The joy of autumn, our one truly honest season
Crisp mornings and duck-egg skies. Russet leaves and blood-red berries. Woollies, scarves and the smell of woodsmoke. After a snowless winter, raw spring and wash-out summer, why we – like our forebears – should delight in the months when Scotland is at h
FROST-SilveRed gossamer lies on the dewy meadow, below a morning sky of duck-egg blue, while the air is filled with the sound of roaring stags at rut in the hills.
Berries gleam blood-red on the rowan, even as the leaves in the wood turn yellow, and gold, and russet and crimson...
Yes, with the equinox yesterday, we are in autumn, the one season in Scotland that still does what it says on the tin.
Whether or not you believe in man-made climate change, weather patterns in recent decades have certainly altered and, after our wettest summer since 1985, there is a glum sense of loss which you might call season deflation.
in winter, not since 2010-2011 have we had the sustained frost and heavy snow that typified yuletide in Scotland right through the 1980s.
And our winters have been followed by late and bleak and cold springs – 2016 saw wintry showers in May, while in 2015 it was almost June before everything came into leaf.
Mild soggy winters, raw springs, dismal sodden summer... but we can still rely on autumn, in all its glory, when the stars turn in a Scottish version of what our American cousins call Fall.
Swiftly, as the nights lengthen and day cools, we lose all summer’s sticky inconveniences – milk on the turn in the jug, flies and midges, wasps and stings and hay-fever, and tourists waist-deep in edinburgh.
Come the autumn, politicians hold their party conferences and, for a while, vex each other rather than us. At this latitude, the ‘white nights’ of summer pass away with the fleeing swallows and the wicked cuckoo.
And suddenly we see the stars anew in all their glory against a black velvet sky, with Orion rising proudly of an evening and the moon – especially for country-dwellers in unlit dales – once more a cheering presence.
THe redwings head south again from their Arctic holidays, and for a few days will bumble engagingly around our gardens. After a summer’s breeding the corncrakes, old and young, desert the Hebrides for their African haunts.
The last great runs of salmon hit our western rivers. Sea-trout, leaping and flashing like living mercury, shoal in Highland lochs. And the guns of autumn boom, from the thud of 12-bores after grouse and snipe, pheasant and woodcock and black game, to the whizz of a stalker’s silenced rifle. Though summer has its gaudy treats – black english cherries and scarlet strawberries and tangy redcurrants – we forget that, in terms of provender, it was rather a lean time for our forebears. But autumn is harvest home, and abundance, and plenty.
Suddenly there are once more decent, floury potatoes. it is once again safe to sup on oysters and scallops and mussels. There is all that game, of course – oh, that sizzle as claret collops of venison hit the pan.
And as you tuck in to steakand-kidney pie, or mince and tatties, or a bowl of broth, or even your mother’s macaroni cheese, you suddenly realise how sick you have become of salads.
Now there are silky plums and real British apples and – for the privileged lewisman – the first feast of guga, a luscious, salted, oily gannetchick. in September, declared the late food-writer Jeremy Round, ‘the season opens for mallard, partridge and teal. But these birds, along with hare and snipe, make better eating later in the year.
‘The best game for September is pigeon and those monarchs of the glen and moor, venison and grouse. Traditionally, in this case before widespread refrigeration, this was also the month in which pork returned to the table.
‘Many of my lincolnshire grandmother’s best anecdotes began: “it was the first chilly snap of September and we were in the yard killing the pig…”’
For our crofters and farmers, this should be a time of accomplishment and satisfaction.
lambs and calves move to the mainland in the autumn sales; wheat and barley and oats are reaped. Though few Scottish schoolchildren now go ‘tattie-howking’ – the origin of our schools’ traditional October break – east lothian, the Black isle and the Mearns are already surrendering truckloads of potatoes and carrots and swedes and parsnips.
For many mothers, still, it is a time of preserving – bottled this and jars of that. And any of us can go foraging in the woods and hedgerows for brambles and rowan-ber-
ries and – more cautiously – delicate wild fungi. I still remember drifting home contentedly from school, four decades ago, my fingers purple and sticky from the wayside blackberries.
I remember how, for a few weeks, garnered conkers were hard playground currency when we returned to school, kitted out with a new school uniform and the dreaded Oxford Set of Mathematical Instruments, our new jotters neatly covered in brown paper by my mother.
