Ode to a Fieldfare

(Composed during the snow-thaw of last month…)

As I sit here, goldfinches glance across the skies outside the window, their ‘charms’ like the bounce of iambic pentameter written with wings. They turn towards our garden, and immediately, their syntax becomes jumbled by a shift and gather of chaffinches - with an adjunct of sparrows tumbling in like a hurried conclusion.

The sparrows twitch their claim to the topmost branches of our damson trees, whilst the goldfinches jolt another stanza back to the skies – or trickle, with a falling cadence, through the branches to our seed feeders.

The chaffinches land halfway up the trees - ponder their way, like careful prose, towards the food in small, turn-taking manoeuvres. The sparrows wait, suss things out, goad each other forward, land on the seed feeders and attack the fat-cakes, all the time saying what they think – blunt performance poets, braving out the day in their bold, sparrow way.

The previous week’s heavy snowfall continues to melt, leaving green edges and a white interior to the garden. A collared dove balances like an erratic metronome, following the perplexity of bird-rhythms now spilling into improvised jazz.

On Friday January 18th, as the garden hunkered down under the weight of the snow’s first arrival, I turned from the window (and a similar bird-scene) to shuffle some new books amongst the old faithfuls on our shelves, when my daughter – at home due to school closures – called out from the landing, “Are those redwings or fieldfares?”

Her words shook me out of my dismay at the increasingly decrepit state of an old university text book I was holding in my hands. Battered even in its youth by unceremonious travels in my overstuffed, seam-ripped student bag – now it was gradually giving up a little more of the ghost, shedding small piles of age-desiccated glue all over the bookshelf. When opened, its paperback cover gaped to reveal a crumbling spine…

I’m very fond of that book – The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, Romantic Poetry and Prose, edited by the aptly named Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling. Just to read its title brings back happy days spent studying odes to skylarks and nightingales…

If there isn’t an ode to redwings and fieldfares, there should be – they deserve that celebration. Mist-revealed spirits of winter - the chance of experiencing their sudden, soft manifestation again, galvanised me into action.

“Are there some in the garden, then?” I called back.

By this time, my daughter had reached the dining room – and I had dashed to the window, grabbing the binoculars.

“There are millions of them!” she exclaimed, “All across the tops of the damson trees!”

We counted them, taking turns with the binoculars. Not quite millions. Nineteen.

“They’re fieldfares.” I declared

“Yep!” confirmed my daughter, taking another look through the bins, “Definitely fieldfares.”

There they were, spread across the tree-sky like a sudden flowering. A winter gift from Scandinavia.

The heavy, white cloud-sag seemed to plump up at the points they touched; each bird a downy planet orbiting into a sudden, glowing constellation strung out across the branches. Smudged with ash and a splash of sunset spillage, they puffed out their chests; all facing the same way to watch the north-east, like compass needles pointing home.

Here, in the anchorage of our own home, the presence of these shifting migrants prised open the lid of the day; made the transformation of snow complete. Last time the snow brought the fieldfares from the wider land into our garden, it tipped only one or two individuals onto our lawn. That was magic enough – but this snow-globe flurry of birds, shaken out into our winter space, seemed to tip us instead into the centre of a whirling calm.

My husband phoned a while after they had swooped away, grey billows gathered into the white folds of sky. Early that morning, the snow-bound state of our car, and the buses stuck on hills, had sent him walking the several miles into the city. Some ‘lovely, kindly people’ he said had given him a lift in their 4 X 4, thoughtfully stopping to offer transport to as many trudging pavement backpackers and hopeful bus waiters as they could fit into their vehicle. His day’s experience of community spirit shone in his voice. Now, he’d finished at work, and was going to walk home.

“And how was your day?”

“We’ve had nineteen fieldfares in the garden!” I excitedly announced.

“Yeah…right!” he laughed.

“No, we have! Honestly!”

“I want photographic evidence!” he joked.

“Already done!”

“Oh – why aren’t I at home?”

“I expect some will still be flying around here by the time you get back.” I consoled him.

And sure enough, a couple of fieldfares did oblige. And I was able to get a better photo – still from a distance and with an unsophisticated zoom on my camera and through a window – but at least it gives a glimpse of that gorgeous colouring – the russet blush on the bird’s chest, the grey dusk hovering at its back, its snowball underside – and its thinking eye.

Fieldfare, Turdus polaris – January 2013

Since then, I have checked in The Poetry of Birds to see if it contains a poem about this magical snow-bird…

The Poetry of Birds, edited by Simon Armitage and Tim Dee. Published by Viking

There isn’t a section devoted to the species (the book is arranged according to taxonomy) but in the fragment included from The Parliament of Fowls, Chaucer tips his hat to ‘the frosty feldefare.’

Then I checked the ever reliable close-chronicler of birds and nature, John Clare

John Clare, Selected Poetry, published by Penguin

- and sure enough, he mentions them (of course he does, I should have known – what in the natural shiftings of his Northamptonshire homeland did he ever miss?) but fieldfares are not the main focus of the poems in which they make an appearance.

In Emmonsails Heath in Winter, he writes:

Up flies the bouncing woodcock from the brig
Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread
The fieldfare chatter in the whistling thorn
And for the awe round fields and closen rove
And coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove
Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain
And hang on little twigs and start again

‘Bumbarrels’ is a lovely and earthy colloquial name for long-tailed tits – and here Clare deftly snags with words their busy, fidgety ways – and arrests us with that audio-visual image of ‘the whistling thorn’ and its close, orchestral collaboration with the fieldfares, for whose movements ‘rove’ is the perfect description. John Clare also mentions fieldfares in Schoolboys in Winter, when the boys on their ‘morning ramble’ pass by the hedgerows, ‘plucking haws on which their fieldfares feed.’ And also in The Shepherd’s Calendar – March:

And flocking field fares speckld like the thrush
Picking the red awe from the sweeing bush
That come and go on winters chilling wing
And seem to share no sympathy wi spring

Migrating around the internet, I alighted on a poem by Ada Cambridge which, though perched at the ‘mawkish not hawkish’ end of the scale (to approximate a phrase from Tim Dee’s Foreword to The Poetry of Birds) - overbalancing, for me, on its melodramatic symbolism and sentiment – does contain some caught essences - and provides a great handle for the birds in its title, The Winged Mariners. It begins:

Through the wild night, the silence and the dark,
    Through league on league of the unchartered sky,
Lonelier than dove of fable from its ark,
     The fieldfares fly

For a while, I paused beside Fieldfares by F.W. Moorman – in which the poem’s voice addresses the ‘Fieldfares, bonny fieldfares’ from a sick bed, finding melancholy reflection in their presence; a bittersweet reminder of the universally ever-turning (and personally ever-diminishing) cycles of time:

Noisy, chackin’ fieldfares, weel I ken your cry,
When i’ flocks you’re sweepin’ ower the hills sae high:
       Oft on trees you gethers,
       Preenin’ out your feathers,
An’ I’m fain to see your coats as blue as t’summer sky.

And then I found enriching food along the way, courtesy of Fieldfare by Polish poet Julian Kornhauser, translated by Piotr Florczyk, which captures a mood of intrigued admiration heading into memory – and a freeze-frame beyond grasping – when ‘like a newcomer from the underworld’ a fieldfare arrives, and its identity is only discovered after it has flown away, not to return:

‘Its hollow name, a title to glory,
hung on a branch like a snowflake.’

