September

Bookshelf webs and wanderings

Michaelmas … Harvest Moon …

After an unseasonal start, this was the month of spiders’ webs: cartwheels and cat’s cradles starring the herbaceous border, filoselle draping across unsuspecting faces and still-bare arms; the early morning garden all dew-spark and connections, enclosed by the mist beyond.

My wanderings began with the first of two books that I think everyone should read in this month, The Fortnight in September by R. C. Sherriff; a novel in which very little happens but which in consequence tells us a very great deal. From its wealth of small domestic incidents, I have chosen blackberrying.

But suddenly, towards the end of lunch, the sun broke through, and the vinegar in the cruet lit up and glowed like wine. It brought them eagerly to their feet, upstairs for their thick boots, and away with a basket, through the town and out to the hedgerows and the tangled, neglected corners of fields, where they found unpillaged blackberries. They came back with a basket nearly full—still glistening from the morning rain. Blackberry pie—and cream—with an egg cup in the centre to keep the pastry up.

R.C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September

‘The vinegar in the cruet lit up and glowed like wine’!

Of course, Michaelmas is the last day on which we are meant to pick blackberries, thanks to the old tale that Satan, flung from Heaven by the Archangel Michael, fell into a blackberry bush and cursed it by spitting on the fruit (or worse). In fact, blackberries are often rain-bletted, fly-blown and unpalatable by the time October begins, and certainly after the first few days. However, until the introduction of the Gregorian calendar to Britain in 1752 culled eleven days from the year, Michaelmas used to fall on what is now 10 October, so there’s time to squeeze in another memorable blackberry-picking, this time from The Salt Path.

The blackberries we’d picked along the way had been small, tart and sharp, so I took one only out of politeness, but when I put it in my mouth it was like no blackberry I’d ever tasted. Smooth, sweet, a burst of rich claret autumnal flavour, and in the background, faintly, faintly, salt.

‘You thought blackberries had passed, didn’t you? Or you’ve eaten them and thought you didn’t like them. No, you need to wait until the last moment, that moment between perfect and spoilt. The blackbirds know that moment. And if the mist comes right then, laying the salt air gently on the fruit, you have something that money can’t buy and chefs can’t create. A perfect, lightly salted blackberry. You can’t make them; it has to come with time and nature. They’re a gift, when you think summer’s over, and the good stuff has all gone. They’re a gift.’

Raynor Winn, The Salt Path

I read Raynor Winn’s stunning memoir first during lockdown. Starved of positivity and spurred by a relentless need to see how Raynor and Moth’s story would end, I devoured it, finishing with a new appreciation for what it is to be without hope and what it is to be alive. That’s an awareness I’ve been striving to regain as Long Covid continues to cling with the pernicious tenacity of ivy on old brickwork, reminding myself that ‘to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from.’

Thoughts of that salt-scoured ‘wild edge’ brought me to another, perhaps more ancient, route: the well-worn white chalk line upon the Sussex Downland that is Louisa Thomsen Brits’s Path. Subtitled a short story about reciprocity, this is a deceptively simply poetic journey, a symbiotic collusion between the walker and the walked-upon, and I need only open my copy to feel a sense of restoration and calm. It’s such a precious book. The pages speak; the chalk speaks.

I am prospect and progress.
Here you stride with long, strong, even pace and easy breath,
along rim and rise,
a single life
between infinite sky and sheltering ground,
walking your body into this moment,
measuring yourself against the earth,
moving towards a gradual sureness
one step
at a time.

Louisa Thomsen Brits, Path

I have always found the Downs best walked in autumn.

High on Firle Beacon, chalk can be said to utter dialect. Foundle was a joint project between Louisa Thomsen Brits, visionary stone-carver Jo Sweeting, and Tanya Shadrick — my first encounter with them all. And this connection brought me back to The Cure for Sleep, a book I know I shall indeed return to time and again. Over the course of Shadrick’s second chance at life, autumn became totemic of an elusive geometry, an ultimately impossible object. In the aftermath of those failed calculations, it was partly through her relationship with Virginia Woolf — her writing and her existence — that a Third Life became attainable; a tentative piecing-together begun as she sat in the garden of Monk’s House.

What had I learned from all this? Was I wise yet after so much wasted time, and so many errors? What was my credo? Did I have one?

‘To make fun from nothing, and meaning from the simplest of materials. To share whatever is learned. To move, with suppleness, between the silly and the serious: not to get stuck in a pose of one of the other.’

What I wrote, in line with Mount Caburn, before lying back in one of the striped deckchairs put out for visitors, eyes closed, simply enjoying the hum of people at work.

Wondering then if Woolf’s last words to Leonard might be made over in a happier way as gift to Nye in a week that was also the twenty-fifth anniversary of our love at first sight. (Our plan was simply to eat chips on the nearby bridge at Southease, feet swinging over the river Ouse — where her body had been found, but in too beautiful a view to avoid ever after as morbid.)

Tanya Shadrick, The Cure for Sleep

How to prevent any wanderings that lead to Woolf from foundering there, contentedly mired in her details and digressions, stumbling against the sadness of her death? Keep it simple, keep it short: a description of a room on a wet September night.

The bareness of Mrs. Pearce’s front room was fully displayed at ten o’clock at night when a powerful oil lamp stood on the middle of the table. The harsh light fell on the garden; cut straight across the lawn; lit up a child’s bucket and a purple aster and reached the hedge. Mrs. Flanders had left her sewing on the table. There were her large reels of white cotton and her steel spectacles; her needle-case; her brown wool wound round an old postcard. There were the bulrushes and the Strand magazines; and the linoleum sandy from the boys’ boots. A daddy-long-legs shot from corner to corner and hit the lamp globe. The wind blew straight dashes of rain across the window, which flashed silver as they passed through the light. A single leaf tapped hurriedly, persistently, upon the glass.

Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room

I find it impossible to think of Virginia Woolf without remembering Vita Sackville-West. She sweeps into my mind’s eye as Woolf saw her, ‘in the grocer’s shop in Sevenoaks with a candle-lit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees,’ the breeched and booted horticulturalist whose long poem The Garden grants us that perennial favourite, ‘Autumn in felted slipper shuffles on, / Muted yet fiery,’ here giving voice to Kent.

Hops ripen to their picking. Down the rows
Of pickers by their tally-baskets bent,
The gaitered master goes,
Slapping his leggings with a hazel switch,
Nodding good-day to folk he knows,
From London slums poured yearly into Kent,
Waking the province with their cockney slang,
And feathered hats, and fear of showers;
Down leafy tunnels, dappled by the sun,
Down sea-green aisles, where loam is brown and rich
Between the hills, and overhead the flowers
In pale imponderable clusters hang,
He loiters, followed by his spaniel bitch
Close in to heel, sulky for lack of gun.

Vita Sackville-West, The Land

And this hop harvest brought me to another, full circle to my other must-read of this equinoctial month: September Moon (1957). John Moore’s colourful, robust, yet lyrical love letter to the Herefordshire hop-picking season, is a novel I adore absolutely.

The short grass was crisp with dew. The harvest moon showed them the way up the path between the bracken. They had seen it rise tonight, through a window at the inn where they had a drink before dinner. While the sun went down due west over Wales, the moon had come up in the east over Malvern. Tim had explained that this only happened when the harvest moon was at the full. ‘Twenty four hours’ light for your birthday!’ he had said.

John Moore, September Moon

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