Neighbourhood: A year's life in and about an English village

by Tickner Edwardes

And, indeed, October in the country, if your design is to keep step and step with the month through all its bewildering changes, leaves you but scanty leisure for social traffic with your kind. Every day now there is something new to wonder at, and ponder over.

To-day the gossamer was flying. If you stood in one of the low-lying sheltered meadows, and turned your back to the light, the air seemed full of these ashen-grey flecks, some only the merest threads, others of the breadth of a finger and several inches long. I have always believed that the gossamer spiders sit in the hedgerows spinning these fairy draperies, and letting them go upon the breeze to little more use and purpose than when a child blows soap-bubbles for the mere delight of watching them soar. At least, what end could possibly be served by them, other than the sufficient and obvious one of bringing a note of austere, chilly delicacy into the riotous colour of an October day? But idling along this morning with literally thousands of these grey filaments tempering the rich gold of the sunshine far and near, I chanced to stretch forth a hand and capture one of them. Between my fingers there hung a shred of fabric infinitely finer than anything that ever came from loom devised by man; and within it sat the gossamer spider herself, a shining black atom, evidently vastly surprised and alarmed at the sudden termination of her flight. After that I pulled down a score or so of these gossamer air-ships, and although a few were tenantless, the most of them bore a passenger embarked on, who shall say how long and how hazardous a voyage? Yet, while none fell to earth as I watched, but seemed to have the power of rising ever higher and higher, it is certain that the gossamer spider’s flight must end with each day’s sun. The heavy autumn dews must sweep the air clear of them at first tinge of dusk.

If there is anything in the old saying that a plentiful berry harvest foretells a hard winter, then have we bitter times in store. The hedges are loaded with scarlet wherever you go, and yet in all this flaunting brilliance there seems to be no two shades of red alike The holly-berries approach more nearly than any to pure vermilion. Then come the hips, the rose-berries, with their tawny red; and the haws that are richer of hue than all others, perhaps, yet of a sombreness that quietens the eye for all its glow. Ruddy are the bryonies and the bittersweet. The rowans love to hold aloft their masses of pure flame, the rich rowan-colour that is always seen against the sky. Along the edge of the hazel copse, where the butcher’s broom grows, its curious oblong fruit gives another note of red. But they are all essentially different colours. Nature often duplicates herself in blues, yellows, and particularly in a certain shade of pale purple, of which the mallow is a common type. But among red flowers, red berries, finding one, you shall not find its exact counterpart in hue in all the country-side.

In southern England, the general lurid effect due to change of leafage in the forest trees belongs of right to November, but already there are abundant signs of what is coming. Though the woods, on a distant view, still look gloriously green, a nearer prospect reveals a touch of autumn in almost every tree. In the beech-woods nearly all the branches are tipped with brown. The elms have bright yellow patches oddly dispersed amidst foliage still of almost summer-like freshness. The willows by the river are full of golden pencillings. Only the oaks remain as yet uninfluenced by the changing times. The temperate autumn nights, that have checked the sap-flow of less hardy things, have had no influence on the oak-woods. They wait for the first real frosts—the knock-down blow.

And strangely, though October is nearing its end, the frosts do not come. The nights are still, moist, dark; and full of the twanging note of dorbeetles, and now and again the steady whir of passing wings. This is the sound made by the hosts of migrant birds, all journeying southward, travelling in silence and by stealth of night.

Coming out into the darkness, and hearing this mighty rushing note high overhead, you get a queer sense of underhand activity and concealed purpose in the world, as though scenery were being swiftly changed, a new piece hurriedly staged, under cover of the blinked lights. It tends towards a feeling that is rather foreign, not to say humbling, to your desires—that of being made a spectator rather than a participant in the great earth play. Or it may have another and a stranger effect. The sound of all that strenuous motion, the deep travel-note high in the darkness, may come to you with all the urging inspiration of a summons: you may restrain only with difficulty, and much assembling of prudence, the impulse to gird up and be off southward in the track of the flying host. The old nomadic instinct is not dead in humanity, as he well knows who keeps his feet to the green places of earth, and his heart tiding with the sun.

Now, too, the brown owl begins his hollow plaint in the woodlands. ‘Woo-hoo-hoo, woohoo!’ comes to you through the fast-falling dusk, the direction and intensity of the cry varying with astonishing swiftness, as you stop to listen on your homeward way. This is conceivably the ‘to-whoo’ that Shakespeare heard; and there is another note, which seems to be an answer to it, and which sounds something like ‘Ker-wick,’ and might by a stretch be allowed to stand for the ‘to-whit’ in the song. But ‘to-whit, to-whoo!’ in a single phrase, from a single throat—that seems to be a piece of owl language that has become obsolete with the centuries.

There is a stretch of lane here, running between high grassy banks densely overshadowed by trees, which is always dark on the clearest nights of any season, but of a Cimmerian blackness on these moonless evenings in late October. As if they knew their opportunity for service, the glowworms often light up the place from end to end, so that it is possible, steering by their tiny lamps alone, to keep out of the ditch that yawns invisibly on either hand. I came through the lane this evening, and counted near upon a score of these vague blotches of greenish radiance hovering amidst the dew soaked grass, each bright enough to show the time by a watch held near. As long as I can remember, glowworms have been plentiful in this stretch of dark, overshadowed lane, and very scarce in all other quarters of the village. New colonies of glowworms seem difficult to establish, although single lights do appear in places where they have not been seen before, and in ensuing year appear again and again, generally in slowly increasing numbers. It is not wonderful that glowworms should keep to the same grassy bank season after season, because, as all countrymen know, it is only the lampless male that flies. The female, who bears the light, and on whom the persistence of the race depends, lives and dies probably within no more than the same few square yards of tangled herbage. What seems really wonderful is that single glowworms of the female sex should occur in places far removed from old resorts of their kind, seeing how feeble are their means, and how slow their rate of travel.

I have said that the flocks of birds that can sometimes be heard in the quiet of October nights, passing seaward over the village, are generally silent, save for the dull, pulsating roar of their wings. As I lifted the latch of the garden-gate to-night, and stood a moment listening in the darkness, the old sound grew out of the silence of the hills, and there went swiftly by what seemed only a small flock; but now and again, as they passed, I could hear a note bandied to and fro in the company, a chuckling, voluble note, which I recognised instantly. They were fieldfares, the first-comers of their species. From now onward, I knew, their queer outlandish cry would mingle with the common sounds of the fields; and not only theirs, but the notes of all other foreign birds that winter here; for the field-fare is generally the last to come.

This cry in the darkness above me, however, was strange in a double sense; because, while the silent hosts were emigrants, only at the commencement of their long, perilous journey, this chattering company had safely arrived at its bourne, all the hazards of the voyage happily past. And it seemed only in the way of Nature, for bird or man, to set forth mute of voice upon a difficult and dangerous enterprise; while to win through safe and sound must provoke each alike to self-congratulation. My fieldfares were halloaing because they were out of the wood.