Simon Armitage, in his Afterword to The Poetry of Birds, muses about why poets ‘have written about birds from the very beginning’:

‘Perhaps at some subconscious, secular level [birds] are also our souls. Or more likely, they are our poems. What we find in them we would hope for our work – that sense of soaring otherness. Maybe that’s how poets think of birds: as poems.’

In his Foreword, Tim Dee points to how, in our own time:

‘Close attention to the seen world and putting such looking into words remain as necessary as ever.’

He ponders the finest contemporary bird poetry written in English by the likes of Kathleen Jamie, Michael Longley and Peter Reading – and describes their work as:

‘Open-eyed meetings that are crammed with ornithological acuity and capture the direct experience of looking at birds today, giving us comparable quickening to that which leaps up around any encounter we have with the real things.’

If I were a poet, I would try to write an ode to fieldfares; to these birds of our nights and winter cloud. I would attempt to pay my own full dues to the poem-that-they-are. But, as it is, this post will have to be my offering…

- Not as a good as an ode; but, as far as my own words are able to stretch to evoke the spell the fieldfares cast over our winter garden, it will have to do…

The Tree House

Signs of spring are already burgeoning…

Lords and Ladies (Cuckoo Pint) – January 2013

…and it’s quite a while now since this “dragon-tree” filtered the fire of the sun through branch and shadow, to melt the snowman….

…which had become its companion, very briefly, during this most recent and unfolding phase of its long life:

Nearby, new buds are reaching out to the light…

And over the past few weeks, I’ve been so inspired by a fantastic new venture which, very appropriately for this time of year, has also been coming into bud…

The Tree House is a proposed new community bookshop which, as I write this, is unfurling ever more towards bursting into leaf. Victoria (aka Evie) – the inspiring force behind the project – is an online friend (and fellow bookish tree hugger) from the earliest days of my first venturing onto the internet.

To explain the project a bit before you head over there to take a look for yourself, I can do no better than quote Victoria’s own impassioned words:

‘Books are not just a means of passing the time, they are lifechanging experiences – the good ones, anyway! They tell us more about what it is to be human, they feed our inner lives and our imaginations (another aspect of humanity that often seems a little underrated!), and make us more creative in our engagement with the world.

The tree is therefore a wonderful image for me of the heart of a reading community – deeply rooted, creating a sheltering and nurturing space, pushing us out into a richer existence as individuals and as a community. Reading can do this! And coming together around books and literary adventures is like planting a forest.

The government wants to sell off our forests. Our libraries are under threat. I see these two things as related – the very things that give life to our planet and our community are seen as superfluous when what is needed, supposedly, is to generate more wealth and get rid of spaces that do not do this. We need trees; we need a sense of community. We can all sit in our homes ordering books over the internet, or downloading them to our Kindles and Kobos and iPads, or we can protect our libraries and bookshops and share this fabulous experience of enjoying books and learning from each other.’

- From The Tree House blog

Please do take a visit over to The Tree House site; there are inspiring posts about the project and about books and reading; fabulous links to some amazing bibliophile-heaven bookshops - all of which sprang from the same soil of passionate motivation that Victoria is now cultivating - and there are also trees!

The Domesday Oak (thought to be 700 years old) Ashton Court Estate, Bristol

It’s a fabulous project, growing in all the right directions – and with a vision that is exactly the sort of seed our society needs to plant and nurture. It’s like the old saying goes… ‘mighty oaks from tiny acorns grow…’ - a cliche phrase maybe… but, like most cliches, loaded with truth!

‘A bird out of Merlin’s ear’

Since my children went back to school last week, there’s been a lot of catching up to do. Lots of gathering together of the self, much realigning – some careful stepping onto newly laid paths, pausing to wander and to really look. Lots of strengthening, preparing; allowing things to resurface and settle.

Some days, I’ve spent long slices of time sitting at the dinner table in our back room, working and thinking and shaping some kind of order and readiness into the previously swirling confusion of ideas and writing projects – and into the general ‘stuff that has to be done’ which often threatens to topple it all.

I’ve been working my way back to the heart of things. That quiet kernel of space so easily lost in the rush of demands and ‘things to be done.’ Over past months, I’ve been tripped up by too many instances of my mind jumping ahead of itself; not allowing itself to settle between leaps. Old, familiar footholds became all too easily muddied by that swirling mix, confusing my way across last year’s stepping stones.

But reading Witch Light through into the New Year definitely helped to recover my balance.

Witch Light by Susan Fletcher, published by Fourth Estate

It is a book filled to the brim with the heart of things; with ‘the heart’s voice.’ Choose almost any page at random, and the prose overflows with it. During the hours in which I allowed myself to sink into Susan Fletcher’s beautiful, lyrical novel, I lived in its world completely – in Corrag’s world. Her first person narrative enchanted me with its beauty; kept me in clear water; slowed me down to watch the light play; helped me to regain calmer focus:

‘Still. There was magick in that place – I promise it.

I felt it everywhere. I felt it in each tiny thing I saw – each stone which shifted under my heels, or each raindrop. I had time, now. Time, until now, had been as thin and as scarce as a wind-blown web – fluttering by, very brief. My second life had been go! Go! And when had I had the time to lie on my belly and watch a snail make its way across a leaf, leaving its moonshine mark? Never. I was running too much. I was galloping over mud and wild land, with the mare snorting hard, and any slow times were spent with her – picking the nettles out of her tail. No snails. No hour upon hour in the rain, watching a leaf’s middle become a rain-bright pool.

I had never liked witch, and still don’t. But if ever I deserved the name at all, it was then, I reckon. It was having my hair fly in the wind as I stood on the tops, and how I crawled through the woods where the mushrooms grew. It was cloud-watching and stag-seeing, and spending long hours – full afternoons – by the waterfall that I’d bathed in, watching the autumn leaves fall down and make their way seaward. They bobbed and swirled. I said magick, one day. In the gully that led to my valley, I stopped. The wind was in the birches, and it felt they were speaking. If they were speaking, it was magick they said. Magick. Here.’

From Witch Light (previously published as Corrag) by Susan Fletcher – published by Fourth Estate.

I felt sad to break away from Corrag’s company when the last page was turned – but, she has lived on in my mind long since – and echoes of her voice curl around the days and the small and the luminous; in moments of starlight and moon shadows…

Christmas moon – dusk, 25th December 2012

…in the times when our damson trees have been greenly on fire in the mid-day rise of winter sun…

…And in the birds who visit the garden continuously, and punctuate my hours as I sit here at the table. Goldfinches, blue and great tits, a song thrush; small fluid ripples of long-tailed tits taking the fat-balls hostage in a clasp of criss-crossed tails, before rushing off into insistent dusks; chaffinches, starlings, a handful of sparrows; our resident robin and dunnock; the chirring magpies; the blackbirds posing and hopping, staring down worms. They fill the edges of awareness with light and colour and movement, until there is nothing for it but to sit and gaze and absorb their rhythms to a slower heartbeat and a resettled frame of mind.

When I turn my eyes back to my task, the birds still fill spaces between thoughts like cushioned areas of dreaming, unconsciously wandering and enlivening the workings of the mind. Their calls and year-turning notes wake me up a little more – and a little more – to the new-beginning months and the strengthening light.

When 2013 was still in its very first days, my husband – putting out the milk bottles in the late afternoon – called me to the hallway. He flung open the front door; let the dusk declare itself a visitor. Invited in, it hovered tentatively on the threshold, clasping its traveller’s cloak of soft grey light – half in concealment, half ready to reveal; a gentle crumpling of birdsong shaken out through its folds.

