on the floor echo the Jaffa
oranges on the table; the green ones repeat the bowl of gourds; the
purple the last belated figs; the red the first apples.  Since Jacob's
sheep in Jacob's day were so suggestible as to produce skewbald lambs
after Jacob had shown them his peeled poplar wands, what would be the
effect, I wonder, if I were to show my ewes this basket of their own
wool, on the lambs which I shall expect next March?




The Heron

Every  morning at dawn the heron comes winging across the woods to rob
my lake of its trout.  It is not a very large lake, and there are not
very many trout; soon there will be none at all if the heron continues
to breakfast in this fashion.  I would not grudge him a reasonable meal
occasionally, but he is an indiscriminate and extravagant fisherman who
pulls out trout too large for him to swallow and strews them mangled on
the bank.  The good fisherman, the honest angler, returns his smaller
catch to the water; the heron acts contrariwise, failing to return
those which are too big to be of any use to him.  The other day he was
seen struggling with one half way down his throat; and in spite of my
liking for herons, especially when they frequent other people's lakes
and streams, I confess I wish it had choked him.

[Illustration: The heronry]

The remedy may seem simple: shoot the heron.  But there is a snag: the
heron is a protected bird, with the price of five pounds on his head.
I discovered this only when I had finally overcome my reluctance to
destroy so beautiful a creature and was about to construct a murderous
'hide' in the wood near his haunt.  The country people were quite at a
loss to understand my hesitation, and their advice was unanimous: shoot
him and say nothing about it.  When I said I couldn't square that with
my conscience they looked at me pityingly.

[Illustration: The heronry]

Meanwhile he continues to breakfast and the trout to diminish.
Although we have tried 'warming his tail' without injuring him he does
not seem to mind having his tail warmed.  So what am I to do?  I could,
of course, walk up to the local police station with a dead bird in one
hand and a five-pound note in the other.  But although that would set
me right in my own eyes and in those of the law, it still would not
dispose of my conviction that if the law troubles to protect the heron
it means that he needs protection, and that without it he will soon
disappear from our ponds and water courses.  Which I, for one, would
regret.




The Lake

The lake did not exist when first I came to the place, but an obviously
artificial embankment surrounding two marshy meadows suggested that
water had once filled the hollow.  Judging by the age of the oaks that
grew on the embankment, it must have been created two or three
centuries ago.  A little stream ran down from the wood, and to dam the
stream was two days' work.  Three days later a sheet of water lay
placidly where the useless swamp had been, a most dramatic
transformation, so simply, cheaply, and easily achieved.

Since that day the lake has been a delight, revealing a whole region of
wild life I had never known before: water-birds, water-insects,
water-plants, and the general peacefulness of water life.  There are
few things to compare with the tranquillity of even a small piece of
water at any hour out of the twenty-four, whether at dawn, midday,
sunset, or midnight; spring, summer, autumn, or winter; few things so
well adapted to repair the cracked heart, the jangled temper, or the
uneasy soul.  The very reflection of trees in water suggests how true
and untrue life may be: the solid oak as we see it growing on the bank,
the mirrored reflection--truth in untruth, the one no more convincing
than the other.  There, surprisingly, lay the new lake, symbol of many
things I had always desired; a piece of water, calm, rich, profound,
agitated, peaceful; a mirror of life both false and true.  It was a
creation romantic beyond my hopes.  Extravagantly I ordered a boat from
the Army and Navy Stores.

[Illustration: Lily leaves]

The pleasure that one takes in a piece of water is also, in large part,
mixed with childish pleasure.  It is all very well to say that one
meditates on the illusions of life as a grown-up: one also paddles
one's toes and trails one's fingers in that queerly different element,
water; watches the tadpoles' wriggling capsules of soot; observes the
gradual spread of bulrushes and thinks of Moses on one's nannie's lap;
watches the dragon-flies among the reeds, darting off on their blue and
brown nuptial flight, so macilent, so oddly joined and jointed, so busy
with something that as a child one only partly understood.  One had
read Madam How and Lady Why, but both Madam and Lady had been reluctant
to give the full explanation of those indicated mysteries.  One simply
observed the insects at their unexplained busyness and wondered what
they were at, and wished also that dragon-flies two-and-a-half-feet
across might still exist, and regretted that such dragons were only to
be found fossilised in such dull dead things as carboniferous deposits.
A dragon-fly with a two-and-a-half-foot wing span would indeed be an
insect worth looking at; an alarming insect, an aeroplane in miniature.
Instead of these, we are left with the common dragon-flies: flies of
our ponds and lakes, beautiful enough but sizeably unworthy of St.
George and his lance.  Since we cannot have humming-birds in this
country, we have to make shift with dragon-flies and kingfishers.  The
dragon-fly and the kingfisher are the humming-birds of England.
Kingfishers do not frequent my lake as frequently as I should like;
only twice have I seen that surprising flash of blue.  Never have I
found the dirty nest dug into the bank.  Yet I continue to look and to
hope, and meanwhile the tadpoles and dragon-flies satisfy me, since the
pleasure one derives from a piece of water is a very simple,
unexorbitant pleasure.

[Illustration: Lily]




Trout

The trout came as a surprise, overbrimming the cup of pleasure.  True,
the first indication of their presence came in a depressing fashion,
for they got drowned and my first sight of them was of a row of ten fat
speckled corpses, neatly laid out for my inspection.  Until then I
should have imagined that drowning was the last death a fish was ever
likely to encounter, but there they were, lying _bel et bien_ drowned
by muddy water in a shallow pocket of the lake which we had been
obliged to empty for the purpose of repairing a leak in the bank.  The
poor things had evidently followed the flowing water during the night
to the last place where water still collected, and the mud had been too
much for them and the water too little.  Beautiful well-fed trout they
were too, turning the scales between a pound and a half to two pounds;
many flies and many water-snails must have gone to their keeping.

This was the opinion of an expert, who obligingly undertook to supply a
consignment of fingerlings from his hatchery.  I had never heard the
expression before, and listened to his specialised wisdom in the mood
of meekness which overcomes one in the presence of someone possessed of
a technical vocabulary which appears to be English but bears little
relation to the language one commonly employs.  One nods intelligently
every now and then to indicate that one has understood, but if one were
honest one would interrupt constantly by saying that one really hadn't
grasped the meaning at all.  This is the kind of discourse which forces
one into the dishonesty of sorting out, bit by bit, what the
all-too-well-advised man is talking about.  In this furtive way I
learnt that fingerlings meant very young trout, the length of a finger;
I learnt also a lot of things about caddis-worms and snails and
bottom-feed, which had never entered into my philosophy.  I came away
from this conversation feeling enriched.

The fingerlings duly arrived by lorry, in containers like milk-churns,
with elaborate instructions accompanying them.  It is far less simple
than one would think to tip two hundred young trout into a lake.  One
has to mix the water by degrees, accustoming them gradually to the
element they will presently have to swim in.  It takes a whole
afternoon mixing the water of the churns with the water of the lake
before one can tip the whole consignment into its final home.  Yet it
is satisfactory, in the end, to pour a milk-churn full of young fish
into the larger waters, knowing that they will wriggle away happily
into the liberty of the placid water, and find therein a number of
snails they can devour.

The fingerlings have grown.  The expert who said that the bottom-feed
was good has been justified in his opinion: the trout that we now pull
out are fine fish, turning three and a half pounds on the scale.  My
feelings when these big trout are caught are mixed: I feel proud of
such big trout being caught in the lake I so easily created, and have
no desire to address them in the somewhat surprising words of Leigh
Hunt:

  O scaly, slippery, wet, swift, staring wights,
  What is't ye do?  What life lead?  Eh, dull goggles?
  How do ye vary your vile days and nights?
  How pass your Sundays?

Then I feel sorry for the innocent fingerlings I introduced to a happy
home; then I feel pleased for the fisherman who has had the
satisfaction of hooking and playing a dashing fish.

The person I do resent, and also admire, is the heron who discovered
the trout weeks before anyone else knew they were there and who has
pursued his discovery ever since.




Early Hours

I wonder whether the freshness of these early spring mornings really
intoxicates the birds as much as we believe?  Judging by their song as
the sun rises, it is easy to credit them with feelings of exhilaration
similar to our own.  Even those who do not express themselves in song
must surely catch the infection from this young, budding, courting air.
My heron, for instance, as he flaps his way from his home-pond to my
suffering lake, can surely not remain indifferent to the brightening
sky and the clean chill meeting his wings above the frosty fields?  The
spring world, seen from above at dawn, empty of men, must glitter with
an extraordinary purity, miraculously combining both the virginal and
the pregnant.  To rise even an hour earlier than usual, is to steal a
march upon the midge-like bothers of the common day; it is to live,
however briefly, in the illusion of a different world.

[Illustration: Plum blossom]

Statistics prove that the beginning of March is normally colder than
the beginning of December, though this year statistics have proved, as
usual, unreliable.  Only he who has gone out into the fields early
knows that the grass has been white and spangled, and that there has
been a sharp nip in the air.  On these still, cloudless mornings, under
a pale blue sky, the first delicate flowers have stood out with a
peculiar brilliance, almost as though they were being illuminated with
artificial light.  It is remarkable how many of the flowers that appear
in a notoriously boisterous season are more delicate and fragile than
their successors: the petals of the crocus and of the early irises look
as though they could scarcely survive a puff of wind; the slender stems
of the blue squills and glory-of-the-snow look as though they would
snap and bend at a touch.  The starry blue anemone, the minute
narcissus, the inch-high saxifrages, all seeming to demand the
protection of glass, do nothing of the sort but choose the roughest of
months to lift their childish heads in the open.  The blossom, too,
though this year the bright days have suited it well, is more often to
be seen through the veils of a scurrying snowstorm.  This year the pink
of the naked almond stands out against the blue, and the white of plum
dazzles in the sun.  Young plum-trees are a sight to stand and gaze at,
the blossom so white, the branches so black.  They compromise no more
than a woodcut in their colour, or absence of colour.

To see these sights, unshared, unspoiled, is worth the lost hour in bed.


[Illustration: Beech wood]




The Urchin Wakes

The moment is near at hand when one no longer wishes merely to 'stand
and stare', but also to look about for things not obviously revealed.
Not only are the birds thinking about their nests, but the hibernating
animals are beginning to emerge.  The squirrels (which, indeed, are not
true hibernators) have been active for some weeks past, and the evening
is not far distant when a dog will grow frantic as he discovers a
hedgehog shuffling along under a hedge.  You can collect the hedgehog
if you like, and make a pet of him with bribes of bread-and-milk, but
if you have no taste or time for such school-boyish occupations there
is still some amusement to be derived from the study of any stray
earth-pig you may meet in the course of a walk.  For one thing you may
consider respectfully that in this queer prickly object, probably very
untidy at this time of year, since leaves and bits of moss from his
winter home still remain impaled upon his prickles, like some grotesque
Ophelia, you have the representative of one of the oldest inhabitants
of Britain.  The earth-pig was here before man was; he is extremely
ancient, and truly indigenous.  In fact, he has probably not changed
his appearance at all since long before a caricature of man first
shambled round on Piltdown.  This alone confers on him a dignity which
is not shared even by the badger, our little British bear, and
certainly not by the rabbit, that upstart foreigner who claims, with
more justification than most of our aristocracy, to have arrived on
these shores with William the Conqueror.  But there are other reasons
which may endear the hedgehog to his compatriots.  Watch him as he
hunts for food, so busy and thorough: he wins the admiration of all who
dislike slipshod methods.  Or pick him up (remembering, however, that
he is covered with fleas) and put him at the angle of two walls, so
that he has no escape except by going over.  Stoutly he sets himself to
climb.  It is a dogged rather than a nimble performance.  For every few
inches gained, he makes a mistake and falls to the ground, rolling
himself quickly into a ball as he tumbles, so that he may bounce on his
prickles and take no harm.  When he does eventually reach the top, he
rolls himself off down the other side, though I suspect that this is
due to accident rather than to design.

Hedgehogs eat snakes among other things; and although the bite of even
an adder cannot harm him the wily pig does not see the fun of allowing
himself to be bitten when he can dispatch his victim by the means
nature has provided.  So he merely gives a preliminary nip to provoke
the snake (for unless he can bite just below the head he cannot hope to
kill outright) and then rapidly rolls himself into a ball before the
fangs can strike him.  Hurt and enraged, the snake attacks, too angry
to notice his own wounds, until the moment comes for the hedgehog to
unroll and start a leisurely meal, from the tail upwards.  I have never
had the good fortune to see such a combat, but I live in hopes.




Eternities of Kitchen Garden

The conservatism of our island race seems to begin with our vegetables.
Rows and rows of cabbages, rows and rows of sprouts....  The sameness
of kitchen gardens appals the thoughtful epicure looking out of railway
carriage windows.  However ill-informed a gardener, his eye never
lights upon a plant he cannot instantly identify.  He may well ask if
enterprise is totally lacking, the sense of adventure entirely dead,
among these cultivators of the homely plot?  The answer is: They are.

Yet there is no reason why the amateur epicure should go unsatisfied.
Variety can be his for a few pence and a little extra trouble; not many
pence and not much trouble.  He grows cabbages already, does he, in his
own kitchen garden patch?  Then why not grow the red cabbage as well as
the green?  There exists a theory in this country that red cabbage is
meant for pickling and for pickling only, a theory demonstrably
fallacious.  He grows potatoes: then why not vary the floury English
kinds with some handfuls of the French, which may be obtained under
such charming names as Belle de Juillet, and which are of a far better
and firmer consistency?  He grows tomatoes, no doubt, but has he tried
the fruit tomato, something like a myrobolan plum to look at, red or
yellow?  Has he tried cooking the young shoots of the common hop, or of
the poke-weed, both of which resemble asparagus?  Has he tried eating
his vegetable marrows when they are four or five inches long, instead
of letting them grow into watery giants fit for nothing but the local
flower-show?  (The more he picks, the more they will crop.)  Has he
given up an odd corner to growing sorrel, that weed demanding no care,
which may be picked as early as February and used either like spinach
or as a soup?  (_soupe  l'oseille_).  Has he any globe artichokes, as
handsome in grey-green leaf as they are useful as a vegetable?  All
these are simple, but a step forward in ambition and the possession of
a warm greenhouse will give him Indian corn on the cob, also the
succulent egg-plant (aubergine) and even pimento if he cares for it.

This list is a short one and is really designed only to send the
kitchen gardener back to the catalogues where he will find further
suggestions and also instructions.  Our nurserymen, some of them, seem
to be getting more enterprising, even if their customers have not yet
followed their example.  The most engaging suggestion which I have come
across, however, hails from France.  It is called 'Innocent surprises
for the salad', and by means of a few packets of seed enables you to
grow fruits charmingly deceptive as caterpillars, snails, worms, and
hedgehogs.


[Illustration: Kitchen garden]




Better though not Bigger Fruit

Writing about vegetables reminds me of several grievances I hold
against fruit-growers also.  In many of her counties England is very
definitely a fruit-growing country; witness the clouds of blossom which
float over miles of orchard during April and May.  Late frosts,
hailstorms, and lack of sun are of course the unconquerable enemies,
but although we may never hope to rival the jewelled, Mantegna-like
swags and garlands of southerly climates--those lemons, those oranges,
those grapes, those apricots, all so rich, heavy, and glowing--we still
contrive to make a fair show both with our blossom in the spring and
our country-cheeked apples and cherries in the late summer.  There are
moments when I feel I would not exchange all the groves of grape-fruit
and peaches in California for the sight of an English orchard, its
boughs weighted down with fruit and all the pleasant cheerful business
of picking going on.

[Illustration: Strawberry]

But to return to my grievance.  I do wonder why the amateur
fruit-grower in this on the whole favoured country should content
himself with the meagre variety he allows his garden to provide.
Gooseberries--yes, they are very well, and their hairy paunches explode
agreeably against the palate when pressed by the tongue.
Raspberries--they are very well too, especially, as somebody remarked,
for the first hundred times.  Currants, too, red, black, and white, are
very good, particularly when damped in their bunches and then dipped in
castor sugar.  But the amateur's garden will do much better for him
than that, if he gives it the chance.  Has he grown the pink currant?
Probably not.  Has he discovered the Alpine strawberry, for which he
will ungrudgingly pay an exorbitant price when it appears on the menu
as _Fraises des bois_ on his continental holiday?  If he hasn't, let me
tell him that in the Alpine strawberry (which is quite as easy to grow
as any other strawberry) he will find a fruit in every way superior to
the rather woody little berry provided as _Fraises des bois_--larger,
less 'seedy', more luscious altogether, and with the advantage of a
longer fruiting season than the ordinary strawberry, lasting, in fact,
well into the autumn.  Has he tried figs against a south wall?  It is a
mistake to think that outdoor figs will ripen only in southern Europe;
they will ripen perfectly in the southern counties in an average
English summer.  Given the protection of glass (unheated) they will
even provide two crops during the year.  Peaches and nectarines, also,
are too rarely planted, yet they fruit exuberantly against a wall
exposed to the sun.  Any house, however small, can supply such a wall;
its owner would be better advised to plant a peach or a nectarine
against it than the tangle of Dorothy Perkins or American Pillar under
which such walls are usually disguised.


[Illustration: Figs]

[Illustration: Grapes]




The Vineyards of England

England had her vineyards once, so there seems to be no reason why she
should not have them again.  They enjoy the prestige of mention in
Domesday Book, and they grew on the south slopes of the North Downs.
They have long since receded into history, and the descendants of our
original vintagers have quite given up the idea of growing the grape
vine now for their own benefit.  Here and there a solitary vine exists
to provide its bunches annually, which in due course are turned into an
excruciatingly nasty drink labelled 'Home-made wine' by cottage-wives,
equivalent to other home-made wines such as 'cowslip' and
'elder-berry', whose names carry a charmingly old-world suggestion so
long as the decoction remains in the bottle, but not once it has left
the bottle for the glass.

In spite of this scepticism taught by experience, I see no reason why
grape-vines should not still be grown more freely out-of-doors in the
south of England.  Even if we refrain from making our own wine, there
is a certain satisfaction in heaping a plate with some dark bunches,
however tasteless, however watery, of our own growing.  The names alone
of hardy vines provide an ornament to the garden; they remind one
vaguely of the troubadours and the Crusades: Primavere Frontignan,
Muscatel, Muscadine, Black Prince.  The leaves in themselves are very
beautiful, both in design and colour--bright green in the spring, dark
red in the autumn; what more could be asked of any leaf?  I used to dry
the most brilliant and perfectly shaped ones between blotting-paper
pressed under two volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, after which
they used to lie about in the unhappy way of things which have neither
use nor a place of their own, until such time as an impatient
schoolroom maid, saying she couldn't put up with my dust-traps any
longer, would throw them all into the fire.




Scrape

In conversation with a farmer friend, I recently learnt of the
existence of this complaint--not to be confused with scrapie, which, as
all readers are no doubt well aware, is due to a small parasite or
sarcocyst lodging in the ovine muscular system.  No.  The complaint
called scrape has a far more endearing origin than a mere parasitic
insect producing excessive itchiness and consequent loss of wool.  It
is nothing less than homesickness; it occurs only in sheep pining for
their native land.

[Illustration: Young cuckoo]

The native land, in this case, happens to be the Highlands of Scotland.
You cannot, it appears, buy Highland sheep and bring them to the south
of England without their becoming infected with this most inconvenient
disease.  The odd thing about it is that the first generation does not
suffer; it is only in the lambs that the homesickness begins to work.
They start by pawing the ground uneasily (hence the name scrape), they
pine; and if not speedily restored to their ancestral hills they die.
The only remedy, according to my friend, is to cross the breed with a
southern ram, when the North apparently agrees to settle down
comfortably with the South.  What an example for Queen Elizabeth.  If
only she had known about scrape, she would certainly have arranged an
English marriage for Mary Queen of Scots.

[Illustration: Homesick sheep]




Flora & Fauna

[Illustration: Blackbird's nest]

All nature is explosive now with the frenzy of production.  Every
morning it becomes more necessary to discover what has happened during
the night.  Lambs appear, calves appear, nests are made, eggs are laid,
leaves develop, flowers open.  Already a vixen has removed a litter of
cubs from their home in too close proximity to the house, carrying them
one by one by the scruff as a cat will carry kittens or a squirrel her
young, trotting seriously with them to a safer spot.  Few babies, I
suppose, enjoy a more unsettled nursery than some fox-cubs, and the
habit of constant _dmnagement_ must become part of their
psychological make-up at a very early age.  The smell of man is
intolerable to a fox, and any suspected approach to an earth will lead
to instant removal.  I appreciate this misgiving, but still am sorry
that the vixen should have found it necessary to go away.  My chickens
are so carefully wired in that she could have brought up her family in
peace.  Unluckily, one can explain such things to animals even less
than one can to human beings.

How often, indeed, one regrets the impossibility of coming to a
reasonable understanding with the animal world.  If only I could say to
a conference of jays and magpies, "Look here, I will gladly supply you
with a daily ration of ordinary ducks' eggs, if in return you will
agree to ignore the eggs of my precious Carolina ducks from whom I
particularly want to breed, all would be well.  It would also be much
better for the jays and magpies, since I should not then be obliged to
shoot them.  If I could address a labour of moles and ask them merely
to refrain from tunnelling their palace under the fritillaries, giving
them a free run elsewhere, all would again be well.  They would not
then have to be trapped.  If I could explain to my dogs the exact area
over which they might range with impunity they would then never have to
be kept on a leash lest they should stray hunting on my neighbours'
ground.  It is all a very great pity, but how can one hope to
communicate with creatures who have been denied even the gift of speech?

Meanwhile all nature is doing her best.  Everything is growing,
increasing, and preying on something else.  Even a bantam, emulating
the cuckoo, has turned a blackbird off her nest in order to use it for
her own eggs.  Unfortunately, the bantam being of a larger size, the
nest does not fit, and the appropriation was revealed by the small
omelette dropped on the ground underneath.  Optimism continues to
triumph.  The blackbird has wisely gone off to build elsewhere.
Blackbirds become remarkably bold at this time of the year.  I stood
watching one this morning, having its bath two yards away from me.
Undisturbed by my presence, it perched on the edge of a tub, pecking at
itself and shaking out its wings to the March air.  It seemed to take a
pride in its orange beak and glossy feathers, as though its business
were to make itself as smart, clean, spring-like, male and attractive
as possible.  If once the blackbird recognised its inferiority in
colouring to the Carolina duck whose eggs are eaten by the beauteous
jay, the blackbird might well give up the struggle in competition.  But
as they are native not exotic birds, and as England is on the whole a
sober temperate island, the blackbird still persists, even as the
daffodil still persists, the Lent lily still coming up through the
grasses in the orchard.




Flora

[Illustration: Planting out]

The gardener is as busy as the vixen.  His seedlings are coming up; and
to the gardener his spring flowers are as dear as her cubs to their
mother.  He has taken as much trouble about them, as the wild mother
carrying her babies for two months in her womb; and, even as the wild
mother, he now wants to put them out into a place of safety.

Colour has crept insidiously over the garden during the last fortnight.
Day by day, colour has grown.  The golden curtain of the forsythia is
especially splendid this year.  I do not know why.  I have never pruned
forsythia in the way I am told to prune it, 'cut hard back to the old
wood', in the terms of horticultural wisdom.  Yet never has the
forsythia, the Golden Bell tree, flowered more exuberantly.

The almonds, too, are exuberant, tossing their pink sprays.  A foolish
snobbery puts some people against almonds.  Nothing could be more
mistaken than this form of snobbery which condemns some lovely
flowering trees just because they happen to thrive in suburban gardens.
If a tree is beautiful in itself, it retains its beauty even though it
may have come into common use.  Nothing can be lovelier than the
blossoms of _Amygdalus communis dulcis_ against the pale blue of an
English March sky, unless against the deeper blue of Sicily or Greece.




Fox at Noonday

I recently observed in the correspondence columns of a daily paper a
letter inquiring whether it was usual to perceive a fox approaching the
habitations of man in broad daylight.  I can assure the writer of the
letter that a fox here, where I live, is in the habit of coming close
up to the garden, where men are working, even at noonday.  He is trying
to catch my chickens, and his bravery is extreme.  He dares the
daylight, and he dares us all.  The fox is usually regarded as a
slinky, nocturnal animal, but this particular fox has reversed all my
preconceived ideas.  He must be either very hungry, or very greedy, or
both.  He appears at all hours and throws the poultry into hysterical
consternation.  The pair of guinea-fowl especially go frantic whenever
the fox appears; it is they, in fact, who give notice of his approach
by their insistent cry of "Go back! go back!"  Human vocables are
often, and too imaginatively, attributed to animals and birds; but in
the case of the guinea-fowl it may justifiably be said that they really
do exclaim "Go back! go back!" in so clear a voice as to rebuke human
beings.  One feels snubbed.  The fox, less sensitive perhaps to such
rebukes, does not feel snubbed but carries on with his marauding ways
until the guinea-fowl are driven to take refuge in an oak tree.
Perched on the big boughs, they chatter their "Go back! go back!"
unheeded.

Animals certainly do behave very strangely at times, and not at all in
conformity with their reputed nature.  I have a swan which refuses to
take to the water.  I do not know whether it is a cob or a pen; all I
know is that it is one of the most sociable birds I have ever
encountered, also one of the most disagreeable.  Hissing with temper,
flapping its great wings, it approaches whenever it sees me go out to
garden, and settles down near me with an expression of intense dislike
but a determination to share my company.  Failing me, it sits beside
the donkey.  The other day it tried to follow an old gentleman into his
motor car.  Company it evidently must have, but with the other
water-fowl sailing complacently on the moat it will have nothing to do.

[Illustration: The swan that refused to take to the water]




The Alsatian and the Partridge

Courage is also a characteristic sometimes displayed in unexpected
quarters.  I had heard tales of a lapwing attacking a sparrow-hawk, and
of a partridge's reckless bravery in the defence of her young, but
never until recently had I watched the scene myself.  The first
indication I had was the complete and sudden rout of an Alsatian dog,
whom I saw flying for refuge across a field, ears back, his tail
between his legs, pursued by a small brown bird which tried to peck him
as he ran.  He reached me panting; but the partridge, not yet having
vented her full fury upon him, ignored my presence and continued to
batter him with beak and wing.  He could have crunched her into one
mouthful, but making no attempt to defend himself he crouched to the
ground, laughable and harassed, until I finally chased the savage
little bird away.  She went off to collect her chicks, but it was some
time before the dog would be tempted to enter the field again.

