An English country Christmas, by the late Ronald Blythe
In an extract from Next to Nature first published last year, the great nature writer − who has died aged 100 − chronicles winter's arrival
I have been in Wormingford, on and off, since I was 22 − first of all as the friend of the artists John and Christine Nash, and later as the dweller in their remote farmhouse [Bottengoms]. My feet have kept the track to it open, if not level, and the view from it familiar.
On this near-Christmas day, I stare from its high north window, just as John once stared from it when he placed a canvas on his easel every week, and, cigarette between teeth, would transfer sketchbook drawings to oils.
The studio in those guiltless days was a homily to dust. Tobacco dust, mortal dust from plants and insects, and, to a degree, from the artist himself. It was never swept, and a single 40-watt bulb gave a discreet account of it.
During the summer, when John went to Cornwall or Scotland (never abroad, if he could help it), he would kindly dust a patch where I could write. I never told him that I never wrote a word in his studio, but always in his lovely garden; for summer went on forever at Bottengoms. Still does. Even at this moment, with Christmas at my heel, the valley within a valley which contains the old house has its own climate. Should it snow, everyone knows that I won’t be able to get to the top. The dip will fill up, hedges will disappear, familiar posts will vanish, and ditches will sound with loud but invisible water.
The first hard frost. All nature bends before it. The ancient rooms themselves feel crisp. The white cat flies through her flap with panache to settle on the ladder-back chair for the day. She gnaws the strange white stuff from her toes. The chair is old enough for Dr Johnson to have sat on with Hodge. Boswell could not abide cats, but nor could he omit them from his masterpiece.
My cats succeed each other in an equality of love – I think. Wintry rifle-shots of frozen branches will honour their graves in the wood.
The frost delineates the landscape, sharpening it, making the garden tidy. “We can see where you have been,” say the walkers-by. Where you haven’t been, they mean.
The view from on high – ie my study window from which centuries of farmers would have woken up to find snow. The window too from which John Nash, a snowophile, would sometimes paint the white garden. What he particularly liked were moderate falls, which allowed the brown winter grass to poke through. His first great winter picture was Over the Top in which a group of heavily clad soldiers scrambled out of their trench, their khaki and the snow creating the colour mood which the artist looked for all his life. He once told me that he had given one of the soldiers the face of a singer he had heard at the Queen’s Hall just before he joined up in 1916 “to show the death of civilisation”.
Christmas Eve. A small gift for the postmen – they have a rota – on whose endless kindnesses the logistics of this remote farmhouse turn.
My towering holly hedge is snowily tipped with old man’s beard but the lower boughs are a glowing mass of orange and dark green fruit and foliage. Blackbirds hustle out as I cut branches to hang over the pictures and fireplace.
Debach, my old home. How often I have walked “the street” at that most sated hour of the year, 4pm on December 25, and marvelled why some family-packed cottage did not explode from all this compressed blood relationship, ritualised obligations and eating. The flocking back home of the brood from digs, jobs, colleges, regiments and vague addresses to briefly create a curious and distinctive atmosphere in pub and church, at the local parties and Boxing Day football. The custom of walking it off has very nearly vanished, and it makes me feel virtuous and adventurous to be alone, outside, cold; beyond the feast, as it were. When I was a boy, whole families walked it off, flaunting their presents, kinship and strength.
Back at home in Wormingford, I walk into a scene which has little to date it. Small typical East Suffolk fields stuck around with gaunt trees, spreading icy ponds. It is what I see every morning from my desk. I watch it emerging from the night; I see what I always see at Christmas, phosphorescent islands, which are farmer French’s sheep, rooks like squawking rags high in the trees, all facing the one direction, lapwings and gulls. There are still a few roses out. Lear said, “At Christmas I no more desire a rose than wish snow in May,” but he would have to put up with them at Debach when there is rarely a time when they are wholly absent. I investigate the toppling Bramley in whose seamy bark I tucked last year’s mistletoe seeds. Nothing. Mistletoe is often unisexual and can be capricious. Its name means “mistel-twig”, but as they used to call basil mistel, it is easy to come to a philological halt. All the festive plants were once simply called “the Christmas”.
December 25. The diarists and letter-writers squeeze against each other on the top shelves otherwise where would I be? Glued to their confessions and not working a minute. But happening to check on one of their Christmases, I cannot stop. Here is John Wesley:
At the Love-feast, which we had in the evening at Bristol, seventy or eighty of our brethren and sisters from Kingswood were present, notwithstanding the heavy snow. We all walked back together, through the most violent storm of sleet and snow which I ever remember; the snow also lying above the knee deep in many places; but our hearts were warmed, so that we went on rejoicing and praising God for the consolation.
