With October well into its second week, I think it's safe to say that autumn, that most poignant and most evocative of seasons, has arrived. The season when the sun slips low in the sky and the last few flowers wait for the coming frost, the time of the poets: W B Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole, Autumn, by John Clare, (whose work was much in my mind when I wrote, The Silent Women) Emily Bronte - Fall, leaves, fall, and Rita Dove, November for Beginners - '...We sit down, in the smell of the past and rise in a light that is already leaving...'
Autumn sets the senses adrift. The scent of grass and apples rise up to meet me as I leave the house, my face is caught in unexpected webs, woven from hedge to gate at the foot of the steps. And here, a solitary white rose still blooms, while the virginia creeper fades and grows sparse. The trees on the street are turning to rust, the leaves to lipstick-colours, scarlet, coral, copper, blood-red. My mind flutters and falls with the leaves, spooling back. Autumn, a time for remembering, the drawing of curtains against the dusk.
My love of autumn has so much to do with the memory of times past - the time when I was just eighteen, on the cusp of a new world, when I left home in the last days of September, travelling west to east, slipping into a new world where I alone determined my days, where I stood at bus stops on a university campus reading Satre and de Beauvoir, wearing loons, and t-shirts with scooped necks and floppy arms gathered at the wrists. A time of rooms-in-hall, of bedsits, of crowding on floors and beds to listen to Pink Floyd and Bob Dylan, smoking cigarettes and joints rolled on album covers, the floors about us flecked with loose tobacco.
These were the late sixities, when hair was wild and coats were long; old, mottled, moth-blown furs bought second hand. A time when I was in love with the world like never before, and with the place in which I found myself.
I'd come from a small seaside town to the city of Norwich which was, and remains for me, an extraordinarily beautiful place. A city of trees and pubs and churches (many of which are now repurposed), it sits out on limb in the hump of East Anglia, not easily reached and thus escaped the worst excesses of the sixties and seventies architects. I hold a special place in my heart for its cathedral, which for some reason I think of as female, smaller than Durham, less imposing, sitting low, in the cobbled Tombland, curtseying in the Cathedral Close, where the cherry trees blossom in the Spring.
It didn't take me long to decide I’d found a new home here, particularly because I knew I would not, could not go, back to where I’d come from. I didn’t know until later that I would leave the city I'd grown to love, that circumstance would force me out, but that anyway it was probably for the good, there was still so much to learn about the world. And London called. Later, much later, I went back in a fine September, and although it didn’t quite work out, the city lives in me still, in the muscle memory of autumn, with its lit windows, log fires, bonfires and smoke.
To add to this, and nothing to do with the city in the east, both my children were born in this season, and both times, early morning I looked up from my bed to the high hospital window in the Maternity Unit in Bishop Auckland and saw nothing but a cloudless blue sky.
As my children grew, autumn became synonymous with conkers and hours were spent foraging for them beneath the chestnut trees on the village green. At this time, one of our elderly neighbours, Reg, whose house backed on to ours, and who knew about the conker mania, would often leave a cache of conkers for the children on the wall outside our house. When he was well, Reg, could be seen taking his morning constitutional, smartly dressed in his military style blazer. But he wasn't always well. He’d been a Japanese prisoner of war and it had left him depleted and in poor health. On days when he was too ill to go out and about, he would sometimes venture down his garden to lean on the back fence adjoining ours and our neighbours, for a chat with anyone who was about.
I cannot see the conkers on the green without thinking of Reg.
Here is an unlikely autumn poem, retrieved from my stash of unpublished writings. I was reminded of it by the showing of Don’t Look Now, this week on TV. It’s followed by an autumnal extract from The Silent Women
The Drowning Season
This autumn thing
this new term leaving,
falling leaf
gutter-lit, lipstick colour
bus stop raining rented room.
This Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie
Don’t Look Now,
did they, didn’t they?
.... on camera
would have done anything asked
of them, so someone said.
This barely time,
begun in autumn,
spent by summer.
October morning
a robin's egg
in it's empty nest.
This yearly drive
through passing season,
failing light
and ache of leaving
Venice and
water everywhere.
Extract from the beginning of The Silent Women
September 1875
The air is ripe with the scent of rotten apples and damp earth. Seed heads rattle in the grass and the wet, yellow leaves of willow stick to the boots of eel catcher, Michael Cory, as he makes his way to the river. Above him the sky is autumnal blue. The smoke from Long Meadow’s chimneys and the low throb of the pumps hang in the air. He is hoping for a good catch to sell in the town market. For wicker hives and griggs fat with silver eels. And enough left over for chopped eel, fried in best butter, for tea when his mother comes home from attending the mad women of Dormitory Twelve, women who believe they speak with Jesus, who claim to be the Queen herself. Women who believe that eels have taken root in their stomachs and suck their lifeblood.
The newspapers had championed it ‘to better the condition of lunatic paupers,’ or so the Chronicle said. But now he wonders at it. This parade of the afflicted seen in the fields and along the river, always accompanied by their attendants. A circus of lunatics. Are there not better places for such a project? The filthy disease-ridden cities for one? It should never have been built on their land, so the locals say, and he agrees, though he is mindful that the land is no longer theirs. It has been parcelled up and sold off. Now there are new ways to make a living, as in the Asylum, ways that pay as much as thirty-five shillings per annum for a mere attendant.
Michael Cory steps onto the riverbank, wades in among the rushes and reaches down in anticipation for the first hive. But his hand alights on something softer than wicker. There is cloth beneath his fingers and there is flesh. A limb. An arm, he thinks, full grown, half-hidden in the reeds. And there is more.
With all thought of eel and hive forgotten, he wades further in and begins to heave and drag a body up through the mud and onto the bank. The shock and the effort leave him breathless. He looks down on the corpse he has pulled from the river. It lies green and swollen in the grass. He puts his hand to his chest. His heart is alive and beating fast, thank God. He takes off his hat and offers up a prayer
Thanks for reading - enjoy these autumn days Avril x