We dress for the seasons. We eat with the seasons. So how about reading seasonally too?
I’ve always known that there are certain books I want to read at Christmas, say, or at the height of the summer. A few years ago I began to notice that there was more to it than that. I am close to being obsessed with weather. I don’t mean that I check the forecast all the time. It’s more that I love the surprises of the English seasons, their tricks and turns. And with every shift of the season comes the urge to read something that matches.
At some point, my mind decided that summer starts halfway through May. Before that, there are two waves of spring. The first is the hopeful, cold, delicate version: snowdrops, daffodils, primroses. New colour after the winter cold, as the weather swings from watery sunshine to ice and storms. The second wave is rich and full, a harbinger of summer. This spring is hawthorn and apple blossom, cow parsley and bright, strong green. The ground suddenly hardens as the hedgerows and trees start to drink again.
Spring feels like hope, and fun, and froth. Life. It also brings moments of melancholy, when the weather turns, or when you realise you can’t quite live up to all that sunshine and joy, at least not today. It’s an unsettling and exciting time. Spring is poetry. Of course it is. Wordsworth and his daffodils, I suppose, although I like my spring poems with a bit more rawness, a bit more of that first wave:
‘This morning blue vast clarity of March sky
But a blustery violence of air, and a soaked overnight
Newpainted look to the world.’
For spring in nature writing, I would recommend Melissa Harrison’s Rain. Four Walks in English Weather. It’s beautifully written, and one of her walks takes place in Shropshire on Easter Sunday. Showers are ‘blowing in and over’; ‘a wren shouts a spring trill from the hedge’. ‘Deep in the warm, damp earth seeds are germinating, the hedgerows are coming into leaf, wild flowers are beginning to bloom and insects breed, and everywhere the birds are at their most active, building nests and defending their territories. Life is getting on with the grand business of growing and reproducing.’
If you want your spring fictional, with more of a mythic pulse (spring as pagan, primeval) you could try Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring. The season isn’t its main subject: that is the oddness of family, and people, and politics. It’s funny, and low-key, until it isn’t, and at the end, there is a turn to something bigger and briefly frightening. ‘As the young birches grew taller the skin at the base of the trunks fragmented and shivered into dark and light patches.’ ‘The young twigs were fine and whip-like, dark brown with a purple gloss. As soon as the shining leaf-buds split open the young leaves breathed out an aromatic scent, not so thick as the poplar but wilder and more memorable, the true scent of wild and lonely places.’
For me, spring fiction always ends up meaning Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. He writes about how ‘The wind, which had been blowing east for several weeks, had veered to the southward, and the middle of spring had come abruptly – almost without a beginning.’ There is a lovely description of the end of May, with its ‘rounded and hollow pastures where, just now, everything that was not a buttercup was a daisy’; ‘To the north of the mead were trees, the leaves of which were new, soft, moist and flexible, not having been stiffened or darkened by summer sun and drought, their colour being yellow beside anything green, green beside anything yellow.’
Mostly, though, this is a wintry novel, and then a summer one. There is snow on the ground as Bathsheba faces her decision to marry Boldwood, a decision that turns to gunpowder and destruction. The rain pours and pours onto the grave of Troy’s beloved as he tries desperately to keep the bulbs he has planted there from being washed away. And then he himself is, apparently, washed away. So why do I find I want to read this book in May?
The mystery was solved when I re-watched watched John Schlesinger’s 1967 film version, and heard again a folk song that is used in it, one I hadn’t really realised had entered my consciousness. Fanny Robin is dead, Troy is in despair, and as Terence Stamp stands there, soaked, handsome, immature, destroyed by his own rakishness, we hear the words of ‘One Morning in May’:
‘As I was a-walking one morning in May,
I spied a young couple, a-making of hay.
Oh one was a fair maid, her beauty shone clear.
And the other was a soldier, a bold grenadier.’
We see him again, leaning against the ricks he failed to protect, and looking up at Bathsheba’s window in the pouring rain, and then we see him run. Is it the saddest moment of the film? There are so many to choose from: passion that doesn’t last, passion that ruins, love that has to wait, and all of it set against the turns of the calendar.