John having made guards for our pew heaters, I remembered Colette at school:
Sometimes a baby pupil, who had tried to warm herself by sitting on her foot warmer, would let out a squeal, because she had burnt her little bottom. Or an odour would spread in the room from a chestnut, a potato, or a winter pear that one of us was trying to cook in her foot warmer… Surrounding us was the winter, a silence disturbed by crows, the moaning of the wind, the clatter of wooden shoes, winter, and the belt of woods encircling the village… Nothing else. Nothing more.
Daphne du Maurier, old now, finds herself at Menabilly alone:
It’s so queer having no one down here for Christmas. I have not done my routine decorating, but have put all my cards around, and have lovely flowers everywhere, and an arrangement of holly on the centre table in the Long Room, and so it all looks very cheerful. If I thought about it too deeply, I might be rather sad, but I don’t... I think the thing is always to look ahead in life, and never look back, except in gratitude...
Francis Kilvert, the young curate of Clyro in 1870:
Sunday, Christmas Day. As I lay awake praying in the early morning, I thought I heard the sound of distant bells. It was an intense frost. I sat down in my bath upon a sheet of thick ice, which broke in the middle into large pieces, whilst sharp points and jagged edges stuck all around the sides of the tub like chevaux-de-frise, not particularly comforting to the naked thighs and loins … I had to collect the floating pieces of ice and pile them on a chair before I could use the sponge … The morning was most brilliant. Walked to the Sunday School with Gibbins and the road sparkled with a million rainbows…
Katherine Mansfield is malcontented in Hampstead a month after the Armistice:
I wish we were all in France with a real Xmas party in prospect – snow, huge fire, a feast, wine, old French tunes on a guitar, fancy dresses, a Tree, and everybody too happy for words. Instead we are wondering to give the postman 5 shillings… or 3… This cursed country would take the spirit out of a Brandied Cherry.
On Christmas Eve 1974 Stephen Spender was in Jerusalem:
After dinner, to the Church of the Nativity, for Midnight Mass. The Church is large and bare, the Mass was intoned in Latin, with some dignity… The most beautiful part of the evening was after we left the service and walked back along the road the two miles to Rebecca’s Well, where our car was parked. We heard, from that distance across the valley dividing us from Bethlehem, the voices from the Church still singing, which the cold night air seemed to purify of raggedness and wrong notes, so that coming from the hill above us, they seemed those of a heavenly choir.
The snow has arrived and has settled in. It came down via the coast and smells faintly of the sea. The air is so keen that I am mildly surprised when it doesn’t splinter from contact with my face. Streaky blood-red dawns announced the snow and less gorgeous prophets declare there is more to come. Anxious voices ask the perennial question, “Will I be cut off?” From civilisation at the top of the track, they mean. I hope so. It is the historic prerogative of ancient farmhouses to become inaccessible now and then, and to create consternation.
The last morning of the old year. Swift saffron-and-black clouds, and motionless trees. Christmas, which took such an age to arrive, has gone in a flash. [...]
The farmers will be deep in seed catalogues distributed by my neighbour on the far side of the valley, Mr Church. Lorries filled with billions of seeds will soon be navigating the Stour lanes, taking us to the verge. I can see them from the house, those slow containers of scents and food, discreet as pregnancy. Mangel, swede, clovers of all kinds, evening primrose and borage – “Sow in the spring at 8 kilos per acre and swath in July when seed-drop is imminent.” Ignorance of what comes up in our fields is now widespread. It reminds me of the Victorian undergraduate who, informed by an angry farmer that he was riding across corn, replied, “I am so sorry but I am not a botanist.” The farm, still the biggest entity of most villages, has become the least seen, the least recognised aspect of rural reality. Crops nowadays are a kind of blank space between destinations, and even for those on their way to church, where they provide so much of the imagery.
The last afternoon of the old year, with the sky darkening and the wind rising. I am trudging across the wartime aerodrome. Hundreds of plovers wheel and shriek ahead. Tomorrow we shall hear of unprofitable mountains being flattened into useful fields by Isaiah’s “new sharp threshing instrument”. He would have approved these seed-beds, which lay as flat as pancakes between the concrete runways. I think of [St] Stephen and so the walk becomes a sermon-walk. The plovers think of snowstorms and so John’s brassica becomes a desperate dinner interrupted by the birdscarer.
The last evening of the old year. Albert Camus’s discovery – “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
This is an edited extract from Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside by Ronald Blythe (John Murray, £25)