“Listen…” my husband said, standing under the sky in last year’s broken down slippers, delight awake in his voice. “It’s five o’clock – and the birds are all singing. It’s five o’clock and it’s still light.”

I stepped outside and stood with him in the brim-full glimmer – a scooped cup of light not yet spilt from the evening.

And the birds floated its surface with their light-drunken notes, like Keatsian ‘beaded bubbles winking at the brim’ – a slow drift of mostly blackbird and robin song; birds who often tease out their territorial notes through the night – and through winter. But the tone was different to that robin song you hear in pre-solstice winter nights. It felt richer, more languid, more primed with a weight of promise – an outward-going rather than an enclosing intention; filled with the possibilities of light.

Last week, as I walked around our little bit of the city’s edge – once a village, still edged with woods and fields – this change in the birdsong was palpable, growing day by day. The trees seemed to flex with it. The woods, glimpsed between the houses, loomed closer, declaring themselves stirring from sleep, cradling the streets once more in a busy sense of living. The weather was mild, soft; spring with grey edges. But then it turned cold again. Fog shrouded the woods in a whispered plan of concealed waiting, and frost crunched under my feet as I re-filled the bird feeders. But, all around me, the birdsong persisted – and the next day, it seemed to raise the tree tops higher to the sky – the hidden buds tipped with fiery winter sun, simmering the cold, clear blue slowly towards spring. Gradually since, the air has drained of warmth, growing colder and deep chill (and, by the time I publish this post, deep snows will have blanketed most of Britain) – but the cup of light has kept filling and re-filling to a rising brim, steeping a new flavour into the days. And at night, Jupiter has sparked bright above our damson trees. Showing the way. To somewhere.

As I sit here at the table, a wren has crept and flitted across the patio immediately outside the glass doors. It has dashed and tail-tipped its way amongst the moss beneath the buddleia bush – like Time passed on in small, overlapping relays; a ticking pendulum of thought receiving a change of rhythm – a signal for the seeding of a new idea; creeping, as the wren in Ted Hughes’s poem, ‘out of Merlin’s ear.’

When the thicket’s drifted, a shrouded corpse,
He’s in under there, ticking,
Not as a last pulse, but a new life waiting.

Lonely keeper of the gold
In the tumbled cleave.
A bird out of Merlin’s ear.

(From Wren by Ted Hughes)

Detail from RSPB Christmas card – Design by Kate Green.

Fresh green shoots are adjusting their positions in our flowerbeds, following the light, feeling for familiar strung-out patterns of change, squeezing through corridors of the spectrum, skyward. My husband planted a whole host of bulbs in the autumn – scattering them in random fashion. “It’ll be a complete surprise where and what comes up,” he said.

Unknown, unguessed, waiting.

Like new days, new months, a new year.

We all know that along with the hope of a new year – like the hope flung ‘Upon the growing gloom,’ and amongst ‘Winter’s dregs made desolate,’ by the ‘ecstatic sound’ of Hardy’s ‘aged’ and ‘frail’ Darkling Thrush (and like the hope of bulbs flung on autumn soil) – shadows and darker realities still remain. But the darkling thrush also reminds us of something fundamental – deeper in our consciousness – as we too respond to the signals of a year’s propulsion towards the light, however slight, however overlaid with the sheen of cold – or a chilling surface of difficult odds:

So little cause for carolings
   Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
   Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
   His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
   And I was unaware.

(From The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy).

As my long-time hero Richard Mabey wrote in his monthly column A Brush with Nature back in the March 2010 issue of BBC Wildlife magazine, penning his words out of ‘the depths of the hardest winter for 30 years’ and in the wake of climate change talks in Copenhagen which ‘ended in abject, shameful failure’ – and in the face of all sorts of official apathy and disregard for natural habitat and wildlife protection:

‘I can’t do despair. I know intellectually the depths of the crisis we are in, but I’ve only to poke my head out of the door and emotionally I’m healed. Today, I can see the first hazel catkins, ready to hatch from their hoar-frost shells…’

He goes on to talk about George Orwell’s essay, Some Thoughts On The Common Toad, written in 1946 ‘in a Britain exhausted by war and racked by six hard winters in a row.’ He quotes this small section:

‘Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead at about the same moment. Suddenly, towards the end of March, the miracle happens, and the decaying slum in which I live is transfigured.’

Richard Mabey adds that, if Orwell were alive today, ‘I suspect he would insist that it’s down to us’ – that Orwell ‘…saw the enjoyment of nature as a kind of revolutionary act, a challenge to the political machine.’

He quotes Orwell’s essay again:

‘I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and – to return to my first instance – toads, makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable.’

Mabey goes on to write: ‘Now may be the moment to take the dictum ‘Think globally but act locally’ very literally………. Conservation works. Down in the parish, we can make a difference.’

‘Nearly 70 years ago,’ Mabey continues, ‘Orwell closed his piece with a tremendous call to arms that still resonates in every detail’:

‘So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the Earth is still going round the Sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply though they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.’

Today, I was reading the farewell article from the National Trust’s former Director-General, Dame Fiona Reynolds, in the charity’s magazine – and the words she cites from Octavia Hill, one of the Trust’s most inspiring founders, sprang out at me as another appropriate link in this New Year chain of thought:

‘What we care most to leave is not any tangible thing, however great; not any memory, however good; but the quick eye to see, the true soul to measure, the large hope to grasp the mighty issues of the new and better days to come – greater ideals, greater hope, and the patience to realise both.’

And my mind returns to more bright beads to add to this chain of hope – to more quotes from Susan Fletcher’s Witch Light; to Corrag’s voice again:

‘What was dark will always be dark, I know that……

……But also, there is light. It is everywhere. It floods this world – the world brims with it. Once I sat by the Coe and watched a shaft of light come down through the trees, through leaves, and I wondered if there was a greater beauty, or a simpler one. There are many great beauties. But all of them – from the snow, to his fern-red hair, to my mare’s eye reflecting the sky as she smelt the air of Rannoch Moor – have light in them, and are worth it. They are worth the darker parts.’

And to Corrag’s faith that:

‘It is the small moments, sir, which change a world.’

A belated Happy New Year everyone! Here’s to a 2013 in which all our hope and creativity – all our contributions to the heart of things (however small or overwhelmed they might sometimes seem) - can add up to something bigger – reaching for, and growing stronger in, the brim-filled light.

Sunset, New Year’s Day 2013, Bristol Harbour

Wishing you all much fulfilment and flourishing in the year ahead!

(With thanks to the excellent Cornflower Books blog, for the inspiring introductions to Witch Light / Corrag and to Susan Fletcher’s writing which prompted me to seek it out - and also to Karen at her magical Moonlight and Hares blog for a special moment of Witch Light serendipity!)

Daughter of the Sea by Berlie Doherty

‘My tale is of the sea. It takes place in the far north, where ice has broken land into jagged rocks, and where black and fierce tides wash the shores. Hail is flung far on lashing winds, and winters are long and dark. Men haunt the sea, and the sea gives up a glittering harvest. And it is said that the people of the sea haunt the land.’

As we said a sad-sweet goodbye to the Angel of the North…

The Angel of the North – sculpture by Antony Gormley, near the A1 at Gateshead.

… (our annual ritual of leaving and returning…)

…something made me turn to those opening words of the prologue to Berlie Doherty’s Daughter of the Sea.

