An ancient artefact takes Ronald Blythe back in time

The long cold winter is running into a not-all-that-cosy May-time. But the blossom has missed the frosts, and the plum and greengage trees are very starry. My wildflower meadow is amazing, with everything from fritillaries to an about-to-burst campion, and over-wild tulips are filling it to the brim.

As for the birds, they are shouting their heads off. This morning, a loud cuckoo was almost overhead. And also fleeting clouds - the East Anglian sort, which pile up into racing armadas; so that hot sun and chilly shadows take turns in extremes. The ditches run icily to the Stour, and the ditch near the house is white with wild garlic.

David has cleared a blackberry forest, so the fine lilac can show itself off in the hedge. It is between Ascension and Whitsun, between the cloud of unknowing and Pentecost, when we should be able to see without the candles.

A neighbour arrives at 8.30 a.m. to find me unshaven and in rags. "I thought you got up early!" She has brought me a photo of Nat Jackson's Mesolithic axe-head, picked up by the Mere the other day. On the radio, the Chief Rabbi tells us that it is 33 generations since Moses. The axe lay between shooting weeds. As always, I think of the hands that shaped it, on the high ground of the forgotten village. Somewhere under the sun.

The Mesolithics lived between Palaeolithic and the Neolithic, from 12,000 to 3,000 BC, and in a world of flint. Moses lived only last week.

Simon's bees topple about on the "bloody cranesbill" and the crinkly orange poppies. As for the birds, they are operatic. I should be weeding, but the wildflower meadow says, have pity on these outriders! The weather runs hot and cold. There is spring noise and spring silence. Nothing is in between. Everything is positive.

I do some showy mowing. "We can see where you've been," cry the afternoon walkers. I can see where the axe chipper has been - down by our river, in Flintland. Did he sing there? Did he have music while he worked? Did he let the chips fly like the birds? Aeons ahead, an escaped people would sing unto the Lord a new song, for he had done marvellous things.

It is a marvellous thing that Nat holds in his young hands - it is 22-carat something-or-other BC. A master hand had cut it. Poor, tender bleeding flesh at work. Phyllida owns it, and she knows its diamond worth. Countless years later, the Virgin's monograph and the Host would be set in flint on the base of a Suffolk church where I was a warden. This most glorious use, perhaps, was in the flushwork of St Peter and St Paul, Eye. It has been called one of the wonders of Suffolk, and no traveller should miss it, especially when the sunshine follows rain.

The enormous Garrya looks dead. Yet here and there, in a forest of crisply shrivelling leaves, a little green hangs on. "Cut it down," say the know-alls. "It will come to life again." But I'll give it the summer. Who could deny it this; and who could deny the 12th-man ministry of St Matthias, although he is little more than a name? Gaps in factual history are there to be filled with our imagination.

Suffice to say that this lot-drawn apostle was worthy of his rank, else those who had seen, walked with, and heard Jesus, would not have accepted his equality with them. There he is, in the Whitsun room, his presence helping to shake it.  (24^th May 2013)

Ronald Blythe spends some time messing about in boats

[Constable - Barge below Flatford Lock]

To the Stour, to launch the John Constable, a fine barge, or lighter, on a fine day, the populace watching, the sun shining, and a young man in danger as in The Leaping Horse. I have been listening to Pepys on the radio, of course. But the replica of what was once a common sight on our classic river is actual enough. David and I make our way to the water's edge, and there, perfect in every way, lies the new barge, bright as a button. May God bless all who take holiday trips in her - me first.

When I was a boy, by the Stour-side, the last Constable barges were scuttled, and lay a yard or two below the surface of the river, where it was hoped that they would feed pike, rot away, and be no more, the railway taking over. Mothers warned their swimming sons not to go near them for fear of being trapped, although this never happened. And I would watch their huge black outlines waver under the gentle current, and think of John Constable seeing them hard at work.

