Under a Broad Sky

ALSO BY RONALD BLYTHE

The Wormingford Series

Word from Wormingford Out of the Valley Borderland

A Year at Bottengoms Farm The Bookman’s Tale

River Diary East Anglian Views

The Suffolk-Essex Highlands

Fiction

A Treasonable Growth Immediate Possession

The Short Stories of Ronald Blythe The Assassin

Non-Fiction

The Age of Illusion William Hazlitt: Selected Writings

Akenfield

The View in Winter

Writing in a War

Places: An Anthology of Britain

From the Headlands

Divine Landscapes

Private Words

Aldeburgh Anthology

Going to Meet George

Talking about John Clare

First Friends

The Circling Year

Field Work

Outsiders: A Book of Garden Friends

At Helpston

At the Yeoman’s House

Village Hours

The Time by the Sea

For Frances Ward

Contents

January

Thawing Out

Children of the Epiphany

Owl Song

It’s Cold Outside

Jane Garrett

On Pendle Hill

Words in Sand

Absent Relations

February

Reverend Women

Sudbury, Suffolk

Wild Places

With George Herbert

Plough Sunday

The Word and The Worm

Spectacles

Voices

Jeremiah’s Book

March

On the Saxon Shore

Memory Bank

Wild Days

Two Suffolk Towns

April

Pangur Bán the Cat

The Royal Maundy and the Badgers

Pastoral Imagery

The Baptist by the River

Mrs Cardy

The General Thanksgiving

May

Norfolk and Ithaca

Queen Esther and the Roadmen

Shandy Hall

Bees, Rabbits, Blythes

A Stranger did Once Bless the Earth

How to Pray

How the Nightingale Sings

June

Stroke Ward

Long Melford

Movement, Stillness

Lost Ships

Paul Nash and Romney Marsh

Thomas Traherne

July

Suffolk Writers

Valuable Men and Things of No Worth

Village School

Second Helping

At Eventide

Blue

August

Maggie’s Funeral

Cats and Walls

Walkers, Wanderers, Vagrants …

John Clare’s Hills and Holes

The Dream and Dragonflies

Sporting Cousins

Southwold and Bunhill Fields

An Apostle for August

September

Stoke Charity and Jane Austen

Braes of Rannoch Church of Scotland

At Rannoch

‘Very little White Satin …’

Mending the House

The Little Horkesley Farm Walk

Traherne’s Happiness

Making Money like the Bee

October

Constance

Little Easton

Salisbury People, Essex Folk

Dean Frances Elizabeth

Ruth and Tess

Old Growth, New Players

Is Your Worship all it Should Be?

‘What have we come to?’

Roger Deakin

November

Cambridge: Siegfried Sassoon

‘We are as clay in the Potter’s hand’

The Pet Shop Boy

Barbara Pym

December

King Jesus

What Value is it?

Learned Friends

Reading Cavafy

Keeping Christmas

Advent’s Enchantment

Christmas in Cornwall

‘At the Yeoman’s House’

Margery Allingham and This Mortal Life

Waiting

Sound Hilarity

Copyright

JANUARY

Thawing Out

IT IS a relief to find that one does not gain a mature vision of everything – that the first sight of snow, for example, will be as serviceable, wonder-wise, as that of all the snowfalls in one’s life. A six-inch snowfall establishes a presidency that takes our breath away, partly by its nerve, partly by its loveliness, bringing our ant movements to a halt, transforming everything from twig to a cathedral. There are no permanent snowfields in this country, so that even the white tops of the Welsh and Scottish mountains are ephemeral, year-lasting though they may appear.

As children, we would hang on to our snow. A patch in a ditch would tantalizingly last for a week or two after a thaw. We would visit it and tell it to hang on. Or our snowman would melt to a kind of licked lolly, his pipe slipped away, his face dripping and eyeless, yet still greyly what we had made him seemingly ages ago; and he, too, was urged to endure.

Snow is water vapour that has been frozen at a high altitude into exquisite crystals that are precipitated on to the earth, like rain, by gravity. The pattern of each snow crystal is endlessly various and beautiful beyond description. Snow is autocratic, commanding its own silence, bringing our world to a halt. Yet such is our disbelief in its rule, from Mr Woodhouse in Emma to the Channel Tunnellers, that we set out when it begins to fall. Naturally, his carriage will be in trouble from it, but our carriages?