This 1998 Puffin paperback edition…

1998 Puffin Books paperback edition of Daughter of the Sea by Berlie Doherty, illustrated by Sian Bailey

…was nestled in a bag by my feet in the car - along with all my other Barter Books summer finds. We were driving away from the far north of England and towards the autumn; the winter already a furthest-north-thought creeping steadily southward from invisible horizons behind us.

I discovered a few years ago, on another long road journey, that I’m able to read in the car as long as we’re still on the motorways; twisting lanes play havoc with my head if I try to focus on the page. But with three hundred miles of motorway from the North-East back to the South-West ahead of us, it felt like a good journey of the mind, and an honour paid to an always complex sense of parting, to allow this tale of the sea, and of rugged northern lands, to carry me home.

And so it was that, as we passed through a bright land of harvest and surreal summer-green (the trees and hedgerows kept strangely lush and leaf-abundant by exceptional amounts of rain) my thoughts were called towards ice, and crofters living close to the rock-rimed bones of remote islands; edgelands where the breath of survival moves with the sea.

In her Author’s Note at the back of the novel, Berlie Doherty tells us that: ‘Some of the stories woven into Daughter of the Sea are based on ancient tales from Iceland, Scotland and Ireland.’ And in the narrative, she achieves that feeling of a generic North – an evocation of shared cultural strands that knit place, experience and a Far North landscape of mind.

Philip Pullman, quoted in the blurb on the back cover, describes the ingredients of the book’s atmosphere perfectly:

‘Tension, emotional honesty and more than a touch of cold northern poetry as well.’

- Philip Pullman, Guardian.

A slender book, ostensibly for children, but with tendrils of deep archetypal concern that hold fast for readers of all ages, Daughter of the Sea casts its net far around a teeming weight of significance – just as the tight-woven, sparse words of folktale reach to catch big ideas, glinting with truth and meaning.

Berlie Doherty tells a tale of humans and selkies locked in an interrelationship which both washes towards the land, and pulls away into unknown deeps. People of the land are drawn to the sea, and the people of the sea are drawn to the land. The netted strands that join them are irresistible – and yet fraught with difficulty and danger. It is a relationship of both gifts and destruction; of both lifeblood and the ever-present threat of death.

It is an interdependence that reveals the very edges of life; the deepest concerns of spirit and survival, where the natural order is broken at your peril. The people in this novel’s pages live with a heavy sense of submission to what the sea must take in return for what the sea relinquishes. They live with a pact that, if broken, exacts terrible price – great sorrow and loss. But, it is also a pact that can bring vital restoration and healing. In these natural cycles of giving and taking, there is a balance of joy and sadness; of wishes and what must be; of possession and letting go.

Daughter of the Sea is written with a lilting call of voice. Its prose is an invitation to the fireside, whilst the snow and ice grips the darkness in the howl of the wind outside. The sea not only haunts the book’s characters and story, but its whole tone too. We feel the touch of ancient depths of human experience in its telling; the accumulated voices of many folk long gone, as the waves of the narrative take up each character and deliver the timeless and interwoven longings and acceptances of their lives…

…The life of Gioga, the daughter of the sea - delivered up by the waves to the yearnings of a childless couple; of Eilean o da Freya, the ‘crab-woman,’ who guards a secret, and lives alone in a den beneath an upturned boat, her story told in the ‘language of her singing’ which ‘has lilts and hisses in it, as if she has listened too long to the sea.’ And Hill Marliner, the mysterious white haired stranger who wears ‘a full grey cloak’ and whose appearance answers to the descriptions in Eilean’s tales of ‘the lord of the oceans’ who ‘rides the waves from morning to night, from ice to ice, from the world’s end to the world’s end.’ And of the islanders, who weave their tales through the cycles of nature; cycles that permeate every moment of their existence:

‘My tale is of the daughter of the sea. The best way to hear the tale is to creep into the lee of the rocks when the herring boats have just landed. The gulls will be keening around you. The women hone knives on the stones, and their hands will be brown from the wind and the fish-gut slime. And as they work they talk to each other of the things they’ve always known.

That’s when the story’s told.’

- (Berlie Doherty, opening to ‘Daughter of the Sea.’)

Spotting Wickham…

On Saturday 15th September, we found ourselves stepping into a universe of slightly fuzzy edges, where bonnets and smartphones became complementary accessories – and Time seemed to knit together a dreaming of two eras.

We had arrived in Bath just in time for the start of the 2012 Jane Austen Festival Regency Promenade - and so many Emma Woodhouses and Lizzy Bennets were passing us by in conversation on their mobiles, I began to wonder if Regency reticules might become the surprise new “must haves” for carrying those ‘excessively diverting’ devices.

Caught in that parasol-twirl of the centuries, we hurried to join the crowds along Milsom Street, and found the militia already gathered there…

…with the Town Crier leading the way

– and a whole host of Admirals and Captain Wentworths, Charlotte Collins, Lady Catherines, Mrs Dashwoods and Mary Crawfords following on behind.

Feeling hopelessly inelegant in our 21st century jeans, we trailed in the procession’s wake amongst shoppers and buskers

…past the Pump Rooms and along Abbeygate; through Abbey Green, and past the now serene and welcoming shadow of its beautiful ancient plane tree, where only a bruised and recoiling patch of earth - from which the grass is said never to regrow - holds a shuddering memory of the public hangings that once took place there…

Walking away from that time, into a recreation that both engages with and leaves it behind, we emerged near the Roman Baths and the Abbey…

…stopping traffic along Grand Parade

…and to the final destination at Parade Gardens.

With elbows resting on the balustrade wall…

…and feeling thoroughly absorbed by the spectacle in the gardens below…

- wild, Lydia-esque ideas began to form in my mind. I’m not really one for dressing up, but occasionally I feel the lure…. And now, inspired visions began to take hold in which I (suddenly possessed of seamstress super-powers) would thread miracles through an imaginary sewing machine, and effortlessly run up an empire line frock in time for next year…

I’ve always been totally useless with a needle and thread (hence the imaginary status of my sewing machine) but I’d read, in a recent copy of Jane Austen’s Regency World Magazine, how many of the devotees of the Festival create their own costumes – and marvelling now at their skill, I fantasised about fashioning an elegant velvet pelisse, or smoothing onto a hanger a finished muslin gown with the pride of a job well done…

All a hopeless dream.

This is the girl who, in school needlework lessons, took a whole year to not finish sewing a tote bag!

But surely I could manage to trim a bonnet, couldn’t I? Looking at the wonderful creations around me, I began to doubt it… Jane’s words from a letter to her sister Cassandra, written in Bath’s Queen’s Square in June 1799, suddenly seemed to echo teasingly through the streets:

‘Flowers are very much worn, and fruit is still more the thing. Elizabeth has a bunch of strawberries, and I have seen grapes, cherries, plums, and apricots. There are likewise almonds and raisins, French plums, and tamarinds at the grocers’, but I have never seen any of them in hats. A plum or greengage would cost three shillings; cherries and grapes about five, I believe, but this is at some of the dearest shops. My aunt has told me of a very cheap one, near Walcot Church, to which I shall go in quest of something for you…

…Elizabeth has given me a hat, and it is not only a pretty hat, but a pretty style of hat too. It is something like Eliza’s, only, instead of being all straw, half of it is narrow purple ribbon. I flatter myself, however, that you can understand very little of it from this description. Heaven forbid that I should ever offer such encouragement to explanations as to give a clear one on any occasion myself! But I must write no more of this.’