For him and his fellow Stour artist Tom Gainsborough, they were the most ordinary sight in the world. The river was industrial, busy all the way to the sea with these horse-drawn coalers which, to the astonishment of the Royal Academy, the young Constable, a local miller's son, imagined would be a suitable subject for art. No one bought.

In vain his glittering workaday visions of our river hung on its walls. The Stour itself twisted and turned through the water-meadows, doubling the distance to its estuary, but offering a smooth alternative to our bad roads, and the laden lighters would glide like slow birds from hard to hard, pulled by huge horses. When the old business was sunk, just before the Great War, we all thought that that was that. Progress had finished it off. Now, here I was, on a Bank Holiday afternoon, saying: "I name this ship theJohn Constable," and climbing in, alongside a score of other river travellers, to sense the exquisite gentleness of a river journey, a fresh flag fluttering at the helm, and the blare of a bugle to say that we were coming.

Oh, we should have sailed all day! The throne we sat on provided such sensations! The afternoon was so Englishly perfect, the scattered folk on the slowly passing banks so civil, the rushing dogs in the grass so gratifyingly amazed by the sight of us, that I, at least, could have sailed on for hours; only there was a queue for others to have a turn.

So we came home to watch croquet being played in a walled garden, and to eat sandwiches.

Should paradise be in your mind, go to Sudbury, Suffolk, for a river trip on the John Constable. Barges are so blissful. And rivers are so good at getting about. They will take you to destinations that can only be dreamed of, and offer you smells that stimulate senses that you had forgotten you possessed.

Seated with other old parties on board my lighter, I saw myself, aged 14 or so, lying with a book in the water-meadows alongside the meadowsweet, the enormous East Anglian skies floating overhead. With maybe a bottle of Tizer. And the Boat Club shouts, and the screams of swallows in concert above me. And to think that all these years later they have let me launch a barge - our river's liner - and savour the early joy.  (17^th May 2013)

In May time, Ronald Blythe's thoughts turn to dancing

The white cat is given to loftiness in her advancing years, sitting high up in fruit trees, and on the ledge of a Tudor chimney, purring away, looking down on us, bursting with achievement. As is the late and lovely spring. Never such a rush of flowers, such drugging scents. Put work aside. Simply be. For - who knows? - such days might not come my way again. The horses roll on their backs; the trees grow greener by the minute. Best of all, both white and purple fritillaries have multiplied in the orchard grass.

It is May Day, the day of days - the day that we once spent in Padstow, drinking beer at 8.30 in the morning as the 'Obby 'Oss [hobby horse] was led out to a haunting song, to process through the slate streets - perhaps the most moving folk festival in Britain. Quite why it should be so escapes all explanation. You have to dance in its wake to prove it so.

And then, those with whom we danced are no longer with us to provide evidence. They have drunk and sung and leapt their way ahead and out of sight, leaving a little music behind - and a pile of curling photos.

My old friend Michael Mayne - for a memorable decade, Dean of Westminster - placed much of his Christian philosophy in an enchanting book, Learning to Dance. "In many ways, I am an unlikely dancer, having only fully mastered the waltz and the Dashing White Sergeant, and, at the age of ten, a passable sailors' hornpipe, yet the ideas of the invitation to the cosmic dance, and of dance as a metaphor for our assorted lives in this mysterious, dancing universe, have gone on expanding in my mind. . ."

Jesus despaired of "this generation", of its joylessness and ingratitude. "You are like children calling out to other children, We have piped for you and you did not dance."

Some years ago, two young neighbours of mine danced down the aisle of Blythburgh Church, in Suffolk, after their wedding. If one is going to dance in church, it may as well be in this angelic building. David, of course, danced before the Ark of the Covenant, being a great poet. In one of his psalms, he turns mourning into dancing, and they conclude with the fortissimo dance music and words of the four final psalms.

Mayne might be said to have taught cosmic dancing wherever he went, and finally at Salisbury, where I "met" George Herbert when I was in my 20s.

