Misty, water-coloured memories
Amid the November murk, John Lewis-stempel rues the suffocating and drenching effect of mist, which might look pretty, but is of no use to man nor beast
As birds do not hibernate, numerous species gang together for safety
THE winter sound of the birds. I was musing on the theme this morning as I filled the pit of the tractor with diesel. The yard was smothered with mist. As it was yesterday. As it was the day before. No surprise, of course, mist in November. John Clare versed about the month in The Shepherd’s Calendar: The landscape sleeps in mist from morn till noon; And, if the sun looks through, tis with a face Beamless and pale and round, as if the moon, When done the journey of her nightly race, Had found him sleeping, and supplied his place. For days the shepherds in the fields may be, Nor mark a patch of sky—blindfold they trace, The plains, that seem without a bush or tree, Whistling aloud by guess, to flocks they cannot see.
That was 1827. Mist: it annuls view, suffocates smell and turns to wet all it touches, which is everything. No sun, no breath, no day, no comfort. Nothing. All that remains in the blankness is sound.
Thus, to the sound of the invisible birds. Above the tapping of my fingers on the coldened fuel tank there was the doomy kraah of a lone crow as it beat its way over the furrows and the pitiless mewing of a buzzard circling, circling the indistinct meadow. Ancient noises; echoes of archaeopteryx hunting this self-same land in, well, ‘the mists of time’. Because mist never confers novelty, newness or optimism. No orator ever said: ‘Let us go forward to the misted uplands.’ Mist is always past tense.
When the tank of the tractor was about one-third full: away in the white-draped orchard, there was a raucous clacking of fieldfares, the big thrushes and then, briefly, I thought, the ‘rush’ of wind through feather of their smaller northern cousin, the redwing, as a flock shifted from one side of the berried lane to the other. (The Viking invaders of winter tend to the vegetarian; the summer migrants from the south are carnivores, which come for the insect hatch of the British summer.)
Out in the pale nails of the stubble: the squirts of finch chirp and the linen-flapping of a mass of wood pigeons landing. Chorus lines, flock stuff. Winter’s options for Nature can be very binary, hibernation or congregation. As birds do not hibernate, numerous species gang together for safety, warmth of communal roost and, perhaps, companionship. (Why not? We like a winter ball, a drinks party, a whist drive—all of them a comradely defying of the cold and the dark.) In the unseen oak tree at the end of the yard, ingloriously half-stripped by the frost and the wind, a gang of long-tailed tits worked; their constant communication like the repeated squeaking of the hinge on a music box.
The tank of the tractor half full, diesel glugging careless of cost: our bewildered Maran cockerel, somewhere at the rear of the yard, cockadoodle-d once, twice, thrice prophylactically, before disappearing into the white-out. They have voices, too, the domestic birds of farmland. Yesterday afternoon, a pack of wild geese passed overhead, free above the cloud, baying like dogs; our grey Toulouse geese strained their necks upwards and answered. Humans. Always the impossibility of translating the music of the birds into letters, but a bass ‘onkh’ will serve for the calling of the geese yesterday, which filled the scene from grassy ground to high blue heaven. The geese, flying or farmed, did not distinguish themselves from each other. Their sound was the same. We go wild about the wild things, but don’t their domestic counterparts deserve respect? They, too, have their personalities and their interest, the birds of the farmyard. I was pulling the nozzle out of the tractor’s tank when the high-pitched scrape of metal on metal made me remember, in a moment of melancholia, the farmland bird I hear so rarely these days: the lapwing.
Once, when I was very young and went out a-ploughing in our south Herefordshire
village, the piping scream of the ‘peewits’ could even be heard above the roar of the Ford County’s six-cylinder engine (quite an achievement); the flickering of the birds’ wings as they tumbled in the mist gave the scene the impression of being inside a blackand-white television stuck on static. Since the 1980s, lapwing numbers have dropped by 50% in England and Wales, due to the familiar woe of farmland birds, the intensification of agriculture, with its overuse of chemicals, switch to silage rather than hay, autumn rather than spring sowing.
I live in hope. The hope that one day a passing band of lapwings will look down on the rough grass and spring-sown wheat of myself and my neighbour, lick their beaks and think ‘des res’. It was as I twisted the fuel cap back on the tractor that the robin on the oak started up a reflective refrain. All the bird sound to that moment had, of course, been calling. Yet the robin was singing a song of territory, staking an early claim to breeding land. Singing for life. The bird’s breast seemed to burn a hole through the mist. Winter may be upon us. Nonetheless, in the song of the robin, spring has already started its coming in. Twice crowned victor of the Wainwright Prize for Nature writing, for ‘Where Poppies Blow’ and ‘Meadowland’, John LewisStempel’s latest bestselling book, ‘Woodston: The Biography of an English Farm’, was published in July (Doubleday, £20)