And from another letter written a few days later:

‘We have been to the cheap shop, & very cheap we found it, but there are only flowers made there, no fruit… Besides, I cannot help thinking that it is more natural to have flowers grow out of the head than fruit. – What do you think on that subject?’

All the ladies around us were impeccably elegant in their choice of bonnet adornment – not a discordant or misplaced ribbon, flower, feather (or greengage!) ‘growing out of the head’ to be seen.

In my own efforts at such practical decoration (be it trimming the Christmas tree, wrapping presents, attempting costume making etc.) there always seems to be a yawning gap between the tasteful effect I aim for in my imagination – and the dog’s dinner that usually takes shape in my hands. Suddenly, I had visions of looking like Lydia gone bonnet-overboard after blowing a whole year’s allowance at the haberdashers…

“If you could dress up as a Jane Austen character, who would you choose?” I asked my husband – and watched as his eyes, bright with the sight of red-coated militia marching to pipe and drums…

…suddenly shadowed with fear…

“Er…er..” he stumbled, warily, not wishing to back himself into any inadvertent corners.

“Mr Collins?” our daughter suggested helpfully, with a teasing glint in her eye. We looked around – plenty of admirals, colonels, Mr Gardiners etc, but no Mr Collins.

“You’d be unique…” I added, encouragingly. “Or you could be Mr Darcy – and take a dip in the Avon over there for added Colin Firth effect…”

Not liking where this was going, my husband’s brow suddenly cleared as he saw a get out clause. “No, no – I’d be Mr Bennet, without a doubt. Then I could stay at home, shut up in my study all day, no family interruptions. Just peace and quiet.” A dreamy expression came over his face. Mr Bookish Nature doesn’t get much peace and quiet…

“Anyway,” he said, diverting attention away from himself, “Who would you be?” he asked our daughter, the teasing gleam turning tables. “Mary Bennet?”

“That’s not very flattering…” she said, sardonically.

“No – she’d be Lizzy. Everyone wants to be Lizzy.”

“Yeah – so you’d have to be Lizzy too!”

“Oh, Lord no – I’m far too old…” I protested – and then suddenly realised, with a mix of horror and mirth, that if my daughter was Lizzy – that would make me…

“Mrs Bennet!” we chorused.

“Oh, my poor nerves!”

How the pages of life turn…

We fell silent again in amused reverie – and returned to admiring the costumes of the Regency folk in the gardens below.

A few time-transporting performances from the militia on the pipe and drums later…

…I noticed my daughter was scanning the crowd with a gleam in her eye.

I questioned her with a raised eyebrow.

“Oh, I’m just trying to see if I can spot any Mr Wickhams…” she said, glowing with a sense of fun…

I laugh and feel as old as Methuselah…

Humanity, and all the patterns to which we dance, essentially never change – books, life, people, time; the pages turn and we find the same stories. Art and experience mingle. Life is mirrored; dressed up and displayed back at us. Different times are transposed, one against the other, capturing between their layers truths for us to grasp and tuck like bookmarks into the pages of our own lives.

Through the decades, ever since I was the age my daughter is now – Jane Austen has helped me to bookmark so many truths – through experience, through her novels; the two overlaying each other like tracing paper revealing the pattern by which to cut the cloth…

The often perilous schisms between reality and surface; the traps where truth lies struggling and smothered in self-delusion; the quiet, seeping devastations of daily thoughtlessness, selfishness, deception or hypocrisy; the momentous revelations to be unpicked from the knit of our every-days; the celebration of the quietly kind, the too often overlooked and truly valuable in the face of the dazzle and casual cruelty of the world; the sparkling humour that pins together the absurdities, the discord, the joys and variety of life’s patchwork fabric; and self-knowledge that should sear from time to time if the cut of the pattern is to hold true, and the needle be willing to repair the stitches that go astray. These are just a few of the threads in the Jane Austen weave that have guided my hand on my imaginary sewing machine, as I’ve stitched a garment of learnt insights to wear through my days, helping me to withstand (and to endeavour to understand) the vagaries of life and people – and myself!

And I’m so pleased that my daughter is a Jane Austen fan – and that we are here in Bath today, seeing Jane’s world come alive in front of our eyes – and in ourselves. And I am so very glad that Bookish Nature Junior is already busy stitching her own garment of insights, guided by Jane’s hand; finding truths, learning about life, about people – about how to spot a Wickham! …And, most importantly of all, tackling those very tricky stitches that are all about learning to know herself…

August Interlude…

‘I love borders. August is the border between summer and autumn; it is the most beautiful month I know. Twilight is the border between day and night, and the shore is the border between sea and land. The border is longing: when both have fallen in love but still haven’t said anything. The border is to be on the way. It is the way that is the most important thing.’

- Tove Jansson

Personally for me, it’s an impossible choice between April, May, September or October for that title of ‘most beautiful month I know’ – but there is a special approaching-the-border feel to August; a character to the month that’s slightly louche and intent on shaking loose.

It’s a wayfarer month, dusty and dishevelled, having tramped along the road of the year to a point where the clothes in the rucksack need a wash, the straw coloured hair a cut, where August’s beard is sprouting grey, unruly tufts – and the birds are quiet and moulting in the hedgerow; the swifts and swallows are turning their minds with the planet’s tilt back to warmer climes… and all is waiting for the fresh cusp of September to shake crisp and golden from the trees – and jewel-berries to fatten into glossy temptation amongst sun-curled leaves.

August is also the month of school holidays, and usual routines fading into forgetting. It’s time for far-flung family and friends - a month of get-togethers and migrations; time to explore overgrown ragged paths, and to follow late-flying butterflies as they glance the low sun on their wings. It’s time to search for lost books in dusty bookshops; to turn dry, stiff pages whispered shut long ago, and to crackle them into life again – to discover voices from times that once were ‘now,’ and which will never know that they have slipped into ‘then’ – voices telling stories that echo memories, or intrigue with new strangeness.

It’s a month when time to write slips away – but is also a brewing month, when ideas simmer, and gain flavour from sights, smells, sounds which infuse the mix of holiday experiences and places visited.

Lots of new posts for this blog are brewing – but August still keeps them bubbling over the camp stove - suspended in its sprawled-by-the-roadside, tea-break of time…

Soon, August will shake the dregs from his cup, pull his boots back onto weary feet, and take a path half hidden between the hedgerow brambles. He will follow it to where its grass wears away, sandy and parched. He will tread the slip and slide of the dunes, avoiding the sharp whip of marram grass, and stoop to marvel at the startling pink of bloody cranesbill and the humbug yellow-and-black of cinnabar moth caterpillars, chomping their way through unruly ragwort. And then, he will hear the whisper of wind and water and the harsh cries of gulls; he will look up to see the sun arrow from the sky on the white wings of terns – and follow its dazzle as spray rises from the waves – and he will amble down to the sea…

Beach Scene (watercolour) – painted by my daughter, 2012

Later, September - carrying the fruits August piled by the roadside for her to bring home (along with the billycan of brew he’d carefully kept simmering) - will arrive back at this blog, and post wayfaring August’s tales of the road…

Until then, August is a month of very few words – he reveals his thoughts through the storyteller month of September, who shows all her fruits proudly in the hedgerows and gleams words gold, red, yellow and bold from the trees…

Woodland Waterfall (acrylics) – painted by my daughter, 2011 (using pointillist technique)

Time, energy, words return with September; with a step taken across another border…

‘The border is to be on the way. It is the way that is the most important thing.’

