Our patron, Sir Simon Russell Beale, is in lockdown in his home in Marlborough and very kindly agreed to record some short readings to entertain our audience and anyone else who’d like to listen.
Richard Jefferies (1848-1887) was an authority on agriculture and rural life. Brought up in the village of Coate in north Wiltshire, Jefferies is best known for his nature writing, but he was also an essayist, novelist and mystic. The Richard Jefferies Society was founded in 1950 to promote appreciation and study of his writing.
John Price, Vice-President of the Richard Jefferies Society, lives in Marlborough and has chosen the extracts that Simon Russell Beale is reading for us. We are issuing these on a weekly basis from early May. We hope you will enjoy them.
This extract is from “Amaryllis at the Fair”, published in 1887, and the last book to be published in Jefferies’ lifetime. It is a novel, and is acknowledged to be autobiographical to a great extent. Iden, the main character in the extract is Jefferies’ father; and the setting is Coate farmhouse, now the Richard Jefferies Museum just outside Swindon.
“By-and-by, his cheese being finished, Iden dropped his newspaper, and arranged himself for slumber. His left elbow he carefully fitted to the remnant of the broken woodwork of the chair. The silk handkerchief, red and yellow, he gathered into a loose pad in his left hand for his cheek and temple to rest on. His face thus supported by his hand and arm, while the side of his head touched and rested against the wainscot of the wall.
Just where his head touched it the wainscot had been worn away by daily pressure, leaving a round spot. The wood was there exposed – a round spot, an inch or two in diameter, being completely bare of varnish. So many nods – the attrition of thirty years and more of nodding – had gradually ground away the coat with which the painter had originally covered the wood. It even looked a little hollow – a little depressed – as if his head had scooped out a shallow crater…
This human mark reminded one of the grooves worn by the knees of generations of worshippers in the sacred steps of the temple which they ascended on all-fours. It was, indeed, a mark of devotion, as Mrs. Iden and others, not very keen observers, would have said, to the god of Sleep; in truth, it was a singular instance of continued devotion at the throne of the god of Thought.
Slight sounds, faint rustlings, began to be audible among the cinders in the fender. The dry cinders were pushed about by something passing between them. After a while a brown mouse peered out at the end of the fender under Iden’s chair, looked round a moment, and went back to the grate. In a minute he came again, and ventured somewhat farther across the width of the white hearthstone to the verge of the carpet. This advance was made step by step, but on reaching the carpet the mouse rushed home to cover in one run – like children at “touch wood,” going out from a place of safety very cautiously, returning swiftly. The next time another mouse followed, and a third appeared at the other end of the fender. By degrees they got under the table, and helped themselves to the crumbs; one mounted a chair and reached the cloth, but soon descended, afraid to stay there. Five or six mice were now busy at their dinner.
A mouse came to the foot, clad in a great rusty-hued iron-shod boot – the foot that rested on the fender, for he had crossed his knees. His ragged and dingy trouser, full of March dust, and earth-stained by labour, was drawn up somewhat higher than the boot. It took the mouse several trials to reach the trouser, but he succeeded, and audaciously mounted to Iden’s knee. Another quickly followed, and there the pair of them feasted on the crumbs of bread and cheese caught in the folds of his trousers.
He was so still, so very still – quiescent – they feared him no more than they did the wall… But Iden was so still it was evident he was really wide awake and restraining his breath, and exercising conscious command over his muscles, that this scene might proceed undisturbed.
Now the strangeness of the thing was in this way: Iden set traps for mice in the cellar and the larder, and slew them there without mercy. So he hated them and persecuted them in one place, and fed them in another.
A long psychological discussion might be held on this apparent inconsistency, but I shall leave analysis to those who like it, and go on recording facts. I will only make one remark. That nothing is consistent that is human.”
This extract is from an essay titled A Summer Day in Savernake Forest, and was published in 1876. It is an early work and it lacks some of Jefferies’ eloquence of his later writings, but is included because of its topicality. He used regularly to walk from Coate to Savernake, as well as to other locations in the Marlborough area.