Alsatians have a bad name and deserve it.  I make this admission
reluctantly, since I love the handsome pair who so vehemently and
unnecessarily defend my person, my house, and my garden.  I should be
grateful to them for pinning down a burglar in the isolated cottage I
inhabit by night, but when they leap towards the wrist of an
inoffensive guest who civilly advances to shake hands with me on
arrival, I feel that their enthusiasm in my defence is not only
misplaced but perilous.  I may have few friends, but I don't want those
few to get bitten.

My guests seldom like Martin and Martha.  They see them only as
growling wolves that have to be kept on the leash until they have
accepted the presence of the stranger.  Once they have accepted it they
become friendly.  They will then go and rest their noses on his knee in
a manner which is rather alarming after his first reception.  It is in
vain that I explain that Alsatians are extremely sensitive dogs and
that they probably wish to make amends for their initial mistake: he
pats their heads with a still tentative and nervous gesture.

I am telling the truth when I say that they are sensitive.  People who
tell stories about their dogs are always bores, but at the risk of
being a bore I must endorse the accepted belief that Alsatians are
amongst the most sensitive and intelligent of dogs, especially
receptive to the mood and intentions of the master.  At moments they
appear to be possessed of a power of telepathy unknown to most humans.
Thus, although most dogs recognise the significance of luggage from
force of association and realise that one is going away when they see
the suit-case brought out, Alsatians are the only dogs I have ever
known who sense an imminent departure even before any signs of it
appear, whether in the form of luggage or unfamiliar clothes.  Ears are
laid back, and a black misery descends.  Martha, who is the more
temperamental of the two, stands shuddering from head to tail, and will
not be reassured.  Martin, more practical, does his utmost to escape,
since he knows that my absence will mean their being shut into the
kennel.  How do they know?  Their knowledge can come only from the fact
that in some curious way they are enabled to read my mind.  And when I
do return, and release them, they crowd against me and tell me
whimpering stories of the anguish they have endured.  These stories go
on for a long time, and really seem to be a desire to express something
in a speech which is denied them.  It is not merely the welcome one
expects from one's dog after absence; it is a prolonged saga of sorrow
which is apt to be renewed hours later whenever the dreadful memory of
the separation revives.

Telepathy apart, their reasoning intelligence is also noteworthy.  Thus
Martin has learnt how to work the various latches on the doors.  He
knows that one type of latch has to be poked up by the nose, another
type pressed down by the paw.  He must have worked this out for himself
since I have never taught him.  Indeed, I would never have taught him
so inconvenient a trick, which means only that I can now never shut him
into any room without turning the key upon him.  Martha, in spite of
his example, has never learnt this trick, although in some ways more
intelligent than he; in this, as in many other instances, Alsatians are
noticeably individualistic: each dog's intelligence is no guide to the
special form of cleverness he will develop.  I find, however, that both
of them exhibit the faculty of association to a degree which would
rejoice the apostles of Behaviourism.  The moment they hear me put the
cap on my fountain-pen they stretch and get up, knowing that that is
the signal for going out.  It is a tiny sound, and I have often tried
to cheat them by screwing it on very silently.  They are never
deceived.  For a long time I thought that their sense of hearing must
be preternaturally acute; I then discovered that they had also observed
the preliminary gesture of taking off my spectacles.

They are thus strange dogs to deal with.  The mixture of reason and
emotional temperament is confusing, contradictory, and leads one to the
conclusion that all Alsatian dogs ought to be severely trained and
disciplined.  One cannot allow a dangerous animal to think for itself
beyond a certain point.  One cannot allow large dogs to decide for
themselves which of one's friends they will bite and which they will
not bite.  Such temperamental sensibility must be directed into
habit-forming channels of routine, and as Alsatians adopt habits of
routine very readily a good habit is as easily formed as a bad one.
Train them, in fact, never to bite anyone at all.  But then what are
they to do when they meet the burglar?  Wag their tails and lick his
hands?  To differentiate would surely be putting a strain on powers of
discrimination even beyond the reach of an Alsatian.

All this is saying much about their nuisance-value but nothing about
their beauty.  sthetically, they are sharp, clean, fine.  An Alsatian
taking a leap over a gate is like a young athlete in perfect training;
a javelin thrower, a discobolus, an archer.  For this reason, I less
like to see them in the characteristic scramble over a higher obstacle;
I like the long, stream-line clear jump, and then the clean quick
landing and the immediate stretching of strong limbs across the field.
Alsatians seem to possess an instinctive feeling for their own
decorative beauty.

A son of Martin and Martha who still has the loose legs of puppyhood,
is so pale and silvery in colour that when he hangs with crossed paws
out of a mullioned window, surveying the landscape, he looks like a
ghost-dog mounting guard in the casement of some rose-red
pre-Raphaelite manor.  This habit of his is not inherited or copied
from either of his parents, but is entirely his own invention.  Or does
it descend to him from some ancestor in the tales of the brothers Grimm?

I rather hope that these most unprofessional notes will not attract the
attention of the Alsatian League, of which I am a member.




Buying a Farm

I have just bought a farm.  This sounds very grand and rich and
capitalistic, but I am assured by competent advisers that investment in
good farming land is as sound a proposition to-day as stocks and
shares.  I find it very difficult to take any interest in stocks and
shares, but I do find it very easy to take an interest in farm-land.
It provides me with enormous pleasure to think that instead of owning
some 3 per cent New Zealand Stock, which means nothing to me, I can own
two hundred acres of my own county of Kent.  Those two hundred acres
are something tangible; something which I can walk over and feel my
own.  They represent something real, not something merely set down on
paper, not such dull things as New Zealand Stock or Conversion Loan.  I
feel then that I can say with Traherne, "When I came into the country,
and being seated among silent trees and meads, and hills, had all my
time in my own hands, I resolved to spend it all, whatever it cost me,
in search of happiness, and to satiate that burning thirst which nature
had enkindled in me from youth.  In which I was so resolute, that I
chose rather to live upon ten pounds a year, and to go in leather
clothes, and feed upon bread and water, so that I might have all my
time clearly to myself, than to keep many thousands per annum in an
estate of life where my time would be devoured in care and labour."

I take an absurd pleasure in owning land.  It is not for any
ostentatious reason, or because I want to be a big landlord; but simply
because I love the fields and the orchards so much that I want to feel
them safely mine.  Safe from any builder-aggressor.  Besides, the terms
of the lease delight me.  It delights me to read that all the
hereditaments coloured pink on the map are mine; that one-half of the
soil of one-half of the bed of the stream known as the Hammer Stream is
mine; that all timber-like trees, tellers and saplings, all minerals
flints gravel clay marl springs wells and water-courses, nests, eggs,
hares and wild-fowl, are mine; that all hedges shall be properly
slashed, laid, and trimmed in a workmanlike manner, nor the size or
shape of any field be rendered different without my consent.  All this
pleases me out of all proportion, and persuades me into thinking that I
live in the England of the Paston Letters.

[Illustration: After the haymaking]




Buying a Motor Mower

I have also bought something else which pleases me far less.  For many
years I resisted the importation of the thing into my garden, but it
has at last arrived.  For a long time I am sure that my gardener
suspected me of avarice: motor mowers are expensive things to buy.  I
think I convinced him finally of the purity of my motives when I was
offered one as a free gift, and rejected it.  He then thought me not
stingy, but mad.

However, he has now his way.  I have laid out my thirty pieces of gold
and secured the enemy in exchange.  Everybody on the place, except me,
is delighted.  They take delight in pointing out how much time the
thing saves, and that one man can now do the mowing in a morning and an
afternoon, whereas it used to take two men two mornings and two
afternoons to do it with the old pony.  I see that.  But I do regret
the old pony.

The old pony came here as a beautiful glossy chestnut cob.  She is
called Gracie Fields because she graces the fields (not my joke).  For
her weekly mowing she used to wear leather boots, which were left
neatly laid out in the pattern of her feet, four chubby objects waiting
beside the mower during the dinner-hour.  Then would come the clank of
the ancient machine as they started off again, and the summer sound of
the whirring knives; the smell of freshly cut grass as the heaps rose
higher on sheets of sacking.  All this has gone now, replaced by the
chugging of the efficient little motor, pursued by the garden-boy
walking far faster than he has ever been known to walk before and
looking absurdly as though he were pushing some wild sort of pram.

There is a certain magnificence about big agricultural machinery; even
a hay-elevator has its beauty, and last year we had a hired
gyro-tiller, which prowled from farm to farm and tore up the pastures
with controlled and methodical savagery.  The exaggeration of its
massive power made it a monster of benevolent destruction; it convulsed
the clods behind it until the field looked like a choppy sea.  It has a
miniature cousin, for use in gardens, which will dig a bed for you in
less time than it takes to fetch the spade from the tool-shed and from
which all dignity is totally lacking.  Machines, to be impressive, must
either be exceedingly delicate or exceedingly large; there can be no
half-measures; thus the motor mower and the hand tiller are rather
comic and certainly vulgar.  I do not think that my gardener has heard
of the hand tiller yet, but even if he does hear of it I am determined
that it shall never take its place here beside the motor mower.




Small but Vigorous

Certain small animals seem to have been created with a fury of energy
enough to do credit to any dictator.  On another plane of life they
might have accomplished anything.  Luckily for humanity, they are
limited by their size to relatively harmless activities.  One of them,
indeed, the common shrew, which may be heard squeaking either with
excitement or temper in the long grasses, is one of the smallest
mammals in existence, but his minute framework in no way limits the
ardour with which he sets about his business.  This business is usually
concerned with the obtaining of food, for the shrew is one of those
unfortunate creatures who must eat continuously and enormously.  It is
not so much that he is greedy, as that if he neglects his appetite he
simply dies.  No wonder that he is in so desperate a hurry when he
knows that his last meal must be followed by another one within the
hour, and that his long nose must lose no time in smelling it out.
Even at night he cannot rest, for he cannot stoke himself up for the
hours of darkness with a particularly large and late dinner: he is so
constituted that he must eat often.  Six times his own weight in food
will see him safely round the clock, but any deprivation or delay will
soon reduce him to a pathetic little corpse.  If you have the time and
inclination to spend most of the day hunting for worms and insects, you
may keep a tame shrew and impress your friends by the readiness with
which he will snatch food from your hand, but be under no delusion:
this is not because he loves or trusts you, it is merely his extreme
urgency leaving no room for fear.

[Illustration: Grasses]

Another hearty eater who is afflicted with a similarly precipitate
temperament is that bane of gardeners, the mole.  Larger and heavier
than the shrew, he still demands at least the equivalent of his own
weight in food each day.  But consider the exercise he takes, and the
violence he displays in taking it.  It is enough to make anybody
hungry.  Semi-blind as he is, we might expect him to go about his work
half-heartedly as a sluggard, but on the contrary he rushes at it as
though a troop of devils were after him.  Digging furiously, his track
may often be watched rising in weals and mounds across the newly-raked
seed-bed, tracing his progress underground.  Physically the little
miner is beautifully adapted for his curious mode of life; his front
paws are amazingly strong and provided with sharp claws and an extra
bone; his ears non-existent though his whole body is, one might say, an
ear; his eyes so deeply buried in his fur that they can come to no harm
while he tunnels; his fur so disposed that there is no 'wrong way' in
which it can be brushed up, a very useful asset when its owner may have
to retire backwards along a narrow passage.  His teeth are sharp and
numerous, as you will learn if you attempt to pick him up; his nose
pointed and well designed for use as a kind of trowel; in fact the only
weak point in his whole equipment lies in the fact that he dies
immediately from a rap on that useful snout.




A Model of Paternity

When I was a child I used to collect sticklebacks in April and keep
them in one of those square glass tanks mysteriously associated with
electric light plants, first putting a few inches of sand at the bottom
and some waving pond-weeds.  The stickleback is an ornamental little
fish, although he comes from nowhere more exotic than our native brooks
and ponds: he flashes red, green, and blue as he darts in the water,
bristling with the curious thorn-like weapons that give him his name
and enable him to vent his rage upon other males of his species.  For
the stickleback, like the shrew and the mole, is small, energetic and
quarrelsome.  His habits are even more interesting than his appearance.
He is a born father, packed with paternal love in the whole length of
his three inches.  His mate, in fact, is allowed no part whatsoever in
the care of the offspring, beyond the sole function which he himself
cannot perform.

It is he who prepares the nest, first rolling himself in the mud in the
bottom of his pond or stream to scoop a suitable hollow.  In this
hollow he carefully builds the foundations of his nursery, which, when
finished, is something like a woman's muff, as round, as neat and as
cosy, but only one inch wide and with only one entrance instead of two.
He has carried a lot of leaves and stringy matter to make it, and has
stuck the whole thing together with a sort of liquid glue that he
personally exudes, extremely busy, painstaking, and anxious.  Here,
however, his single-handed preparations break down.  He cannot lay
eggs.  For this menial purpose the services of a lady have to be
engaged, or perhaps we should say that the lady has to be coerced,
since she shows no enthusiasm for the task but has to be fetched and
piloted and even steered into the entrance.  Even then she does not lay
enough eggs, but has to be given two or more successors.  The
stickleback takes no further interest in his helpers once they have
done what he wanted.  They are allowed to swim away and pursue their
irresponsible life in the pleasant shallows.  He, preoccupied, fusses
round his nest, keeps a careful watch on the eggs, stirs the water
softly with his fins to produce a current, and fights off any possible
invader.  No trouble is too great for this little model father.

[Illustration: The stream]




One Afternoon

[Illustration: The big pig]

At 5 p.m. I was listening to the first report of Herr Hitler's speech
to the Reichstag, but by 3.30 p.m. I had gotten myself with relief out
into the very different atmosphere of the open fields, the quietly busy
fields, busy with their April life.  Corn was springing, larks were
singing, lambs and piglets being born.  On my way I fell in with Henry,
the man who looks to the sheep and pigs.  He is a dryly ironical man
with a shrewd estimation of men and animals, comforting himself always
with the warm little bowl of his pipe.  On this particular afternoon he
invited me to accompany him to the pen where a gilt was in process of
farrowing--'pigging', as Henry more realistically calls it.  Three
little rosy nudities had already appeared, and Henry routed out a
fourth from the straw, so weak that it could scarcely stand, as he set
it on its feet.  Its shell-pink body faded swiftly from pink to cream,
a startling transformation, as rapid as though a vein had been opened
and the blood made to flow.  The tiny thing became almost transparent;
wavered once; staggered once; fell over; and died without a sigh.
Henry, also without a sigh, threw it on to a rubbish heap.  This little
event of birth and death over, he began to wonder (as though he were
thinking aloud to himself) how many piglets he could transfer in
fostership from sow to sow: some sows produced too many, some too few;
some sows with a big litter, fourteen or fifteen, had too few 'deals',
meaning dugs; others, the young sows, the gilts, might give birth to
only three or four, and therefore might take over the responsibility
for more mature and prolific mothers.  I listened to Henry cogitating
these matters, working out his problem of supply and demand: the supply
of birth-rate, the demand for food.  All this took place under an
orchard flushed with blossom as pink as the flesh of the healthy little
new-born pigs.

He then went on to show me the sheep he had put to eat off a crop of
winter-proud wheat.  I was no longer really listening; I was
remembering the herdsmen of the unknown Elizabethan:

  All day their flocks each tendeth;
  At night they take their rest;
  More quiet than who sendeth
  His ship into the East,
  Where gold and pearl are plenty,
  But getting, very dainty.


Henry represents that herdsman to me, is a source of great pleasure,
though I suspect that he sometimes regards me as a nuisance with my
questions and the inexplicable interest I take in matters which to him
are all in the day's work.  Thus I am amused by things which to him are
not amusing at all: merely an inevitable bother and interruption of his
daily round.  It does not seem to him in the least pleasing that one of
his cows should wade across the stream on to the neighbouring farmer's
meadow, leaving two distressed twin calves behind her on the other
bank; he goes about the task of getting her back, calling "Lass!
Lass!" in a patient voice, for he knows that to show impatience towards
an animal is worse than useless; but to him there is no touching
anxiety in the worried mother or the worried calves trotting up and
down, unable to rejoin one another however fain they may be to do so.
As I sat watching Henry at this occupation, I discerned two parallel
lines of string floating on the current of the stream.  Like Time, they
seemed to have no beginning and no end, and I amused myself speculating
on what their purpose could possibly be: were they perhaps some
traditional country form of fishing, unknown to me?  If I pulled, would
a net rise to the surface several fields away?  I pulled gingerly, but
there was no resistance and nothing but yards and yards of wet twine
came into my hands.  "That?" said Henry, coming back after restoring
Lass to her hungry children, "That's the balls of hop-twine we put into
the water upstream to shrink them, come unrolled in the floods.  I
shall have to ball them all up again." So that is one of the unexpected
things Henry has to do.  When I remember that the twine used every year
in a forty-acre hop-garden would reach from Kent to Edinburgh (so it is
said) I do not wonder that he is less amused by such contretemps than I.

[Illustration: 'Copper's' pigs]

Now why, I often ask myself, should these ordinary things give me so
deep and lasting a satisfaction?  Why should Henry's simple expressions
move me more profoundly than any Dictator's rhetoric? which, after all,
is likely to affect my life and the lives of my countrymen in far
greater degree.  Such things cannot be set into their right proportion;
they must always return to the question of personal temperament.  I
sometimes think that the love of nature and the natural seasonal life
may attain the proportions of a vice; may obsess one to the extent of
desiring nothing else, nothing beyond: a drowning, a lethargy, an
escape, an indolence and an evasion.

[Illustration: Ploughing]




Bluebells

Had Y.Y. not stolen my thunder in _The New Statesman_ last week, I
should to-day be writing about the bluebells now spreading across the
woods in clouds of low and horizontal smoke.  They recall the smoke of
autumn bonfires, only clinging to the ground instead of mounting
through the trees, drifting slowly across the russet branches.  Y.Y.
did, however, steal my thunder very thoroughly, including an
impeachment of the bluebell picker 'who comes home carrying a bunch of
bluebells on his handlebar'.  So I desist.

Thunder, I surmise, is not the correct word.  Neither Y.Y. nor I could
possibly be described as thunderous.  I have met Y.Y. once only in my
life, but from a constant perusal of his essays I imagine him to be a
temperamentally pensive, secluded person, with tastes totally unsuited
to the present day.  I can imagine him very happy as the young Andrew
Marvell at Appleton House, submitting patiently to the hours his
tutorial duties imposed, escaping gratefully to the green shades beside
the river Wharfe in his free afternoons.  How deeply I find myself in
agreement!  The older I grow, the milder and more contemplative become
my inclinations.  I suppose it is because, as life becomes more and
more confusing and alarming, I try to simplify it into the enduring
terms I understand, which supplies the answer as to why I prefer Henry
and the orchards and the cotes and all that they imply.




Eclipse

[Illustration: The Greek tortoise]

Many, if not most, people must have observed how frequently happenings
occur in series.  There exists a superstition that things happen in
threes--you break one object and then immediately break two others,
although you may not have broken anything for years.  I do not know on
what ground this superstition is based, but although I try
(unsuccessfully) not to be superstitious, there are still certain
beliefs to which I pay attention.  One of those beliefs, corroborated
by experience, is that although for weeks and even months one's own
personal life may have remained uneventful, it will suddenly and
without warning produce event after event, all in a rush, all in one
day.  That these events should be on a big scale or small does not
affect the question.  The point is, that a number of things happen
suddenly within twenty-four hours.  Doves enter the window at dawn and
sit cooing on the window-cill; a girl gets engaged; a boy gets a job;
one hears the cuckoo for the first time this spring; the swans lay
eggs; two partridges are discovered to be nesting in the orchard;
eighteen bantam chicks hatch out; green woodpeckers carve a hole in an
apple-tree; a puppy chews the Greek tortoise, and the sun goes into
eclipse.

A busy day for those who enjoy a quiet life.

The sun went gently, not dramatically, into his eclipse.  There was
none of that darkened drama which attends the total phenomenon.  The
sun merely crept, rather cautiously on this occasion, behind the moon's
shadow for three-quarters of an hour, allowing his sinking majesty to
be impaired by no more than a bite out of a schoolboy's slice of
bread-and-butter or the Mad Hatter's out of his teacup.  It was not an
impressive eclipse, as eclipses go.  But even a partial eclipse, I
discovered, may offer unexpected effects.  I was thankful that unlike
the Chilcotin Indians I need not feel obliged to tuck up my robes and,
leaning on a stave, walk round in circles until the sun was once more
in safety.  I was thankful that I might squint simply through a smoked
glass, standing outside the kitchen door, sharing the glass with other
members of my small household.  We passed it from hand to hand, from
eye to eye.  Looking westward at the sinking bitten sun, other objects
came strangely into our darkened view: a flowering tree of red prunus,
transmuted into a tree of a sinister loveliness unknown to any earthly
botanist; and Kentish oast-houses coming into the small dark picture
too--those oast-houses which always suggest witches' hats even in
ordinary daylight, but which seen through a smoked glass with an
eclipse of the sun going on behind them take on an alarmingly
Sabbatical character.  The visiting moon did indeed leave something
remarkable that day.




Evening after Eclipse

The effect of smoky light produced by the eclipse extended itself into
the starlit hours.  I went out, late, and unexpectantly glanced up into
the quince-tree.  The ring-doves who had sat cooing on my window-cill
early in the morning were now roosting in the quince, their feathers
dappled by starlight; the leaves of the quince were dappled by
starlight too.  The stars of heaven were bright beyond.  The leaves
were as sharply defined as in an Umbrian landscape by Perugino.  I
could not have believed, and do not expect anyone else to believe, how
lovely were the doves, the leaves, and the stars.  It was one of those
visions which one will never forget but can never hope to communicate
to anyone who has not seen the same thing at the same moment with the
same eyes; a rare moment, a rare vision, unshared, private, and
precious.

Meanwhile, the romance of the betrothed girl was going on; the
excitement of the boy with his new job; the majestic calm of the swans
taking turns on their nest; and the pain of the little Greek tortoise
with his shell bleeding where the puppy had chewed it.  Evening sank.
The sun had disappeared beyond the horizon in an eclipse greater than
the nibble of eclipse he had suffered earlier in the evening.  Night
sank.  Peace came.

Then the warrior searchlights started to joust in the sky.

[Illustration: Outline of the oast]




May

At this season of the year, when so much in nature happens so quickly,
I find it difficult to keep my head.  I surmise that such a phrase may
read as an affectation; yet I protest with all my sincerity that I do
try to set down on paper as simply and directly as possible the
feelings by which I am moved.  It is a hard thing to do; hard not to
appear either exaggerated or mawkish, precious or inexact.  It is very
difficult indeed to write about nature and the natural processes
without getting bogged in morasses of sentimental language.  It is
difficult for any honest writer to express his feelings in a way which
will convince himself, let alone his readers, of his original
sincerity; and if it is hard enough to be starkly honest towards
ourselves even in our own private thoughts, to arrive without
embellishment or gloss at what we really mean, the writer alone knows
how far harder it is to be faithful on paper.  Something comes between
the writer and his pen; the passionate feeling, the urgency to record,
emerge as a blob of ink, a smudge, a decoration.  As Orlando
discovered, green in nature is one thing, green in literature another.
Thus if I set down that I have to-day seen apple-blossom strewn by wind
on grass, I am stating a fact, and if I should happen to re-read my own
words in future years (which is unlikely) they will probably recall
that vision, as fresh and bright in memory as on that morning in the
month of May.  If, on the other hand, I start to expand my statement,
in the hope of evoking a similar vision in the mind's eye of another, I
shall immediately find myself drawn into semi-falsities, into truth
wrapped round with untruth; I shall immediately begin to search for
what the apple-blossom was 'like'; I shall find confetti or snowflakes
as a convenient comparison; I shall hit on the word shell-pink to
express the delicacy, the papery delicacy of the scattered petals; I
shall begin to 'write'; but really, if I can be sufficiently severe
with myself, I shall put my pen through all those blobs of ink, those
wordy words, and cut myself back to the short phrase about
apple-blossom strewn by wind on grass.  It ought to be evocative
enough, without amplification; but such is the impuissance of the human
mind that it requires expansion before the experience of one person can
be communicated to another.  Or, at any rate, it requires a magic which
mere prose is unable to provide.  This is where poetry comes in; where
poetry is, or should be, so far more evocative, more suggestive, than
prose.  Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with
poetry which says so much more in shorter time.

Writing is indeed a strange and difficult profession.

[Illustration: Sky]




Farmers and Beauty

In this connexion I have a quarrel with Dr. Joad.  To me, he is not the
distinguished lecturer of Birkbeck College, or even C.E.M. Joad, but
simply Cyril, a puzzled philosopher trying to arrange the complications
of life to suit his own ideas--an impossible attempt.  My friend Cyril,
then, who blows in on me occasionally with a knapsack on his back--for
he is a confirmed hiker--writes several books every year and contrives
to enrage me in each one.  In his latest work he makes some remarks
which I must challenge.  He knows no farmer, he says, who cares for
beauty.  The English country-side, he says, is admittedly very
beautiful, but who finds it to be so?  The townsman.  It is, he says,
the townsman rather than the countryman who sensitively perceives the
country.  Pressing his argument, he instances Shakespeare, Richard
Jefferies, and W.H. Hudson as writers on nature who have spent most of
their lives in towns; in fact he goes so far as to call them townsmen,
which they certainly never were by origin, but only in later life.  I
quarrel with him on all these points.

My experience of farmers (and labourers, too) is that many have a deep
though inarticulate appreciation of the beauty of nature.  They may not
be endowed with Joad's gift of expression, but the silent contentment
they bring to the smoking of their evening pipe as they lean over a
gate when the day's work is done, surveying a clean orchard or a good
crop coming up, is at least as deep as Joad's who has not had the
bother, sweat, risk, and expense of spraying the orchard or sowing the
crop.  I deny absolutely that the countryman has no sense of the beauty
he has himself (inadvertently and centennially) created.  Of course he
takes a more practical view than Joad.  He surveys his acres with an
eye to caterpillars, weevils, and weeds.  That does not imply blindness
to the beauty of his landscape.  It implies only that
Joad-in-the-country has nothing to do but to observe the landscape and
think of his next book, whereas the countryman in his rare hour of
leisure has the double job of enjoying his acres and of wondering
whether he has done the best he can by them for their own benefit and
his own necessary profit.  I freely admit that the real countryman's
enjoyment of beauty may not be 'pure'; it is associated with cognisant
reflections; less detached than that of the townsman who stands outside
it; more intimately connected; it represents the difference, let us
say, between marriage and romance.  What Joad overlooks, however, is
that marriage and romance are not necessarily disparate.