Not all of my spring reading is rural. For a long time, my year was an academic one, so spring also brings the first hint of exams. Cut grass smells like revision to me, a potent mixture of good (finally getting to grips with something) and bad (Exams! Help!). I am lucky enough to live close to Oxford. It’s a beautiful and extraordinary place. I used to live and work there, and like anyone who spends most of their time somewhere lovely, I stopped noticing it most of the time. Then, sometimes, I would catch the odd echoes in the high-walled streets, the lamp light that pools around the sides of the buildings, the golden glory of it. It is a place that makes you feel you (and your mind) are just passing through, and how lucky you are to do that. It’s a place that makes you want to read more, be smarter, think harder, write better.
For me, Oxford is at its most exciting at two times of the year. One is October, the start of the new academic year. The other is in horse chestnut season, in the first, soft sun of the late spring and early summer. Partly, the excitement is just about how fabulous the city looks at this time. Cotswold stone seems made for this time of the year, and the sight of the fresh leaves against the buildings is so lovely it can make you stop suddenly. It’s also about what’s happening: everything goes up an extra notch as the students prepare and are prepared for examinations. For this time of year in Oxford there is really only one novel that will do, and that is Brideshead Revisited. Not much of the novel is set in Oxford, and some of its saddest moments have nothing to do with the place, but it is the plunge into Oxford, ‘still, then, a city of aquatint’ that makes us understand how Charles falls in love, with a person, with a family, and, eventually, with God. The other thing to read if you want to feel the glow of that old-fashioned Oxford, is Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night. A detective story melded with a love story, its plot begins to build to a crescendo as spring and a new term arrive:
‘So the Summer Term set in, sun-flecked and lovely, a departing April whirled on wind-spurred feet towards a splendour of May. Tulips danced in the Fellows’ Garden; a fringe of golden green shimmered and deepened upon the secular beeches… newly whitened tennis-shoes broke out like strange, unwholesome flowers along plinth and window-ledge… Solicitous tutors began to cluck and brood tenderly over such ripening eggs of scholarship as were destined to hatch out damply in the Examination Schools after their three-years’ incubation.’
If you don’t want to spend your spring reading in the English countryside, or in an English town either, then you could always look to Italy. I should say that I don’t usually go in for ‘I moved to a foreign country and learned to love life in a whole new way’ books. I tell myself it’s because they’re unconvincing, but I fear it’s actually because they make me feel gutless and provincial, too English to manage abroad. Of course there are places I would love to travel to see, but I’m not sure I could ever live abroad for ever. Let me be clear: this is not a Little Englander thing. I firmly believe that Europe manages a better relationship with culture, and certainly with the life of the mind, than we usually achieve in this country. It’s just that I love the smell of the air here, the scent of the rain, the green of the trees. I have a sneaking feeling that the people who managed to transplant themselves and become part of another culture simply have more zip than I can muster, and less drippy homesickness too. But Frances Mayes’ books about restoring a Tuscan farmhouse give me a strong dose (from the safety of my kitchen table) of what it might be to exist somewhere else, and I read and reread them at this time of year especially.
In the second book, she finds herself experiencing her first spring in Italy. ‘Surges of energy, kaleidoscopic sunlight through the leaves, the soft breeze’. ‘Primavera, first green, and the wet grasses shine. A European spring, my first. I have only read of Proust’s chestnuts flowering, Nabokov’s linden lanes, Colette’s double-red violets. But no one ever told me about quince, their sudden pink flares against stone walls. No one said the spring winds can turn murderous.’ Mayes writes with energy and detail about poetry and buildings and the beauty of the countryside and the difficulties of learning a language. And the food! Oh, the food! There are sections of her books that contain recipes, and she is always willing to stop for a good coffee, to pause to pick some tomatoes, to take a detour for pudding.
My spring ends in the English countryside again, with Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford. And if you hated the tv series, don’t worry: the book is nothing like it. Set not very far from where I live now, it’s a quiet memoir of a village childhood. In it, Thompson writes about the May Day celebrations:
‘On the last morning of April the children would come to school with bunches, baskets, arms and pinafores full of flowers – every blossom they could find in the fields and hedges or beg from parents and neighbours. On the previous Sunday some of the bigger boys would have walked six or eight miles to a distant wood where primroses grew. These, with violets from the hedgerows, cowslips from the meadows, and wallflowers, oxlips, and sprays of pale red flowering current from the cottage gardens formed the main supply. A sweetbriar hedge in the schoolmistress’s garden furnished unlimited greenery.’
She recalls the drift into dreams at the end of the day, of ‘daisy crowns which turned into pure gold, then melted away’.