The sun is hot on the study window, the May wind chilly. My old friend Antony Pritchett, Vicar of Pickering, is about to pay his annual visit, and we shall do a bit of exploring and a great deal of talking. Each year, I have to provide somewhere different to go, but the talking takes off in fresh directions without the least trouble.

"When did you first decide to be a priest?"

"When I was six."

When did I first decide to be a writer? Who can tell? "How is Merbecke?" Merbecke is Antony's dog.

Friends in Yorkshire or Cornwall, or in a Barbara Pym novel, or wildly dancing in scripture, or at this moment giving the churchyard grass its first good back and sides, are given movement by May time. I am, too; and the mower is raring to go at the first pull. The poppy seed I scattered is up; the climbers I tied back are in bud. So soon. So on the go, everything. "Allus on the goo," the neighbours used to say - and not approvingly.  (10^th May 2013)

Ronald Blythe takes time off to enjoy a picnic with the birds

"We will have breakfast with the nightingales," Romane announced; so off we drove through the waking town. Except for us, everyone was going to school or to work. The suburbs ended abruptly; then came a kind of overture to the marshes and rivulets, with tall, greening trees, after which appeared a far distant coast that the sea had torn to ribbons over the years.

We set up our meal on a little gorse plateau, and already the nightingales were at their chook-chook-chooking and piu-piu-piuing, though unseen. The coffee and rolls had stayed hot, and a white-and-blue tablecloth had been laid. The gorse was in bloom with a vengeance. When Carolus Linnaeus first witnessed flowering gorse, they said, he burst into tears, overwhelmed by its glory.

Far ahead, dominating the watery land was the tower of All Saints', Brightlingsea. It stared down on Alresford Creek and across to us, making itself felt as became the church of a Cinque Port, and a solid thing in a fluid landscape. We talked in a desultory fashion about what should, or could, or must not happen to our living back home, and seemingly in another country.

More and more nightingales sang; more and more marshes glittered. The sun stoked itself up. We sampled Marit's marmalade, and felt irresponsible. Now and then, seagulls were blown about over our heads.

I found myself remembering a figure from these parts, the Revd Gerald Montague Benton, an archaeologist, one of those learned men who blinked through their glasses and whose apparent easiness and civility concealed an iron will where faculties were concerned. What brought him to these salt marshes, to this liquid meeting of earth and sky? Amazingly, his parish church had been shaken to bits by an earthquake, in 1884. But the instability of things remained apparent. Also the brightness of things.

Sprawling above the crashing Atlantic Ocean in Cornwall, I saw no point in ever doing anything again. Be a layabout - cease. Listen. But then we must get home for lunch. The white cat, who is sloth incarnate, will be lying on her warm brick wall, starving to death.

And I must take a hundredth look at my white and purple fritillaries. Never so many. They are blooming in the orchard, and on old grass paths, along with countless other wildflowers. The long cold winter held them back, then the spring said: "Now!" And thus this racing flood of blooms. The ancient ash tree is suddenly young again, every twig ending with fat buds, and the mower goes at first pull.

We all sit in the chancel at matins. The cold interior has preserved the prolific Easter flowers and distilled their scent. The Epistle is St James's reminder that "Every good gift, and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." What language!

What is actually coming down at this moment is the first spring rain. It drenches the lambs in the far field, the joyful dogs, the conversing horses. It ruffles the surface of the ponds, and polishes up the view. St James speaks of self-deception, of our being hearers and not doers of the Word. He is so beautiful in his reproaches. Who could not take him to heart?  (03-May-2013)

Ronald Blythe lifts his eyes to the hill, but a pony is not there

“No house should be on any hill or on anything,” wrote Frank Lloyd Wright in his An Autobiography. “It should be of the hill, belonging to it, so hill and house could live together each the happier for the other.”

Bottengoms Farm is roughly contemporary with a book, De Magnete, written up the road by William Gilbert in 1600, in which the terms “electric attraction”, “electric force”, and “magnetic pole” were first to appear in the English language.