[Illustration: The village]




Fishing

On a calm, warm evening with bats and flies about, just the happy sort
of evening to pull a trout towards sunset out of the lake, I went down
hopefully equipped with rod and landing-net; took out the boat; and
found myself confronted by a large wet sheep.

The poor thing had been driven into the water by a dog--my own dog,
suddenly gone gay.  Fortunately it was also one of my own sheep, one of
that unusual horned variety known as Jacob's sheep, so that I need feel
no sense of guilt or apprehension towards an injured farmer.  I did,
however, feel a sense of responsibility towards the animal itself and
rowed towards it in a spirit of rescue, discovering then (not for the
first time) how very difficult it is to help animals in distress, so
profound and instinctive is their mistrust of one's good intentions.
Alarmed by my approach it made efforts to swim, and indeed did very
nobly as a swimmer, crossing the lake as I rowed after it, swimming
desperately in the effort to escape me whom it took to be yet another
enemy.  I caught it up on the farther shore, where it stuck in the
shallows, enabling me to lasso it neatly round the horns with the
boat's painter; I had no other rope, so had to sacrifice the painter
with my knife.  We sat contemplating one another, the sheep and I, I
still wishing to fish but entangled instead with this poor tiresome
creature, unwillingly looped to it by a rope, faced by the need of
getting it safely back to land.  It looked at me with vacant eyes;
seldom had I seen so unhelpful a victim.  We stared at one another, and
as we stared it sank lower and lower, getting wetter and wetter, until
its fleece billowed out like a Victorian bathing-dress filling with
water, floating on the surface in woolly flounces half buoyant, half
sodden.  Its long tail drifted on the surface behind it, an absurd
sausage.  I tugged at the rope hoping to tow it back to shore, but the
beast, apparently intent on frustrating my friendly purpose, wrapped
its forelegs round a stump of old willow and could not or would not be
budged.  I sat back in the boat thinking how ticklish a problem it was
ever to help people out of their private difficulties, the sheep
meanwhile continuing to contemplate me with the same vacant unhelpful
eyes.  I tugged again; rolled up my sleeve; sank my arm to the elbow;
grasped the all too muscular forelegs; succeeded in unwinding them from
the stump; and eventually rowed off with the sheep in tow, a ludicrous
rodeo that ended in landing the most unexpected fish I ever caught.




More Fishing

Years ago, in Scotland, I used to fish far more successfully.  I think
the trout there must have been less sophisticated; they certainly
showed more willingness to be caught; and as I never found a
half-drowned sheep waiting for me in the loch, my attempts at fishing
were uninterrupted.  I could always be certain of bringing back five or
six trout for breakfast on the following morning.  I shall never forget
the enchantment of those evenings--the walk up to the loch, alone or
with my father, the loosening of the small moored boat, the paddling
out into the platter of still water surrounded by heather hills, the
silence, the privacy, the soft dip of the oars, the soft swish of the
cast, the stillness, the sudden rush of the line, the rasp of the reel,
the rush of the fish, the excitement of waiting with landing-net
poised, the gleam of the tired fish coming to the surface almost ready
to be scooped out of the water yet with enough life left in him to make
one last dash, the beauty of the hills all around us, the final
successful scoop, the twitching speckled body dropped in the bottom of
the boat.  My father was a humane man, but neither he nor I could
resist the zeal of that brief intense struggle with a prey so far
colder and smaller than ourselves.  I have observed that
humanitarianism is deplorably apt to work in ratio to the size and
charm of the victim concerned.  Thus although my father had no
objection to catching trout, nothing would induce him to shoot the
roe-deer in the woods.  Once or twice during the season there were
organised beats which he hated but never had the moral courage to
forbid.  He would take me with him, and together we would stand waiting
in a clearing, he with his gun ready and an unspoken understanding
between us of what he meant to do.  We both liked the woods; we liked
the sounds, the bracken, the birches; we never talked much; even the
dogs stayed quiet; our own quietness seemed to influence them.  Then
from a distance would come the noise of the beaters advancing, and
suddenly a smaller noise--the crack of a twig, the rustling of a
leaf--a frightened little noise, the tremble of a fugitive.  An
interval of silence always seemed to impose itself between the advance
of the beaters and the forerunners of the deer; some moments of
suspense during which the deer and the man with the gun were intimately
and fatally connected.  They came in terror, and he waited, the
murderer filled with secret mercy.  Peering round a tree-trunk came the
first elegant little head, the bright eyes, the tiny horns, the active
arrested hooves, searching for escape down the familiar ways.
Nimbleness paused and peered.  Then he, taking apparently careful aim,
would fire and a scamper of feet would follow.  How had he managed to
miss?  The fruitless report must have scared all deer for a mile round.
Yet he was generally considered as a very good shot.


[Illustration: Fishing]


[Illustration: Silver birches]




Shooting

He did not like big covert drives either, though as a good shot he was
always invited to them, and again owing to a lack of moral courage he
seldom refused.  Propped on our shooting-sticks, he and I would wait at
the edge of a wood, beside the split rod fluttering a bit of rag to
mark his standing.  On those richly golden autumnal afternoons, with
his loader and dog, we must have looked like a photograph in the social
illustrated papers.  I do not think he enjoyed it any more than I did.
There was an excitement, of course, as the birds began to come over,
and a certain satisfaction as the big pheasant suddenly crumpled in the
air, falling with a thud a few yards away; but he always called it
slaughter and would flick the blood from the breast feathers with a
regretful finger.  What he really enjoyed was rough shooting, where he
felt that he and the birds stood a more even chance; he felt that these
were wild birds, not fat semi-tame things expensively bred for the
fashionable sportsman's pleasure; besides, a tramp of ten or fifteen
miles over rough ground and through wet turnips helped to justify the
few brace he could carry home in his own (and my) pockets.  To this day
I can feel the cold wetness of the 'roots' sloshing round my ankles,
then the drying brush of the heather.  His dog and I followed him in
equal obedience.  We never knew if we were going to put up a partridge,
a pheasant, a woodcock, a snipe, or even a grouse.  The element of
chance and difficulty swept all those covert-shooting days from our
souls like a clean wind.  We had no loader with us then, no keeper
expecting a five-pound tip; freedom was ours and the sporting chance.

He was a pleasing man, my father.




Other People's Gardens

There exists, as most persons interested in such matters have by now
discovered, an imaginative and well-organised scheme which enables us
to visit other people's gardens.  In the old days we used to peer
wistfully over a hedge, allured by some gay border, some group of
flowering shrubs, wishing with all our heart that we might penetrate
further and wander unhurried and unescorted through the suggestive
revelation of somebody else's ideas.  Nothing but a shrinking from the
thought of intrusion prevented us from ringing the front-door bell and
asking for the necessary permission, no doubt gladly to be granted,
since all true gardeners are friendly, generous, ungrudging people.
Now, all that is changed.  Our longing need no longer be thwarted, even
by our own delicacy.  In return for one silver shilling laid down on a
table we have the freedom of the most beautiful gardens in England,
magnificent and modest alike.  In return for one shilling we are made
citizens of the most lovely, private, and idealistic of boroughs--the
gardener's own intimate familiar home.

We have been called a nation of shopkeepers; we might with equal
justice be called a nation of gardeners.  The membership-roll of the
Royal Horticultural Society climbs towards forty thousand, a figure
which may not rival the Tail-Waggers, who have now passed the
half-million mark; still, taking the two societies together, gardeners
and dog-lovers, the figures must surely represent something essentially
peaceful and amiable in our national life.  A nation that so profoundly
and extensively loves flowers and dogs must surely have something very
unbellicose in its make-up.  I remember once attending a flower-show in
Berlin, where the principal exhibit was of the most spiky and truculent
forms of cactus, grey-green bayonets, murderous pikes--a horrid symbol,
I thought, at the time, although that was more than ten years ago and
the Fhrer's name only an insignificant whisper.  The second principal
exhibit was an avenue of tombstones, appropriately decorated with
wreaths or bouquets of tin flowers.  In a flash I saw English cottage
gardens; I saw the fortnightly shows at Vincent Square; the
dove-coloured spinsters coming up from the country with their little
note-books, peering closely down into the mealy auriculas, taking
notes, placing their orders rather cautiously since they could not
afford to be unduly extravagant and must cogitate longly over even a
sixpenny packet of seed; then lingering over the flaming azaleas, the
rose-red prunus, all so enticing; and then the _sotto voce_
conversations: "But you know, my dear, one can't _trust_ these
nurserymen; they tell you something is perfectly hardy when of course
it isn't, except perhaps in Devonshire, and anyhow one knows they bring
things on under glass, so how can one order things happily to try out
in one's own garden?"  So, worried and dubious, they go round the halls
at Vincent Square; but at any rate they are dealing with real possible
flowers, not with the sinister cacti and mortuary wreaths of the Berlin
equivalent of our Chelsea show.

This worry and dubiousness is naturally removed when you go round
somebody else's garden.  No fake is possible there: you see things
growing in the open where they have always grown.  There is no question
of not trusting the nurseryman, or of things having been grown for a
specific purpose under glass.  This is the main difference between the
garden and the show.  In the garden you see things growing as they have
grown in their natural way, taking their chance of frost, wind, and
rain.  No spurious advantage has been brought to it except the love and
green fingers of the owner.

[Illustration: Roses]

It is a real experience to open one's garden to the public.  In a sense
you might think it a desecration, a violation of one's patch of private
peace.  'How offensive', you might think, 'to have eight hundred
strangers straggling all over one's very personal property!'  You would
be wrong.  It is a pleasure; even a form of flattery.  It removes all
sense of guilty egoistic pleasure.  You share your personal delight;
the scheme you have built up for ten, twenty years becomes part of the
pleasure of hundreds of inquisitive eager gardeners, makers of beauty.
It is very necessary to have makers of beauty left in a world seemingly
bent on making the most evil ugliness.  These mild, gentle men and
women who invade one's garden after putting their silver token into the
bowl, these true peace-makers, these inoffensive lovers of nature in
her gayest form, these homely souls who will travel fifty miles by bus
with a fox-terrier on a lead, who will pore over a label, taking notes
in a penny note-book--those are some of the people I most gladly
welcome and salute.  Between them and myself a particular form of
courtesy survives, a gardener's courtesy, in a world where courtesy is
giving place to rougher things.

[Illustration: Hollyhocks]




Other People's Ideas

Seeing other people's gardens in this way with the consent and
encouragement of their owners is not only agreeable but valuable.
Other people's ideas always seem better than, perhaps only because they
are different from, one's own.  I have some definite ideas about
gardening myself--for example, I believe in exaggeration; I believe in
big groups, big masses; I am sure that it is more effective to plant
twelve tulips together than to split them into two groups of six; more
effective to concentrate all the delphiniums into one bed, than to dot
them about at intervals of twos and threes.  I believe also in picking
up the hints that nature gives us, and in taking full exaggerated use
of them, seizing on the chance effects of plant-association.  For
instance I once grew catmint right along the top of a retaining wall,
and that was pretty enough, but then one day a seedling of the Cheddar
pink appeared just in front of the catmint, and the little rosy flowers
of the pink mixed themselves so suitably with the mauve sprays of the
catmint that I sowed more Cheddar pink the whole way along the top of
the wall in front of the mint, with the result that in the following
year I had a misty mingling of pink and mauve which I should never have
thought of, if that seedling had not shown me the way to do it.  Apart
from the flowers, the grey-green sprays of the catmint and the
grey-green lumps of the pink made a quiet combination even when neither
plant was in flower.  It was satisfactory the whole year round, summer
and winter.

Then another day I noticed that a blue gentian, _sino-ornata_, had
wandered from the place where it was meant to be, and had set itself
just in front of a bush of blue plumbago.  The gentian and the plumbago
were in full flower at the same time, and I saw that if one wanted to
produce the effect that a piece of the best blue sky had fallen down to
earth, one must plant _Ceratostigma Willmottiana_ with the gentian all
round its feet.  Near by, the forget-me-not Royal Blue was struggling
up through the mauve wallflower _Cheiranthus linifolium_.  The
possibilities are endless.  I never thought of setting the blue poppy
under the swags of _Rosa Moyesii_, till a stray poppy gave me the hint.
Escallonia Donard's seedling flowered suddenly one year behind a large
clump of Iris Quaker Lady.  The small pink violet (I think it is Coeur
d'Alsace) crawled over to a group of _Iris reticulata_, another hint
which should be taken.

These were the cool-coloured, but I also have in mind a long double
border, enclosed between dark hedges, carried out in a scheme of red,
orange, and yellow that looked hot and sunny even on a grey day.  There
was a paved walk right down the middle, and on either side grew this
fiery profusion of red and orange snapdragons and dahlias, velvety red
salpiglossis, eschscholtzias in every shade from yellow to flame,
zinnias like balls of fire, and a great clump of red-hot pokers
towering in torches at one end.  The scarlet _Verbena chamdryoides_
trailed over the paved walk lying very flat and pressed on the grey
stones.  Someone had evidently spilt a packet of snapdragon seeds by
mistake, and it had germinated in the cracks of the paving, making a
sudden lake of blood-red in the middle of the path.

The same idea was repeated earlier in the year in a little square
garden, entirely enclosed by a hedge of rosemary.  There were Iceland
poppies of the most brilliant shade of orange; Siberian wallflower;
yellow alyssum; and that best of all orange roses, Mrs. G. A. van
Rossem, mixed with that amazingly flame-coloured rose, Dazzler.  The
common little golden sedum had dumped itself in tiny cushions all over
the paths.  The real touch of genius came in a huge spray of the tall
Austrian copper briar, flinging its gold and orange fountains over the
smaller things growing at its feet.  Single, like all the briars, it
threw itself about in a wild exuberance, ten or twelve feet high;
coppery in colour, red on the inside of the petals and yellow on the
outside, brilliant with the brilliance of a nasturtium.  It was a fine
lesson in the art of not mixing one's manners; a bold experiment,
wholly successful.

[Illustration: The tumble gate]

Then I remember a herb-garden, planned on a tiny scale; put into terms
of an ordinary room, I don't suppose that it would occupy more than the
ordinary floor-space.  And everything in it was exactly to scale; the
paths were only two-bricks wide, the middle was occupied by a tiny
stone column, there were four beds each no bigger than a wide-spread
table-cloth, and yet they seemed to be packed with all the herbs that
the most exacting French cook could possibly desire.

There is one sort of garden which I much want to possess.  It is an
Alpine lawn.  Those who have walked over the Alpine pastures know how
the small, bright flowers of those regions grow in the short turf, the
little violas and pinks and gentians, orchises and harebells, all
blowing together over miles of upland.  I want to reproduce this effect
on a small scale.  But my lawn would not be given turf as its
foundation, for in this country the grass would grow too long, and the
presence of the flowers would make mowing an impossibility.  It would
be composed of thyme, the densest and most creeping sort, and before I
laid the thyme I should set whatever plants I wanted, choosing those
which would not object to this dense mass growing round them.
_Gentiana verna_, for instance, would revel in it, and what could be
lovelier than the brilliant blue of its trumpets coming through the
dark green of the thyme?  Then I should have bulbs--scillas, and grape
hyacinths, and crocus, and some of the miniature narcissus, and those
very small Persian and Greek tulips, linifolia and orphanidea.  I
should make this glorified toy symmetrical, either square or
rectangular according to the shape of the piece of ground, and at the
four corners I should plant four very straight little trees of the John
Downie crab-apple, for in the autumn, when the flowers had disappeared,
the sealing-wax fruits would hang as in a Mantegna or a Crivelli above
the dark cloth of thyme.

I suppose that one must have an edging to keep the thyme within bounds,
and I should like to make it of grey stone slabs placed on edge, not
more than four or five inches high.  One might allow _Raoulia
subserica_ to crawl over some of the stones.




Stone Troughs

Trough-gardening has recently become popular, and there is much to be
said in its favour.  Trough-gardening means using old stone pig-troughs
and stone sinks for growing plants so tiny and delicate that they might
escape notice in the open garden.  The principal advantage of these
troughs or sinks is that they may easily be raised to eye-level on
supports of brick or stone, so that their contents may be appraised
without undue stooping or peering; they are, so to speak, a garden in
miniature adapted to the needs of the short-sighted or of those
afflicted by rheumatism or lumbago.  Even for the strong-bodied
gardener they have their uses.  They enable him to grow his choice
small things in pockets of soil especially adapted to their needs.  He
can place them in sun or shade; he can supply or withhold water as they
require; he can watch and supervise; he can perceive the alien weed and
remove it in its seedless babyhood.  It is a very intimate and myopic
form of garden pleasure.

These troughs or sinks are not difficult to obtain nowadays.
Galvanised iron has superseded the drinking-troughs in the fields, and
glazed china in the scullery sinks.  Many of them have been thrown away
as useless, or turned upside down to form a doorstep.  I myself possess
a trough which I found lying in a pig-sty, and which I discovered was
traditionally known as Wat Tyler's foot-bath, having been bought under
that description from his old home.  It is now filled with small bright
blue flowers--gentians, lithospermum, and _Omphalodes lucill_: Wat
Tyler certainly never intended it for such a purpose, even if he did
use it as a foot-bath, which I doubt; but the gain equally certainly is
mine.




The Chelsea Flower Show

The worst of the Chelsea Show, from the reporter's point of view, is
that there is nothing to say about it.  It is perfection--the
gardener's dream come true.  One may complain that the tents are too
hot, or too wet, or that there are too many people, but at least one
cannot complain that there are too few plants or that the exhibitors
have not done their job superbly.  Their job is to produce the most
exquisite flowers most magnificently grown, and no one can say that
they fail to carry out their obligation.  The rest is beyond their
control.

One grievance commonly expressed by the casual visitor is that 'the
Show is always the same'.  This is true, and yet not quite true.  Of
course, the old favourites are there and always will be, in such array
that the novelties are apt to get overlooked amongst them.  Yet there
have always been 'sensations', and still are.  It was only last year
that we first saw the Russell lupins in their extraordinary variety of
colour, so far removed from the old familiar blue as to seem almost a
different flower.  Going further back, there was the day when
Rhododendron Pink Pearl startled everybody from Queen Alexandra
downwards; the day when the blue poppy made its first appearance; and
that other day when an exhibit of gigantic pansies provoked an old
gardener into saying: "Them's not pansies; them's lies."

In 1938 in particular there were a lot of lies.  The snapdragons had
turned into church spires, the delphiniums into cathedral towers, the
bougainvilleas into flaming sunsets bearing no resemblance to the old
magenta curtains we used to know.  Some of the lilies, competing with
Jack's beanstalk, had shot up to such a height that one could view them
comfortably only from a distance.  In amongst these monstrous growths
crept the usual crowd of keen amateur gardeners, so keen, so amateur,
so touching in their raincoats, with their note-books and pencils in
hand.  I thought they seemed a little dwarfed and humbled before this
amazing display of the craft they modestly attempted to practise in
their own gardens.

It may be ungrateful to criticise, especially when people have taken so
much trouble, but does one really like the amazing results that the
nurserymen have been able to produce?  I think the answer divides
itself sharply into two parts.  One likes and welcomes the advances
made by experiments in hybridisation, which lead to really new beauties
among, say, the lupins, the irises, or the primulas.  One positively
dislikes the mere triumphs of scientific feeding which lead only to an
appalling turgescence among our old familiar friends the cottage-garden
flowers.  I never believed I could be frightened by a snapdragon until
I went to the Chelsea Show.

Besides, one knows quite well that, even given the desire, one could
never reproduce the same effect in one's own garden.  Not without
taking continuous trouble or without employing a number of very
painstaking and very expensive gardeners, all provided with sacks or
bottles full of the most expensively specialised fertilisers.  Few of
us can afford such luxuries, and even if we could afford them I doubt
whether the most sincere flower-lovers amongst us would wholly
appreciate the results of their efforts.  I think that inside our
hearts we all prefer the old flowers as we have usually known them.  We
are alarmed, and somewhat humiliated, by the overfed unnatural
specimens misleadingly staged for our benefit at the Chelsea Show.  The
exhibitors are not to blame: they are only carrying out their job with
all the resources now at their disposal.  But the rest of us cannot
emulate them, and many of us would not wish to do so.




Gardens & Gardeners

[Illustration: Thunder clouds]

I myself took to gardening quite late in life.  I must have been at
least twenty-two.  As a child at home, I had always had a strip which
was known as 'Vita's garden', because of the tradition that every child
must automatically love and cherish a garden of its own, but in point
of fact I didn't and furthermore it wasn't really my garden at all.
For one thing, it is a complete fallacy to believe, that any but the
most exceptional child enjoys so peaceful a pastime as weeding,
watering, and generally caring for the welfare of the patch with which
it  has been entrusted: the average child is far too unmethodical and
far too impatient.  Weeds grow too fast and flowers too slowly.
Waiting for weeks and even months for your seeds or bulbs to come into
bloom seems like waiting for years at a tender age.  Meanwhile the
weeds grow apace, and you regard with distaste the task of pulling them
up, especially when it is suggested to you by your elders.  It is much
more fun to grow mustard and cress on damp flannel on the schoolroom
window-sill.  You can sow it in the shape of your own initials; it
comes up within a very few days; and then you can eat it for tea.  Very
satisfactory.

Thus it came about that whenever my garden showed signs of becoming an
eyesore and a wilderness, a company of gardeners would arrive with
hoes, forks, and rakes, and speedily restore it to order.  Thus, also,
I very naturally lost any personal interest in it; any personal
interest, that is to say, which I might ever have had.  If the
gardeners looked after it, why should I?  It was only when I grew up,
and had a house and garden of my own, that I discovered the delights
and pains of gardening for myself.

As a child I had the good fortune to live in an exceptionally beautiful
home, with acres of garden to match, all enclosed within a high stone
wall.  There were wide expanses of green lawn; miles (as it seemed to
me) of flower-borders; little orchards here and there; and a wilder
part full of tall trees, mossy paths, and a carpet of bluebells.  Of
course, such a garden had to be kept orderly and trim, and my own
little patch could not be allowed to offend.  The head-gardener was the
terror of my life.  He was an immensely dignified man, with a hooked
nose, keen eyes, and a great black beard, giving him the appearance of
a major prophet.  From time to time he used to descend on me with
accusations of having robbed his peach trees or destroyed his borders
by picking flowers, accusations which were sometimes well founded and
sometimes not.  In those days I regarded him as an ogre and a
spoil-sport, but looking back on him now I see that he was merely a
typical head-gardener of the grander sort, justly exasperated by the
depredations of an irresponsible child.  Absolute lord in his own
domain, he must have counted me among the worst of his garden-pests.

[Illustration: Cottage flowers]

I can look back on him now with affection and respect.  His family had
been in the service of mine for several generations.  He was a fine
traditional type of man, complete with his virtues and his faults.  His
virtues were many, including a great pride in the place, which I think
he considered more as his own property than my grandfather's or my
father's.  His majestic appearance was enhanced by the green baize
apron which he always wore on weekdays; it seemed to set him apart from
other men; and oddly emphasised by the strand of raffia which he always
carried twisted round his ear.  He had some charming little habits,
too; for instance, he would send in a solitary apple or pear, the first
of the season, a label with its name carefully tied to its stalk, to be
placed before my father's plate at luncheon.  Invariably, also, a slip
of paper recording the temperature was laid on my father's plate at
breakfast: Min. 40, Max. 60.  When I was young it never occurred to
me to ask who Min and Max might be; I simply accepted them as people
who lived in the garden.

On Sundays he discarded the green baize apron, and appeared dressed in
funereal black with his whole family in church.

His faults, I regret to say, were also many.  They proceeded from no
vice inherent in his nature (for he was an upright man), but from sheer
obstinacy and a dislike of changing anything to which he had grown
accustomed.  He thus disliked cutting vegetables while they were still
fit to use and preferred to let them run to seed rather than allow them
to be delivered young and succulent into the kitchen.  This, I have
since found, is a failing common to nearly all professional gardeners.
Then, of course, when it came to the flower garden, he had no taste at
all.  He grew, and grew very skilfully, the most hideous and
ill-assorted plants with no regard whatsoever for colour, suitability,
or elegance.  Such a thing as a colour-scheme had never entered his
mind; nor, so long as he could keep his health and his job, would it be
allowed to enter it.  Every now and then my father, spurred on by some
gardening friend, would make a protest; but although the black-bearded
prophet would listen respectfully and politely, it never made any
difference to the garden.  Things went on in exactly the same way as
before.

I greatly preferred his second-in-command, a gentle timid little man
who had a real feeling for flowers, and who was far too weak to be in
command at all, even as second.  He and I were friends, not enemies.
He explained to me so wistfully why he minded my cutting the
delphiniums he had just spent hours in staking, that I felt ashamed of
my thoughtlessness.  He never scolded, he only pleaded.  So I listened,
instead of trying to outwit him.  Under the right guidance, that man
could have been turned into a true and sensitive gardener.  He was
excessively nervous, and kept touching his cap at every sentence while
he talked to one.  It was a trick, a habit, which was generally
attributed to the fact that he had somehow managed to collect a bullet
lodged in his brain.  Nevertheless, he was a born gardener, and a
little enterprise and encouragement from above would have transformed
him from a drudge into a creator.

Unfortunately, this brand of encouragement was seldom forthcoming from
the old-fashioned head-gardener fixed in his grooves.  He was so
temperamentally opposed to any innovations that the apprentice under
his rule had no chance whatever to enlarge his ideas or to experiment
with them.  Yet, actually, gardening fashions were rapidly changing
under the example of certain pioneers, who not only grew plants in
unorthodox ways, but also reintroduced many old favourites which had
been forgotten.  They were doing things calculated to horrify the
head-gardeners of my acquaintance.  They wished entirely to scrap the
old bedding-out system, which meant the abolition of such plants as
lobelias, begonias, and calceolarias, dear to the heart of gardeners of
the Victorian generation.  Instead of this system (which entailed much
trouble as well as producing a hideous and stereotyped result), they
advocated the planting of charming old perennials, with some regard to
colour, design, and flowering season.  They even suggested that
separate parts of the garden should be set aside for seasonal beauty,
discarding the old idea that every part of the garden should show some
colour, however sparsely, at every time of the year.  These ideas were
very revolutionary, and took a long time to penetrate the armour of the
professional paid gardener; in fact, I doubt if they have generally
penetrated it to this day.  It is only by insistence that the
well-informed employer can get what he wants done in his garden.

