SUMMER
If, like me, you are more interested in seeing things happen than in seeing them when they have happened, you will not be such an advocate of Summer as of other, any other, seasons. For Summer is the one time of year when practically nothing happens outdoors. From about the middle of May—I speak of the south parts—to the middle of September Nature sits with her hands in her lap and a pleasantly tired face. There, my children, she says, I have done my job. I hope you like it. Most of us, I own, do like it very much, and signify the same in the usual manner by vigorous ball-exercise and liquid refreshment, much of it of an explosive and delusive kind. When the Summer is over, somewhere round about Michaelmas day, Nature rolls up her sleeves and begins again. Properly speaking, there are only two seasons—Spring and Summer. The people therefore who, like me, prefer the Spring to the Summer, have more time in which to exhibit or dissemble their love—and a good deal of it, I confess, uncommonly beastly in the matter of weather.
The people who like everything are the people to envy. Children, for example, love the Winter just as much as the Summer. They whistle as they jump their feet, or flack their arms across their bodies; and whistling is one of the sure signs of contented youth. I remember that we used to think it rare sport to find the sponge a solid globe of ice, or to be able to get off cleaning our teeth on the ground that the tooth water was frozen in the bottle. I don’t believe I ever had cold feet in bed, and am sure that if I did I had something much more exciting to think about. There might be skating to-morrow, or we could finish the snow-man, or go tobogganning with the tea-tray; or it was Christmas; or we were going to the pantomime. All seasons were alike to us; each had its delights. That of Summer, undoubtedly, was going to the seaside. We always had a month of that, and then a month in some country place or other which my father did not know. That was done for his sake, because the seaside bored him so much that even his children noticed it. It was nothing to us, of course, as we lived in the country, and did not, as he did, poor man, spend most days of the year in London; but equally of course we weren’t bored. I never heard of a child being bored, and can imagine few things more tragic in a small way. No: it was always interesting to live in someone else’s house, learn something of their ways, chance upon a family photograph, or a discarded toy, or a dog’s grave in the shrubbery; or to read their books and guess what bits they had liked—any little things like that. And, of course, it was comfortable to know that one’s father wasn’t always smothering a gape, or trying to escape from nigger-minstrels. As for the sea—a very different thing from the seaside—I don’t believe he ever looked at it. I am certain that I never saw him on the sands. The sands are no place for you unless you had rather be barefoot than not. Now, it is a fact that I never saw my father’s feet.
At the same time, I don’t know where else one could be in August, except at the seaside. Really, there is very little to say for the country in that month. The trees are as near black as makes no matter, the hills are dust-colour, the rivers are running dry. True, the harvest is going on; but the harvest is not what it used to be. You had, indeed, “a field full of folk” (in old Langland’s words) in former days. All hands were at it, and the women following the men, building the hiles, as we call them; and the children beside them, twisting up the straw ties as fast as they could twist. And then the bread and cheese and cider—or it might be home-brewed beer—in the shade! But bless me—last year I saw the harvesting of a hundred acre field—our fields run very big down here; and the whole thing was being done by one man on a machine! The Solitary Reaper, forsooth! The man was reaper, tyer and binder all in one; you never saw so desolate a spectacle. So the harvest is not what it was. It may have attractions for the farmer, but for nobody else that I can think of. Go north for your Summer and you may do better. August is wet, generally, in Scotland, but when you are in Scotland you won’t mind rain, or had better not. You can catch trout in the rain in Scotland, and with a fly too: that is the extraordinary part of it. And the Scottish summer twilights are things to remember. They are overdone in Norway, where they go on all night; where the sun may go behind the hill for five minutes and begin the day before you have thought of going to bed. You can’t keep that up—but it is exciting enough at first. The great charm of the Norwegian Summer to me is that it includes what we call Spring. The other season in that country is Winter, which begins in September and ends with May. Then, immediately, Summer begins: the grass grows and is ready for the scythe, the cherries flower and get ripe and are eaten—all at once. You get those amazing contrasts there which you only have in mountainous countries; which I remember most vividly crossing the Cevennes from Le Puy to Alais. On the watershed I was picking daffodils, only just ready to be picked; in the valley of the Ardeche they were making hay, and roses were dusty in the hedges. I slid from March into June—in twenty minutes. You will not be so piqued in England; yet if your taste lies in the way of strawberries for instance, you can do pretty work even in England. You can begin in Cornwall, or Scilly, and have your first dish in early May, or late April, with clotted cream, of course. Then you can eat your way through the western shires to Hampshire, and make yourself very ill somewhere about Fareham, in June. When you are able to stand the journey, you can go on to the Fens and find them ready for you in early July. In August you will find them at their best in Cumberland, and in October, weather permitting, you will have them on your table in Scotland. After that, if you are alive, and really care for strawberries, you must leave this kingdom, and perhaps go to California. I don’t know.
The Summer will give you better berries than the strawberry, in my opinion. It will give you the wild strawberry, which, if you can find somebody to pick them for you, and then eat them with sugar and white wine, is a dish for Olympians, ambrosial food. Then there is the bilberry, which wants cream and a great deal of tooth-brush afterwards, and the blaeberry, which grows in Cumberland above the 2,000 foot mark, just where the Stagshorn moss begins; and the wild raspberry which here is found on the tops of the hills, and in Scotland at the bottoms. I declare the wild raspberry to be one of the most delicious fruits God Almighty ever made. In Norway you will have the cranberry and the saeter-berry; but in Norway you will want nothing so long as there are cherries. I know Kent very well—but its cherries are not so good as those of Norway.
I had no intention, when I began, to talk about eating all the time. It is a bad sign when one begins that, though as a matter of fact we do think a great deal of our food in the country—because we are hungry, and it is so awfully good; and (as I daresay the Londoner thinks) because we have nothing else to think about. That is a mistake, and the Summer is the time to correct it, by spending it in the country and trying to understand us. Let me be bold enough to suggest to the Londoner who takes the prime of Summer to learn the ways of the country in it, that he would prove a more teachable disciple if he did not bring his own ways with him. He is rather apt to do that. He expects, for example, his golf, and always has his toys with him for the purpose. Well, he should not. Golf is a suburban game, handy for the townsman in his off hours. Country people don’t play golf. They have too much to do. The charabanc is another town-institution, to be used like a stagecoach. Nothing of the country can be learned by streaming over moor and mountain in one of them. The Oreads hide from them; Pan and old Sylvanus treat them as natural process, scourges to be endured, like snowstorms or foot-and-mouth disease. The country is veiled from charabancs, partly in dust, partly in disgust. For we don’t understand hunting in gangs. The herd-instinct which such things involve and imply is not a country instinct. We are self-sufficient here, still, in spite of all invitation, individuals.