Enough to make your heart sing
Trilling skylarks ascending in an azure-blue sky and a beady-eyed snake herald the start of spring for John Lewis-stempel on a mild March morning
Trilling skylarks herald spring for John Lewis-stempel
LONG, long ago, the Venerable Bede calculated that the first day of Creation was March 18. Remembrance of this schoolboy fact comes to me down the decades as I stand in Bank Field, the dew on the grass as shiny as birth fluid, every hedge exhilarated by thorn blossom, the sky so clear I can see into Heaven. The astronomical arithmetic that led to the Anglo-saxon monk’s discovery was explained to me at my Form Three desk, agilely so by Mr David. I thought the more plausible explanation was that old Bede merely stood in an English field in March at dawn.
The world feels brand new on a spring morning such as this. Certainly, the skylarks have found something to sing about. Two are fluttering above the hayfield, up into the dome of the blue world. How to describe the song of larks ascending? Famously, the poets have tried. Percy Bysshe Shelley settled, in To a Skylark, for ‘flood of rapture’ to describe the ecstatic chattering of the ‘blithe spirit’. Better is George Meredith’s The Lark Ascending: ‘He rises and begins to round,/he drops the silver chain of sound/of many links without a break,/in chirrup, whistle, slur and shake,/all intervolv’d and spreading wide,/ Like water-dimples down a tide/where ripple ripple overcurls/and eddy into eddy whirls;/a press of hurried notes that run/ So fleet they scarce are more than one.’
Meredith’s poem inspired Ralph Vaughan Williams to write his musical work of the same name, with quivering violin imitating the singing of Alauda arvensis. The composition regularly tops the Classic FM annual Hall of Fame poll. I first heard Vaughan Williams’s Lark Ascending on a cassette tape borrowed from Hereford City Library when I was 11; I returned the tape, but the music plays still in my mind.
The Lark Ascending, written as the composer walked Margate’s clifftops in the first week of the First World War, was an attempt to capture the spirit of English pastoralism. He got it. The skylark is the quintessential bird of the English countryside.
We poeticise the bird; the French, as the deceptively jaunty song Alouette confirms, roast it. (‘Little skylark, I’ll pluck your feathers off’ runs the refrain, translated.)
‘There is, I see, no sympathy in the eye of a snake, only a monstrous nihilism’
However, we also do it harm; the numbers of the bird in England plummeted by 24% between 1995 and 2013 due to changes in farming practice, principally the multiple cutting of grass for silage. Skylarks are doughty birds—to the cheer of British troops on the Somme, they sang their hearts out during the battle—but they cannot, as ground nesters, survive the 10.70m swirling blades of a Claas Disco mower three to four times a year.
I watch the skylarks over the hayfield become trembling specks, then dissolve in the divine heights. A skylark can ascend to heights of 985ft. A skylark lifts our minds to higher powers, nobler deeds. In the gently falling shower of song from the unseen birds, the decidedly earthbound me turns back to my job. The sward on the bank is good and rich, about 25 grass and flower species to the square yard. It’s already goldening with dandelions. I’d like to get the sheep on it.
Animals are what they eat, so a botanically rich diet is good for livestock health. All the farms here on the Welsh borders once had their ‘hospital fields’, onto which were turned sick animals or those in need of pepping up after the thin fare of winter. There’s spring growth in the grass; the query is whether the land is too wet to bear the weight of 100 ewes and lambs. It should be drying. March, after all, is named for Mars, the Roman god of war. Traditionally, March was the month to begin military campaigning. Farming and war—they’re both a battle with the elements.
Crouching down, I gauge the wetness of the soil. You can get an electronic gadget, a soil-moisture probe, to do this. I do it the old way and stick my index finger into the clay of Herefordshire. Withdrawn, the digit is a glistening clay pink, meaning too wet for the weight of sheep, let alone cows.
The colour of Herefordshire soil, made from Devonian Old Red sandstone, is the colour of human flesh. There’s something literally grounding about putting a finger into earth. There were civilisations that believed humans were made from clay; the word human and the word humus, meaning soil, even come from the same Proto-indoeuropean root. That root word is (dh)ghomon or ‘earthly being’. The Hebrew adam, meaning ‘man’, is from adamah, ground. We live off the earth and, when we die, we go back to it, to add to the humus.
It’s while I’m regarding my finger of clay that I see the grass snake. We resile from snakes, the most determinedly earth-bound of creatures: legless, condemned to crawl on their belly, unbearable with the heaviness of their own being—unlike the sky lark. The snake comes towards me, coiling and recoiling. There is, I see, no sympathy in the eye of a snake, only a monstrous nihilism.
The same spring sun that drew the skylarks towards it has warmed the snake into life. I take an ungainly leap out of the snake’s way. The larks must laugh at my attempt to fly.
Twice crowned victor of the Wainwright Prize for nature writing, for ‘Where Poppies Blow’ (2017) and ‘Meadowland’ (2015), John Lewis-stempel was the 2016 British Society of Magazine Editors Columnist of the Year
‘A skylark lifts our minds to higher powers, nobler deeds’