[Illustration: Dog daisies]

Yet there can be no doubt that gardening is a real and widespread
passion among the English people.  You have only to motor through
country districts, to observe that every little cottage has its front
garden overflowing with flowers.  You have only to attend one of the
fortnightly flower-shows held by the Royal Horticultural Society at
their own hall in London, to see the numbers of serious, amateur
gardeners poring intently over even the tiniest exhibit.  It is no
social function, this fortnightly show; it exists solely for the true
lovers of flowers; it is in no way comparable to the great Chelsea
Show, from which many of the true flower-lovers abstain, because they
contend (and rightly) that they cannot get near the flowers, and are
not interested in the fashionable world which flocks to the Show with
no more interest in the flowers than they will later display in the
race-horses when in due course they flock to Ascot.  Again, you have
only to knock at the front door of any little manor house, to be
greeted by a puzzled interrupted lady in a large straw hat, a pair of
leather gloves, and a trowel in her hand, whom you have disturbed in
the act of planting out her stocks.  When she has recovered from her
surprise, she will be only too pleased to lead you intimately round her
garden.

That is the way in which the English love their gardens, not because it
is 'the right thing' to do, but because it is in their blood, from the
cottager to the lady of the manor.

Again, you have only to visit some settlement abroad, when you will
find that round every little shanty or bungalow the English occupier
has endeavoured to scrape a garden from the hopeless soil.  Stony,
sun-baked, waterless it may be, but still a few petunias or snapdragons
struggle for existence, carefully tended by the tired man in his
shirt-sleeves.  It is really touching, sometimes, to come across these
pitiable efforts in unlikely places.  The exile cannot live without his
handful of flowers to remind him of home.

Nevertheless, as I have said, despite this ruling passion, it took a
long time for certain novel ideas to reach either the salaried gardener
or even his employer.  At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when
romanticism was so much in vogue, a considerable change had been worked
by the so-called 'landscape gardening' introduced by Capability Brown
and others, who aspired to banish formality in favour of 'nature'.
This they attempted to do by transforming straight paths into winding
ones; by planting conifers and dark, dank shrubs at the edges of lawns;
even by building sham ruins in the Gothic style which might serve as
summer-houses or as objects of interest at the end of a vista.
Landscape gardening when boldly carried out on an extensive scale was
sometimes successful, but when reproduced in miniature it led only to a
shapeless, meaningless disaster.  The result was then neither a garden
nor 'nature'.

Curiously enough, also, the landscape idea was seldom pushed up to the
walls of the house itself.  Around the house the theory of formal beds
persisted; it was only when you wandered a little distance away that
you were supposed to find nature unfolding herself in serpentine paths
and sinister shrubberies of laurel and rhododendron.  "The ugliness of
the garden about the house," it has been well said, "was assumed to be
an essential part of the thing itself, removing that for ever from the
sympathies of artistic people.  The flower-garden planting was made up
of a few kinds of flowers which people were proud to put out in
thousands and tens of thousands, and with these, patterns, more or less
elaborate, were carried out in every garden save the very poorest
cottage garden."  There could be no truer description.  Left to the
professional working-gardener, the beds were regularly filled year
after year with scarlet geraniums, pink begonias, discordant salvias,
yellow calceolarias, and greenhouse plants with variegated foliage.
Nothing more hideous, unsuitable, or unnatural could be imagined.  The
beds themselves, which were usually set in lawns, were of equally
unpleasing shape, either kidney, heart, or lozenge, which perhaps was
just as well, as it matched the planting-scheme and it was better that
the gardener should be hanged eventually for a sheep than for a lamb.

So frightful was the whole arrangement, in fact, that some enterprising
spirits began to feel that it could be borne no longer.  There was
something wrong with gardening, but what?  And where was the remedy to
be found?  The words which I quoted a few lines back were written in
1885 by a man to whom gardeners owe all possible gratitude and honour.
In his own profession he was one of the most remarkable men I have ever
known, and his career and achievement were no less remarkable than his
personality.

[Illustration: Lettuce]

Of the earlier part of his life I can speak only by hearsay.  I am
given to understand that he was born of the humblest parentage, and
that he started on his career as a garden-boy.  When I first met him,
he was a very old man, nearing eighty if, indeed, he had not passed it,
totally paralysed, and extremely rich.  Exactly how he had managed to
amass his fortune between the days when he was a poor little boy
sweeping up leaves for the wage of a few shillings a week, and the days
when I came to know him as the owner of an Elizabethan house and one of
the loveliest gardens in England, I have never been able to discover.
I know that he had gradually worked his way upward; I know also that he
had made a name for himself as a designer of gardens; that he founded
at least two popular gardening papers; and that (among several other
books) he had written one called _The English Flower Garden_, which to
this day remains a classic in horticultural literature.  Still, all
this does not seem sufficient to account for the enormous difference
between his early fortunes and his later.  I do not seek to explain it,
nor to pry into his private life by asking questions of friends who
knew him far better than I ever did: such inquisitiveness would be
merely impertinence.  I am quite content to rest with the memory of the
courteous old man I saw in his invalid-chair, sitting out in the sun
among his flowers, unable to raise his head, scarcely able to move his
hands, but still sufficiently alert to take pride in the garden he had
created and to talk with knowledge and enthusiasm about his schemes and
his innovations.

After luncheon, I well remember, he announced that he would like to
take me all through his woods.  I was somewhat appalled by this
suggestion, as I failed to see how this helpless paralytic could
possibly be propelled all over the acres of his estate, especially by
rough woodland paths, for I was unprepared for what was to follow.  At
a signal, four sturdy men appeared, and, heaving their master bodily
out of his chair, dumped him in a motor-car furnished with caterpillar
wheels.  He invited me to take my place beside him and off we went.  It
was my first experience of such a tank-like machine, and I confess that
seldom have I been more alarmed.  We lurched, we heaved, we threatened
to turn over, we crossed swamps, we climbed banks, we ascended hills
almost vertically, we descended hills clinging on to the sides of the
car to prevent ourselves from being shot forward.  I kept a nervous eye
on what was coming next, but my host, well wrapped up in his blankets,
appeared to be quite unmoved.  He talked learnedly all the time about
blue spruces and I daresay about other spruces also, but I was in no
state of mind to profit by these remarks.  He was justly proud of his
woods, but personally I was relieved when we returned to the nice,
flat, flagged paths of his garden.

He was an admirable old man, was William Robinson, and I suppose he did
more to alter the fashions of English gardening than any man of his
time, not excepting such worthy contemporaries as Miss Gertrude Jekyll.
The quotation which I gave from one of Mr. Robinson's prefaces shows
that as long ago as 1885 he had grown discontented with the fashions he
described as then in vogue.  His preoccupation was what to substitute
for them.  Luckily for him and for us, he had occasion to wander round
the countryside and to observe for himself how charming and withal
simple were the happy-go-lucky gardens of the poor cottagers, where no
elaborate schemes had been adopted and flowers had been left to grow
for themselves in a happy tangle.

Many were the old-fashioned plants which he rescued from neglect, so
that the rich man could once more enjoy the despised catmint, pinks,
and humble flowers seldom to be seen except growing round the doorsteps
of the poor.

With those pictures in his eyes he set to work to pull the theories of
gardeners to pieces.

He was not afraid to make extremely rude remarks, nor to include many
of England's stateliest homes in his list of what he calls pretentious
places.  "There was hardly a country seat," he wrote, "that was not
marred by the idea of a garden as a conventional and patterned thing."
Even the Royal Horticultural Society did not escape his castigation.
Especially abhorrent to him were the "designs which may be quite all
right on the surface of a carpet," but not on the surface of the much
enduring earth.  Yet he was no fanatic obsessed by a single idea, and
nothing enraged him more than to be thus misunderstood.  "They think I
want to bring the wilderness in at the window," he wrote, "I who have
given all my days to save the flower garden from the ridiculous!"
Where formality was indicated by the lie of the land, by the existence
of walls or terraces, he was quite prepared to accept it.  In his own
garden he had a south terrace laid out with flagged paths and square
beds; which was one of the prettiest bits of formality imaginable.

The real originality of Mr. Robinson's methods lay in his choice of
what to grow and how to grow it.  In his own square beds, for instance,
where he grew principally roses, he also grew clematis, whose purple
clusters rose above low shrubs of silvery grey, and furthermore he
smothered the ground with pansies and even with low rock-plants,
horrifying the rosarian whose conception of a rose-garden had been one
of savagely pruned bushes of uniform height, with bare ground in
between, liberally disfigured by mulches of unsightly and unsavoury
manure.  Then high up into his trees he flung great festoons of vine,
honeysuckle, jasmine, and again roses; in fact anything that would
climb and cling, draping the upper branches with an unexpected beauty.
Clematis he would grow not only on posts or pergolas in the accepted
way, but would trail it along almost at ground level, so that the
passer-by looked down into the upturned face of the starry flower.  It
was noticeable, however, that in all this riot of planting, nothing was
ever allowed to become disorderly: he knew to perfection the art of
concealing art.  Everything was managed in such a way that each flower
looked as though it had grown there of its own accord, and yet was
displaying its colour, its shape, and its habit to the best advantage.

The efforts of these first daring rebels produced the gradual change
which crept over gardening taste under the influence of their writings
and their own example.  Little by little one began to hear of such
novelties as the woodland garden, the wild garden, the swamp garden,
the orchard garden, and of separate enclosed gardens devoted to flowers
of one colour or to the flowers of one season.  Then began also the
flood of new introductions from other countries; China, Japan, Tibet
contributed seeds and shrubs and flowering trees in ever-increasing
quantities; the United States and South America and Africa sent their
share.  A revival of the older roses also took place, so that in
addition to the stunted and often scentless hybrid teas and perpetuals,
people began again to plant the old moss and musk, the beautiful specie
roses which fling up their long strands in wild profusion, the old
damasks and Gallicas which had practically vanished from the gardens of
the well-to-do.

[Illustration: The well]




Gardeners

Gardens have behaved in an extraordinary way this year (1938).  Looking
back upon my garden-diary, I find that on January 26th the blue
primroses were in full flower, thus preceding their ordinary flowering
period by about two months.  Primroses, even the blue ones, have no
right to start flowering in profusion until March or April.  Then on
March 9th I find a note saying 'all primroses flowering in earnest',
and towards the end of the month another note to the effect that the
garden appears to have gone mad, and that the pink clematis montana is
out in company with tulips, hyacinths, anemones, and even a few of the
flag irises.  By April 1st we were eating asparagus from the open; by
Easter I was picking roses.  But there is no need to go on with the
tale.  Everyone knows that gardeners invariably say the season has been
exceptional, only this year it happens to be true.

I find gardeners disconcerting people.  Either they know infinitely
more about the subject than I do, or else they know infinitely less.
Seldom do I encounter one with whom I can discuss our common topic on
equal terms.  The gardener who knows more is impossibly highbrow, and
makes me feel as small as a board-school child trying to discuss
medival Latin literature with, say, Miss Helen Waddell; the gardener
who knows less makes me feel as though an earnest culture enthusiast
said: "Do tell me something about _The Shropshire Lad_; it's a play, I
know, but I've never seen it."  This, by analogy, is what happens when
somebody points to a delphinium and says: "How they have improved
lupins recently, haven't they?"  How should one reply?  To correct the
speaker sounds patronising; to pass over the slip in silence destroys
the possibility of further comment.

[Illustration: Llyn Ogwen--North Wales]




National Parks

The love of the English for natural beauty in all forms is, however,
one of their most endearing characteristics.  I was talking to a lady,
a stranger, not so very young either, who had cheerfully travelled a
hundred miles by bus on a hot day in order to visit a garden thrown
open to the public.  Looking out of the bus windows as they drove along
the country roads, she told me, had not been the least part of her
enjoyment.  It made me wonder, as I had often wondered before, what the
English landscape had been like a hundred years ago, before the
builders and the bungalow-dwellers had started to ruin it.  Parts of
Surrey, for example, before it became suburbanised, must have been
remarkably beautiful.  The corollary to this reflection was to wonder
still more what the English landscape would be like a hundred years
hence, and the picture evoked was so appalling in its possibilities
that I staggered, for the rapidity and efficiency with which building
societies and their clients are doing their work of debasement all over
the country can surely be equalled by no other branch of trade.  As a
character remarked in a Flers-et-Caillavet play: "Vous avez un flair,
une suret dans la gaffe--c'est du gnie."

It was thus with some relief that I remembered that a campaign for the
establishment of National Parks had been launched by Mr. Norman Birkett
under the auspices of the Council for the Preservation of Rural
England.  One may hope that if this admirable scheme is pursued with
all the vigour that well-advised and responsible enthusiasts can throw
into it, something may yet be done before it is too late to safeguard
areas of Great Britain for posterity.  The scheme is ambitious, but not
Utopian.  If carried into effect, it would mean that such regions as
the Marlborough Downs, stretches of sea-coast, the Norfolk Broads,
Dartmoor and Exmoor, the Peak and Dovedale, the Lake district, a large
part of Wales, and most of the Highlands, including the Hebrides, would
come under control and that the advance of vandalism might be stopped.
Although the scheme would entail a certain expenditure of public money,
I refuse to believe that our nature-loving public would grudge a few
hundreds of thousands (not millions) to be expended for a benefit which
it will very particularly appreciate.

[Illustration: Llyn Gwernant--North Wales]




The Kentish Landscape

At the moment of writing these words, Kent is looking absurdly like
itself.  Cherry, plum, pear, and thorn whiten the orchards and the
hedgerows; lambs frolic; the banks are full of violets and primroses;
the whole landscape displays itself as an epitome of everything fresh
and innocent which has drawn ridicule upon the so-called school of
Georgian poets.  It is a simple delight which pleases everyone, from
the unsophisticated to the sophisticated.  Why affect to despise it?
Year after year I enjoy it more, and reflect with pride that my own
county offers a fair presentment of the English scene to the foreigner
travelling in his Pullman between Dover and London.

He, of course, cannot know it as we know it, though on his way up to
London he is accorded a generous glimpse of the valleys of the Beult
and the Medway.  He sees the orchards and the hop-gardens; orchards he
has seen before in his own Normandy, but the hop-gardens strike him as
very peculiar and individual, opening and shutting as they do while the
train flashes past.  If he does not already know what they are, he is
reduced to asking an obliging stranger for the explanation.  Those tall
bare poles, that elaborately knotted string, those ploughed acres--what
does it all mean?  The explanation is forthcoming: it is English beer.
Of course: this is Kent.  He looks out again with renewed interest, he
remembers that this is called the garden of England.

Then his train slides into London, and he forgets about Kent.

But we, who live in Kent, do not forget about it and have no wish to do
so.  Intimately, not dramatically, it unfolds itself month by month.
There are other landscapes more sensational, more romantic, more
picturesque.  This is a country-side which needs knowing.  It needs a
close and loving knowledge of the woods, the lanes, the villages, the
changes of light, and the lost places.  It needs, perhaps, a spirit far
removed from the speed and competition of modern life to know and love
it completely.  One must be satisfied with small and subtle things.
One must have time to absorb.  Otherwise one is in very much the same
position as the man in the train, flashing through, registering merely
the passing comment: "Very pretty, yes, very pretty indeed."

Living here, we realise more than the prettiness, the tenderness, the
intimacy, we realise also the variety which can be ours for a little
trouble.  I wonder what picture the word 'Kent' evokes most readily in
the minds of its lovers.  For one of us, it will be acres and acres of
blossoming trees; for another, the short sunny slopes of the chalk
hills; for another, the wide skies and lush meadows of Romney Marsh;
for another, the sea-coasts; for another, a bluebell wood and the
sunlight falling through the young green of the beeches.  There are the
slow streams and the stone bridges, composing exquisitely with the
tower of the village church beyond.  There are the villages themselves,
many as yet unravished--Yalding, Smarden, Chiddingstone, Brenchley; the
little towns which preserve their charm and dignity such as Tenterden
with its wide main street and the decency of its small Georgian houses,
Cranbrook rocketing up and down hill, crowned by the white windmill and
its noble sails.  There are the dens and the hursts, with the miles of
pleasant country in between, and the pink cottages tucked into odd
corners, bright as a painter's palette with their jumble of flowers.
All this is Kent, and all indubitably English.

Sentimentally, we may linger over some of the lovely placenames: Sutton
Valence, Appledore, Stone-cum-Ebony, Capel-le-Ferne, Damian in the
Blean, and the three Boughtons, Aluph, Malherbe, and Monchelsea.
Historically our associations need fear competition with no other
county: four of the Cinque Ports are ours, the Pilgrims' Way, and
majestic Canterbury.  We have plenty of food for pride, either as men
of Kent or Kentish men.

But how true, in actual fact, is this idyllic picture?  We all know the
optimistically misleading style of the average guide-book, in which we
are conducted by the enthusiastic author from one enchanted spot to
another, little paradises of rural retirement, as secluded as when
Cobbett passed between our meadows on his famous Rides.  Here is
nothing, if the author is to be believed, to mar the prospect or rudely
to jerk the dreaming mind.  Every now and then, of course, the author
gets confronted by some evidence of ugly utilitarian modernity to which
he can blind neither himself nor his readers, and then in a fine
indignation he lets himself go in several pages of lamentation, leaving
us with the impression that these eyesores are of rare and strictly
local occurrence, restricted to a few square miles or acres of
victimised landscape, unlikely to impose themselves on a smaller scale
on the happy wanderer who has the privilege of following his guidance
down the by-ways.  How far, I wonder, have I been guilty of giving the
same misleading impression?  One must be strict in these matters, even
at the cost of some nasty truths.

Let me admit, then, that I have dwelt on the favoured corners and have
left unmentioned those which one would rather pass with averted eyes.
There is no denying that parts of Kent are dangerously near to London,
and that the progressive spirit of the Southern Railway has brought
them within a point of accessibility which can only be called suburban.
The railway company, the road-makers, and the building societies have
worked together in a morticed harmony which, applied to international
problems, would soon produce a desirable settlement of world-affairs.
The owners of the land, acting either under the stress of financial
compulsion or allured by the temptation of a quick and certain profit,
have lent their co-operation by large sales of property to enterprising
speculators.  On the part of all concerned there has been a general
agreement to 'develop' the residential possibilities of one of
England's loveliest counties.  The only pity is that under this process
of development the county should so rapidly be ceasing to be lovely.

It is necessary, to-day, to know exactly where to go in order to find
the unspoilt beauty where the true country-lover may rest his soul.  My
only plea in defence of my own veracity is that such retreats do still
exist in Kent, more generously than the frequenter of main roads could
possibly imagine.

We who care about such things view with alarm the spread of what we can
only regard as damage.  Daily, we see our fine trees being felled and
their place taken by concrete posts slung with chains in front of
shoddy buildings.  Screaming red roofs and half-timber (no more solid
than ply-wood) spring into being amongst our mellow cottages.  Small
wonder that we ask ourselves where it is going to stop, or, in a more
practical spirit, what can possibly be done about it.

We do not wish to be reactionary or to deny the necessity of modern
demands.  Accommodation must be found, both for the working-man whose
legitimate business keeps him to the district and for the
daily-breaders and the week-enders whose desire is for a 'cottage in
the country'.  The natural consequences of these needs appear
respectively in the form of council cottages and the small villa or
bungalow.  To the credit of the local councils it must be said that
their productions are frequently of decent design, workmanlike
construction, and sthetically quite creditable.  They could be better,
of course, but they could also be a great deal worse.  The same credit
can scarcely be given to the large-scale contractors who supply the
myriads of small 'homes' so temptingly offered on easy terms, nor to
those members of the public who snap them up so quickly that the
advertisement board which was there yesterday will be gone by
to-morrow.  For this standardised trash I could wish only one fate:
that it should all be miraculously transported and dumped as one large
new city in the plumb Middle West of America.

[Illustration: Hop garden]

Let me not be misunderstood.  I recognise fully that 'development' must
take place; that sellers of land and contractors must make their
profits; that the new owner and occupier must be satisfied as to
convenience and cheapness.  But still I wonder whether the outcome of
all these separate requirements need be of such unexceptionable
hideousness?  I have heard it said that the whole trouble arises
because there is no central control, and that the present haphazard
system can produce only what it does actually produce; I have even
heard it suggested that an official committee of supervision for the
whole country should be appointed under the auspices of the Office of
Works.  The men whom I privately heard making this suggestion were Lord
Curzon and Mr. Ramsay Mac Donald, two very different types of men, the
patrician and the politician, yet both inspired by the same wish to
preserve the beauty of their country.  There is much to be said for
such a scheme, but there are also a great many obvious objections to
raise against it.  In its favour it may be said that the taste and
experience of an expert advisory board would in the aggregate be better
and more valuable than the taste of the average builder and of the
public for whom he caters; against it may be said that in matters of
taste few men with strong prejudices agree (and from such men the
advisory board would presumably be drawn) and that one generation would
almost certainly condemn the voice of the other.  It is also evident
that the indignation aroused by the restrictions necessarily imposed by
such a board would be extreme, for our national character comprises a
strong dislike of interference in our private affairs, and in a
non-totalitarian state it is difficult to believe that a man would
tolerate dictation in so private and personal a matter as the choice of
his own home.  If he likes bow-windows with stained glass, sham beams,
or scarlet roofing, what authority can venture to forbid him to have
it?  The only appeal is to his own discretion and sense of fitness; but
the sad truth is that the taste of the public is demonstrably bad.  It
prefers the ornate to the simple, the pretentious to the modest, and
the consequence is that the small margin available in the estimate goes
into something showy rather than into the honest domestic architecture
whose survivals provide one of the minor beauties of our country.  It
seems only a foolishly Utopian dream to hope to raise the standard by
even the most tactful methods of propaganda, yet the fact remains that
a change of heart in the public alone would produce a change of method
in the builder.

It appears to me that something might be done by organising open
competitions among the regional architects.  As men familiar with the
district they would have a good chance of understanding its needs, both
practical and sthetic: the treatment of brick, stone, plaster, tiles,
or thatch, as the case might be, would come naturally to them as part
of their daily life.  The winning entries in these competitions should
be displayed as a kind of bait to the public in several ways, either by
photographs of the design in local papers, or exhibited in the post
offices, or, best of all, as actual constructions to be let or sold.
It is conceivable that with a _de facto_ example before their eyes,
some prospective purchasers might turn from the monstrosities to which
at present they are offered no alternative, and where some led the way
others might follow.  There is no real reason why a presentable house
or cottage should not be erected conveniently and inexpensively, nor
should the solution unduly tax the ingenuity of the designer.  His
scope would indeed be varied and extensive, for apart from private
dwellings the public requirements are great, and in the creation of new
streets, new suburbs, even new villages, I can imagine a lively
excitement to an inventive man.  There is nothing necessarily to be
said against the garden-city, of which indeed one has appreciated some
attractive examples; the garden-village, in the country, complete with
church, school, shops, and even a central community garden as well as
gardens to the individual houses, might invite the envy of strangers
from miles around and cause us to forget the shudder usually aroused by
the mere sight of the words 'building developments'.  It should also be
possible, by the extension of such schemes, to concentrate activities
in more definite areas, instead of letting them straggle in their
present happy-go-lucky fashion all over the place.

The isolated bungaloid effort, admittedly, is difficult to cope with,
since you cannot prevent a man from buying a plot of ground where he
likes and putting up whatever he likes on it.  It seems very strange
that a man who has the taste and sensibility to wish to live among
beautiful surroundings should not also have the taste to see that his
own abode is probably the one thing which ruins them; but so it is.
Here, again, the bait of a suitable, non-discordant sample might do
more than many pages of written exhortation and entreaty.  Many people,
small blame to them, prefer the convenient modern dwelling to the
picturesque but earwiggy old creeper-covered cottage where the
alternative is either to crawl about bent double or else to bang your
head on every lintel.  There is no reason why they should not have it;
there is also no reason why they should make it impossible to look
across miles of country where nothing breaks the eye's delight.

[Illustration: Oast cowls]




Plant-hunting

There are certain occupations which I enjoy enormously in theory, and
do actually enjoy in practice provided I need pursue them only once or
twice a year.  One of these is plant-hunting.  I am not, alas,
referring to anything so adventurous as an expedition with yaks across
Tibet, nor even to the more accessible delights of walking over Alpine
meadows or Dolomitic screes where every yard is blown with the flowers
that so signally refuse to flourish in one's own garden.  I refer to
the far milder and more modest ambition of discovering the rarer
species of our native orchises for oneself in their own habitat.

The perseverance is great, and the reward may be small.  One may have
to creep, stooping, one's face lashed by brambles, one's hat torn from
one's head, one's back breaking, through acres of hoary dogwood and
Way-faring tree in search of the Military orchis which one never finds.
Militarism being (one hopes) at the low ebb in this country, perhaps
_Militaris_ has gone into retreat.[#]  One knows it should be there;
but either it has been picked by some marauder or eaten off by rabbits.
So one has to content oneself with the ubiquitous tway-blade and its
dingy green flower.  _O. Militaris_ has disappeared.  One emerges at
last from the dark inhospitable depths of the wood and finds oneself on
the open down-land, where it is possible to breathe the air again and
stretch the muscles.  Here, surely, even at the cost of crawling over
some hundreds of acres with eyes fixed to the ground, it might be
possible to find a Green Man or even a fly or a spider?  The discovery
of a Lizard is of course beyond all reasonable dreams; but still, one
never knows.  One's luck might be in.


[#] _Written in June_, 1938.




Orchidace

I went on such an expedition recently with two friends.  We did not
find much, it is true; or, rather, we found none of the real rarities.
That, however, never matters, for the compensations are so rich: the
small, lost, down-land churches, miles from the villages they are
supposed to serve; the wide windy skies, the grassy slopes, the deep
valleys with farm-buildings exquisitely composed into the group of
barns, house, and oasts with steep brown roofs.  I heard someone say
the other day that when he saw or read about such things, nothing else
seemed to matter, neither European complications, nor wars, nor threats
of wars--they were all forgotten.  I felt the same myself, when
eventually we found the Bee orchis growing beside a partridge's nest.

We had sought all day, and had found nothing, except _Orchis
pyramidalis_ and the Fragrant orchis (_Gynmadenia Conopsea_) in such
profusion as to become common and a bore.  Just at the right moment we
came upon the rarer Bee.  With the perfect tact of the true artist, the
Bee had placed herself beside this abandoned nest: the chicks had
flown, the eggs were left, broken but tidily arranged within their
scoop of grass, pale brown shells neatly opened to expose their pale
blue lining, and above these the Bee orchis brooded in full flower like
an insect preparing to descend on whatever honey she might find within
the range of a few rich yards.  Yet she never moved.  She stood there,
static, above the partridge's nest and the broken eggs on the open
down, her dark lip hanging sulkily.  She was small, and rather
difficult to find among the grasses; and so was the partridge's nest,
so well concealed; but finding them both thus in juxtaposition seemed a
small triumph on a plane of beauty one would not readily forget.