Thus I see an author in his study and a farmer down by the river, toiling away, the one letting in the light, the other keeping out the weather. Electric is Greek for amber, which, when rubbed on the warm arm, sends a current through the conducting flesh. Several centuries, however, would pass before it illuminated my shadowy rooms.

The old friends who inhabited them in my youth sadly put away the Aladdin oil-lamps with their battered parchment shades, and had a single bulb hung from a beam in each room, never loving this improvement. A generator in the garden linked up with Duncan’s farm over the hill, and the light would quiver when he switched on his grain-drier. “There!” they would complain. “You never got that with the lamps.”

Brought up as a child in subdued interiors, I still do not possess a torch, and am an expert on the degrees of darkness.

The unknown house-builder set his farm due east. As everyone knew, death and sickness dwelt in the south. Summer poisoned the ponds, bred disease. Thus I am facing bright dawn all the year round.

The new sun rolls along the hill like a hot penny, “fading the furniture”, as they used to complain, not to mention the front door, over which a roll of beach canvas would be let down to prevent the paint from bubbling. Brown or green paint it would have been, not my Trafalgar Blue.

The commotion of the Easter services over, I am able to think at last. Morning tea, morning light, morning cat, and the roll-penny sun hill — “enough to blind you”. Or enlighten you.

The hill mourns the pony that has been put down. He was 36. The children rode him. Oh, sorrow, sorrow. Oh, mortality. Oh, hill of horses, some ploughing, some idling, some gathering for a horse chat, with my sunshine on their backs. How do horses grieve? One of the many meanings of “put down” is to dethrone. The small pony was dethroned from his high hill, as we shall be, bodily speaking.

But bees are about, bending the sloe blossom to their will. I sit in an old wooden chair that I have mended at great cost and drink tea, and give praises to God for the lawnmower, and for being due east, and for still being enthroned of a sort. Seabirds, sniffing turned earth, whizz by.

How well we sang the Easter Anthems. How patient, and not remotely murderous, I was this year when we came to the dreadful “That were a present far too small”. How good I am this daybreak, facing up to things.

I make a silent resolution where the hill is concerned. I will climb it and see what is going on all around it. I will give the stricken beasts a consolatory word, and they will give me a cautious look through the electric fence. Their paradise is guarded by fiery currents.

They will pity me for having to feed so low down — for dwelling in the vortex of the rape ocean. They think I have come up for air, but I have climbed the hill to give them the time of day.

A friend has brought me a copy of Robert Morden’s map of Suffolk, 1700, a map to get lost by, though pleasantly so. It skirts Wormingford, and pays great attention to gentlemen’s parks. It does not rise to my hill.  (17-Apr-2007)

Ronald Blythe finds much that is relevant in an Austen heroine

As the countryside swarms up, and as folly in its many disguises preoccupies the nation, let us re-read Jane Austen.  And particularly Emma.  Emma Woodhouse, you will recall, was "handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition", and "seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence, and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her".

Thus, both ignorant and innocent, she believes that she is qualified to run the parish.  Of course, one does not have to be a rich girl to possess this ruling confidence: elderly or merely grown-up politicians with a great deal of money do the same.  But it is the confidence of folly which brings unease.

This being the Church Times, we must first glance at Emma's religion.  It should not take long.  It is, of course, Austen's religion - and she the daughter of a parson!  But what she knew and recorded, wrote someone who knew her, "was the opinions and practice then prevalent among respectable and conscientious clergymen before their minds had been stirred - first by the Evangelical, and afterwards by the High Church movements".

Thus the Church is scarcely mentioned in Emma, in spite of the fact that four of its main characters - Mrs and Miss Bates, and the Revd Philip Elton and Mrs Elton - could not be more closely connected with it.

Mr Elton does not suggest priestliness, and does not mention his Lord once.  And Emma herself only goes to church twice in a long novel, and that to weddings.  The ethical and social aspects of Christianity jostle every chapter, though never the spiritual.  In Austen-land, however, these are the religious contours.  When popular Evangelical sounds broke into her sedate Anglicanism, she said that "they who are so far from Reason and Feeling, must be happiest."