Glimmers of taciturn August’s mind may break into words, if his tongue loosens in the meantime – and if the hours give him opportunity to trudge an extra mile or two. But September is hot on his heels, looking forward to gaining her time to speak. She has a lot to tell…

See you back here then, when – all blackberries, apples and ripened words – September will take her place beside the hedgerow, and pour the summer’s brew into the Bookish Nature picnic cups for all to share…

‘One summer morning at sunrise a long time ago
I met a little girl with a book under her arm.
I asked her why she was out so early and
she answered that there were too many books and
far too little time. And there she was absolutely right.’

- Tove Jansson

Sailing Boat at Sea – painted in oils by my daughter, 2011 (using rag technique)

White Crow by Marcus Sedgwick

We returned from one of our regular trips to the library recently - me with a bagful of poetry – and my daughter with White Crow, a young adult novel with a dark, portentous cover…

As soon as we were through the front door, my daughter disappeared to her room, clutching the book like a prize – and by tea time, she had already read half way through it. By the end of the day, she had finished it, and was wearing that enigmatic expression of a reader just emerged from a journey somewhere inward, challenging and rewarding…

She mentioned an elfin-like girl named Ferelith – and mysteries that had gripped so much, she had been unable to put the book down… But she didn’t want to spoil it for me if I decided to read it too… (I’ve been careful not to include any potential spoilers in the following review, for the same reason…)

In the library, I’d only taken in a general impression of the book’s cover and title. Now, looking at it again, I fully registered who the author was – and recognised Marcus Sedgwick’s name as one that often crops up on children’s book recommendations and shortlists for book awards, including the Carnegie Medal. I checked my bookshelves – and yes, I was right, I have one of his other novels, The Dark Horse, which I bought a while back and still haven’t got round to reading.

Intrigued, I borrowed White Crow from my daughter a few days later – and, like her, found it was one of those gobble-up books that won’t let you go. I’m not quite sure who or what did the devouring – whether I gobbled up the book, or whether it gobbled me. All I know is that I was edgily compelled to turn just one more page, to read just one more chapter – unable to let it go. The book has an uneasy hold on you – circling you first with intrigue, and then moving in ever closer, to enmesh you in a growing sense of troubling darkness.

And as the story progresses, we are moving into very dark and disturbing stuff indeed. At the climax of the novel, Sedgwick heightens the tension to such a degree, my fear for the protagonist became oppressive, almost physical. Mistrust, the sinister and the malign are pitched to an all pervasive sense of dread; an almost unbearable suspense.

Reading this book, I felt increasingly on shifting ground – metaphorically and, in terms of the characters’ location, quite literally. The story is set in the village of Winterfold, based on Dunwich in Suffolk:

‘Once upon a time there was a whole town here, not just a handful of houses. A town with twelve churches and thousands of people, dozens of streets, and a busy harbour.

And then the sea ate it.

Storm by storm, year by year, the cliffs collapsed into the advancing sea, taking the town with it, house by house and street by street…’

We see a landscape where the last remaining church in the village is half eaten away by cliff erosion, its eastern end gaping open to sea, moon and stars; where the graves and bones of the long dead are poised to fall into the sea – and where subterranean secrets of the past are about to be exposed in all their horror.

This is a novel of big themes and big questions. It’s about the inevitability of death and loss – and about human questioning beyond the boundaries of that inevitability. Opposites constantly fray each other’s edges – life and death, sea and land, love and hate, good and evil, trust and mistrust, choice and fate, hope and despair, heaven and hell – angels and devils.

Sixteen year old Rebecca arrives in Winterfold with her father, their relationship also fraying at the edges of love, mistrust and resentment. Her father is a police officer, under suspicion for some kind of dereliction of duty that may have led to the death of a young girl. In Winterfold, they are looking for a retreat from the hell of their situation in London.

Rebecca meets Ferelith, a local girl with an ethereal, other-worldly quality, who is:

‘…strange-looking; there’s something elfin about her. Everything ends in points; her nose, her eyes, her chin, her lips, her fingers, the spikes of her long tresses of black hair…… her teeth, not quite a vampire’s, but not far short.’

Ferelith is a highly intelligent young woman who, having gained her ‘A’ levels at the age of fourteen has taken herself out of school, bored with it limitations. What interest her are big questions. Is there a God? If there is a guiding force in the universe, is it benign? Is the universe just a big cosmic accident? Is there a purpose to life? What are the implications of all the possibilities? She becomes obsessed with the question of life after death, wrapping up her thoughts in stories that surround the old, ruined manor in Winterfold; stories of a man called Dr Barrieux who arrived in Winterfold in the eighteenth century, fresh from the French Revolution, amid rumours that he was conducting sinister experiments into the possibilities of life after death.

An exploration of the philosophy of William James (philosopher and psychologist brother of the novelist Henry James) also runs through the fabric of the novel; Ferelith is very interested in choice and how it determines the future – and bound up in her obsession with questions about the afterlife, is William James’s analogy of the white crow. As Ferelith explains it in the novel:

‘You might say that although you have not seen every crow in the whole world, every crow you have ever seen is black. Therefore the chances are very great that all crows are black. In fact, you have decided that all crows are black. Now of course, if someone could show you a white crow, everything would be overturned in a moment.

But all crows are black.

And in the same way, you conclude that no one lives after death. There is no ‘other side’. There is no white crow.

But, supposing I said I had seen a white crow? Just one. A single white crow.

What then?’

There is a leaden weight of sadness and suffering behind both girls’ histories, and a longing to love underlies their troubled paths. In their developing friendship, there is a moving, tentative reaching out through the ravages of damage, whilst manipulation and detachment , threat, cruelty, power-play and vulnerability become a shifting counter current in that connection between them.

The summer in which the story takes place is unrelentingly hot, dry and parched – but, like everything in the book, the unease between states is held on a knife edge and Winterfold, living up to its name, retains ‘a cold embrace, and like the snows of winter, it does not let you go easily.’

The language is tight, edgy; it makes you jittery and unsure. There are three narrators – an omnipotent narrator, telling the story in third person present tense, an eighteenth century priest telling his story in diary form – and Ferelith, narrating in first person past tense. Like the unstable landscape, the unsettling dance between the narratives adds to the shifting feel of the book – and the reasons for the differing tenses become startlingly exposed by the end of the novel. The very structure of the book fulfils the interplay of its explorations.

All the time, as I raced through the book, I was aware that Marcus Sedgwick was layering the narrative with meaning and significance, with clues and pointers; food for endlessly questioning thought. For instance, each of the chapters narrated by Ferelith is headed by a song title, which I’m sure on further investigation, will throw up some deeper significance. So far, in hindsight, I’ve realised how one is a major clue.

It is a book that deserves a second – slower and closer – reading. Its structure is layered with fraught possibilities, working on many levels simultaneously. The symbolic and apparent, the psychological and physical, the natural and supernatural draw the reader to their tipping points, challenging interpretation. Taking us on subterranean journeys of the human mind, Sedgwick offers up an unsettling exploration of the unanswerable, and leaves our perceptions teetering on that ever present knife edge of doubt and insight.

This is territory suitable for older children and adults. Dark, disturbing and leading into gruesome and horrifying recesses of humanity, it is a troubling read, but one that nags at the edges of the mind and sets a deep questioning to eat away at assumptions and veiled possibilities, exposing them to the light of scrutiny, just as the sea in the book relentlessly uncovers what’s hidden, and the storms force us to look and see.