[Illustration: Evening sky]




Owls

While on the same expedition we came across a young owl.  It was
sitting in the middle of the lane, and although the big, black car I
was driving advanced towards it like Juggernaut it refused to move.
Instead, it turned round to face the bonnet and to bridle in fury, too
young to fly from danger, but not too young to be cross.  It was very
cross indeed, quite prepared to defy the death that so imminently
threatened it.  Sitting right back upon its haunches, it fluffed out
its wings and spat defiance at us.  Move it would not.  It blocked the
road.  We had to stop the car; get out; and politely shoo the little
indignant owl to a safer place.

I like owls.  I admire their intransigent spirit.  I have respected
them deeply ever since I met a baby owl in a wood, when it fell over
dead, apparently from sheer temper, because I dared to approach it.  It
defied me first, and then died.  I have never forgotten the horror and
shame I experienced when that soft fluffy thing (towards which I had
nothing but the most humanitarian motives) fell dead from rage at my
feet.

I like owls, partly because they hoot, and partly because they are so
beautiful when they fly by night.  Two white barn-owls live and breed
in a barn where I live.  Year after year, they have duly reared their
brood.  Year after year, I have seen them sail out across the fields
seeking for provender, and have seen them return, ghostly, with things
in their claws that I would prefer not to investigate.

I dislike owls for reasons that I had better leave to another note.
Beautiful and poetic as owls are, they have other aspects which the
realist cannot ignore.  I shall therefore revert on a future occasion
to their more unpleasant habits and to the contents of their stomachs.




Athene noctua

I was gratified to receive a letter from a reader saying that he could
hardly wait for me to reveal the horrors that owls included in their
nightly diet.  He was under the impression, he said, that they lived
principally on mice, bats, and beetles.  Well, he was almost right; and
I fear that my revelations will interest him less qualitatively than
quantitively.  The variety of the victims is less impressive than the
numbers in which they are consumed.  When we consider that a pair of
young barn owls kept under observation during the space of three weeks
devoured one hundred and twenty shrews, forty-five rats, and sixty
mice, varied only by a lark, a sparrow, and a partridge, we can
estimate that their greed was not paralleled by their selectiveness.
In other words, they ate anything they could get, and never seemed to
tire of the monotony.  An analysis of the pellets cast by adult barn
owls gives a wider range, seven hundred pellets supplying the evidence
for one thousand five hundred shrews, ninety voles, two hundred mice,
nineteen sparrows, one greenfinch and two swifts.  Another analysis, of
a mere seventy-five pellets, gives the remains of sixty-nine shrews,
twenty-nine voles, sixteen mice, thirty-seven birds, and a few dung
beetles.

It would seem, then, that the owl is a valuable ally of the farmer,
since it attacks chiefly the mischievous small enemies of the farm.
The barn owl certainly is an ally, and anyone who destroys a barn owl
is committing a foolish crime against his own interests.  But what
about the Little Owl, _Athene noctua_?  [After all, we ought, I
suppose, to remember that the phrase 'Owls to Athens' was once the
equivalent of Coals to Newcastle.]  Every now and then, in the Silly
Season, the Little Owl becomes News.  Is it useful, or mischievous?
Ought we to exterminate or encourage it?  No one has decided.
Personally I think that the Little Owl does more good than harm, since
although it may destroy a few small birds during its hunting, it also
destroys a number of pests such as rats and slugs.  My view is, that
the Little Owl ought to be spared.  The more owls we have in this
country, the better for both the poet and the farmer.

[Illustration: The edge of the wood]




Owls Brood

I find something curiously touching in the quiet patience of a nesting
bird.  Day after day, at whatever hour one visits the nest, she is
sitting there, close, warm, and lonely.  One wonders what her thoughts
may be; what fears may assail at the approach of footsteps; what deep
instinct informs her of the final reward of her perseverance.  The
courage of some of these small creatures is indeed remarkable; I have
inadvertently put my hand right on to a thrush, and had my finger
sharply pecked by a blue-tit in a drainpipe.  Not so a Little Owl,
nesting in a hollow apple-tree I pass every morning on my way to
breakfast.  Long before I have reached the tree she is out and away,
flying off with the peculiarly noiseless flight which suggests twilight
far more than the dews of summer morning.  Once or twice I have
deceived her; crept up to her tree, and seen her cowering, head drawn
back, ready to strike, a wicked eye looking up at me from the darkness.
I was afraid she might desert her nest, a squalidly messy affair, but
she shows no sign of doing so, and I look forward to the day when five
recoiling babies will huddle at the bottom of the hollow trunk.




Cygnus olor

[Illustration: Cygnets]

The disagreeable though sociable cygnet which once insisted on sitting
beside me while I weeded, was finally and firmly transferred to the
lake where, after several attempts to return on foot to the garden, it
at last consented to settle down, exchanging my company for that of the
solitary, older swan.  By that time it had changed its plumage from
grey to white, and the two of them swam round together, gravely
circling in full Jovian majesty.  I was pleased by this, since the
remarkable ungainliness of a swan waddling on land is equalled only by
the beauty and dignity of a swan sailing on its proper element, and I
had not enjoyed the spectacle of the cygnet making a fool of itself.
They made a fine pair.  The sex of the cygnet was, however, still
undetermined; anxiously I watched the colour and shape of its beak,
whether it would turn from a buttercup yellow to orange, whether it
would develop a big blob or a relatively small one.  Much to my relief
the beak continued to show every sign of femininity.  The cygnet was
obviously not a cob, but a pen.  The older swan, for his part, grew
more and more aggressively masculine.  He became more and more
possessive and protective.  I began to think of them as he and she.
The old gentleman whom I have mentioned elsewhere in these notes, the
old gentleman who looks after Jacob's sheep and who has ideas of his
own, still insisted that they were of the same sex.  He was only
slightly disconcerted when in May they started to make a nest.  Two
cobs, he maintained, often did that.

[Illustration: Swans and cygnets]

For a time I feared that his interpretation of the curious morality of
swans might be correct.  It was quite in vain that I walked round the
lake murmuring:

  'And she might be that sprightly girl who was trodden by a bird.'

My incantation seemed to take no practical effect at all.  They made
two nests in succession and abandoned them both.  Then one day the
ex-cygnet was observed to be sitting patiently, continuously, proudly,
on the third attempt at a nest.  By then I was sure.

The old gentleman was sure too, indeed there could be no denial; but
being a real countryman he was not prepared to retreat easily from his
position.  He announced to me that 'they' had laid five eggs, thus
denying by implication that either had been more responsible for the
eggs than the other; then added (rather inconsistently, I thought) that
they owed their parenthood entirely to the fact that he had fed them
with bread throughout the winter.  I accepted both these theories
without wasting time in argument.

Six weeks later the eggs hatched out.  Most young birds are noticeably
plain, their beaks being too large for their faces and their feathers
too sparse for their bodies.  The mouse, the rabbit, the puppy, the
kitten, however delightful later on, are not attractive to even the
most ardent animal-lover in their first, blind, naked stage.  This
drawback did not apply to the little cygnets.  They were full of charm
from the start; moreover, they could swim at once, and thus fulfilled
their function without delay.  The little flotilla followed the mother
in close formation, bobbing on the ripples, ducking their heads in
search of food in absurd imitation of their parent.  It was pretty to
see her shelter them with her body when the wind blew too strong and
manoeuvre them between the rushes into quieter water.  On the second
morning I counted only four instead of five, and wondered where the
fifth had gone.  I could not believe that even a fox would have faced
those great angry wings, but there was no doubt: only two pairs of grey
fluff followed in the parental wake.  Then a small grey head poked up
through the mother's feathers, emerging on a thin neck curved into a
mark of interrogation, out of what must surely be the snowiest, softest
place of refuge in the world.

[Illustration: Swans in the sun]




Podiceps ruficollis

Reading about the manners of birds described by other people is
agreeable enough, but the interest is impersonal and savours too much
of a transient curiosity over odd habits, much as we might experience
in reading about the Trobrianders.  The Trobrianders are unlikely to
affect, or even to enter, our lives.  Nor is the Great Auk, or the
Chiloe Wigeon, but the moment a personal discovery, however humble,
comes our way, how very different is our response.  The excitement of
discerning the nest of a long-tailed tit among some exceedingly thorny
rose-bushes is enough to make us feel that we are really in touch with
the queer hidden world of nature.  We knew of course theoretically that
long-tailed tits did construct such remarkable homes to rear their
brood, but never until we saw it with our own eyes did we quite believe
it.

It was thus with pleasure and surprise that, scrambling round the lake,
I observed a strange dank patch of mud on the extreme tip of a fallen
willow bat, half in and half out of the water, and knew it for the nest
of a Little Grebe.  The surprise was unwarranted, for the Little Grebe
commonly frequents our lakes and ponds, and there was nothing at all
noteworthy in the fact that it had thus chosen to honour my own small
piece of water.  Still, there it was, and I was pleased.  More, I felt
even proud.  'The Little Grebe', I murmured to myself, snobbishly
avoiding the more popular name of dabchick.  '_Podiceps ruficollis
ruficollis_', I might have added, but owing only to my ignorance I
didn't.

Instead, I approached cautiously to the very verge of the lake.  The
nest was right out in the water, balanced on its horizontal bat, the
tiny waves washing up to it as the breeze blew.  Thanks to the
ingenuity of the builder, no one would ever have taken it for a nest at
all.  It was very different from the neat, dry nests of the
neighbouring moorhens, carefully plaited with papery reeds, like cheap
waste-paper baskets, among the stumps of old trees out of reach of
water or foxes.  The nest of the Little Grebe was, in comparison, a
messy affair that made one wonder why two kinds of water-bird, living
in such close proximity and in precisely the same circumstances, should
have evolved so different a method of dealing with the same dangers and
the same difficulties.

[Illustration: Moorhen's nest]

Sitting down to watch for anything that might happen, I reflected how
greatly I should dislike to start my life from such a home.  One
instinctively thinks of a nest as a warm, cosy thing--the incubator
system foreseen by nature.  This nest bore no relation to the incubator
system whatsoever.  It was muddy, it was wet.  It looked cold and
sodden.  It was, in fact, nothing but a dab of wet mud.  A strand of
wild honeysuckle grew unhappily out of it.  No eggs were visible
because the Little Grebe has the ingenious idea of covering her eggs
with wet leaves whenever she absents herself from her responsibilities.
Frighten her, and off she goes, after hiding her treasure.  This was
evidently what had happened, but after I had been sitting there for a
few minutes there came a rustle among the reeds and a neat head peeped
out, sensed my presence, and again disappeared.  I scarcely liked to
remain on the watch, because it so obviously distressed the bird whom I
could now see sailing round on the outskirts, worried and anxious.  The
nest might be messy, but it was the only thing she knew how to do, and
it was dear to her.  Happy though I was, sitting among the spent
bluebells and the ragged robins on a summer afternoon, I got up and
went away, not to distress the Little Grebe unduly.

A few weeks later a quick scuffle on the bank drew my attention to a
second nest, even wetter, messier, and more dabby than the first.  It
was not even perched on a bat, but floated independently with no
visible support.  I rowed out to it, since it could be reached only by
boat, stirred the dank leaves, and found the warm eggs lying beneath.
The sudden warmth of the eggs startled me, coming after the coolth of
the water and the soggy moisture of the nest.  The warmth of the eggs
and the coldness of the water seemed in significant contradiction: the
warmth of life, the cold of Ophelia's death.  The touch of those five
warm eggs was one of those small, dulcet, delicately sensual
experiences which one does not forget.

I know, however, that when presently I revisit those nests, the broods
will be out swimming with their mothers, and at the first alarm will
clamber on to their backs and be carried off into safety.  It is one of
the prettiest sights of the waterside, this soft scramble of chicks
into the comfort of their mother's feathers.




Circus

During the summer months you may meet them on the country roads, a long
file of caravans drawn by a traction engine.  Rocking and swaying, they
crawl elephantine between the hedges, gaudily painted; the
merry-go-round and the swing-boats, the animals' cages and the
tent-poles, the ponies following on a rope.  These are the humble
village circuses that pitch their brief camp in a field, beat their
drums, blow their trumpets, put out their streamers, pocket their
gate-money, and depart again after a prodigious litter and ruin of
demolition and repacking.  These are the humble circuses of summer;
where they hibernate I do not pretend to know.  They come with the
swallows and leave us with the autumn, a ragged, bright, thievish,
vagrant fraternity, associated with sun and dust and parched fields;
they are the brood of summer, and for them winter has no place.

But in the winter their grander brethren blossom out in the glare of
great towns.  The Christmas holidays bring them, and with them their
paraphernalia of wonders that are always fundamentally the same, and
always just sufficiently different.  What painter could sit unmoved at
a circus-ring, his fingers not twitching to hold the brush?  The lights
are there, flaring and crude; the shadows, cavernous and brutal; the
shapes are there, in the pale ring of the arena and in the shining,
twirling figures, whether sheathed in silver and purple, or blotched
with paint in the eternal clumsiness of a clown.  Hoops and horses,
velvet ropes and glittering trapeze.  Violent light from reflectors
overhead, and the dim tiers of the audience, now transfixed and agape,
now released into a sudden riot of stirring and applause.

[Illustration: On the road]

The arena lures us, as it lured the Romans to the Coliseum, as it lures
the Spaniards to the bull-ring.  It is a little epitome of life itself,
where, concentrated under the rays of the limelight, men come safely
through situations of skill and danger.  It seems astonishing that they
should come through, but somehow they always do.  And that, I think, is
the weak spot of the circus.  Not that we secretly desire an
accident--though some psychologists would make us believe that under
every expression of goodwill lies a subconscious and diabolical
intent--but that we are persuaded, from the start, that juggler and
acrobat are fully able to perform successfully the feats they set out
to perform.  Be it never so seemingly impossible, we know, coldly
sophisticated as we are, that the man has not undertaken a job beyond
his strength.  Therefore, we scarcely want to see him execute it.  We
are convinced, even before he has embarked upon his enterprise.  The
moment we arrive at the circus we turn into born believers.  We accept
the fact that the man can ride a bicycle along a tight-rope in mid-air;
that he can pause mid-way (though heaven knows that we ourselves cannot
remain motionless upon a bicycle on firm ground, let alone upon a
tight-rope), and that he can without loss of equilibrium put up a
parasol and again without loss of equilibrium allow a little boy to
climb upon his shoulders.  But in spite of our confidence, in spite of
the fearful thrill at our hearts, we are humanely cowardly somewhere
for the safety of a fellow-mortal--we would rather not see him do it.
He can do it all right, of course, but just suppose...

The worst of it is that children, for whom the circus is primarily
designed, are as trusting as their elders.  Perhaps they miss half the
thrill, being without that whisper of uneasiness, that terror that
something might, after all, go wrong.  They are not torn, as we
grown-ups are torn, between the rather bored conviction that the man
can do it, and the qualm that perhaps, after all, he can't.  The man to
them is a grown-up, and consequently omnipotent.  That he can keep
twelve plates in the air, or ride a bicycle along a tight-rope, is no
more marvellous than that their father should be able to blow smoke
down his nose.  Danger, in itself, means nothing to them.  'Take care,
you'll hurt yourself', that daily and familiar formula, means, at most,
the possibility of a grazed knee.  They cannot envisage the mess and
ruin of a human frame.  And so, with open mouth and upturned nose, they
serenely, politely, follow the fabulous feats enacted for their benefit.

They like the clowns, on the whole preferring to see a man funny than
imperilled.  Their applause of the clowns is spontaneous, not
perfunctory.  The clown knows the value of a pretended failure; he
knows that to stumble over the first attempt will bring a more
sympathetic and rapturous appreciation of his ultimate success.  He has
brought himself down to the human and fallible level; he has shown
himself to be no Omnipotent; he has come closer to the understanding of
a child.

What a world, to be sure!  One would like to know something of the
mentality behind the scenes.  Do they take their gyrations quite for
granted, or does it give a new outlook upon life to behold an audience
twice daily upside-down?  Is there any real satisfaction in being a
contortionist?  The most disheartening part of these accomplishments
must be, surely, that they are of no use outside a circus.  Very
rarely, in ordinary life, is one called upon to pick up a handkerchief
with one's teeth from the back of a galloping horse.  It must be
depressing in the extreme to have to spend so many hours in the
practice of such unpractical achievements.  They are not really an
equipment, even when mastered.  They are only a livelihood.  I doubt
even whether the lady who leaps so lightly upon the rounded rump of the
piebald horse would cut much of a figure in the hunting-field; I have a
suspicion that she would come off at the first fence.  And the
tight-rope cyclist might well be tumbled off his saddle on a greasy
road.  It is sad, but perhaps at the same time comfortable to our
vanity, to reflect that the infallible and indestructible gods of the
arena may be, in ordinary life, rather less competent than ourselves.

[Illustration: Red Admiral]




Between two Seasons

Summer is still here officially, but subtle hints have already been
thrown out by its successor among the seasons.  There comes a morning,
always, at this time of year when one awakes to the realisation that
one's knees and the tip of one's nose are unexpectedly cold, and, still
drowsy, scrabbles to regain the blankets one had flung off during the
earlier part of the night; then, aroused to full consciousness, leaps
from bed to gaze out of the window.  What has happened?  The familiar
summer aspect has changed.  A faint white mist hangs between the trees,
a chill dampness soaks the hollyhocks.  A few pallid sunbeams struggle
through the mist.  There is dew upon the grass, and diamond spider-webs
along the hedges.  For the first time one notices that the apples out
in the orchard are beginning to redden.

A couple of hours later all this is forgotten, and summer reigns again
as though her sway had never been threatened.  The sunbeams have won
the victory over the insidious white mist, and in the hot, broad day
the grass is again warm to the touch, the hedges dry enough to rustle
under the weight of a bird.  The adders have come out to sun themselves
upon the stone.  The long mauve tassels of the buddleias are smothered
with butterflies and bees.  From a distance comes the whirr of a
reaper, most summery of sounds, as the noble wheat falls sadly and
gracefully in widening bands.  The brief ghostly apparition of autumn
has gone, but we know that any morning now it may be renewed.

[Illustration: Red Admiral]




Eels

On summer evenings it is pleasant to sit by the lake, watching the
electric-blue dragon-flies quivering over the rushes while the sun
declines and the big trout leap a foot out of the water.  The stillness
is broken by their splash and by the distressful cry of the moorhens,
but these natural sounds leave the other inhabitants of the waterside
untroubled.  If you keep very still, the confidence which your arrival
faintly disturbed will soon be re-established and a vole will scramble
from the water almost at your feet.  It gives a peculiar sense of
intimacy with nature to realise that your presence is accepted without
fear by the small and vulnerable creatures of bank and wood and to
watch them going unalarmed about their normal business.

On such evenings, earlier in the year, you might almost hope to see an
elver making its way over the damp grass from the ocean to the lake, a
sight, it is said (I do not know with what truth), that no man has ever
been privileged to witness.  Eels, as everyone knows, are creatures of
curious habits; the Bermudas are not remote to them, and you may take
it that the sinuous creature of our native ponds is probably
better-travelled than many humans.  It must be very tiring to be so
constituted that one has to swim several thousands of miles in order to
find sufficient depth of water in which to arrive at sexual maturity.
A hundred fathoms of pressure is, I believe, the minimum necessary.
But why the resulting elvers should then return to the haunts from
which their parents had come, or should themselves obey the urge to
seek the depths of the Caribbean in the fullness of time, is a mystery
which none can answer.

All we know is that the little eels arrive, small and diaphanous, and
are well-advised to avoid the cities of Bath and Bristol, where they
traditionally run the risk of being made into elver-cakes.  The town of
Melun is no place for them either, for Rabelais asserts that the eels
of Melun screamed before being skinned alive.  The eel, in fact, does
not seem to meet with much human sympathy; even the common sayings
about him are disobliging.  I wish, however, that we used his adjective
more generally: 'An eely man' seems to me an excellently descriptive
expression.

[Illustration: Ducks]




Eels in Italy

Sitting by the Lake of Garda one evening after dinner, I observed a
fishing boat about to leave the small harbour, and hailing the men I
asked whether I might accompany them.  A lantern hung at the prow, and
under a great dim sail we very slowly drifted away from the shore.  It
was already dark; the vague shapes of men bent over their gear,
silently setting things in order.  A figure squatting in the prow
motioned to me to come beside him; I saw then that he held a pronged
spear-like weapon in his hand, and that between his knees crouched a
little boy, ready and eager to unhook the lantern.  At a signal he
swung it overboard, and we peered down into the clear green depths of
the water.  It may have been deceptive, but I should have said we
looked down through at least twenty feet of water so pellucid that the
pebbles lying on the bottom were plainly visible.  Not pebbles only,
but droves of fish that darted by, and, under the fish, long coiling
shapes that seemed almost somnolent compared with those quick-moving
midgets.  The man with the spear poised his weapon; the little boy with
the lantern cautiously lowered it until the light almost touched the
surface.  The coiling shapes writhed uneasily, and as they writhed,
separating slightly from one another, the man with the spear struck.
He struck with a gesture of singular beauty and precision, a gesture
which in the fraction of a minute suggested all the centuries during
which men, similarly armed, had struck down into those very waters.
The dripping spear came up triumphantly, the snake-like victim impaled
upon its prongs; the little boy, excited but businesslike, sprang to
disengage it from the barb.  It was flung into the well of the boat,
but the spearman had already lost interest and, with his dark little
acolyte again lowering the lantern, was once more gazing down into the
glaucous transparency.




The Hop-picking Season

The hoppers are arriving in Kent.  It is curious to observe that the
moment the East-ender leaves his slum in Bermondsey or Rotherhithe for
this annual expedition, he starts to cut quite a different figure in
the public mind, ceases to be a mere and rather vulgar Cockney, and is
instantly invested with all the attributes of romance.  For three weeks
in his drab year he is allowed to rank in picturesqueness with the
gipsy.  Why this should be so is a little difficult to explain.  He
dresses in the same way as he does in London, yet there is a difference
between the Cockney and the hopper; perhaps the red handkerchief
knotted round the throat looks better in a field than in the slum.  The
tawdry muslins of his women make a bright and oddly foreign effect
among the bines.  The presence of many children turns the serious
business of picking into something like a pagan festival, reminding me
of the Neopolitan celebration when the local little boys spray their
naked sunburnt bodies with the copper-sulphate used for the prevention
of Phylloxera and prance about stained in turquoise blue between the
olives and the vines at dawn, a scene which Leonardo might have found
it in his taste to record in paint.  The Londoners' children are
neither so gay nor so pagan, but still a certain light-heartedness
descends on all.  It is very un-English in spite of being so
essentially English.  The hop-garden is a fair substitute for the
vineyard, with its swags of green bunches so like the white muscat, its
long leafy tunnels dappled with light, its brown canvas troughs filled
with the pale flowers.  Colour and gaiety reign in a way they never do
at the other great country events such as hay-making or harvest.

This gaiety is reflected also in the trouble that the Cockney family
takes to make its temporary home as lively as possible.  The sleeping
quarters provided are usually no better than a range of wooden
huts--sometimes even an old railway coach--lime-washed inside, and
supplied with a wooden bench and a couple of trusses of straw for
bedding.  Nothing more.  It is all very clean, bare, and hard.  Little
can be said for it save that it is clean and (one hopes) weather-proof.
Fortunately the families who have descended yearly upon the same
hop-garden for several generations, grandmother, mother, and child,
know exactly what to bring with them in order to turn the hut into a
home.  They bring coloured lithographs and lace curtains; bedspreads
and china ornaments, and by the time they have set out their treasures
their little hovel looks as attractive as a Dutch interior.  Then when
the working day is over they gather round bonfires and rouse the quiet
night with songs and piano-accordions.

In damp sunless weather the picture is different.  We remember then
that perhaps thanks to our climate we are a glum race.  A peddler comes
round crying mackerel at five a shilling; alive they were, and
swimming, this morning at sunrise, for the sea is not so very far away,
but now the dead protruding eyes of fish stare at the pickers over the
edge of the basket; this has to do duty for song and sunburnt mirth.
The pickers then contribute nothing of jollity.  Sordid, pasty bundles,
sitting on camp stools or wooden boxes, their muslins hidden away
beneath their mackintoshes, their babies uncomfortably asleep in
go-carts beside them, they strip the bines in gloomy silence,
preoccupied solely with the completion of their tally.  A tally to a
family; a big thing to fill, and only 1s. 5d. when you have done it.
No wonder they are sometimes gloomy, especially when it rains.  The
grape is a fruit, the hop only a flower; perhaps that makes all the
difference.

It appears also that they do not wholly like being in the country.  So
long as the weather is fine they make the best of it, regarding it as a
holiday to be enjoyed, almost an obligation, but then as day dies a
certain alarm disquiets their souls.  Away from traffic and street
lights, they are frightened.  The silence and the darkness of the
fields perplexes them.  They will not go about after dusk except in
little bands.  Toughs though they may be at home, they are not tough
enough to stand the desolation of the darkened country-side.  On the
whole they feel rather relieved when the moment comes for them to climb
into their charabancs or cars again and return to a mode of life they
understand.

Perhaps, however, they will not much longer be called upon to add their
picturesque touch to the country year.  The bines, it is said, will
soon be stripped by machinery.  Oh, brave new world!

[Illustration: Oasts]




The Garden and the Oast

It is the annual outing of the East End, but the East End cannot be
expected to take any affectionate interest in our peculiarly local
crops.  These acres, representing several thousands of pounds, tended
all the year by expert, almost instinctive, country hands, from the
first training of the bine to the last fingering of the swollen flower,
are turned over in the height of their fulfilment to the unskilled,
unsympathetic mercies of the Cockney.  Consider for a moment the care
and vigilance which throughout the months of winter, spring, and summer
have brought the gardens to their autumn state of fecundity.  First,
after the harvesting, the old bines must be cleared away; then the
pruning-knife must sever and select; then, with the shooting of the new
bine, up go the strings--strings reckoned by the ton; six hundred miles
of string, fixed to the ground at the bottom by women and boys, and to
the permanent wires overhead by men on stilts, giant figures stalking
between the poles in the bleak spring day.  The bine begins to grow;
heavily fed, it will grow as much as two feet in a night, twining round
the strings from right to left, for the hop cannot be persuaded to grow
widdershins.  You may think that a plant with so much energy might now
be left for a little to its own devices.  Make no such mistake.  It has
its enemies: mould and insects; it has its remedies: wash and powder;
the enemy must be looked for, and the remedy applied unsparingly, even
though the men with knapsacks blow hundreds of pounds sterling in fine
sulphur dust into the air.  The wind, too--a proper gale will do grand
damage in the hop-garden.  But the garden survives these dangers, and
towards the end of August you are rewarded by the pale, imponderable
clusters, well grown out, as you walk down the green, lovely aisles or
mount your fixed ladders for a final inspection.  It is then, when your
expert judgment decides that the flower is ripe for picking, that
London lets loose its hordes and the garden is profaned by the presence
of these philistines, and the fish-peddler cries his mackerel at five a
shilling.