“With the thermometer ranging from 130 to 135 degrees in the full blaze of the sun, few men would fail to appreciate the cool glades of Savernake Forest. Even without the tropical heat of the present summer, it is a charming spot, for it cheats us into a passing forgetfulness of the weary, horse-in-the-mill sort of life we all lead more or less in this work-a-day world. Here Summer has robed the trees in all their bravery. Vegetation has reached its prime. No sickly stain hints that they must die before winter comes. They whisper and rustle in the glorious sunshine in all the pride of life. In the great beech avenues the shade dapples the walks or lays in dark masses for miles and miles. The silvery trunks and arching boughs more than realize all that poets and romance writers have ever said or sung of woodland naves and forest aisles, of which the noblest cathedrals offer so poor a copy. On either side the crisp, dry leaves lie ankle deep on the ground, and betray the light, faltering steps ‘of the hare as she pauses to gaze a moment at the passing stranger, and then scuds away to the nearest cover. As for the squirrels, they are quite at home in these leafy strongholds. There they sit, the arch impostors, making believe that they find nuts in the empty shells of the rotting beech mast. Their bushy tails are coquettishly spread over their brown backs, and they themselves eye the invader with a mild surprise, till, startled out of their propriety, they scamper up the giant trunks and leap from branch to branch, adepts in all the mysteries of the flying trapeze.
The forest is no level plain, but, like other parts of the Wiltshire downs, its surface is broken into heights and hollows, and tiny canyons, over which the tall fern waves in unbroken patches, hundreds of acres in extent. The fallow deer muster strong in the woodlands, but show less than they will do a few weeks hence, for the does are nursing their young ones in the bracken, and have for the time given up society. The jays in yonder oak glade chatter harshly, and flutter restlessly from tree to tree. The giant branches, so gaunt and bare, might each make a separate trunk that would have required at least a century for its growth. It is a sombre spot, a place where these Titans of the wood have met to lay their bones when their time comes. They stand firm in the summer air, make a brave show in their decay, and look calmly down on the bleaching limbs they have lost in some struggle with winter and rough weather. The soft mellow crush of the wood pigeon’s note sounds all in keeping with this woodland mausoleum, while the flaunting, fine gentlemen woodpeckers, in scarlet and green and gold, seem a little out of harmony, not so much on account of their dress, as from their chuckling want of sympathy.
The thorns form quite a feature in the landscape, raising their twisted trunks from the green sward, or from the fern brakes.
Savernake Forest is not a toy place. The ‘rides’ are endless, the roads manifold, and it may well chance that a stranger who has no compass in his pocket to point the way to Marlborough, Dursley, or Great Bedwyn, might lose his way and be compelled to make his bed among the bracken. The day seems to have less than its usual span, for the shadows point eastward, and grow longer and longer, the topmost boughs of the great clumps of beeches wearing for a moment golden tints from the level beams of the setting sun. But there is to-morrow, to-morrow, and to-morrow, in which others may dream away the summer hours in this loveliest forest in Britain. The finest pleasures are the cheapest, and few pleasures might be less costly than a day in the forest.”
This extract is from The Story of My Heart which was published in 1883. It is usually described as his “spiritual autobiography”, and divides Jefferies admirers, as does supposedly Marmite split the population. This extract describes the journey from Coate Farmhouse to Liddington Hill – which in those days did not have the A419 or the GW Hospital in the way!
“My heart was dusty, parched for want of the rain of deep feeling; my mind arid and dry, for there is a dust which settles on the heart as well as that which falls on a ledge. It is injurious to the mind as well as to the body to be always in one place and always surrounded by the same circumstances. When this began to form I felt eager to escape from it, to throw off the heavy clothing, to drink deeply once more at the fresh foundations of life. An inspiration—a long deep breath of the pure air of thought—could alone give health to the heart.
