COUNTRY LIFE
Bitter Weather
January has lived up to a bitter reputation. In both 1684 and 1740 the Thames was frozen in January. In 1768 Gilbert White records that the year " begins with a fortnight's frost and snow " ; in 1770 there is " frost for the first fortnight " ; in 1771 " severe frost until the last week in January " ; in 1772 " to the end of the first week in February, frost and snow " ; in 1773 " the first week in January frost ; thence to the end of the month, dark rainy weather." And so on, the same story down to the year 1792. In 1814 the Thames was frozen over again in January. In January, 1907, W. H. Hudson was in West Cornwall, " where the cold became intense, and that rare phenomenon in West Cornwall, a severe frost, began, which lasted several days, and was said by some of the old natives to be greatest frost in forty years." Back to White : " the first week in January (1776) was uncommonly wet," to be followed on the seventh by " snow during all the day, which was followed by frost, sleet and some snow, till the twelfth, when a prodigious mass overwhelmed all the works of men." An earlier winter, 1768-9, provides a near parallel to the present. The autumn of 1768, like the autumn of 1935, was exceptionally wet, six and a half inches of rain falling in some places in September alone ; and White in turn could draw another parallel—" the terrible long frost in 1739-40 set in after a rainy season, and when the springs were very high." From all this he makes the deduction " that intense frosts seldom take place till the earth is perfectly glutted and chilled with water, and hence dry autumns are seldom followed by rigorous winters." All of which is very interesting in view of our own recent winters, the dry summers of 1932, 1933 and 1934 having all been followed by soft winters. But this winter has still far to go before it equals the terrors of 1776, when there were 32 degrees of frost at sunrise on January 31st at Selborne, and the Thames was so frozen over " that crowds ran about on the ice " and the cold so " penetrating that it occasioned ice in warm chambers and under beds."
First Signs As far as White could judge, Selborne was colder during that frost of 1776 than any other place in England. This year the south in general has escaped, and while there were deep snows in the Midlands and the North and skating in Lincolnshire, many valleys south of London were green or only freckled with snow. At the same time the Downs were white, and on Sunday, the 20th, the snow line, lying at about 400 feet, was as straight and clear as though-drawn with chalk and ruler. In the valleys the frost has touched nothing, and things seem already as advanced as in 1935. The hazel catkins were long and soft by the 13th, the day before what has traditionally been known as the coldest day of the year. By the 12th primroses in open copses were out. Snowdrops were already out, aconites had followed them, and on the 16th I saw such a colony of dog's tooth violets as I can never hope to see again : many hundred parasols of dark rose and pink, rampant as celandines, with chance aconites shining among their marbled leaves. By the 17th wild violets were out. Dog's mercury was already common. Lords and ladies were up, brilliant as green glass.. An odd crocus or two had a pencil-tip of yellow. And all the time, through the frost and in spite of it, there was an unmistakable rising of passion in the thrushes' song before daylight. It had an amazing clarity in the bitter dark morning.
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Farmhouse Holidays The word farmhouse is one of the pleasantest in the lang- uage. No doubt there were days when farmhouses were farmhouses simply, but the amazing post-War re-discovery of the countryside has brought about sonic changes, so that the word is now, to say the least, a little elastic. A'farmhouse may now be anything from a farmhouse to a roadside shack, from the small-holder's cottage to a guest-house. The word is stretched to cover a multitude of sins. I mention this because it occurs to me that there may be lovers of the countryside who contemplate the pleasure of a farmhouse holiday. They . may have been stimulated by stories of houses run by benefactors whose mission in life it is to feed the jaded guest with an unlimited supply of the tenderi•..t chickens, brimming bowls of cream, fruit straight from the .farmhouse bough and all the home-made comforts of a perfect country house at a couple of guineas a week. But things are not•always what they seem and there are, alas,- farmers' wives who cannot cook and even farmers' wives who are not farmers' wives at all. I write this out of the bitterness of experience. • I 'will not describe the farmhouse; it defies description, on this page at least. • I cannot describe the roasted chickens, the succulent ducks, the peas that melted in the mouth, because there were none. Nor the swimming bowls of cream, the cakes as light as love, the home-baked loaves, the cream cheeses, for the same reason. I could describe the farmer's -wife,- because she remains indelibly imprinted on my mind as being as slovenly and dirty as the house itself. And I can describe the empty tins from whieli we ate our only peas and fruit and which, before the week was out, were piled as high at the back door as our smashed illusions. I pride myself on an unstinting admiration for the English farmer and his house, and I have no doubt that there are many farmers' wives who take in guests with credit to themselves and pleasure to all concerned. But clearly the word farmhouse can exercise a dangerous hypnotism.
Striped Tulips Of all flowers grown in this country the tulip seems to have the longest record of popularity. It is essentially a civilised flower, a shape cut out of satin, and it looks perfectly at home in the small villa gardens of today. " Wee had it first out of Turkey about fifty years since," wrote Sir Thomas Hamner in 1659, " where it grows wild in some parts, par- ticularly about Jerusalem as they write, and is thought to be that flower translated ill a hilly, which was sayd to bee more gloriously arrayed than Solomon." It was then the hey-day of striped tulips : -" Wee did value in England- only such as were stript with purples and other redds, and pure white." And Hamner gave earnest instructions for their cultivation : " I know in Paris one of -the ablest- florists there, who had got a great deal of money by Tulipes, and -hee assur'd Knee hee chang'd his habitation. every 'third or fourth yeare in Paris because of his Tulips, which hee found infinitely better'd by varietyes of afire as well as Earth." Striped tulips, so often seen in paintings of the Dutch- school, have rather gone out of fashion, but they were still-popular a hundred years ago, and The Floricultural Cabinet gave directions for their cultivation which were almost as earnest as Hammer's own. They were " as is practised in Flanders by the greatest artists," and ran : " Take the plaister of old walls and powder it very fine ; mix this with drift sand, or such sand as is sharp, and found on the sea shore ; to this add of the water that runs from Dunghills or lakes, and mix these as well as possible, and put it over the surface of the bed a little before you plant your Breeding or Plain Tulips. and it will make them break into stripes to a wonder, as related to me by a gentleman of great honour." A far simpler way.
in my experience, is to grow a few Bizarres among " your Breeding and Plain Tulips." All the dunghills in the world could not produce such a splash of stripes, crimson on white. gold on bronze, scarlet on yellow, as develop in a year or two.
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A Friendly Covey A friendly covey of partridges on the lawn every morning throughout the winter has been a pleasing sight. The fat feathery dumplings incessantly at work in the grass have contrasted pleasantly with the occasional arrival of a coek pheasant, who can find nothing better to do than preen his stuck-up feathers on the pergola and squawk a murder at every movement of stoat and man. There is something very much of the English earth about the partridge. Earth- coloured himself, he tones more easily and completely with earth than almost any other creature. And unlike the pheasant, he is lovable. So that I look eagerly every morning for the covey of dark brown heads working like clockwork hammers in the wintry grass.
II. E. BATES,
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