The profanation, however, marks but a brief stage in the history of the
hop from bine to bottle.  At the sole moment of its picking is the hop
subjected to the hands that neither love, hate, nor understand it.
Once picked into the pokes, when the garden begins to assume a dirty,
dejected air, with the cut bines withering in their fallen heaps, the
poles sticking up gaunt and useless, the wires overhead fluffy with the
fringe of cut strings--once picked, the flower is hurried to the oasts,
where skilled driers receive it.  These are men who have been for
thirty, forty, fifty years at their job.  They handle their material
and their implements as though they knew what they were about.  Indeed,
they disregard some of their implements, with a sort of contempt, such
as the thermometer and the weighing-machine, referring to them only as
a concession to convention, to corroborate their human judgment, or to
satisfy the overseer, when their instinct is rarely proved at fault.
This is pleasing, and as it should be.  The hop is once more in hands
that have the mastery over it.

[Illustration: The barn door]

All day the chimneys of the kilns have been smoking blue, but the life
of the kiln does not slacken with dusk, when the pickers go home to
their camp; all night the process of drying goes on, to keep pace with
the supply that has been pouring in from the garden.  Inside the oast,
we choke and cough with the sulphur; the doors of the furnaces stand
open for a fresh stoking, like the entrails of a ship, the pan of
sulphur blue in the midst of the fire; the men, demoniacal figures
redly lit, shovel on the coal, slam the doors, throw down their shovels
with horrible clang; this ground-level of the oast is a place of
violence.  Propped against the wall, too, are brutal shapes, sacks as
big as bullocks, with the white horse of Kent prancing painted across
them, and their corners tied into ears like the ears of killed beasts.

But on the upper story the hop reassumes its character of pale colour
and feather weight.  In the long, low, raftered loft, where everything
is whitewashed, the lanterns swing from the beams above mountains of
dried flowers on the floor, billowing heaps of a ghostly pallor, an
exquisite imponderability.  Impossible to give a name to their colour.
It is a cross between ash and gold; the colour of dust-motes, of corn
in moonlight, of fair hair under a lamp.  All the green has been taken
from them in the drying; they are crisp and airy; everything you touch
is sticky with resin, even the bristles of the brooms are knobby with
resin gathered in sweeping up the floor; the pungent smell is in the
air.  The lanterns throw the shadows of the rafters in sharp designs on
roof and floor.  The men, dressed in white overalls, pile the heaps
higher with rake and scupper--huge scoops made of white canvas.  In one
corner, where a hole gapes in the boards, two men shovel the hops down
the hole into the mouth of the sack which hangs below, out of sight; a
great wheel spins round, the shadow of its spokes whirling over the
whitewashed wall, and the weight descends into the sack, pressing,
packing, till the flowers are squeezed into solidity, and one believes
at last what had always seemed so unconvincing, that a ton of feathers
weighs as much as a ton of lead.

[Illustration: Inside the oast]

This is all activity; but the hops at their drying are quiet and
private.  Doors along one side of the loft open on to the upper
chambers of the kilns, white, circular, the roof rising to a point.
The hops are spread knee-deep upon the floor.  They are green still,
and a faint blue smoke rises through them.  It is very quiet in there,
with a quality of solitude and vigil; very warm too, and heavily
scented, inside the circular oast.  The drier steps into the sea of
hops, and slouches through them, kicking them up.  Especially on the
outside edges is it necessary to see that they shall be evenly dried;
so he slouches round the wall, an old man in white corduroys,
travelling against the white wall, stealthily as it seems, kicking up
the pale green sea that faintly rustles, disturbing the smoke into
little wreaths and eddies.  There is a medieval flavour about it: the
round chamber, the roof pointed like a witch's hat, the white and
green, the warmth, the smoke, the ancient man, the smell that creeps so
soporifically over the senses.  Out in the yard, as you come away, the
shafts of the waggons stick up at the stars, and the cowled chimneys
point in a blacker darkness at the darkness of the sky.  To the left
lies the ruined garden, with aisles of bare poles waiting for next
year's bine.  You stumble down the lane, and at the corner turn to
throw a glance at the group of kilns.  A light appears in a little
window, high up.  You know then that the old drier has taken his
lantern into the oast, and is slouching the hops, round and round the
wall, in that furtive way, a mysterious rite, while in the loft the
weight sinks rhythmically into the filling sack, and the overseer
scribbles another ton upon his slate.  There is no sleep for the men,
and to-morrow the carts will come creaking up the lane with new loads
from the gardens.

[Illustration: Hops]




Humulus Lupulus

The history of the hop is not uninteresting.  Guinness is good for you;
but in the reign of Henry VI popular opinion took a different view, and
the hop was condemned as 'a wicked weed'.  By the time of Henry VIII
the wicked weed had attained quite another status, having been
officially introduced from Flanders for cultivation in Kent and two or
three other counties.  Even so, Henry VIII ruled that the brewer should
not put any hops into the ale, since this addition would 'dry up the
body and increase melancholy'.  This ruling of an autocratic King did
not prevent an irreverent subject of the Crown from writing, perhaps
rather inaccurately,

  Hops, Reformation, Bays, and Beer
  Came into England all in one year.


The overwhelming proportion of those hops which came into England,
never to depart, is grown in Kent, and has had its effect upon the
landscape of the county in those characteristic pointed oast-houses,
with their white vanes swinging to the wind.  Most people must be
strangely incurious.  Nearly everybody must surely have seen oasts
dozens of time, if only from the window of a train, yet if one lives
near a group of them one is constantly asked what 'those odd-looking
buildings' are for.  During the first weeks of September, anyone can
see for himself what they are for.  He can climb up into the upper loft
and glance into the round turret where the deep green carpet of cones
is spread drying in the hot fumes.  He can watch the men shovelling the
dried heaps through a hole in the floor, packing them tightly into the
great sacks called pockets in which they are to be driven away to the
brewer--the last stage in the endlessly complicated process of the
hop-grower's year.




Harvest

'The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped,
nor was ever sown.'  The harvest was long delayed this year, and it
seemed indeed that the great corn-field would never be ready for the
reaping.  Day after day it continued green, lacking the Midas touch of
the sun; Lammas came and went without effect, yet the proverb records
that after the Loaf-mass corn ripens as much by night as by day.  The
change came as imperceptibly as the growth of a child, until one
morning I woke to the realisation that it was no longer green but
yellow.  Regretfully, I knew that the hour was approaching when the
beautiful moving sea would go down before the sails of the reaper and
nothing but the stubble remain until the plough should follow to turn
it once more into furrows.  Still the ripening loitered on the way.
The pale yellow persisted without giving sign of deepening into the
brown so prophetic of the crusted loaf.  Evening after evening I went
to look at the corn, half hoping, half fearing to observe the second
change which would mean that harvest was at hand.  There are two times
of day when, for sheer beauty, it is most advisable to look at a
cornfield: the early morning, when the shadows are long from the east,
and the evening when the shadows are long from the west.  Noon is too
high overhead and less becoming.  Of the two extremes, sunrise or
sunset, sunset is greatly to be preferred, for then a sultry marriage
takes place between the low deep light and the voluptuous field;
sunrise, beautiful though its shadows are, is really too young, fresh,
and romantical.  There is an age and an agelessness in corn which
better suits the dying day.

Much can be said for moonlight also, though there would appear to be a
contradiction between the dead blanching of the moon and the warm
living of the corn.  Yet they mysteriously marry.  There have been
evenings of late when the moon riding between Mars and Jupiter has lit
the cornfield in a way that suggested the spiritual life alternating
with the material life symbolised by the sun, both necessary to the
bread by which man cannot live alone.

The corn is cut now, and the harvest in.  The men worked till daylight
failed them, cutting, carting, stacking, for the weather might spoil
and other things more serious than the weather might spoil also.  It
was more than ever urgent to get the harvest in.  In the few fields
which are not yet carted the sheaves remain pitched upright, throwing
cones of shadow like the black cones employed by map-makers as symbols
to mark the site of Roman villas in Britain.  Lammas came, Lammas went;
the Romans came, the Romans went; the sheaves remain, the sheaves will
go, they will be carted into the big barn and the field will be
stripped empty until next year when other sheaves will stand in their
place like dunces' caps marking the site of villas or tiny pyramids
recalling the monstrous accomplishments of Egypt.

The corn was orient and immortal wheat...

[Illustration: Corn]




Cornucopia

[Illustration: Oats]

Summer goes down in a last splendid burst of lavishness.  Even this
year of 1938, about which so many complaints were heard, I could have
gathered enough natural food within half an hour to keep several people
from starvation for several days.  The William pears need little more
than a night in a dark cupboard before they turn sweet and yellow.  The
hedgerows are already hung with the black and red clusters of shining
blackberries, and the nuts in their pale green sheaths are more
abundant than I have seen them for many years.  The fallen maggoty ones
crack underfoot, as we tread reaching up to pull down the sound ones
hanging overhead.  The little white umbrellas of the mushrooms are
dotted all over the fields.  On the garden walls the peaches are no
less rosy than the bricks, and the figs have turned as brown as a piece
of old velvet.  Out in the orchard, standing just high enough to have
escaped the May frosts that ruined the blossom in the valleys, big
green cooking apples drop with a thud into the grass among the violet
cups of the autumn crocus.

Peace and plenty, if only for the moment.

[Illustration: Apples]




Waste?

I find that people vary considerably in their attitude towards the
fruits of the earth.  Some, true country-dwellers, put them to jealous
use, and a well-stocked store-room is the result.  There are few sights
more agreeable than shelves neatly loaded with glass jars as coloured
as jewels with jam, juice, and jellies; the ruby of raspberry, the
aquamarine of gooseberry, the fire-opal of marmalade, the pearls of
white currant.  Then there are--or should be--the big brown crocks full
of chutney and of beans layered in salt; the pails of eggs preserved in
isinglass.  There should also be large marrows laid aside; and perhaps
one of them may be hanging up, disembowelled and stuffed with brown
sugar, destined eventually to produce a decoction of which it is said
that one drink is quite enough and two a great deal too much.  Add a
few dangling bunches of dried herbs, and the store-room begins to wear
the aspect it ought to wear.  An air of proper pride presides over it;
a quiet, independent air; a practical expression of trouble taken.

To-day few are left to take such trouble.  Why layer beans in salt when
a tin of peas can be bought for 8_d_.?  Why bother about blackberries
when canned peaches arrive miraculously and cheaply from California and
the Cape?  Why bother to cut the down out of bulrushes when Kapok
cushions can be bought for a few pence?  So, gradually, the traditions
are dying out even amongst the country people.

From the town-dweller one expects, and gets, a different point of view.
It horrifies the town-dweller to observe the wastage that goes on.  To
him, unaccustomed to the lavishness of nature in potential foodstuffs,
the free feast offered suggests nothing but perplexity and envy.  "How
can you leave all those good apples lying there?" he says in righteous
surprise.  "How can you allow half your vegetables to run to seed?  Why
don't you send them to a hospital if you don't want them yourself?  You
don't realise what they cost to buy in a shop."

The townsman is right, and yet wrong.  Right, because it is true that
sufficient advantage is nowadays not taken of many things which we
could have for nothing (nothing, that is, but our own labour).  Wrong,
because in his ignorance he frequently does not know the reason.  He
does not realise that the windfalls are bruised and thus not worth the
gathering except for jam.  He has never been accustomed to let a
proportion of his vegetables run to seed so that he may harvest
it--another free gift--for next year's crop.  There are many
explanations the countryman could give him.

One thing, however, always does surprise me, and that is the
indifference with which the hop-pickers regard the mushroom.  I had
always believed that mushrooms were considered a delicacy when you
could not just wander out and collect them in the fields but had to buy
them from the greengrocer; I discovered, on the contrary, that the
invasion of Londoners did not even recognise them for what they were
but amused themselves by kicking them over with the toe of their boot
while walking along.  There they lay, broken and scattered, the lovely
pink undersides like fishes' gills, turned black and sodden.  I suppose
that, growing the right way up in the field, they looked very different
from the tumbled sooty heap in the greengrocer's basket.  I pointed out
the lost opportunity to a party of pickers from Bethnal Green.  "What!
them mushrooms?" they said incredulously.  "Why, we thought they was
toadstools."




Departure

The pickers have nearly finished their job and will be leaving us at
the end of this week.  No longer shall we see the red light of their
fires burning in the distance, nor, on a Saturday night, shall I be
able to walk down to their huts, sit with them round the brushwood
fire, and listen to their jokes and their songs.  It is a scene which,
with a difference, always carries me back to a ranch in California,
where under the shelter of a great rock the cowboys would light their
bonfire and sit round chanting endless sagas of the trail.  There is no
great rock here, and the stars are less enormous, but even in the
lameness of my own familiar fields the sole illumination of the flames
casts a wild beauty over the rough faces and the coloured scarves.  The
doors of the huts stand open, a little oil-lamp revealing each
miniature interior; the head of a sleepy child droops suddenly; an
armful of fresh brushwood makes the embers flare; the plaintive notes
of the accordion continue to rise and fall.  It is nearly two o'clock
in the morning; the jokes, the dancing, and the ribald songs have
ceased; they have stopped dancing the Lambeth Walk; the songs are all
sentimental now--eternal Sehnsucht and eternal pain.

I shall miss the hoppers.

[Illustration: The oast loft]




Controversial Topics

That last week of September 1938, excruciating though it proved at
every moment to our strained nerves, enjoyed a singular outward beauty.
September went down in a slanting golden sun, touching our familiar
landscapes with a light so rich and mellow as to preclude all
suggestion of irony.  It seemed, indeed, inconceivable that devastation
should fall suddenly on such a scene.  Looking across at the harmless
sunlit hills, the mind rejected the conception of violence.  Men might
be digging trenches in their gardens, and reason encouraged them to do
so; but still some deep old stupid optimism lurked, telling them that
this was only a precautionary measure, not really (not in the last
resort) necessary.  They joked as they dug, and it was hard to tell
whether their joking or their digging was the more sincere.

We dug a trench in the orchard here--a most inadequate trench which
would certainly have fallen in at the first heavy rain, a most
unscientifically constructed trench, which expressed the instinct to
burrow into the friendly earth rather than any calculated attempt to
provide a four or five years strong shelter against the attack of an
efficient foe.  Not that, out in the country as we are, danger seemed
very likely; but one never knows, thinking of Spanish villages and the
swoop of machine-guns.  So one must make provision.  This sudden hasty
burrowing into the earth struck one as truly horribly uncivilised: man
seeking refuge from man under the peacefully ripening apples and pears
of September--man turning himself into a frightened furtive threatened
creature like a rabbit or a mole.  Human dignity fell crashing from its
unique state: it dug, it tunnelled, it hid itself away in the last
desperate attempt to protect its vulnerable body.  Shocking, and yet
necessary.  How wrong and foolish that such a necessity should arise
between man and man.  What would a visitor from another world, a more
co-operative world, have felt about my rough trench dug hastily in the
orchard?  Mars approaches, only thirty-six million miles away instead
of forty-five, accompanied by two small moons, smaller than ours, more
rapid in their flight; and we beneath the red planet cower between
walls of yellow clay.  There are indeed times when absurdity can appear
more tragic than high tragedy; and so I thought when, visiting a rich
man's garden, I came upon an elaborately revetted dug-out concealed
among the rhododendrons.

I suppose that the psychological effect of that week acted upon all of
us differently.  None of us could have predicted what associations of
thought it would set up in our minds, as a reaction after the immediate
danger had passed temporarily away.  There was the man who remarked
that he wished he was living again in 1916, because then he knew that
the war would end some day.  For my own part, it started very vividly
into life two subjects upon which I have always found it very difficult
to make a final and comprehensive decision: blood sports, and
vivisection.  I know quite well what my instinctive answer is to both:
instant and complete condemnation.  But then contributary
considerations creep in, and I find myself unable to press my answer to
its logical conclusion--a very distressing position for a person of
logical and argumentative temper.

I have tried seriously and painfully to discover my final feelings on
these matters.  I care seriously about them both, for the sake of
civilisation and the sake of animals.  Unfortunately, the more deeply
one cares, the more bad thinking one is likely to bring to the argument.




Blood-Sports

Blood-sports is the easier problem of the two.  All truly civilised men
and women must recoil in horror before the scenes associated with
stag-hunting and otter-hunting; and even fox-hunting, which appeals to
many either on account of the qualities it calls out in man and horse,
or on account of the mischievous and unendearing character of the
victim, or merely because it forms a picturesque and traditional
adjunct to the country-side, meets with considerable disapproval.  But
are we to push our disapproval farther, and condemn also the man who
takes out his gun in the hope of bagging a brace of pheasants, or the
man who endeavours to deal with the nuisance of rabbits, or even the
fisherman who pursues his quiet pleasure with certainly no thought of
cruelty in his mind?  The answer would seem to be that we must accept a
killing for necessary food, where the pursued stands at least as good a
chance as the pursuer, while censuring whole-heartedly those
revoltingly organised excursions on a grand scale, arranged purely for
the gratification, glorification, and blood-lust of man.




Vivisection

Here a real anguish of doubt and indecision enters my soul.  Is it
better to let a man suffer an obscure disease than to sacrifice a
guinea-pig?  Obviously, no.  Then, the principle once established,
where are we to draw the line?  No one, I suppose, would deny that much
valuable information has been obtained through experiments on animals,
and many of us would accept without much difficulty the idea of
experiments carried out as humanely as possible on, say, mice and rats.
(One instance of our usual bad thinking is that our sympathy varies in
proportion to the size of the animal, and also in proportion to the
animal's attractive or unattractive qualities.)  Yet in spite of this
tolerance a point must come where the most callous will boggle.  A
dog--your own dog--would you give him up for the advancement of
science?  Those trustful brown eyes, that paw laid on your knee?
Supposing you saw even a photograph of him strapped down on the
operating table, what would you feel then about vivisection?  "But,"
says the surgeon, "you have admitted the principle; to jib now is
surely mere sentimentality?"

We sigh.  Perhaps it is.  Perhaps it is just bad thinking again that is
making us so inconsistent.  We know very well, however, that we have
reached a ditch which we find it impossible to jump.  What are we
finally to concede?

We must concede that human benefit comes first; and, having done that,
assure ourselves that the precise gain to our knowledge can be acquired
in no other way.  Thereafter we must assure ourselves that the most
stringent legislation, supported by official inspection carried out
without warning, shall at least ensure that only essential experiments
are undertaken, with the minimum of suffering whether mental or
physical to the animal concerned.  I should like to write here, more
sweepingly, 'only essential and associated with the compulsory use of
ansthetics', but I know, horrible thought, that certain brain
operations can be usefully performed only during the full consciousness
of the victim.  I should like to write also that the more sensitive and
intelligent animals should be wholly spared, but here again I fear that
those better informed than I will protest that none but the highly
developed subject is suitable for certain purposes.  It is a grim
thought.  I could endure the sacrifice of frogs and rats, but there are
other sacrifices which I find it impossible to contemplate.

Thus far my inconclusive reflections lead me, and at this point I
realise as I have often realised before that the only constructive
solution I have to offer is in favour of the most severe control and an
almost unlimited judicial power of punishment.

My remarks on the quarrelsome subject of vivisection[#] resulted (as I
foresaw) in a vigorous attack of correspondence from both the
anti-vivisectionists and the research campaigners.  It provoked Mr.
Bernard Shaw himself into taking up his pen.  In fairness to both
sides, I must say that each has tried to be fair to me, even as I had
tried to be fair and impartial myself, though it is difficult to be
impartial on this subject, where feeling and reason are at even greater
disaccord than usual.  It therefore seems desirable to revive the
question, and to go into it at greater length, with, I hope, the same
degree of impartiality.  I should like to state simply and
straightforwardly at the start that I love animals as deeply as the
most ardent anti-vivisectionist can, and that the idea of their being
forced to suffer on our behalf is instinctively repugnant to me.  I
hope that my word for this may be accepted as sincerely as it is meant,
and that having dispelled all possible misunderstanding I need say no
more about it.


[#] I am well aware that my use of the word 'vivisection' is loose and
incorrect.  'Vivisection' actually means a cutting operation carried
out without an ansthetic, and as such was rendered illegal by Act of
Parliament in 1876.  Since, however, 'vivisection' has come to mean
'experiments on animals' in the popular mind, I use the expression for
brief convenience.


Much, much as I should like to range myself wholly on the side of the
anti-vivisectionists I still cannot do so.  Even after reading all
their arguments, and heaving all my own feelings into the scale on
their side, I still cannot help believing that the interests of man
must come first.  It is a horrible choice to make, but one must make
it.  In making it, one postulates of course two things: (_a_) that the
permanent alleviation of human suffering matters more, in the long run,
than the temporary pain of an animal; (_b_) that the temporary pain of
the animal will really contribute to the permanent cure of human
suffering.

The anti-vivisectionist disputes both these points.

[Illustration: Geese]




The Anti-vivisection Arguments

The question for the opponent of vivisection splits into two parts.  He
has two separate arguments to advance.  One argument is ethical, the
other is practical.  The ethical question is: Is vivisection morally
justifiable?  The practical question is: Does vivisection lead to any
useful results in the treatment of human pain and disease?

Let me take these two points in their order.

First, the anti-vivisectionist considers that 'vivisection is cruel,
and cruelty is either right or wrong'; moreover, that it 'ruins the
souls of those who practise it'.  None would deny the iniquity of
wanton cruelty, and, indeed, such cases are forcibly punished in this
country, but a scientific investigation conducted for the highest
humanitarian ends can scarcely come under the same heading.  The
ethical aspect thus seems to me really unworthy of more than a moment's
consideration.

Secondly, he denies that any benefits whatsoever have accrued to man as
a result of the practice.  The sweeping statements produced in support
of this theory are scarcely borne out either by reasonableness or by
the facts.  It is idle to pretend, for instance, that insulin has had
no effect on the treatment of diabetes; that smallpox remains
unaffected by vaccination; that diphtheria resists all attempt at
immunisation; that the treatment of rickets and pernicious anmia owes
nothing to experiments on animals; nor the understanding of antisepsis
and ansthetics (chloroform), the measurement of blood-pressure, and
the administration of artificial respiration (Schafer's method).  Such
contentions destroy their own case by their very intransigence.  All
vaccines are declared to be useless; the hypodermic syringe is 'a most
dangerous practice and _one that is quite outside the provision of
nature_' (italics mine); vivisection is to be condemned if only because
it has produced no cure for cancer; and if certain diseases must be
admitted to show a statistical diminution, the fact is to be ascribed
solely to the improvement in sanitary conditions, not to any advance in
medical science.

Such is the case which the anti-vivisectionist puts up, but on an
examination of the facts, supported by statistics, the arguments appear
to be untenable, and, in many instances, unfairly presented.

Another argument frequently advanced (again unsupported by facts) is
that as animals differ so much from human beings, all experiments
carried out on them are valueless as an indication, and that the only
experiment of any value can be practised on a human being.  The proper
study of mankind, in fact, is man.  Well, physicians and scientific
researchers have often been willing to experiment on themselves.  One
has only to instance Simpson and Duncan, Edgeworth and Davy.  There is
nothing that I can see to prevent the convinced anti-vivisectionists of
the present day from offering themselves as suitable subjects for
experiment.




The Case for the Vivisectionist

Statistics so thoroughly dispel the theory that certain diseases (only
a few of which have been enumerated above) have in no way yielded to
the treatment discovered as a result of experiments on animals, that
anyone interested may be referred to the printed evidence for himself.
It is impossible to go into the details here in this short space, but
the evidence is easily available and proves, I think beyond question,
the precious life-saving gains to medical science.  Another point
consistently overlooked by the opposing party is the benefit to animals
themselves, in the millions of cases prophylactically treated for such
ravaging plagues as anthrax, rinderpest, rabies, and canine distemper.
These facts once accepted, nothing remains in favour of the
anti-vivisectionist's argument except (_a_) our humane, potent, and
natural repugnance, and (_b_) our more rational and practical anxiety
as to the actual terms of the law, and as to the way in which that law
is administered.

[Illustration: The farm gate]




The Cruelty to Animals Act, 1876

The complete text of this law may be obtained, on application to the
Stationery Office, for the price of 1_s._, and all that need be said
here is that it attempts adequately to safeguard all animals used for
experimental purposes against suffering either during, or subsequent
on, the experiment.  A further and most elaborate system of
Certificates exists, concerning the grant of extra licences for
specific cases, including the proviso that 'an animal found to be
suffering pain which is either severe or likely to endure, shall
forthwith be painlessly killed'.  Lovers of dogs, cats, and horses may
be relieved to learn that these animals receive special consideration.
The principal query which remains in my mind after a careful study of
these documents, is not whether they are adequately framed but whether
they are adequately observed and enforced.

This, of course, is difficult for the layman to estimate.  One can
judge only by the report issued annually by the Home Office.  In the
report for the year 1937 I read that the total number of experiments
was 918,960, and that 901 visits were paid by official inspectors, or
roughly 0.1 per cent, a figure which seems to me insufficient for a
sufficiently rigorous control.  In fairness, however, one must add that
these visits are nearly always paid without previous notice; that an
overwhelming proportion of this alarming total of close on a million
experiments is taken up by nothing more serious than inoculations and
hypodermic injections; and that _in no case_ has a licence been granted
dispensing with the use of ansthetics in any operation more severe
than subcutaneous venesection (blood-letting).

These few remarks do not cover a quarter of the subject; I have not,
for instance, touched at all on the subsequent effects on the animal
thus used for experimental purposes.  In the meantime, however, it does
appear that instead of trying, often emotionally and ignorantly, to
thwart the efforts of medical science, we should do better to
concentrate on the truly shocking and unnecessary cruelty involved in
such practices as castration on farms, tail-docking, the use of steel
traps, and certain forms of sport.