A Day and an Eternity in Samuel Palmer’s ‘Valley of Vision’ – Part One

The Darent Valley in Kent was Samuel Palmer’s ‘Valley of Vision,’ and a home for many of my childhood daydreams.

Open a book containing Palmer’s rounded hills, swelling moons, embracing trees; the inviting dip and curve of a lane – like the mind’s reach into promised discovery – and I am back there, caught again by the spirit of the place…

Samuel Palmer Vision and Landscape, by W. Vaughan, E.E. Barker & C. Harrison (British Museum catalogue). Cover shows The Magic Apple Tree, c.1830

Cornfield by Moonlight, with Evening Star, c.1830 - Samuel Palmer

Early Morning, Samuel Palmer - 1825

A Hilly Scene by Samuel Palmer, c. 1824-6

Once a week, every week all through my childhood, our little family car would wend its way along the road above Shoreham and through Eynsford, en route to visit my grandparents. From the back of the car, forehead resting against the window, I would drink in Samuel Palmer’s valley below, and let my imagination rove over the hills on the far side. A check-list of familiar scenes would unfold and recede – the memorial cross, carved into the chalk of the Downs in remembrance of villagers killed in World War One; the arch of the railway bridge; Eynsford ford – tugging enticingly at thoughts of bare feet, fishing nets and buckets; a hidden castle; tiled cottages with tiny doorways; a looming church tower; a school playground surrounded by fields, its trees gathered round like benevolent dinner ladies, inclining their branches to listen and keep watch.

In June 2010, three generations of our family were back there again – in the Valley of Vision. It was a hot, hot day. The sun beat down on our heads and glittered on the river. Butterflies shrugged the heat from sap-high leaves.

Our first stop for the day was Lullingstone Roman Villa – my first visit there since a school history trip back in the 1970s. My memories of that trip are of Eynsford Castle - muscular, flinty, uptight and stolid; a building blindly in league with our raucous imaginations. I remember the walk past the river, through the impressive arches of the railway viaduct…

…and towards the shed-like building which housed the Roman Villa at that time. After an hour or so spent echoing our amazement around that modern protective enclosure, we headed off for a nettle-stung wander through the woods, our teachers anxiously herding the intrepid souls who were each convinced they knew ‘the best way to go’ to catch a tantalising glimpse of Lullingstone Castle, before our return to school by train. I think I learnt more about history that day than during any lesson spent in the classroom. I felt it and touched it – saw for myself the layers that preceded, and yet somehow also surrounded, our own layer of time and earth…

…The Roman Villa has lost none of its magic this time round. It is like an ancient dream unfolding from the ground, full of the colours and form of past thoughts and footsteps. You can almost see the mind-turns of long-gone people etched in the evidence of their actions.

Mosaic depicting the mythical story of Europa and the Bull, Lullingstone Roman Villa

Mosaic panel in the audience chamber, depicting the story of Bellerophon, Prince of Corinth, on the winged horse, Pegasus, killing the Chimaera.

Four hundred years of occupation give the villa many layers all of its own. Painted water nymphs glance palely from the niches in the lower walls (a former cult room), their eyes gleaming with liquid knowledge we can only guess at. Standing on the footbridge over the river outside, it is easy to see why they are here. Easy to apprehend those ancient people’s sense of a presence of deity in the play of water and light in the river that was their lifeline.

Beneath that clear, cold water a bed of flints dices up the sunlight, damselflies glance it back at the sky like blue-green fire – and the water trembles in gentle folds, ever onwards in a renewing one-way journey.

This is a valley of flint and water – and, today, of sunlight; bright and transforming. The villa is built partially from flint; grown out of the land that surrounds it. The villa’s history is fascinating. It consists of successive additions to the building made by the many generations that lived in its walls. Here, the water nymphs, when first exposed by archaeologists, blinked in the light of the future, and were found surrounded by the collapsed rubble from the room which once stood above. When the archaeologists pieced together painted pieces amongst the rubble, they discovered a wall painting of figures engaged in Christian worship, plus painted Chi-Rho symbols – unique, unequivocal evidence of a house-church in Roman Britain.

The wall paintings are also a discovery of almost unique international importance. There are theories that, amongst the depictions of Roman legend and the literary allusions to Ovid and Virgil in the villa’s mosaics, there may also be secret allusions to Christ and Christianity, which perhaps date to a time when the villa family may have been wary of declaring Christian belief. The realities of the exact unfolding of the layers of belief here remain a challenge of interpretation. However, an adherence to a new, emerging religion is literally written into the walls, enmeshed there in the building’s fabric amongst earlier traditions and beliefs – perhaps also reflecting a mix that was still interwoven in the minds of its inhabitants.

Centuries later, a young artist, Samuel Palmer also felt a spiritual transcendence in this valley. Nature, he felt, brought him closer to God; the numinous was all around. The paintings that emerged from the years he spent in Shoreham glow with a mystical, visionary insight that locks on to the land and the significance it unfolds for him. Together with a small group of artists, which included George Richmond and Edward Calvert, Palmer formed the first brotherhood of painters in England. Known as The Ancients and based in Shoreham, this small artistic movement wanted to turn away from the industrial revolution and modernity, to return to spiritual values, connect art to nature, and to explore literary imagination and poetic rapture.

Neo-Platonism, the Bible, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Bunyan and Spenser all informed Palmer’s work. He loved Virgil (I wonder if he could have ever dreamed of those ancient, forgotten mosaics buried beneath his valley? Making hindsight connections now, it’s easy to weave fanciful thoughts of those hidden Virgilian allusions seeping up through the earth, to mingle with Palmer’s own Virgil-inspired visions in paint.) The Ancients were disciples of William Blake, finding particular inspiration in Blake’s woodcut illustrations to Thornton’s Pastorals of Virgil. In his 1825 sketchbook, Palmer wrote about his response to these woodcuts:

‘They are visions of little dells, and nooks, and corners of Paradise; models of the exquisitest pitch of intense poetry. I thought of their light and shade, and looking upon them I found no word to describe it. Intense depth, solemnity, and vivid brilliance only coldly and partially describe them. There is in all such a mystic and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the inmost soul…’

(A.H. Palmer, The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer).

In this tribute to Blake, Palmer seems to give a perfect description of what he, himself, achieved in his own work, revealing the bound up nature of aims, inspirations and leaps into the unique. The two men - though different in many ways - give us glimpses, through their respective art, of vibrant, questing minds somewhere out on the edges of the apparent, both peeling away layers to see what lies beyond, beneath, alongside – just out of our immediate line of sight, alive in the tensions of existence and imagination.

Continued in A Day and an Eternity in Samuel Palmer’s ‘Valley of Vision’ Part Two…

Samuel Palmer, Self-Portrait, c.1824-5

William Blake at Hampstead, c. 1825 by John Linnell (1792-1882)

- All art illustrations in this post are from Samuel Palmer Vision and Landscape (British Museum publication).

A Dickens of a Lot to Do!

Do you know that feeling – when your head is so full of concerns, worries, events, demands and things to do, that you just freeze, come to a standstill, not knowing which way to go, what to tackle first – and so end up going in all directions and none?

