COUNTRY • LIFE
I wAs drawn magnetically for one last look at the autumnal finery of the south-western Chilterns before winter's defoliation replaced colour with form. -I found myself at the gate of Fawley churchyard where a spinney of golden-yellow elms flared like funeral pyres in front of the funereal churchyard yews extending their formal arms over the ponderous and dilapidated monuments that ivy was smothering in its python coils. The sun was discharging slanting beams into the spinney's heart, so that the trees carried a light both borrowed and their own. Suddenly, there flowed out from below their tall fires a silvery trail of sound—a thrush singing at the ebb of November. The song was broken into brief phrases, lacking the slurred, throaty and coarser elements, and was so brilliant that it might easily have been a nightingale's. It was an indescribable moment of the sharpest contrasts in which melancholy and resignation were shot through with a tumultuous gladness, in which the dark and the light were as indispensable to each other as life and death.
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