But at least Doctor Who was back of a Saturday night, followed by learning our ‘repetition’ for Sabbath School and the weekly three-in-the-tub sheepdip of a bath…
Now there are still the first nuts, and those first luscious Muscat grapes in the shops, and on walks there are all those leaves. Nowhere in Britain, perhaps, is autumn glory more resplendent than the great woods of Perthshire and the north, and even in my fifties I still thoroughly enjoy kicking through drifts of fallen leaves or trying to catch one in its fluttering descent, through thinning silver sunlight and brisk nor’eastern breeze.
Autumn is not just an event, though, but a process – a time of transition and change, as we near that tilt of the equinox and brace ourselves for the first October gales that fast follow.
Students resume their courses at university and, thus, thousands of teenagers leave home for the first time. Parliaments finally resume. Football becomes rather important – every Scottish dad reads his newspaper backwards. The Queen, not without reluctance, makes for her capital from the long summer idyll at Balmoral, a year nearer the time when she will return to Deeside no more.
For the discerning, this is in many ways the best time of year to take a Scottish holiday if not encumbered with offspring and schools. September and October tend to be dry and, in recent years, have been remarkably sunny. Highland roads are no longer choked with caravans and camper-vans and accommodation is significantly cheaper. The air, too, clear of pollen and humidity, lends wondrous clarity to ravishing views.
It is a season of comfort food, and comfort generally. One cannot think of autumn without smoke, be it the woody scent of a hundred bonfires or the glow of peat, or logs, or coal in your own hearth.
Sturdy boots and cosy jackets are hunted out once more, and the electric blanket is more appreciated. Sports such as badminton and tennis are put aside, and you find yourself doing a lot more conscious walking.
Autumn also has its rituals. The Gideons used to come and present New Testaments at school – though the SNP has now probably made it illegal – and there is that deliciously corny event, the Last Night of the Proms – though the Nats would probably ban such a typically British event, too.
We have new traditions, like watching The Apprentice (if you have good taste) and The X-Factor (if you do not). But there are older festivals. Hallowe’en, in all its matchless supermarket tat, soon looms, though you have to be very Scottish indeed – and determined – to carve a turnip lantern. And in Hebridean villages at least, boys are already on the hunt for scrap timber and erecting great bonfires, all set for November 5.
AUTUMN is moreover a season of remembrance, and the more affecting these days as the last veterans of the war against Hitler rapidly take their leave of us. Soon trays of red poppies will be by every shop till as we remember how, for our tomorrow, so many gave their today. And beyond that lies Christmas, which – for all its feasting and consumerism – hinges on its own wonder: that God was Man in Palestine, and lives today in bread and wine.
Autumn should, at many levels, be a time for reflection. Should it not be one of great thankfulness? We have cupboards and a fridge-freezer full of food, and assume too readily that good things will always be abundant, available and affordable.
But this has not been the historic norm. Well within living memory, many Scots lived in a hardscrabble subsistence economy and on a diet of extraordinary monotony – porridge for breakfast; fish and potatoes for dinner; bread and jam for tea, and perhaps some boiled meat on Sunday. Many went hungry. In 1923, conditions on Lewis were so bad there was a public appeal and a Lewis Destitution Fund. Tales of hardship in Glasgow during the Depression are legion. Even today, the fruits of the earth are never a given.
IN the financial crisis of 2008, Britain came within hours of entire banking collapse – we could well have gone the following morning to the cashpoint and found none of us had any money. Blight, floods or other ecological disaster could yet see famine, even here in the smug and complacent West.
Nor are we as thankful as we might be for peace: there has been no war in western Europe since 1945 and that, again, is historically atypical. Our grandmothers were not so fortunate, and an abiding memory I have of mine is their enraged horror at the waste of the least food. This sprang not just from their own memories of childhood hunger, but from the exigencies of wartime rationing (I had more cheese for supper last night than, in 1944, Lord Woolton would have allowed me for a week).
And they were conscious, too, of the men lost in the Battle of the Atlantic, giving their lives to bring vital provender to a besieged Britain.
Today we might reflect, as summer fades and the nights draw in, on the flat fact of our own mortality. So few of us really do. But the book of life is brief. Everyone, everywhere, everywhen ends. ‘I shall pass this way but once,’ mused the Quaker missionary Étienne de Grellet. ‘Any good that I can do or any kindness I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.’
We might profitably think likewise, amidst the skittering leaves and crisp new apples, the everearlier but somehow more glorious sunsets and the skeins of honking geese making retreat overhead…
The stars turn, and a time presents itself – when the Earth, or at least this hemisphere of it, must sleep, and creation all about us goes dark and still. But let us embrace reliable old autumn – and in all thankfulness exult in it. ‘There is radiance and glory in the darkness, could we but see,’ wrote the Renaissance friar Fra Giovanni, ‘and, to see, we have only to look.’