[Illustration: Apples]




October

This is the time of year when the season changes its character; when
the early morning hours are soaked as well as radiant.  How beautiful
these October mornings can be, even though they spoil later in the day!
The spiders' webs veil the hedges with their miracle of fragile
intricacy.  The birds are singing again, in wistful reminiscence of the
far-away spring.  The quinces are turning golden to match the trees.
The berries are redder than blood among the darkness of the yews, and
they lie like gouts of blood on the grey paving stones where the
thrushes have smashed them.

But it is also a time for activity, not merely for contemplation.
Already the big cornfield has been ploughed up, and the furrows shine
after the rain.  The farmer and the gardener are both busy, the
gardener perhaps the more excitable of the two, for he is more of the
amateur, concerned with the creation of beauty rather than with the
providing of food.  Gardening is a luxury occupation; an ornament, not
a necessity, of life.  The farmer is not at all concerned with the
eventual beauty of his corn as a feature in the landscape, though,
indeed, he gets a certain satisfaction out of it, as he leans against
his gate on a summer evening, and sees his acres gently curving to the
breeze.  Still, beauty is not his primary aim; the gardener's is.
Fortunate gardener, who may preoccupy himself solely with beauty in
these difficult and ugly days!  He is one of the few people left in
this distressful world to carry on the tradition of elegance and charm.
A useless member of society, considered in terms of economics, he must
not be denied his rightful place.  He deserves to share it, however
humbly, with the painter and the poet.




The Garden in October

The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always
optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied.  They are for
ever planting, and for ever digging up.  They always look forward to
doing better than they have ever done before.  "Next year..." they say,
and even as they pronounce the words you become infected by their
enthusiasm, and allow yourself to be persuaded that the garden will
indeed look different, quite different, next year.  Experience tells
you that it never does; but how poor and disheartening a thing is
experience compared with hope!  Let us continue to be sanguine even at
the cost of future disillusionment.  A pound's worth of plants is worth
the full pound, even if ten shillings out of the pound eventually die
on us.  The survivors will compensate us for the failures.

This, then, is also the time of year when we take our gardens to
pieces.  It is a special moment in the year, when plants may safely be
shifted round to new and better positions, and other plants may safely
be introduced to one of those new planting schemes we had designed on
paper earlier in the year.  Throughout the spring and summer we had
enjoyed the flowering beauty planned last May, but if (as I trust) we
may be accounted true gardeners, this is the time when we can make
drastic alterations and look forward to a better, different effect next
spring.  And so it goes always forward: scheme after scheme, dream
after dream; and although only a very poor proportion of the schemes
and dreams come to fulfilment, there always remains the hope that some
day some effort will fulfil itself in terms of our loveliest
aspirations.

In the meantime, I shall continue to plant and shift during the months
of October and November.  I shall continue to think that my garden will
look quite different and better next year, although I know deep within
my heart that it will look exactly the same to everyone except,
perhaps, to me.  Alone I shall be able to register that my shrubs are
growing, and that the Winter-sweet I started from seed will at last
begin to flower.




Sloe-Gin

One of the most pleasant autumnal occupations I know, is when I go into
the low, warm kitchen to help to prick the sloes for the making of
sloe-gin.  Big bowls of sloes are waiting on the kitchen table under
the light; purple buttons heaped as generously as blackberries; and
there we sit, perched on the kitchen table, methodically punching each
sloe with a fork.  Then plop into bottles, to be filled up with gin and
sugar; corked, and left for six months to mature under the larder
shelf.  Under, not on, for they must be kept in the dark.  I cannot
quite explain why this occupation affords me such quiet satisfaction.
It is not that I particularly like sloe-gin; in fact, I rather dislike
it as a sickly drink.  But there is something about that yearly scene
in the kitchen--the hanging light, the clean scrubbed table, the bowls
of freshly-collected fruit, the blue-paper stacks of sugar, the cleaned
bottles, and the baby cooing in its cot--all these things make me look
forward to the evening when we shall once more make sloe-gin in the
kitchen.




Fog

Leaning over the parapet of the Pont Neuf, I watched a few swirls of
vapour drift above the river, so ethereal and milky that they really
only added to the cleanliness and elegance of Paris.  A Frenchman
beside me thought otherwise.  "Voil," he observed gloomily to his
companion, "voil ce qu'  Londres on appelle le fog."

I was amused by this remark, having a sudden vision of a midnight
darkness descending on London at midday, diabolical with flares,
congested with crawling traffic.  There is a certain beauty in this
black-and-red effect, however, although it may be denied to the choking
yellow variety; and considerable beauty also in the white country fog,
so long as it is not too thick.  It must be transparent enough for us
to discern the shapes of trees, their trunks cut off, so that nothing
but the finely veined heads remain, untethered, as sometimes in a
desert mirage the tops of mountains appear to float suspended above the
solid earth.  In this thin fog, familiar objects become invested with a
new unreality: it is as though we were seeing them for the first time.
_Dissimili non sono che nei sembianti_--a most profound remark.  Even
houses, the homes of men, become as suggestive as the unknown lives
moving inside them.  A side-road, opening and vanishing as we creep
past, might lead into another and more desirable world.  It is only
when the shroud really comes down and we know that the thickening must
deepen with the failing daylight, that fog turns into the enemy,
obliterating, instead of enchanting, our way.

Since such disadvantages are likely, indeed certain, to overwhelm our
island at intervals during six months of every year, upsetting the
arrangements of thousands and even throwing them into actual danger,
why may we not be given white kerb-stones along our country roads?  The
device is obvious and relatively inexpensive.  There would be no need
for the extravagance of a running kerb everywhere; white, painted,
upright stones, like miniature milestones, placed every few yards would
be of enormous value to the motorist in fog.  One knows the difficulty
of trying to follow a grass verge; one knows also with what relief one
hails a mere white central line.  Now in Italy, where the peril of fog
is practically nil, many of the main roads and bridges are ornamented
by black and white striped stones, running for miles, for no reason
that I can see except pure bravura.  If Italy can afford this luxury,
why can we in England not afford a similar necessity?

[Illustration: Black cloud]




Sylva C[oe]dua

[Illustration: The woodman]

A small imitator of fog appears in autumn, not only in the early
morning mists, but also in the smoke of bonfires burning (most
uneconomically) leaves, haulms, and rubbish.  The skill of the born
countryman in building a fire out of the dampest material, a fire which
will smoulder for days, even under rain, is an art which has to be
learnt; it may not be so exact as the art of the charcoal-burner, who
day and night must temper his pile to the wind, but it is ingenious
enough.  Very soon now an extra coil of bluer smoke will rise above the
woods, and drift across the brown and yellow trees in that slow
imperceptibly spreading way to which no other pace is comparable: it
means that the wood-cutters are at work.  Already the auctions of
underwood have taken place in the local sale-rooms, and the underwood
has been knocked down at sums varying from under five to perhaps twenty
pounds an acre--it depends on the size and variety of the wood, but in
any case provides an easy and recurrent income for the landowner.
Chestnut ranks high for spiles, poles, and fencing; birch comes much
lower down, being no longer required for such purposes as the yokes of
oxen, and finding very little use now save for children's toys, brooms,
and handles.  In Kent we reckon our wood by the cant, meaning the area
between one ride and the next; I had always taken this term for
granted, but realised that it must be a local expression when a sudden
qualm made me look it up in the big _Oxford Dictionary_ to discover
that even in that majestic work it was not recorded in this connexion.
Our local woodmen, I observed, sometimes refer to it as a canter.

Coppice planting has a respectable ancestry, dating back to 1545 under
the Statute of Woods, with subsequent encouragements.  The first time I
ever ordered a cant to be cut, I did so with dreadful misgivings, for I
hate the sound of axe on wood, but now I welcome the annual arrival of
the wood-cutters in my own woods, knowing that it will not impair but
rather will enhance their beauty.  From beginning to end the process is
one long delight.  I like to see the tree-trunks appearing suddenly in
their naked couthness, and the ground exposed with all its system of
rabbit-burries, hitherto concealed.  I like the primitive traditional
shelters that the men put up for their labours--four poles at the
corners, and a roof of brushwood or canvas, looking oddly 'native' in
the woods of Kent.  I like the rude mallets and tripods that they
fashion from the material lying ready to hand.  I like the quick skill
with which they perform their work--the sharp slanting cut as low as
possible, since tall cutting means gnarled stools ten or twelve years
hence, and rough, unskilful cutting means rotting stools.  I like
knowing that, next spring, bluebells and foxgloves will appear in the
clearings, where I have never seen them before.

I like the men themselves, with their wise store of woodcraft and
wood-knowledge.  There is one whole family which works on its own
account in my wood, from half-past six in the morning till half-past
six in the evening, a father, mother, and six children.  Four of the
children are under school-age, and their parents bring them every day
to sleep or tumble under the trees, brown little woodland cubs, while
the handsome young man and woman fell, slice, strip, and stack the
redolent wood; during the holidays the two elder children come too,
almost as skilful at stripping the bark, industrious, and apparently
indefatigable.  They have their moments of relaxation, though every
half-hour spent in play means a loss of earned pennies.  But no child
could resist the toy left at their disposal.  Someone had dumped an old
car among the undergrowth, lacking wheels or engine, a black,
disreputable object which came to light as the chestnut began to fall
around it, so incongruously reminiscent of the American Middle West
that I resolved crossly to get it removed at the first opportunity.
Next time I passed that way, five happy urchins were scrambling in and
out of it, going for imaginary rides, calling a halt, putting the baby
in the dickey, getting in again, imitating the horn (which was
missing), starting off again for a new destination.

Finally, I like feeling that the woods are being properly used.  I like
the idea that the man (whoever he was), who planted the coppices in
such orderly rows, is now looking down with approval from some better
place, seeing that his plantings are regularly attended to every ten to
fourteen years.  He must have made his plantings at least a hundred
years ago, and I hope he does not feel that he has secured too unworthy
or too unappreciative a successor.

All these things deeply satisfy my incurably Tory soul.

[Illustration: The woodman]




November

Facts so often disprove the theory that November is an unpleasant month
that I begin to wonder whether the theory was ever well-founded, or
whether our climate is actually changing.  This year, apart from a few
days of particularly savage gales, November has been as mild as spring,
the thermometer sometimes nearly touching 70 in the shade.  One notices
such things in the country more closely than in cities, especially if
one has a garden and consignments of shrubs and bulbs waiting to be
planted in it.  I understand that I share this innocent taste with some
five million of my compatriots, and that between us we spend some forty
million pounds annually on our gardens.  It is satisfactory to think
how obligingly the weather has behaved towards so large and extravagant
a number of us.

Fashions in gardening change, not owing only to caprice or the
prevailing taste but owing also to the increasing choice of plants
placed upon the market.  Take, for example, the many varieties of
flowering trees now available, pyrus or prunus, I doubt whether the
average amateur bothers to differentiate much between the ever-changing
classifications.  The main point is, that he can now secure them at
reasonable prices, and plants them freely in his garden.  Many of them
are relatively new--the Japanese cherry itself made its appearance only
at the end of last century in this country--and consequently few
full-grown specimens are to be seen as yet except, say, at Kew or in
the private gardens of certain pioneers.  For most of us, they are
still represented only by spindly little trees with the nurseryman's
orange label still fluttering.  It pleases me to reflect how superb the
heads of blossom will be in fifteen or twenty years' time.  Some
villages even planted avenues to commemorate the Coronation; one can
predict that the whole aspect of these villages will be changed when
the trees have had time to grow, forcing the descendant of Herr
Baedeker to add a note drawing attention to this remarkable feature in
his Guide to England for 1950.

[Illustration: The floods]




Wind-monath

Apart from the pleasures of gardening, November has beauty of its own.
The Saxons called it the wind-month, for then the fishermen drew up
their boats and abandoned fishing till the spring; it was called the
slaughter-month, too, when pigs and cattle were salted down for
preservation throughout the winter.  Scarcely affected by this
precaution to-day, we still can think of it as the wind-month which
brings the last leaf off the tree.  It is not a bad test of a person,
to discover whether he sees as much (perhaps more) beauty in the naked
boughs as in the obvious loveliness in June.  To his discerning eye the
ploughed field will seem as noble as the corn, and infinitely more
austere.  If it is a bare month, it is also a busy one.  Man is busy,
with his eternal optimism preparing for next year; and the squirrels,
too, are busy in their less longsighted way, preparing merely to get
through the winter.  I went out early one morning, so early that I
wasn't expected by the small occupants of the orchard, and flung a
squirrel into a rage and a couple of wood-pigeons into taking their
blundering flight out of a pear-tree.  I could not be sure whether the
squirrel blamed the disturbance on the pigeons, or whether the pigeons
blamed it on the squirrel, or whether they all blamed it on me.
Anyhow, there I was, out in the orchard before I was expected,
upsetting everybody at an hour when they thought they might have the
orchard to themselves.  The pigeons set off on their heavy clumsy
flight, the squirrel rushed up his tree, chattering with anger.  I
followed him, and sighted his drey, untidily built of leaves, in the
fork of an oak tree overhanging the moat.  I could have shot him dead
there and then, and indeed the law tells me to do so; he is a
mischievous little beast, I know, but somehow when I saw him preparing
his winter larder, even though I guessed it to be stocked chiefly with
my own precious nuts, I could not have brought my finger to press the
trigger.  This was sheer sentimentality on my part, for both reason and
the law assure me that the grey squirrel ought to be exterminated.  Of
course, I prefer the red squirrel, and liked once to see him leaping
about our woodlands; I know also that the grey, the alien tree-rat, is
supposed to have ousted him, though this is a moot point; but somehow I
cannot bring myself to shoot so nimble and pretty a little beast.  The
very rush he makes up the tree into safety, his chattering angry cry,
compensate me for the loss of many nuts.  That early hour in the
orchard, when I surprised him and the wood-pigeon, meant more to me
than many bushels, whether of cob or filbert.  Such moments bring one
into a closer communion with the secret life of nature than any amount
of reading in even the most sympathetic books.

[Illustration: The weir]




Fox-hunting

Recently the local Hunt drew a covert neighbouring my own small estate.
I heard the familiar shouts, and the deep note of the hounds, and went
to the top of my tower to watch the whole procedure.  From there I
could observe the beauty and picturesqueness of that remarkably English
scene, the pink coats moving among the brown underwood, the skewbald
hounds ranging eagerly, the tossing heads of horses as the followers
waited near a gate.  If only they had been pursuing a drag, I thought,
how happily I could have given myself up to enjoyment!  They found
their fox, however, when to my delight he had the sense to bolt
straight into my own private wood where the Hunt is forbidden to
follow.  A hunt-servant on a white horse galloped off to recover some
couples of hounds, and I reflected, not without pleasure, on what my
neighbours must be saying about me.  Nothing would disturb that fox
now, so long as he remained where he was, nothing worse than a big
waggon lumbering down to bring in the cord-wood for my fires.  He would
not grudge me that.  Meanwhile the discomfited field moved off, and I
came down from the tower, leaving the wild bees that have lived up
there for generations to their winter sleep.

[Illustration: Blue tit]




Sudden Snowfall

Looking out of my window early on the shortest day of the year, I
observed a large hay-wain pursuing its way across the big meadow--no
uncommon sight, when one lives in the middle of a farm.  A familiar
sight indeed: the trusses piled clumsily high, the team pulling
sturdily, the two men trudging alongside, their upright whips drawn
delicately against the sky.  The world, however, had turned white
during the night.

It was dazzlingly white in sunlight, and across the virgin snow the
haycart toiled on its way, looking absurdly out of place.  The nostrils
of the horses smoked, as like a great black ship the heavy cart lurched
and rocked on its way between the rick and the cow-sheds.  In the
complete stillness of this quilted world it was the only thing that
moved.

There was no colour at all, nothing but a photographic black and white,
or so it seemed at first sight, until one noticed that the white
pigeons sitting on the roof of the barn were really electric blue.  The
pigeons reminded me of the birds, which must be hungry, and going
downstairs I found them hopping in dozens on the platform where they
are accustomed to find their food.  Usually one perceives birds
separately, and at a distance, but the advantage of perches at
eye-level just outside the window is that they come in congregations,
their collective colours brilliant and varied as a paint-box.
Blue-tits, great-tits, chaffinches, robins, all bright morsels flying,
hopping, picking, perching, dangling, flashing in the snow, far more
vivid than when the world was green.  Their behaviour was not at all in
accordance with their loveliness.  The robins, driven by hunger, had
forgotten to be as disagreeable as usual; but a large throstle, after
eating his fill, took up his position and with clapping beak turned the
platform into a kind of Tom Tiddler's ground, where the small fry could
snatch only at their peril.  Self-satisfaction spread over me as I
considered how far more charitable I was being than they to their own
kind.  In fact, there are few occupations which induce greater
self-satisfaction than dispensing food to hungry birds.  Their need is
so great, and one's own wealth so boundless.  One does not know whether
to feel more like St. Francis or Lord Nuffield, but either persuasion
is flattering.  The maize I threw out to the pigeons turned into golden
sovereigns as it left my hands.  And not only food but warmth is
miraculously at one's disposal.  A half-dead wagtail, gradually
reviving, wrapped in flannel near the fire; a dove sitting on the back
of a chair; and in my own sitting-room a robin (he must have come down
the chimney), perching with complete assurance and an innate sense of
decoration among the jade leaves and coral berries of a Chinese tree.
He stayed with me while the snow lasted, and with the thaw I let him go.

[Illustration: The bird table]




Traps in the Snow

My sense of loving-kindliness, however, exaggerated as it was by the
season and by the resources of charity at my command, had been
disturbed by the wickedness of the throstle, which affected me much as
the pea affected the princess.  It may have been a small thing to come
as a reminder of the cruelty of nature, whether human or otherwise; a
small thing, in a world where the nastier qualities may be observed
daily on so extensive a scale.  Men were killing one another in China
and Spain, and preparing possibly to kill one another in Europe also;
but somehow that vicious little snap of the throstle's beak, that
dog-in-the-manger attitude of the already gorged bird, shocked me as
closely as anything I could read that morning in the daily paper--a
disproportionate sensibility, no doubt, but none the less real.  It
made me wonder how deep true kindliness could go; how ill-considered it
really was; how shallow, how easily dispelled.  The English, I
reflected, were on the whole a mild and kindly race; they disliked
violence, they were amiably and even sentimentally disposed towards
animals and children; the cases prosecuted by the R.S.P.C.A. were the
exception, not the rule.  I remembered an occasion when I gave orders
for a litter of mongrel puppies to be drowned, and then met the
gardener, carefully sheltering the puppies under his coat from the
rain, on his way to plunge them all into a bucket of water.  "I
wouldn't like the poor little chaps to get wet," he explained.

Is this hypocrisy, or merely bad thinking?  It is useless to draw the
moral, but useful to dwell on the results.  How, for example, can we
continue to countenance a practice which allows an animal, be it
rabbit, fox, or dog, to twist its broken paw out of a steel trap
between the hours of sunset and sunrise?  Few men, I think, would stand
by and watch such agony, yet many cheerfully make such agony possible.
Lack of imagination, I suppose.  What the eye does not see, the heart
does not suffer.  But we ought not to be content to leave it at that.

[Illustration: The lonely road]




A Country Party

An elegant pamphlet written by a Mr. Cornell in 1814 brought me some
warming thoughts on a cold morning.  The title in itself was genial: _A
treatise calculated for making excellent wines from the various fruits
of this United Country, in relation to strength, brilliancy, health and
economy_.  It had distressed Mr. Cornell that 'so many a Mr. and Mrs.
Bull' should be hoaxed with foreign wines, which were not only
exorbitantly expensive but perniciously doctored, when such wines as
juniper, whortle-berry, cowslip, mead, and metheglin could be made in
the still-room and matured in the cellar.  The author approaches his
subject with a suitable reverence; vinous fermentation, to him, is 'a
divine operation which the Omniscient Creator has placed in our cup of
life'; the idea that wines should not be given fair play, but should be
drunk before they have attained their full beauty, strength and
fragrance, rouses him to indignation.  How, he asks, can individuals
expect their wines to be good and generous if drunk in such improper
circumstances?  When, however, he hears the seething in his own vats
(in which he has been careful to place a mysterious object he calls a
huc-muc) his satisfaction is such that he can relieve his feelings only
by a homely comparison: it is puffing and blowing, he says, like our
old cart-horse.

At last the great moment arrived when he could invite a party of
friends to celebrate his vintage of three hundred gallons.  The company
included the author's Aunt Hambleton, the sprightly Widow Conway, the
Reverend Mr. Rubicund, Miss Wood, a young lady to whom the occasion was
especially interesting as she was on the point of being led to the
hymeneal altar by young Farmer Moam; and Miss Jurtina Meadows, whom Mr.
Cornell 'had dignified with the classic appellation of Sappho, since in
her unbending moments she wrote stanzas terse and chastely sapphic'.

They were all very gay.  Miss Meadows especially appears to have been
enjoying one of her unbending moments, for Mr. Cornell records that 'a
radiation was playing between mine and the blue eye of Jurtina', and
towards the end of the evening it was she who observed that since the
ancients did celebrate their vintages with dance and song, the moderns
might well follow their example.  She had brought her pedal harp with
her; touching it now 'with delicacy and Attic grandeur' she proposed a
song from each in turn.  The company being very ready to oblige, Mr.
Grimston led off with _The Brave British Soldier_, followed by the
Widow Conway with _I Sigh for a Husband at Sixty_, accompanying the
stanzas with such sportive winks and blinks that a lover would have
lowered her age full 20 per cent.  Mr. Rubicund then sang _The Bower of
Felicity_, not once, but twice, his nose by that time being highly
tinged with purple.  Aunt Hambleton tried next, but broke down; she
'made an attempt to sing a little rural song, but her memory was not
equal to her inclination', and Mrs. Moam, having neither pipe nor song,
had likewise to be excused.

Jurtina came to the rescue.  Fixing her host with her blue eye, she
melodiously sang a little pastoral of her own composition in which the
following verse occurred:

  How delightful his vineyard, his cot,
  Where rational amusements combine.
  Oh! how happy would indeed be my lot
  Could I say to myself, _He is mine_.


Lively, elegant Jurtina.  She now proceeded to create Bacchanalian
Personages: the Rev. Rubicund was High Priest, the ladies were Arcadian
Nymphs, she herself was the Goddess Ariadne, and their host of course
was enthroned as Bacchus in a great arm-chair decorated with ivy and
laurel.

It was impossible, he said, to describe their mirth and glee.  His cup
was full (in more ways, I suspect, than one), when on bidding him
good-night Jurtina embraced his hand with the tenderest affection,
whispering in his ear, "Call me no longer Sappho, but your--Ariadne!"




'And the Stranger within thy Gates'

She arrived in a wooden crate, labelled with the word 'Worcester', so I
called her Worcester, knowing her by no other name.  There exists in
history a reputable tradition by which people may take their surname
from the town of their origin, so being unable to discover her personal
name from the gentleman who had been so kind as to supply her at my
request, I called her after the station from which he had dispatched
her.  A simple reason, but quite a good one.  I could scarcely have
received her as a guest under my roof for six or eight weeks, and left
her anonymous all that time.  That would have been not only
inconvenient, but also inhospitable and impolite.

The gentleman who supplied me with Worcester employed the most
delightful writing-paper; unlike most writing-paper it did not confine
itself to a bald statement of the address, but in addition was
copiously illustrated.  It was sprinkled with diminutive reproductions
of photographs, all apparently taken between 1880 and 1890.  There was
one of the gentleman himself, or possibly his father, dressed in a
black coat and a bowler hat, holding a litter of lion-cubs in his arms.
There was another of a lady and a little girl, holding baby bears.
There was another of a retriever bitch with young tigers crawling over
her.  Even the retriever, stout and complacent, managed to convey
unmistakably the later Victorian period.

Worcester herself was completely Victorian, both as to appearance and
character.  More of a sheep-dog than anything else, though doubtless
other elements were present, she resembled one of those woolly
hearthrugs which lay before the big coal fire in Victorian
drawing-rooms.  Her grey coat was matted, her face round as an owl's,
her tail a mere bob, her paws chubby.  Her nature was made for integral
and unquestioning devotion, a devotion which for those few weeks, from
the first moment, she chose to lavish upon me.  I loved Worcester
almost as much as Worcester loved me, yet how badly I treated her!  No
cad ever behaved worse to the woman who loved him.  First I hired her,
unseen, unknown, for my own selfish convenience, for a paltry sum too,
a mere three guineas plus travelling expenses.  Then I took her
children, the four blind puppies she had brought with her, and caused
them to be drowned one by one, day by day, in a bucket.  It is true
that owing to her conjugal carelessness they were worthless mongrels;
true also that I replaced them one by one by aristocratic Alsatians of
the same age; but they were her own and she whimpered a little each
time I removed one.  Yet how kindly she took to her fosterlings!  There
was nothing of the stepmother about her as she nuzzled those four
little wolfish cubs in the straw and gave them the best she had to
give--her care, her warmth, and her milk.  Her pride in them was as
great as if they had been her own; she never suspected that they were
only four out of a litter of eight, given over to her because eight
were too many for their own mother to feed.

Nor did she know that their mother, my own savagely jealous bitch,
would have fallen on her and torn her soft body to rags had she
suspected her presence.  I kept them very carefully apart, the mother
in the kennel, Worcester in her shed.  I let Worcester out only when
the Alsatian was safely shut away.  Then Worcester came lumbering out,
happy to be free, happy to be with me in the garden, but always so
conscientious about her charges that she would make sudden dashes back
to the shed, make sure that they were safe, and then gallop back to me,
reassured.

Then her time began to draw towards its end.  The little wolves were
growing beyond her, and as they started to snarl and bicker she would
look at them with a slightly puzzled air.  They were learning to lap
from a bowl and were becoming rough, with a roughness that was never
inherited from a sheep-dog.  And as they grew daily more independent
and more fierce, so did Worcester transfer more and more of her large
loving heart to me.  They might not need her any longer, but she had
decided that I did.  So she sat beside me as I gardened, and though I
encouraged her to rummage round for mice and rabbits and to have a
little fun in return for the service she had rendered me, she would not
stir.  She merely looked at me with her good brown eyes gazing through
her shaggy face, and scraped at my hand with an enormous paw, as though
she were saying, "Don't send me away.  Let me stay.  This is my
happiness."

