Many farmers dislike summer time, but it is at least an acknowledgement of the truth, that day and night are not the same thing in summer and in winter. To me, living in the country, summer time is pure joy. I can never forget the first day when that miraculous movement of the clock seemed suddenly to release upon us in one day all the sunshine of a summer. It was May 21st, 1916, and life had for many months been darkened for us by the war. I am convinced that the sun was confused by the change in the clocks, so that he shone that day for more hours than he knew. We were in London, and my brother Reginald suggested a drive into the country, so we drove away from our own troubled times and back into the eighteenth century, down the Avenue in Bushey Park where the chesnut trees were lit by their thousands of flowery chandeliers. Then to Hampton Court, where man has for long dominated nature, and where the art of one generation has never feared to impose itself upon the work of bygone predecessors.
The huge bell of the palace clock was indeed striking that day for the first time, an hour ahead of the sun, but at Hampton Court, the human race expects to be supreme. Wolsey’s Tudor Palace had accepted the new formality of Wren’s Fountain Court: horticulture had produced in the English climate those stupendous bunches of grapes which rivalled Joshua’s spoils from Palestine: the formal eighteenth century flower beds had been adapted to the free grace of flowers grown to accord with the taste of another day. The royal palace knows how to adapt itself to the vagaries of kings, and Hampton Court obeyed the new law of Summer Time, with a zest unequalled elsewhere.
Nature too rejoiced in the sun. At luncheon in a copse near Chertsey we saw the clear liquid rays work miracles as they slipped through the pale green foliage of the birches, and at Ascot, the azaleas in my uncle’s garden smelt like Hymettus honey. We reached Windsor in the evening. There we stayed, watching the long-delayed sunset lighting the castle walls when night had begun at last to creep over the forest trees in the park. It was unforgettable—the red flame which illuminated that vast conglomeration of buildings, where the passing centuries had slowly achieved a triumph of dignity and strength. Thus lit, in proud isolation, Windsor Castle seemed to be plus royaliste que le roi.
The coming each year of summer time always recalls to me that long lovely day, though putting on the clocks was no new thing at Wilton. Like the King at Sandringham, Sidney Lord Pembroke had always advanced his clocks half an hour in the shooting season, though this made endless confusions over fixing engagements with people who were keeping Greenwich time. The Wilton people called Lord Pembroke’s manipulated clock-time ‘The Lord’s Day’.
On the downs, Lord’s Day and Commoners’ Day are lost in a wide awareness of the rise and fall of daylight which cannot be experienced by people who live in the valleys. The shepherds in their huts in the lambing season watch the eternal wonder of the sky, and so do the gipsies in their tents. I was nearest to it when I was once isolated by whooping-cough, and lived for three weeks in the grand stand on Salisbury Race Plain. There I saw the weather as never before, and I saw too, that if you can only see enough of it, all weather has beauty. My companion in exile was Foyle, our delightful maid, and we had great fun together, for she was an extremely racy conversationalist. We shared a bedroom, the only room in which it was possible to light a fire, and in it we lay, side by side, on camp beds.
On our first night, we had the worst thunderstorm of a generation, and half Wilton hurried up to see us next morning, convinced that the grand stand must have been struck by lightning. The storm made us feel very little and futile, as it roared round us, filling the sky with blazing darkness; and yet it was strangely exhilarating to be there alone on the downs, with all the powers of nature screaming past our room. We talked to one another in subdued voices during the din.
The storm was the opening of a fortnight of bad weather, and those wild days were wonderful to watch. I used to lie out in the shelter, watching the Cathedral as it changed its aspect every hour. Sometimes it appeared to be quite near by, and then it was of a brilliant transparent texture, lit up from within. A quarter of an hour later, it had receded into the distance, and stood miles away, a dull and sulky grey. Then it warmed to a deep yet threatening blue, after which it lost all appearance of solidity, and became an ethereal building of sunlit mist. In the evening it shone as red as the sunset which illuminated it; and often there played about it wide sheets or narrow spears of summer lightning, which shivered upon the delicately carved pinnacles of the spire.
Lots of people came to visit me in this beautiful isolation, riding up singly or in parties, driving pony-carts, or walking through the Hare Warren, for this was in 1907, when few country neighbours possessed motor cars. We often had large tea-parties, when the guests sat at the correct quarantine distance, and Foyle gave round tea and cakes. When everyone had gone home, we retired to our little sitting-room, with all round us the endless silence of the downs, and then, often, we heard again the thud of hoofs. Foyle hurried out to welcome the belated visitors, but no one could be seen, and the galloping