That’s what happened to this blog over the last few months – and it lived on only as half-started posts in my notebook, good intentions and a ghostly on screen presence… the spirit of Bookish Nature Past…

Miss Havisham-like, I still feel a bit frozen and stuck, my blog all cobwebby and neglected. The clocks all stopped. But, on Sunday, some bookish progress was afoot, when I finished reading The Mystery of Edwin Drood – in the nick of time, ahead of the BBC’s adaptation to be screened… tonight!

To be precise, it was back in August when I finished reading The Mystery of Edwin Drood as it was left to us by Charles Dickens – forever suspended at the end of Chapter 23 which, so poignantly, he penned just the day before he died. Since then, I’ve been trying to unfreeze my literary critical faculties enough to write something here about Dickens’s unfinished novel, before embarking on reading Leon Garfield’s interpretation of a possible ending. The plan was to write my impressions of Dickens’s last novel and my take on where it may have been going – then to read Leon Garfield’s completion of the tale, write a separate post on that – and then conclude with a post about the BBC adaptation and how each compares… However, still being stuck in my Bookish Nature version of Satis House, that plan has remained as cobwebbed over as Miss H’s wedding cake!

But, at least now… at the eleventh hour… I’m blowing away the dust and trying to resurrect the poor neglected thing (though I doubt I’ll get my Edwin Drood posts finished in time to coincide with the screening of the television mini-series; will this blog ever be topical??? I always seem to be dozens of steps behind the signs of the times!) With an attempt to stay vaguely on track, I leapt in ahead of the BBC adaptation’s imminent arrival, and read Leon Garfield’s ending of the novel over the weekend – so this resurrected creature of a plan won’t be quite the same thing as was originally intended. But, hey, it just may well morph into something more meaningful…or meandering…or both… and go down all sorts of unexpected ways, maybe following all those probing and mysterious beams of light which, through Dickens’s (and Garfield’s) imagery, follow the novel’s brittle, edgy darkness and prise it open, pestering a reminder of truths to keep the shadows in perpetual tension; a play of light and dark upon the wall – with struggling gleams of possible resurrection and redemption being, I think, what Dickens may have most wanted the reader to keep their eye on…

So, I suppose that’s a very good note on which to also resurrect this blog. I tried in vain to write a detailed post about Edwin Drood yesterday morning and ended up still going down a thousand ways and getting nowhere (I keep hitting this problem of too much in my head, and not enough idea how to deal with it all!) I was feeling a little despondent that I’ll never get back the blogging habit. But, over the next few days (or most probably weeks…) I will attempt to bludgeon into shape all my notes and we shall try to begin again… At least I’ve managed to cobble together this post today, which is a start and makes things seem a little less daunting! And there are some nature oriented posts lurking half prepared in my notebook to knock into shape too…

Add to that the fact that the BBC’s very interesting adaptation of Great Expectations has left me longing to return to the real thing… plus the very tempting group read of Our Mutual Friend (one of my absolute favourite novels of all time) coming soon over at The Argumentative Old Git – I’d better get started on dusting off those cobwebs! See you back here soon for, hopefully, some resulting shiny new posts over the coming weeks…

All the World’s – a Book…

I hope you had a happy, bookish World Book Day 2011!

I started writing the following post yesterday, with every intention of posting it on the actual ‘Big Day’ - but… time and events had other ideas… So, here’s the finished article; a day late – but hopefully still topical (may whichever day you happen across this post, be a bookish celebration wherever you are in the world!)

Here’s what I wrote on 3rd March 2011:

My son has gone into school today dressed as Harry Potter, his wheelchair wheels sprinkled with wizardly magic (how he would love to be able to fly that NHS wheelchair, broomstick fashion, at Nimbus 2000 speeds! There would be no stopping him; he’d be airborne faster than you could say ‘snitch!’)

As I write this, my daughter will be paying homage beside Shakespeare’s grave. I hope she is passing on to Will a special moment of remembrance from her mum…

Later, she will spend a couple of hours at a workshop with the RSC – followed by a trip to the recently re-opened Royal Shakespeare Theatre, to see Rupert Goold’s production of Romeo and Juliet; a school trip beyond the wildest dreams of my own teenage years!

She’s beaten me to it as first member of the family to experience the new theatre at Stratford upon Avon. For the past few years, I’ve periodically watched its gradual rebirth, gazing across the River Avon at the original red brick façade, imagining the ghosts in its walls stirring, gathering up the memories and poetry of the soul of the theatre as it settles around the new stage and waits for new magic to happen.

My September 2008 trip to see the RSC’s truly riveting, unforgettable Hamlet (David Tennant, Patrick Stewart, Penny Downie – directed by Gregory Doran) saw the RST redevelopment looking like this:

My birthday treat in February 2009 (to see Antony Sher and John Kani in a deeply moving production of The Tempest – its African heartbeat throbbing with the strange magic of the play) - took place in a mysterious, mythological world parallel to these scenes:

And, in June 2009 – another trip to Stratford upon Avon revealed these changes in the theatre:

…all bound up with memories of the truly visceral drama of the assassination scene in Julius Caesar, which I watched through tears of shock and pity, my emotions wrung by the electric, skilful interplay of confusion, betrayal and human frailty moving like a lonely, cornered animal amongst the characters on the stage.

In August 2009, my daughter and I were gifted a very different mood of fun, frolics and superbly handled mayhem in the Young People’s Shakespeare production of A Comedy of Errors – and in June 2010, my friend and I were back in ancient Rome, following Darrell de Silva to Egypt, as he and Kathryn Hunter sparked and sparred in a crackling production of Antony and Cleopatra.

In beautiful August evening sunshine, 2010 – after my daughter and I had been treated to a wonderful Young People’s Shakespeare production of Hamlet - in which Debbie Korley delivered one of the best, most heartbreaking Ophelias I’ve ever seen - I took these pictures of a near complete new RST:

…And also took these commemorative pictures of the Courtyard Theatre, the RSC’s temporary performance space (and template for the auditorium of the RST rebuild) with sad, fond nostalgia in my heart. How I love that ‘big rusty shed.’ So full of memories…

But now, anticipation of my first visit to the transformed RST in June awaits new memories in the making. My tickets – little paper portals to actually be there when Jonathan Slinger, directed by Michael Boyd, inhabits the skin of Macbeth – are tucked away safely and at the ready. My excitement about this production is simmering at heart leaping levels already – it will be the first live performance I’ve seen of  ‘The Scottish Play’ since Peter O’Toole was beguiled by siren witches in the infamous Old Vic production of 1980!

Macbeth is special to me – the first Shakespeare play I ever read. I first opened its pages when I was about the age my daughter is now, and it awakened in me a passion for the Bard that has continued to deepen, grow and embed itself ever more firmly in the fabric of who I am. Now, I see the same process at work in my daughter…

For these reasons, and more, I can hardly wait to see Macbeth come alive on stage in what promises to be an electrifying production - and I can’t wait to get inside the new RST. Tonight though, the magic of the place will be brought home here in the sparkle of my daughter’s eyes, and in her tales of her experiences there. This World Book day, she is caught in those heady, early stages of falling in love – as I was when I first read Macbeth – with the book that truly belongs to all the world:

Just a few World Book Days ago, she too went into primary school dressed in the Gryffindor cloak my son wore today (she was Hermione – big hair included!)

Not long before I first read Macbeth, I was tucked up in bed riveted by Jill’s Gymkhana or avidly following Bilbo Baggins ‘there and back again’ (well, I still am sometimes…some things don’t change… )

From Ron Weasley to Romeo, from The Hobbit to Hamlet – there’s no telling where a journey through books will lead…