This is the Familiar Month
I suppose everybody finds that at about the end of July the hedgerow, the field and woodland take on a particular familiarity. The meadow with its sudden crop of ragwort, stinking of apples and beset by tiger-striped caterpillars ; the brambles in the hedge and mid-field bushes beginning to set ; uninteresting stretches of dried-off grasses and umbels, in all shades of brown from the near-white of quaking grass to the rich madder of sorrel ; the bryony with green clusters of berries not yet turned bacchic ; the trees shabby and the birds indolent and dumb ; these charac- teristics of the countryside suddenly remind us that this is how it was in those timeless weeks of summer holidays from school, aeons ago (for even if we left school only last year it is an eternity away). All the rest of the childhood year we were more or less at school and penned indoors. But the great release into nature, with access to our own adven- tures and the ever-fresh discovery of the universe, came in August. The appearance of the outdoor world at that time is therefore sealed upon our imaginations, like the " songs my mother taught me," and will always be slightly haunted for us.
Previous page