I knew, however, more and more miserably I knew it, that I should soon
have to send her away.  If I had kept her openly she would have got
murdered, and I couldn't permanently play this game of Box and Cox
between the kennel and the shed.  And surely my first loyalty was due
to the beautiful intransigent creature who had two years' claim to
oppose to Worcester's seven weeks, two years during which she had
regarded me as her exclusive property?  No, Worcester must return to
her career.  The professional foster-mother.  Litter after litter of
mongrel puppies, drowned one by one to make room for small strangers of
champion stock.  Employer after employer, all base, all treacherous,
all paying their three guineas, all accepting Worcester's love and
service, all lifting Worcester back into her empty crate on the last
morning....




Gadgets

I mistrust gadgets, generally speaking.  They seldom work.  The proved,
old-fashioned tool is usually better and it is safer to stick to it.  I
thus make a rule of throwing all tempting catalogues of gardening
gadgets straight into the waste-paper basket, not daring to examine
them first, because I know that if I examine them I shall fall.  It
will mean only that I shall with some trouble obtain a postal order for
10_s._ 6_d._, to acquire an object which will speedily join similar
objects rusting in the tool shed.  It should be clear from this that my
mistrust of gadgets is equalled only by my weakness for them, and that
no amount of experience can make me find them anything but irresistible.

Nevertheless this attitude may be ungrateful, for there are certain
gadgets which have been my companions for so long that I have ceased to
think of them under that name.  There is the walking-stick shaped like
a golf-club with a cutting edge to slash down thistles; you can do it
without pausing as you walk, and not only does it control the thistles
but provides a harmless outlet for ill-temper.  Then there is the long
narrow trowel of stainless steel and its associate the two-pronged hand
fork, both unrivalled for weeding in between small plants, though
perhaps there is no tool so well adapted for this purpose as the old
table knife with the stump of a broken blade.  There is the little
wheel on the long handle, like a child's toy, which you push before you
and which twinkles round, cutting the verge of the grass as it goes.
Above all, there is the widger, the neatest, slimmest, and cheapest of
all gadgets to carry in the pocket.  Officially the widger is Patent
No. 828795, but it owes (I believe) its more personal name to the
ingenuity of Mr. Clarence Elliott, whose racy gardening style ought to
be more widely appreciated.  He invented the widger, its name, and the
verb to widge, which, although not exactly onomatop[oe]ic, suggests
very successfully the action of prising up--you widge up a weed, or
widge up a caked bit of soil for the purpose of aerating it--all very
necessary operations which before the arrival of the widger were
sometimes awkward to perform.  This small sleek object, four inches
long, slides into the pocket, no more cumbersome than a pencil, and may
be put to many uses.  Screwdriver, toothpick, letter-opener, widger, it
fulfils all functions throughout the day.  Its creator, Mr. Elliot, I
observe, spells it sometimes with a 'y': wydger, no doubt on the
analogy of Blake's Tyger, just to make it seem more unusual.  Whatever
the spelling, it is the perfect gadget.

What an odd little word 'gadget' is, almost a gadget in itself, so
small and useful.  Its origin is obscure and it is believed not to
appear in print before 1886.  Yet it is not, as might be thought, an
Americanism.  It appears as an expression used chiefly by seamen,
meaning any small tool, contrivance, or piece of mechanism not
dignified by any specific name; a what-not, in fact; a chicken-fixing,
a gill-guy, a timmey-noggy, a wim-wom.  I commend these agreeable
synonyms to Mr. Clarence Elliott's notice, and at the same time record
my gratitude for his revival of that other sea-faring word, manavlins.
I wonder how many English-speaking people are familiar with its meaning?




Tool-shed

[Illustration: Flower-pots]

Different from gadgets are the time-honoured tools which hang in the
dusty brown twilight of the tool-shed when their day's work is done.
The wood of their handles is as tawny as the arms of the men who use
them; they have a sun-burnt air.  The steel of spuds, forks, and
trowels glistens quietly as though it were resting; it has been in
contact with the earth all day, and recalls the old expedient of
plunging a dirty knife-blade into the soil and withdrawing it restored
to a brightness like the flash of Excalibur.  The prongs of forks are
burnished as bayonets, the curve of hooks gleaming as sabres.  The big
wooden trugs repose peacefully across the handles of the barrow.  The
long handles of rakes and hoes dangle in rows, symmetrical as Uccello's
lances.  There is a shelf with all the odd accumulation of labels,
green string, hedging-gloves, old tobacco tins full of saved seeds.  A
hank of yellow bass hangs from a nail, blond as corn.  The flower-pots
are piled, tier upon tier, red as a robin's breast.  Red and brown,
green and golden, steely as armour, dusty as snuff, the tool-shed
deepens in shadow as the respite of evening shuts the door and leaves
the small interior to the mouse.

[Illustration: French shepherd]




Note from another Country: Burgundy

It seems remarkable that English tourists should penetrate so sparsely
into provincial France--English tourists, who have but to hop across
the Channel, a light matter for Englishmen who cannot afford to fear
the sea.

The Channel is a different matter for such Europeans as may enjoy a
whole continent spread around them, and may take a train from one
station to another without facing the discomfort of boats and an
element which takes no account of passengers, whether _de luxe_ or
third class.  How often has one heard, on foreign lips, the words '_Je
crains la mer_', and how impossible do these words become, translated
into the English idiom!  The continent of Europe is overrun with
English men and women who have not feared the sea.

Provincial France is the surprising exception.  A few cars bearing the
G.B. disc draw up before the Hotel de l'Europe at Avignon; others stop
to lunch at Chartres; the _chteaux_ of the Loire open their doors to
the descendants of the nation who burnt Joan of Arc; but in the little
French towns and country districts you will not find them.  A stray
undergraduate with a knapsack may follow Stevenson across the Cevennes,
but the great tide has not yet flowed up into the backwaters.  One
rejoices; but one wonders why.

_La belle France_--the very words are tender, opulent, and embosoming.
They imply a generous rolling country watered by many streams, softened
by many forests, enriched by cornfields and vineyards, studded with
little cities fat and rich with the memorials of secular history and
art.  Those who see only the open hedgeless plains of the north between
Calais and Paris, or the scorched horizons of Provence on the way to
the Riviera, have no idea of the bounty concealed within the folds of
the secluded regions.  Yet the provinces of France are easily
accessible--such provinces as Burgundy, for instance, where you are in
the depths of the French country, as rich as the wine it produces,
among the towns of lovely names: Avalon, Auxerre, Vzelay.  What more
could anybody want?

Vzelay is a village, twelve miles from a station; a steep village
crowning a hill, and crowned in its turn by the cathedral which
dominates all the surrounding country like the Ark marooned on Ararat
when the floods had retreated.  Vineyards pour down the hill-side, and
the sunset from the ramparts is like spilt red wine over the voluptuous
curves of the landscape.  Down at the foot of a hill winds a river
between poplars, among the woods and the water-meadows, with cattle
standing knee-deep in the shallows.

It is all on a large and placid scale, as placid as the great creamy
oxen who sway along the lanes dragging waggon-loads of timber behind
them.  The sense of a deep, old, country existence is everywhere
present, both civic and agricultural, for the little towns are but the
fitting complement of the quiet peasant life; they have been for
centuries the rallying-point of the men who come into them occasionally
for market or for worship.  The fields for labour; the market-place for
barter; the cathedral for religion.

It is never possible to forget that this is a Catholic country.  The
doors of the churches are always open, the churches seldom empty.  One
or two figures kneel in the shadows of a side-chapel, and the whisper
of confession rustles like a bird that seeks its way out.  The dim
interior is pervaded by the scent of recent incense, and the little
lamp hangs burning in reminder of the vitality of Rome.  The light
filters through the stained glass that is a glory of France; through
the windows of Auxerre, Bourges, and Chartres, and once of Rheims.  The
church is dark, and the glow of the coloured light comes through as
though the windows were made of the petals of many flowers.

[Illustration: La Belle France]

That is the quality of stained glass; it seems to be made of living
substance.  Its peculiar vital brilliance makes paint seem thick and
dead.  For this reason the most beautiful windows, to my mind, are
those which restrict themselves to pattern without any attempt at
representation; the kaleidoscope effect of pure design, apparently
haphazard though in reality exquisitely balanced and proportioned, is
ideally adapted to such fragments of splendour.  The leaded lines which
unite them interrupt no such continuity as we demand for, say, the
representation of a human figure; but rather add, by their blackness,
to the illusion of a slab of many colours, smashed to pieces and put
together again between us and the light.  This, I think, is the
particular property of stained glass.  The telling of a story, the
portrayal of a scene, is not its function; that may be left to paint
and canvas, tempera and fresco.  Stained glass delights us with the
pure and primitive pleasure of pattern; of pattern which springs up
suddenly, like a jet, amidst the gravity of stone; a sudden exuberance
breaking the exactions of architecture, piercing the solid wall with
fantasy like an exaltation of the heart on an ordinary day; yet rich
with a deep sobriety, not merely light-heartedly gay.

Coming out from the church, it is pleasant to sit or stroll beneath the
plane trees which, regularly planted, provide an outdoor room roofed
with green in the heart of the town; or to idle through the streets,
paying tribute to the French genius for domestic architecture.  The
streets are quiet and sunny, but their sleepiness is diversified by
many a stone balcony of baroque swagger, or pointed turret at the edge
of the town overhanging the drop above some wooded valley.  You may
even find a fair, where it is possible not only to enjoy the spectacle
of a lively nation amusing itself, but also to purchase many delightful
and unusual objects.

I remember such a fair at Saulieu in Burgundy, with a merry-go-round
whose wooden horses were not horses at all, but pigs and swans and
prancing dragons with scarlet nostrils; and a Bal Tabarin where the
gipsies as well as the peasants of the neighbourhood had congregated;
and a travelling circus whose performance I refused to watch because I
do not like to see lions made to jump through paper hoops.  The fair
came to life in the evening, when flares illuminated its tinsel gaiety
and wherever one walked one was showered with confetti.  But even
during the day-time it was not void of interest, for then the little
booths displayed their wares; and, succumbing to the perennial
temptation of buying something in an out-of-the-way place, something
which would have a sentimental value once one had got it home, however
trashy it might then appear, I bought a blue glass bottle embossed with
all the marks of punctuation--comma, asterisk, query, semi-colon--for
which I might surely have scoured all the pawnbrokers of England in
vain.  I wondered then and wonder still, for what market a bottle
decorated with the marks of punctuation could possibly be made?  Then
one could buy coats of olive-green corduroy with every button
different, buttons bearing such emblems of sport as a pheasant, a
partridge, a hare, a stag, _garde-de-chasse_ coats, which would have
made the envy of our English poacher.

It is surprising how a few days dawdling in a village will familiarise
one with its life.  By the second morning one already recognises the
butcher's dog, the grocer's errand-boy, the village cripple.  One knows
at what hour to expect the postman on his rounds, to listen for the
bell calling the children back to school.  Living in such a place one
readily assumes an attitude of superiority towards birds of passage.
One is a Resident, impatient for the luncheon-hour invasion to pass on
with a roar of cut-outs, leaving the village street to its siesta and
oneself to a life which has already arranged itself into the grooves of
habit.

One regards the invaders with an amused though slightly irritable
contempt, forgetting that only yesterday one arrived oneself by the
Paris train, and that next week another train will carry one away from
this tiny focus of one's brief adoption.

[Illustration: Olive tree]




Note from another Country: French Savoy

The village itself lies at the meeting-place of two green valleys; it
straddles across the river, and its grey stone houses match the
boulders that have rolled down from the heights into the meadows.  So
green are the valleys, so lush the grass, that this would seem to be a
place of the soft lowlands; it is only on looking up that you notice
the line of the larches, which stop as though they had been
artificially planted, and remember that you stand in fact at a height
of over six thousand feet.  Then you begin to wonder, and to inquire;
you look at the peasants, in blouses and straw hats, scything the grass
and the flowers in the full blaze of the sun, with summer hanging so
heavily over everything as almost to persuade the stranger that he has
come to a hot southern climate; and in the heat of the day there occurs
to you the thought, as a spectre arising, that in the winter months the
valley must present a very different aspect....

[Illustration: Savoy countryside]

The peasants smile when you ask them.  Yes, they say: from June to
September, that is our summer, from the feast of St. John (June 24th)
to the feast of St. Michael (September 29th).  Those are the dates when
the cows first go out to pasture, and when they finally return.  And
little by little, thanks to your questioning, you find out what sort of
winter this is, which lasts for nine months of the year.  Snow over
everything, and the wind howling down the valleys, and no communication
with the outside world save on skis or sleighs.  All outdoor work
ceases; there is nothing to do but huddle indoors, the men repairing
their tools and carts, the women making lace and knitting stockings,
all living in one room with their cattle.

I saw one such room in the house of the village muleteer; a low, dark
room full of shadows, the beds sunk into the walls like cupboard
shelves, curtained off; six cow-stalls down one side, and a smell of
clean stable.  The small, mouse-coloured cows stood munching their
supper, looking as though they were made of suede, and filling the room
with their gentle shifting and breathing.  It was very easy to believe
in the comfort that the warmth of their bodies could give in winter.

The cur himself, in whose house I lodged, shared his quarters with his
cow.  She lived in a room on the ground floor, her name was Marquise,
and she used the front door like a lady.  The cur, Marquise, and their
servant, Theodorine, made up the household between them.  In winter
they carried the portable range from the kitchen into Marquise's
room--I scarcely like to call it her stable--lived there, ate there,
and slept there, all three of them.  How that household would have
rejoiced Balzac! and how he would have appreciated all the inhabitants
of the village, from the abb in his skull-cap and green velveteen
suit, who had once lived in Paris and was now returned to end his days
in his birthplace, to Mademoiselle in the post office who could be
heard bullying the entire province on the telephone.  Above all, how
Balzac would have appreciated Madame X.

Madame X kept the hotel, but she was more than an hotel-keeper; she was
a Napoleon.  That woman knows as much about life as she does about
cooking.  She does not spend the whole of her year in the Val; with the
onset of winter she shuts up her hotel and retires to Paris; but what
she does in Paris is a mystery which nobody has yet fathomed.  All that
concerns her guests in the Val is that she concentrates upon her
business as though she had no other pre-occupation in the world.
Stout, motherly, bustling, capable, she contrived to give each guest
the impression that she had taken him or her under her protection.  The
most surly and close-cropped of mountaineers did not long remain surly,
for she could charm a smile out of the most recalcitrant Prussian.  She
would come round, at dinner, bearing an enormous basin of whipped
cream, as proud as an artist with his achievement.  "Voil quelque
chose qui vous rendra vos forces, mon petit enfant", she would say to
the poor little dyspeptic who sat among his medicine bottles at the
next table.  Her relations with her guests were purely personal, and
although she no doubt had her favourites it was difficult to discover
who they were.  Her persuasiveness had but one drawback: one ate too
much.  Partly to please her, since she looked so really distressed if
one refused a second helping, partly because of the excellence of what
she set before one.  "Madame, may I take my lunch out to-morrow?"  And
there would be a basket prepared, with cold chicken (_poularde de
Bresse_), tomatoes, cheese, apricots, and peaches.  Then one would set
off, climbing up by the cattle-tracks at first, till even those petered
out, and one found oneself above the line of trees, in complete, high
solitude, on the slopes of short grass blowing with the bright Alpine
flowers.

Up there, it was possible to walk for the whole day without meeting a
soul, or to lie by the shores of some little lake without fear of
disturbance even by a shepherd.  Streams abounded, and waterfalls, so
that one was seldom without the pleasure of running water.  Indeed,
such simple delights as had been provided for the wanderer had been
provided on a lavish scale.  Simple they might be, but they were
unsparing.  This is the especial gift of mountain country: all
niggardliness is absent.  So noble and generous are the mountains
themselves that their humbler complements seem anxious to follow their
example.  Not one stream, but twenty streams; not a dozen flowers, but
thousands of flowers; no dubious hazy sun, but the sun in uninterrupted
glory.  Parsimony in all its forms is put to shame.

[Illustration: Val D'Isre]

The flowers above all excelled themselves in variety and abundance.  At
first sight the hill-sides seemed to be indiscriminately peopled with
them, but on closer observation they resolved themselves into a
multitude of tiny separate gardens, planned and selected with the
nicest art.  Within the circles of scattered boulders they grouped
themselves according to their habit: the rosy, cushioned silene pressed
close against the rock, the grassy cup starred with mauve violas and
the blue of the gentian.  What tantalisation for the gardener! he who
at home, and with endless trouble, persuades a few trumpets of gentian
to face the damp English spring, and who here beholds them thrown about
in handfuls over acres of turf.  How amazing are their brilliance and
their delicacy! they grow with no fear of the imposing summits around
them, these bright tiny things, intimidated neither by the space and
emptiness nor by the storms which stalk over these lonely heights, the
lightning dancing along the ground, for these are the places where the
elements have things to themselves--but seeming rather to be the
natural children of this large austerity, small, lucent, daring, the
only colour vividly dashed on the green monotone of the turf below the
rocky or the snowy peaks.

And--since the pursuit of flowers leads us always higher and higher;
since we are soon no longer content with the gentians and violas, but
must seek for rarer and more fastidious things--it is remarkable how,
the higher you climb, the more delicate become the flowers.  You would
imagine that they should become more robust as the altitude becomes
more severe, but the reverse is true: down in the valleys the coarser
flowers mix with the grasses, and are scythed down with them to make
fodder for the cattle; it is up on the high passes that you find the
flowers which best please the fastidious taste.  Between nine and ten
thousand feet, exposed to all the anger of heaven, you find _Androsace
alpina_ and _Potentilla nitida_, tight against the shale, growing as
low against the earth as any plant possibly could grow, rooted in stone
as it seemed, and drawing its colour apparently from nothing but some
bleakly geological substance, since soil there was none; nothing but
crumbled rock; a tiny denizen, infinitely brave.  Such flowers are the
small valiant children of the peaks.

[Illustration: Winter in Savoy]

Over one of these passes, they say, once came camels.  A rich merchant
of Venice, a native of the Savoyard Valley anxious to revisit his
birthplace before his death, set out from Italy with a caravan of
camels and descended by the Col de L'Iseran upon the astonished village
of Val d'Isere.  That was in the sixteenth century, the caravan
handsomely furnished with such trappings of harness and tassels as were
a suitable accompaniment to the splendour of a wealthy Venetian in that
sumptuous age.  No doubt it amused him to cut a dash such as had never
been seen among the poor peasants of his mountain home.  The splay feet
of camels slouched across the turf amongst these Alpine flowers.  I see
nothing inherently impossible in the story.  I have myself encountered
camels on passes in Asia, as high and as storm-swept as the passes of
French Savoy.  Camels are disagreeable but long-suffering beasts,
streaming out most decoratively on a sky-line.  I like to think that a
caravan of camels came once from Venice to Val d'Isere.

There, to-day, runs the Franco-Italian frontier, a bulwark of black
rock, jagged and formidable, ironically called the '_promenade de
famille_'.  The Fascist guards do not encourage stray pedestrians; in
fact, it is better to stick to the French side, unless you are
satisfied to cross by such recognised routes as the Grand or the little
St. Bernard, or unless you are ready to risk a rifle bullet.  It is no
sacrifice to stick to the French side.  There is room and to spare.
But, evidently, one must be careful to visit it only between the feast
of St. John and the feast of St. Michael, unless one is prepared to
find the flowers blanketed by snow, a cow in one's bedroom, the hotel
shut up, and Madame in full flight for Paris.




Note from another Country: Tuscany

Once when I made the mistake of living in London somebody wrote to me
in a charmingly old-fashioned writing, with a great many capital
letters and underlinings, saying: 'What a Torment it must be for you to
live in a Town, seeing nothing but Houses and Advertisements'.  This
might seem to be a simple saying, but it sank into me and made a stain,
so that I wondered about people: how many of them, who lived in towns,
really saw nothing but houses and advertisements? and how many of them
who led a more retired life, built up for themselves a whole inner
existence out of tiny but immensely significant occurrences?
Montaigne, for instance, was obviously such a one, to whom even a new
thought was an event; and in the permanent mood of an intense inward
excitement he took to his essays, as the daily purgation of a mind
which must find some outlet, so intoxicating were the discoveries made
in solitude, and came to the conclusion that it is exceedingly
difficult to say what one means.  My copy of Montaigne says on the
fly-leaf: 'Mary Jones, her Husband's Gift, 1751, price 14_s._ the three
Volumes.'  I like to reconstruct that Mary Jones.  To her, her husband,
spelt with a capital letter, was a fact; and his gift, also spelt with
a capital letter, was an event: Her Husband presented her with the Gift
of Montaigne's Essays, nicely bound in brown leather, but on what
occasion she does not say: not an anniversary, surely, or the appended
date would have been more specific than merely 1751: no, it must have
been an occasional gift, an unbirthday present, on a stray day of the
year; perhaps he had been cross to her in the morning, and, sensible of
remorse, returned home in the evening with the gift under his arm, who
knows?  And the cost of the gift, he must have told her that; let it
drop, as it were: fourteen shillings! else how should she have known,
as know she evidently did, for the sum is entered in the same
handwriting.  Or was that writing his, not hers?  We shall never know,
nor shall we know whether this acquisition or the perusal of that
Montaigne represented an adventure, a milestone in the life of Mary
Jones; all that we can know is that the gift at some time, perhaps at
her death, passed from her possession into that of Thomas Sedgwick
Whalley, of Rendip Lodge, whose bookplate adorns the end-paper; and
then comes my name, with that of the friend who gave me the book: a
whole little palimpsest of lives, superimposed one on another in the
foxed old volume: Montaigne himself, Mary Jones, Mr. Whalley, and then
finally me.

[Illustration: Water for the vines]

Such speculations are possibly not worth pursuing, and the
psycho-analysts, indeed, definitely disapprove of day-dreams; they give
them a terrible name, unco-ordinated thought or something like that,
and tell us to practise a useful concentration.  But the truth is that
the adventures which happen in the mind are more dangerous and
important than those which happen outwardly in the open air; they have
a habit of fermenting, and all sorts of toadstools sprout in the
half-light of our underground cellars.  Shall we then listen to the
psycho-analysts and their warnings?  The toadstools have their beauty.
Scarlet, speckled, grotesque, they glow in the obscure corners.  It is
not safe to explore underground: you do not know what you may meet.

There was an adventure which happened to me once, and which, although
it will lose everything in the telling, I will tell.  It did not take
place among houses and advertisements, and those who saw me pale with
terror--those, that is, who saw the effect without having shared the
experience--laughed at me in a kindly and comforting way.  I was
annoyed that they should have found me out, for what had happened
concerned me and me only, but there was no help for it; my looks had
betrayed me.  Had I seen a ghost? no, I had seen nothing so palpable as
a ghost; I had in fact seen nothing at all; I had only felt.  I was
careful not to tell them this; I simply said that I felt ill and wanted
air.  So I did.  But what I wanted most was time to absorb something
which I already knew I should never forget.

The place was an old Italian castle, situated down in a valley among
cypresses.  The slopes of the hills, in rough terraces, were covered
with vines; and as the month was October the leaves had turned to a
brilliant red, so that the hill-side in the level rays of the sinking
sun appeared to be on fire.  It was a remote place in the country, a
deep bowl of a place, scooped in the hills; and that old castle, among
the black trees, scarcely visible, seemed to be trying to burrow its
way even more deeply into the heart of the earth.  I am not saying that
it was sinister, for it was not; only it was like a great piece of rock
that had got lodged among the cypresses at the bottom; that had rolled
itself down from the top of the hills and would have liked to go deeper
had the earth not stopped it.  There were no other dwellings within
sight; it was alone with the red vines and the black cypresses and the
circle of blue sky overhead; nor could it rightly be called a dwelling,
for the peasants used it only during the day-time and deserted it for
the night when their labour was done.  It was deserted when we came to
it, but the great gate was open to a push in the thoughtless trusting
way of remote country districts, and our footsteps rang unchallenged on
the stones of the inner courtyard.  We penetrated into the rooms; they
were put to purely useful uses; hung with grapes, that is to say,
grapes that were not to be pressed into wine, but dried into raisins,
so that they were hung, bunch after bunch, along osier wands where the
maximum of sunlight would strike upon them.  Even now the afternoon sun
was on them, making them transparent as they hung, the veinings and
even the pips visible, as the veins of a hand held against the fire.
We exclaimed, and thought them lovely.  But there were deeper recesses
within the castle: a flight of stone steps, leading down, less
attractive than the old banqueting rooms hung with grapes, but more
attractive because more mysterious, less obvious, more frightening.  I
slipped away and went down alone.

Upstairs I left the courtyard, with the late sun striking into it, and
the voices of my friends; the steps led me down into an increasing
darkness, so that I reached out my hand to touch the wall lest I should
stumble.  I could just see that the bottom of the steps opened out into
a cellar.  There was a gleam of light from a cobwebbed window opposite.
A dim aroma came up to me, but I thought nothing of it, and trod
light-heartedly down into the cellar, and stood there among the
enormous barrels, like vats, ranged on either side of the vault.  I
stood there, pleased to be alone in that queer place, looking at the
vats, and snuffing the curiously scented air.  I did not at first
understand how insidious the scent was; at first, it was sweet and
heavy, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but just different from
anything I had ever smelt before.  I snuffed it, interested, as one
might play with a new idea.  I was down there, I suppose, for two
minutes before I was overcome.  I had not realised that the barrels
were full to the brim with fermenting juice.  Even as I was seized with
panic--panic in the classical sense of the word, panic in the sense of
a spirit sprung from nature and stronger than myself--I did not realise
it.  I knew only that I must reach the air or I should fall.  Blindly I
turned and staggered for the steps, gasping for air, gasping above all
for sanity, struggling to escape the cellar where such irresistible
forces had nearly taken possession of me.  I reached the top, and the
hands of my friends pulled me into the light.

But what I still want to know, is, what happened to Mary Jones and Mr.
Whalley when they went down into the darker places?




THE END




  BY THE SAME AUTHOR


  _POETRY_

  THE LAND             _Heinemann_
  KING'S DAUGHTER      _Hogarth Press_
  COLLECTED POEMS          "     "
  SOLITUDE                 "     "


  _TRAVEL_

  PASSENGER TO TEHERAN     "     "
  TWELVE DAYS              "     "


  _FICTION_

  THE EDWARDIANS           "     "
  ALL PASSION SPENT        "     "
  THE DARK ISLAND          "     "
  FAMILY HISTORY           "     "


  _BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM_

  PEPITA               _Hogarth Press_
  ST. JOAN OF ARC      _Cobden Sanderson_
  ANDREW MARVELL       _Faber & Faber_
  APHRA BEHN           _Gerald Howe, Ltd._


  _MISCELLANEOUS_

  SOME FLOWERS         _Cobden Sanderson_






[End of Country Notes, by V. Sackville-West]
