AND ANOTHER THING
Do not go gentle into that good autumn this year
PAUL JOHNSON
The last match of the season is over. Cricketers oil their bats thoughtfully and ponder, 'How many more in my time?' The paunch is a little rounder, the joints a twinge stiffer, that big throw from the on boundary a bit feeble, was it not? There is much tidy- ing and locking up at this time of year beach huts, summer houses, delectable cot- tages in the high hills. Climbing-boots are cleaned and put away lovingly along with huge, thick-ribbed, brilliantly coloured stockings and hardy breeches of Bedford cord. Maps are folded and returned to the shelves. The sun slants generously on bare boards and invites one to linger longer, but it is deceptive, the summer is gone. The ruck- sack is packed finally — not with the method and eagerness of spring, but crossly, hurried- ly, cramming clothes in regardless, crushing and creasing them as though these poor inanimate things can be blamed for the fatal passage of time. Then it is hoisted on to reluctant shoulders, and a last look back fixes in the mind the beloved, moss-grown stones before one takes the first steps down the steep, rocky path towards mechanisation and urban destiny.
I like resorts at fin de saison. The days shorten, the breezes are less kindly, the waves break with a touch of anger in the foam, the beach thins out, there are fewer ankles amid the surf and only one or two heads bobbing in deep water. No donkeys now, the deckchairs are stacked, the ice- cream man calls it a day and drags his cart up the old lifeboat slipway till another year. For the first time in months you can smell the ozone as the cloying niff of popcorn and chip fat dies away. I walk the front at these times, conscious of a new air of possession of empty spaces, long greying horizons unin- terrupted by human forms. The children are safely back at school, their mothers bemoaning their fate elsewhere. The old folk fear the faint nip in the air and youth has fled to more exciting places. The gulls are hungrier now the summer profligacy is over, and it is their angry clamours that fill the thin air with sound. The ocean is a shade darker, even in mid-afternoon, with strips of silver where the sun, lower on the horizon, falls slantingly through the scud- ding strips of cloud. The tone is silky, almost satiny, the colours subdued, the mood ele- giac. There is a solitary fellow-stroller, quite unknown to me, whom I greet like a friend. `Summer's over."Yes, thank God.' Well — is he right? I think so. I like all seasons in their turn, welcoming them, bidding them a fond but not tenuous farewell.
In our London garden I gather leaves and vegetable detritus, including fallen pears bird-pecked, wasp-spoiled — to throw in the new patent composter which stands, like an unarmed Dalek, by the far wall. I pluck two dozen big pears from the branches, before the greedy doves and blackbirds get them, to lie on the windowsills of the storeroom. This year, the vine has produced an unprecedent- ed mass of foliage which has climbed up the back of the house to the topmost balcony, so that the whole of the garden is a deep green den, an urban Amazon. But of fruit there is little — what there is, green and tiny — so the invading starlings have gone away hun- gry. But there are still plenty of flowers, and the sun, though low, bravely gleams, so I am reluctant to put away the garden chairs and the cushions around the hospitable oaken table, for the last time. In my studio is a good haul from a fitful summer — 40 or so watercolour sketches, some of them finished and frameable, others with ideas to be worked out in the chill months ahead.
Autumn is an end and a beginning, a new paragraph in the annals of our lives as they fleet away, a time to take stock, no doubt, but I have not done so this year. Have you? There seems so little stock to take and no expectancy of much more to come. And I recall snatches of seasonal preaching, so many years ago, to drowsy consciences. `Boys, this year I want you to make a special effort!"Boys, this is going to be a critical academic year for you. Don't let me down.' Now it is hard work just to carry on, keeping up a little courage to face the future, and not dismaying oneself by looking backwards into the failed past. But corporate entities, of course, cannot permit themselves this luxury. It is a time when they have to start afresh and pretend they mean it. Magazines have a relaunch, newspapers a facelift (so do, increasingly, society ladies — and non- society ladies — emerging from a summer quarantine with a slight but perceptible change of expression, not always for the bet- ter). Companies reinvent themselves, logos are changed, images replaced, bored direc- tors, who have seen it all before, get what is intended to be an eye-opening pep talk from a new advertising agency, hired at great expense, which has often been recent- ly reinvented itself. The tired are refreshed, the old chopped, the young encouraged and bribed, the supine jerked awake by a strong dose of new technology, ominous statistics pointing to desperate futures are flashed around and impressed on innumerate peri- craniums, and autumn begins in stimulating gloom partly mellowed by confused mist.
The politicians do not like what they see, particularly reassembling colleagues. This is a time when manifestos are published, pro- grammes laid out, aims declared ex cathedra and parties smartened up for public inspec- tion; also a time for the hairline-sights on perennial hatreds to be adjusted for greater accuracy and new vendettas launched. It is a time for counting your enemies — a lengthy and depressing business — and bidding your remaining friends close ranks. It is a time for wills, for insurance schedules, for accountants and lawyers and planners and advisers to seek to recast your life in new and better shape (and send in their annual bills). It is a time for painful reflection, dis- agreeable action, the end of procrastination, the beginning of long-needed showdowns. The summer truce is over, the autumn cam- paign season has started, and the first casu- alty lists are rolling in.
So it is a time to be stoical, to be brave, to stick it out, to draw strength and suste- nance from literature, the arts, nature. I will go for long walks, read The Prelude and the whole of Paradise Lost, something I have not done for 40 years, construct from countless drawings my long-projected six- foot oil painting of Lake Como, listen intel- ligently with score and libretto in hand to the whole of The Ring, learn to use the computer properly. I have just written a life of Bonaparte and worked that odious man out of my system, and I am now eagerly studying Newton in the hope of educating myself in the ways of science. Autumn is a measuring rod and an invitation to melan- choly, but it is also a war cry of the spirit. Time and fate may have made us weak, as Tennyson says, but the will remains 'to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield'.
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