Ah, the sweet prelude to an English winter! For me it is so much a more beautiful season than any other, which is just as well since it goes on for most of the year. It is a time when there is more colour in the country than there was ever before. Ploughed fields take on a look like a farming scene in the initial letter of a medieval manuscript. Bricks are an intenser red and Cotswold stone is more golden, the limestone and granite of the north is more silver, bare branches are like pressed seaweed against the pale blue sky. Whatever remains green is more deeply, richly green than it was before.This waiting, intense stillness is generally a prelude to a storm. The smallest sound is easily heard. Cocks are continually crowing, ducks quacking as though they were happy, and even across three miles of still, misty fields, it is possible to distinguish all six of the church bells as men practise method ringing in the oil-lit evening tower. But this night there is not one of those gigantic winter sunsets and the house is more than usually full of spiders, huge hairy ones which cast a shadow twice their own size on the drawing-room carpet. And then, in the night the storm begins. Will the trees stand it, this gale which makes them roar and creak and roar again? Will the earth ever be able to soak up these torrents which beat the house, brim the water-butts and swish on grass and gravel? And has anyone remembered to shut the upstairs window?
Winter is the one time when I feel I can indulge myself in reading what I like instead of what I ought to read. Time stretches out a little more and I stretch myself with it. Slow books come back and I try to forget our jerky modern novels. While the storm shakes the shutters, I re-read Scott, generally starting with The Heart of Midlothian. And as the great rumbling periods, as surely and steadily as a stage-coach, carry me back to Edinburgh, the most beautiful city in these islands, I feel an embarras de richesse. There is too much I want to read, too many memories I wish to experience.
Every winter I read The Task by William Cowper, and twice or thrice those wonderful books in it where he describes a Winter Evening, a Winter Morning and a Winter Walk at Noon. The frost blades of north Buckinghamshire, the snowed-over woodlands, the dog that gambolled in the snow, the bells and post horns, the cups of tea, melted, dead, silenced, evaporated for nearly two hundred years, come to life again. And if the next morning is nippy and white with frost, then Cowper’s magic power of description gives an eternal look to the cold and sparkling scene so that even this duller landscape in which I live might be the gentle undulations round Cowper’s Olney, Bucks, or it might be something earlier still, a frost-bound Dutch landscape by Breughel.
Winter is the time for reading poetry and often I discover for myself some minor English poet, a country parson who on just such a night must have sat in his study and blown sand off lines like these, written in ink made of oak-gall:
Soon as eve closes, the loud-hooting owl
That loves the turbulent and frosty night
Perches aloft upon the rocking elm
And hallooes to the moon.
And here they are, these lines, widely spaced upon the printed page and hundreds more, by the Reverend James Hurdis, D.D., Incumbent of Bishopstone, Sussex, printed a century and a half ago, some of the most perfect descriptions of an English winter that were ever written in English. And you and I are probably the only people in England who are reading Hurdis. The smell of the old book is like a country church when first you open its door, the look of the pages is spacious like the age in which it was written and the broad margins isolate the poetry as Bishopstone must then have been isolated among windy miles of sheep-nibbled downs.
There is no need only to escape into the civilised past, which is more easily done in winter than in any other time of the year. Even modern barbarism becomes almost human, especially in places which make their money out of summer visitors. Am I wrong in thinking that the blonde with a handkerchief wound round her head and a cigarette in her mouth is a little politer now when she refuses to sell me the cigarettes I know she has in hundreds under the counter? Do I perceive a mood less casual in the bar-attendant at the Grand Hotel? Is it possible that when I ask for a room at the reception desk, I shall actually be accommodated instead of being sent away with a scornful refusal? Maybe this is all imagination. But of this I am quite certain, when I receive my fee for describing to you these joys of winter, I shall indulge in the greatest winter joy I know. I shall take the