House-sized trucks swing this way and that on the motorway. One of life’s little luxuries is to watch the world sliding about on a television screen, the fire blazing, the snow enthroned for as far as one can see, and those who think that they can beat it in a rare old muddle.

It drifted into my farm-track, and Henry the Vicar saw Jamie the postman gallantly stumbling through it with my letters. The horses wore their snow blankets and steamed in groups; the blackbirds fed on a square of swept grass; the oaks and ashes groaned and creaked; the churchwardens considered cancellations; and the snow snowed and snowed.

The forecasts were as black as the weathermen could make them, and their disaster-prone prose rose to new heights. The white cat watched from a safe window. It was her scene. I read my Christmas presents, The English Poems of George Herbert by Helen Wilcox, Ravilious in Pictures, Sussex and the Downs by James Russell, and the quite marvellous At Large and At Small by Anne Fadiman, ‘the confessions of a literary hedonist’. It takes one to find one.

On the Sunday after Christmas, I rescued St Stephen from under seasonal trash. It is quite awful how the simple glories of the stall slide into murder and flight, and so quickly. And poor young Saul, guarding the coats. How do men live with the faces of those they killed? Although Paul said, ‘I am what I am’, and was not what he was, the wintry execution remained an icicle in his heart.

The earth was hard as iron, we sang, and the crib blocked my way to the pulpit. Today, the snow has gone, and the dead roses wave in the wind. Countless snowdrop tips prick through the mulch into the wood. It is very cold. Young friends come to lunch all the way from Dorset, leaving their baby behind. It might snow. You never know. Not these days.

Children of the Epiphany

POSSIBLY the frozen fields put me in mind of him, but I find myself immersed in Chekhov’s short stories, a paperback that the bookseller found for me in his storeroom. He apologized that it should be such a flimsy edition. But it is perfect.

There is a painting of an onion-domed village church on the cover, below which two women chat in the snow. It is 1944, and millions were perishing on the Eastern Front. Should it happen to be the Epiphany, the Magi would have been forbidden entrance to the church. Outside, everything is waiting.

I read a story called ‘Children’, one of Chekhov’s best, thought Tolstoy. It is marvellous. The grown-ups have gone out, and the servants are cutting out a dress in the kitchen. Four girls and a boy play an unnamed game for copecks. The girls are ladies; the boy is the cook’s son. It is 1886. Yet it is now. It is the noise of any game, and it could be going on in any stuffy computerized bedroom at this moment, the unfairness, the absorption.

In the village, I hear of a friend’s children tobogganing. Wormingford is hilly and slippery and immensely cold. It is Twelfth Night, and dreadful lights will vanish from the gardens. In church, china kings and cows will be wrapped in tissue paper.

Someone has protested about the infantilizing of the Epiphany. It is full of children, of course, all those boys being carried up the Temple steps for registration, and soon to be murdered. John and the Christ-child. But it is not a childish feast. Never need one be more grown-up to comprehend it. It is all about recognition. It is about God and people finding themselves in the same situation. Was not life easier when they knew their place?

During the Epiphany, early on in this new light, St Paul advises us both to accept and to celebrate our differences. ‘Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love.’ Few commands have been more ignored. He had walked and sailed all over the Roman world, and had seen how the empire had been able to absorb every kind of person, and some bizarre religions. Was there a moment when he thought that, if he set out the claims of this one in Rome itself, it would receive a similar tolerance?

Rome was an enlightened civilization. Greece had passed on its unquestionable light to it. But then comes this blinding light, with its blinding conviction of a higher authority than Caesar. No emperor was going to put up with that. And so the stamping out of this light began. But it was wildfire, luminous, travelling, flaring up there just when it had been put out here. Eventually, sovereigns in England would think it an honour to walk in the footsteps of the Magi who offered gold to a poor child who manifested God on earth.

Religious light is a form of darkness to some. ‘Science gives off a clearer light,’ they insist. Others see a dual illumination, the one interpreting the other. I see a steady light, and the brightest and best of the sons of the morning. It is light enough.

My parents told me that my first word was ‘dark’. They were carrying an oil-lamp from room to room in the old house, and, as people do, one of them said, ‘How dark it is!’ And the other said, ‘Yes, how dark it is! What a dark night!’ And this several times. And the baby echoed, ‘Dark’. This was not thought to be prophetic. Or, as they were waiting for ‘Dad’, ungrateful.