There is a hill to which I used to resort at such periods. The labour of walking three miles to it, all the while gradually ascending, seemed to clear my blood of the heaviness accumulated at home. On a warm summer day the slow continued rise required continual effort, which carried away the sense of oppression. The familiar everyday scene was soon out of sight; I came to other trees, meadows, and fields; I began to breathe a new air and to have a fresher aspiration. I restrained my soul till I reached the sward of the hill; psyche, the soul that longed to be loose. I would write psyche always instead of soul to avoid meanings which have become attached to the word soul, but it is awkward to do so. Clumsy indeed are all words the moment the wooden stage of commonplace life is left. I restrained psyche, my soul, till I reached and put my foot on the grass at the beginning of the green hill itself.
Moving up the sweet short turf, at every step my heart seemed to obtain a wider horizon of feeling; with every inhalation of rich pure air, a deeper desire. The very light of the sun was whiter and more brilliant here. By the time I had reached the summit I had entirely forgotten the petty circumstances and the annoyances of existence. I felt myself, myself.
There was an intrenchment on the summit, and going down into the fosse I walked round it slowly to recover breath. On the south-western side there was a spot where the outer bank had partially slipped, leaving a gap. There the view was over a broad plain, beautiful with wheat, and inclosed by a perfect amphitheatre of green hills. Through these hills there was one narrow groove, or pass, southwards, where the white clouds seemed to close in the horizon. Woods hid the scattered hamlets and farmhouses, so that I was quite alone.”
This extract is from an essay titled Wild Flowers, included in a book of collected essays The Open Air, published in 1885. It is a good example of Jefferies’ more lyrical nature writing. The full transcript is below.
“If we had never before looked upon the earth, but suddenly came to it man or woman grown, set down in the midst of a summer mead, would it not seem to us a radiant vision? The hues, the shapes, the song and life of birds, above all the sunlight, the breath of heaven, resting on it; the mind would be filled with its glory, unable to grasp it, hardly believing that such things could be mere matter and no more. Like a dream of some spirit-land it would appear, scarce fit to be touched lest it should fall to pieces, too beautiful to be long watched lest it should fade away. So it seemed to me as a boy, sweet and new like this each morning; and even now, after the years that have passed, and the lines they have worn in the forehead, the summer mead shines as bright and fresh as when my foot first touched the grass. It has another meaning now; the sunshine and the flowers speak differently, for a heart that has once known sorrow reads behind the page, and sees sadness in joy. But the freshness is still there, the dew washes the colours before dawn. Unconscious happiness in finding wild flowers—unconscious and unquestioning, and therefore unbounded.
I used to stand by the mower and follow the scythe sweeping down thousands of the broad-flowered daisies, the knotted knapweeds, the blue scabious, the yellow rattles, sweeping so close and true that nothing escaped; and, yet although I had seen so many hundreds of each, although I had lifted armfuls day after day, still they were fresh. They never lost their newness, and even now each time I gather a wild flower it feels a new thing. The greenfinches came to the fallen swathe so near to us they seemed to have no fear; but I remember the yellowhammers most, whose colour, like that of the wild flowers and the sky, has never faded from my memory. The greenfinches sank into the fallen swathe, the loose grass gave under their weight and let them bathe in flowers.
One yellowhammer sat on a branch of ash the livelong morning, still singing in the sun; his bright head, his clean bright yellow, gaudy as Spain, was drawn like a brush charged heavily with colour across the retina, painting it deeply, for there on the eye’s memory it endures, though that was boyhood and this is manhood, still unchanged. The field, the very tree, young ash timber, the branch projecting over the sward, I could make a map of them. Sometimes I think sun-painted colours are brighter to me than to many, and more strongly affect the nerves of the eye. Straw going by the road on a dusky winter’s day seems so pleasantly golden, the sheaves lying aslant at the top, and these bundles of yellow tubes thrown up against the dark ivy on the opposite wall. Tiles, red burned, or orange coated, the sea sometimes cleanly definite, the shadows of trees in a thin wood where there is room for shadows to form and fall; some such shadows are sharper than light, and have a faint blue tint. Not only in summer but in cold winter, and not only romantic things but plain matter-of-fact things, as a waggon freshly painted red beside the wright’s shop, stand out as if wet with colour and delicately pencilled at the edges. It must be out of doors; nothing indoors looks like this.”