Lately, I’ve fallen in love with the countryside all over again. I never fell out of love with it, but for a long time, I had an on-again, off-again affair with cities and towns. Exciting, thrilling, but I never felt that I was truly home.
I grew up in Devon. That sort of phrase conjures images of big kitchens with ranges, dogs everywhere, and horses too. My country childhood was nothing like that. We lived in a modern house. It was cats, not dogs, and my mother had been terrified of horses ever since one ate her straw hat.
We did live close enough to Dartmoor that I could walk out onto it, but I could also walk to school and there was a shop at the end of the road. We never had an open fire or an Aga, and I’ve no idea how to draw water from a well. We didn’t even grow our own fruit and vegetables (well, there were some raspberry canes left there by the people who’d had the house before us). I certainly didn’t have to experience the seasons the hard way, as farmers do (and perhaps that’s why I go on and on about how much I like winter. Central heating does a lot to aid the romantic view of the outdoors). But even into such a very modern life, I found the countryside, the seasons and the weather intruding in a way that excited me.
I’ve lived in big towns or small cities for most of my adult life. They were and are beautiful places: interesting, exciting, and the bookshops take some beating. But all the time I was in those places, I felt that something wasn’t right. I could never quite relax. These were places to exist, but not truly to live. And five years ago, by a series of twists and turns, I found myself recreating the kind of life I lived as I was growing up. A modern house, on the edge of a village, and just up the hill from a shop. The countryside I live in is different now (North Oxfordshire, not Dartmoor), but what is the same, what feels right, are the colours and the smells.
The first winter that I lived in this house, I would drive home from the nearest town over a bridge at the bottom of a steep hill. The house I could see from the road was a mill house. The field on one side of it had rare breed sheep They were more black wool than they were white and the colouring of the wool somehow rendered the expressions on their faces especially pleasing (like cats with white splodges on their noses who always look a bit distracted). The field on the other side had horses, and at the very top of that field, growing in the hedge, was (still is) a broad, squat apple tree. As autumn came on, most of the apples fell, but those that clung on turned from a normal, appley reddish-green to a deep, intense yellow, the colour strengthening as the weather got colder. In the winter light and at dusk, they shone like lights. They stayed even through the harshest weather. They glowed, even in the lowest, greyest light. On every drive home that winter, I waited for the moment I would turn the corner up the hill and see them. That year, I read for the first time Edward Thomas’s ‘After Rain’, about what is left after a day and a half of a November storm. He talks about the leaves pressed into the road, and then:
“…What hangs from the myriad branches down there
So hard and bare
Is twelve yellow apples lovely to see
On one crab-tree…”
It is the middle of August now, and this year’s yellow apples are already showing in the hedgerows. The hawthorn berries are turning red, and in places they are so thick that I worry they will break the branches on the tree. The fields are yellow and the hedgerows are just beginning to look fusty. There are bonfires, and the smoke and the heat together make a sweetness of scent that is only possible at this time of year. Late summer, and autumn coming. Perfect.
As I drive or walk, when I open a window, when I work in the garden, or just sit quietly with a cup of tea, the smell brings me straight back home. The more I can feel the weather, the more I can feel the seasons moving, the happier I am. I am close enough to fields and bridleways to walk out of my door and see no one for hours. I like to watch for the subtle colour changes that mean one season is moving towards another. I like the sound of the owls in the trees, and of the trees themselves as they move in the breeze. I used to catch tiny parts of these things when I lived in towns, and they would make me suddenly homesick: berries in a hedgerow at the end of someone’s drive; the leaves rustling in the trees before a storm. The more I can feel the weather, the more I can feel the seasons moving, the happier I am.