Owl Song

NOW and then, on Mondays and Fridays, I forget to collect the milk from its perch at Cockrell’s Farm and walk up the track at near midnight. It is then that the valley owls cry. Byron said that only the rebuke ‘I told you so’ was sadder than owl songs.

But I don’t find these sounds either melancholy or lonely. Tawny owls announce themselves with a shriek of ‘ke-wick’, then go operatic with a beautiful musical ‘hoo-hoo-hoo’, this followed with a long, tremulous ‘oo-oo-oo-oo’.

I should add that I discovered this score in my birdsong book. It has been a birdsong end of the year with the centenary of Olivier Messiaen, a composer who was able to, well, compose from what he heard in the woods near Paris.

Religious mythology has libelled owls and most creatures, doing them great damage, but here, as 2008 closed, was a Christian mystic who went to the night opera and the dawn chorus for inspiration.

My Tawny owl roosts in the leggy hazels which arch over the deep gully and will now and then screech off in fury when the occasional car comes down. But on the midnight milk-run he will be silent-winged over the river singing his majestic solo, ‘Hoo-hoo-hoo-oooooooo …’ I will listen to him in bed, this time thinking, another year, another year.

The saint for New Year’s Day is a monk named Almachius, who is said to have put a stop to the disgusting gladiatorial combats by running into the arena and separating the fighters, and getting killed himself, a brave action which so impressed the emperor Honorius that he put a stop to these cruel entertainments.

He comes to mind because, much to local joy, the Russian Orthodox Church has bought the Garrison Church at Colchester for £50,000. This is a fine wooden building from our Empire age, and far too good to be turned into some commercial enterprise. The icons are already set up, the rich liturgy already sounding.

A mile or two away they are excavating a Roman arena. The monk Almachius who ended death in the arena came from the East. Sea-birds from the nearby marshes, flying over, will note the sumptuous Orthodox singing, just as they would have looked down on endless church parades.

Set-aside having been banished, odd-shaped areas of fields have been left for the birds and other creatures. One of these runs alongside the fifty-acre field, from the crumbling bee bank to the badger sett.

I am re-reading my friend Richard Barber’s English translation of the Bodleian Library’s Bestiary or Book of Beasts, which is the pre-Renaissance understanding of the animal kingdom, and which is about as far from David Attenborough as one can get. Real and fantasy creatures roam the world side by side, unicorns and mice.

What my owls would make of the Bestiary’s verdict on the ‘Screech Owl’ I dare not think: ‘It is so called from its mourning and lamentation. When it cries it imitates either weeping or groaning … This bird signifies the wailing of sinners in hell.’

Barn owls are ‘screech’ owls, and rarer these days than Tawny owls. Pale and ghostly, Messiaen would have found it difficult to accommodate their wild shrieks in his bird music. But they are far from hellish, and are fond of people, making their home with farmers, who would hear them yapping and snoring in the rafters of their sheds, amiable birds actually.

It’s Cold Outside

POTHOLES have appeared in the track, and along the lanes. I remember how shocked I was to bump over them in Manhattan. Snow and ice, and now rain, have achieved their sieve-like purpose.

Not to mention the last-minute descent of the oak leaves, which until yesterday blocked my winter river. Toiling in the half-light, banking the sludge, I freed the flow. Robins and wheatears helped. It was warm, almost sultry, and I liked to think that I could smell the spring. Not a soul about, the afternoon sky black and streaky gold, the silence meditative.

Then, hours at my desk. I am putting 30 years of John Clare essays into a book. The wonderful poet of the fields looks up at me, saying: ‘Is this right? Are you sure?’ The 30th essay has yet to be written. What more can I say? I may call the book ‘At Helpston’. Titles are so committing. I have seen his birthplace only in summer, and have to take his word for what it looks like in January. Taking a writer’s word is the least one can do.

A Helpston friend gave me his asylum photo for Christmas. It was taken by Mr Winter from Derby, in 1862, two years before his subject died. I see the photographer floating the plate in his darkroom, and the wary smile surfacing. Clare’s eyes are youthful behind the cotton-wool brows, and his forehead rises like the Alps. He is challenging the lens to capture his likeness – holding back on it, as it were, as we sometimes do.

On Monday, we all went to St Mary the Virgin in Dedham to