Death is avoided, for the most part.  Its absence is comic rather than sad.  "What a blessing it is when undue influence does not survive the grave!"  But money is a far more serious matter.  There is a hard fiscal core to all the novels, and particularly to Emma.  When rich Frank Churchill marries penniless Jane Fairfax, "it wasn't a connection to gratify - although, because of the Married Women's Property Act being far off, even if Jane had been as rich as Emma, Frank would have taken everything she possessed at the chancel step.

Sir Walter Scott, the international novelist of Austen's day, and himself writing his way out of bankruptcy, when he reviewed Emma, blamed the author for her mercenary view of marriage.  To this she replied that if it was wrong to marry for money, it was certainly foolish to marry without it.

And so the glorious author goes her way in the 21st century, undated, witty, and still financially sound in our unequal world, shaking our certainties, and laughing at our pretensions.  And yet mysteriously, like the old Jews, not liking to say his name even when practising his love.

She certainly knew that there was such a thing as society.  It was this knowledge on which the morality of her wonderful novels depended.  We use them like a measure for our own time, for what is true taste and for what is folly.  Inequalities that we thought we had grown out of have returned.  The immensely rich rule.  There is a North and South.  A funeral costs £10 million.   (19-Apr-2013)

Ronald Blythe is on duty in the garden - and in the house

[William Morris]

There is quite a lot of noise about silence at the moment. Quietness suits me better. Silence cuts out the wind in the plum trees, Mozart, etc. Is quietness the diminutive of silence? Not to me. It is too great for that. Dean Swift said that the best doctors in the world were Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman. Not that I take my quiet medicinally. It lies around me in various states of non-noisiness, which are broken now and then by the white cat falling off a radiator.

I am doing duty in the long walk, a three-hour job once a year, when the winter litter is raked up and the spring grass made ready for the mower. All kinds of destinations lead from it: for my badgers, the way to the boundary stream; for me, the way out. I try not to stick to the narrow way so as to avoid making a bare patch. A couple of cuts and the long walk will deserve being written in capitals. But not yet. Though the grass is green. The badgers snout about in it for worms.

Such winter-spring skies; such rowdy birds travelling across them, blown-about gulls and the like. Such shafts of sunshine. Yet an April quietness prevails. And the clean grass looks hopeful.

Soon, I must come in and correct some proofs. To do this, I must stop reading, and follow the text line by line. This is a nice, mechanical task that takes ages, and that cannot be hurried. And is best done in silence, or at least quietly. The study clock ticks through the sentences and would miss out tea, given a chance.

Now and then I think of popes, archbishops, etc., settling in, hanging up their new clothes, staring at their new names on the envelopes, trying out their new blessings in the mirror. St Jerome said: "The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart." He also said, reading Ephesians: "Never look a gift horse in the mouth."

So, what must I read, with Easter passed? With my proofs done? With the birds kicking up a row? With the angel announcing Mary's pregnancy? With bluebells budding in Arger Fen? With the long walk looking a treat?

First, I must finish William Morris's Icelandic Journals, which are not as cold as they sound. Warm-hearted, in fact. He was 37, and losing his wife to Dante Gabriel Rossetti; so, drawn by the sagas to an unlikely destination, he set sail for - Iceland. And its surprising flowers. Famous as the author of The Earthly Paradise, he was received by the Icelanders with honour and love.

The Victorians journeyed to Iceland in order to find a society nobler than their own. Not a paradise, necessarily, but a better place than Dickens's Britain, and its gross materialism. Morris arrived there in July 1871. Now read on. He returned two months later: "So there I was in London at last, well washed, and finding nobody I cared for dead," and his head full of flowers, and his pockets full of diary, and his heart full of Socialism - a dear, great, still young man. "Topsy" to his friends, and an antidote to our current thinking.  (12-Apr-2013)