Autumn in Sussex. The rustle of trees under boots, kids back at school, boys playing conkers, penny for the guy. Marvellous, isn't it? Photo: Getty
Summer’s lease hath all too short a date, and there is always a day when you realise that the lease is about to expire. This year it was the Tuesday of the third week of August. After a fortnight of high temperatures, a last hurrah for the sun god’s English devotees, the heavens opened and the clouds finally had mercy on the scorched, sighing grass after a long dry spell. A strong, gusty wind sprung up, its force strengthened by the funnel effect of our valley. Suddenly — almost overnight, it seemed — the lanes and paths around the village were full of fallen leaves, and the woods along the valley had added gold and red and brown to their colour palette, after months of reliance on greens.
You notice the chill at either end of the day. The dewfall is heavier. You still get hot days here and there but the heat doesn’t start early and linger into the evening as it does in high summer. There is a change in the light. To adequately describe it is far beyond my poetic powers, but in the evening, when the long shadows fall on the hills behind the house, the glow from the sinking sun seems somehow richer and deeper.
I do regret the end of summer. It means no cricket on the radio and no picnics with the children; no early morning cups of tea in the garden, listening to the dawn chorus before the rest of the family are awake. It means no more pleasant evenings sitting outside with a cigar and a beer after the children are in bed, watching the stars come out and hearing the owls hooting in the trees on the hillside.
More than other seasonal transition, the end of summer feels a little sad. Winter into spring is joyous, exciting, a triumph of colour and warmth and fertility. Spring into summer is a promise fulfilled, a glorious unfolding. Autumn into winter is often almost imperceptible. But the fading of summer is unmistakeably the end of something. Possibly it’s an artefact of childhood memory, when the second half of August meant that the long carefree days of the summer holidays were drawing to a close.
The approach of autumn is undoubtedly also a symbol of the passage of time, especially at my time of life, when middle age is starting to loom on the horizon in a mildly alarming fashion. It is a reminder that the children are growing up, nothing ever stays the same, beauty is fragile. If you’re anything like me you think of other summers long ago, old friends neglected or departed, the roads not taken. As Housman puts it, “The happy highways where I went, and cannot come again”.
All the same, autumn is my favourite season. The best part of the year, for my money, is the stretch from Michaelmas (30 September) until Epiphany. To some extent I think it’s my North European soul. I remember with great fondness the exhilaration of walking across the causeway to Holy Island in Northumberland as a fierce wind whipped in off the North Sea. I like bare trees and storms and empty moors and big waves crashing on to windswept beaches. I like how the world feels shortly after dawn on a grey, clear morning, when there’s been rain overnight.
I like returning to the warm glow of the front door on a cold, drizzly evening, that magical moment of homecoming. I even find a sort of contentment in the slightly melancholic mood of October and November, which is tempered by looking forward to Advent and Christmas. It’s probably also nostalgia: I look back very fondly on my university days, and my first term stands out particularly in my memory as a time of promise and excitement and novelty. Nor can I deny the pure childish satisfaction to be gained from crunching leaves underfoot or aiming a big kick at a pile of them. It is a longstanding theory of mine, strongly confirmed by having children, that one of the secrets of a happy life is to cultivate your delight in simple, innocent pleasures.
On a less poetic level, autumn is more promising on the fashion front than summer. Like most Englishmen, I am not at my sartorial best in the warm months, heavily dependent on ageing T-shirts of uncertain shape and lurid Bermuda shorts. One such pair is lively enough that a fellow cycling commuter once said that she noticed me every day on the Clapham Road. Greyer skies and cooler temperatures offer the opportunity for a more varied and elegant wardrobe — jackets and jumpers and scarves, subdued colours and an air of sophistication that is only achievable in summer by dressing in a white linen suit like the villain Belloq from Raiders Of the Lost Ark.
In my childhood, a highlight of the season was always Bonfire Night, that old and strange English celebration, full of dramatic historical resonance. I wonder now whether mine was one of the last generations to experience proper Guy Fawkes celebrations. Just in my adult life — the last two decades — the Fifth seems to be fading away, partly of course due to being overshadowed by the hideously ersatz commercialised ghoulfest of Halloween, but also, I suspect, because the cultural and demographic revolution in Britain since the 1960s has rendered it more and more incomprehensible to modern people.
We are no longer defined by Protestant Christianity, and the virtues that supposedly or actually flow from that. What does it really matter, then, if the Protestant Settlement and national independence were saved from destruction at the hands of plotters working for a foreign Catholic power 400 years ago?
Nevertheless, in those places where 5 November is going strong, like Sussex and west Kent, which have a venerable and robust tradition of extremely raucous Bonfire Nights, you can get a sense of an organic institution deeply rooted in our shared history. The notorious Lewes Bonfire commemorates the Lewes Martyrs, Protestant dissidents burned in the 1550s under Mary I, but its historical significance goes well beyond that.
In later centuries it became a focus for anti-establishment radicalism, and an opportunity for the kind of occasional tolerated mayhem that was a feature of earlier feasts — think Lords of Misrule on Twelfth Night. So perhaps there is hope for its survival. After all, it falls at the right point in the calendar, halfway between the end of summer and Christmas, soon after the clocks go back to make the evenings darker still. It is a moment when a cheerful, boisterous communal event, rooted in what remains of our collective memory, is much needed.
The subjects of memory, and the more sinister and bloody parts of the past, bring to mind another wonderful feature of autumn, namely that it is undoubtedly the perfect season for the classic ghost story. The steadily darkening days and the unsettled weather, the increasingly stark landscapes, and the way in which each house becomes a small island of light in a great mass of darkness; they all combine to create the ideal atmosphere for settling down with M.R. James or Sheridan Le Fanu or Algernon Blackwood.
James is a particular favourite of mine. On those late November days where it barely seems to get light at all, I might find myself thinking of Dennistoun, the protagonist of Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook, who uncovers a gruesome supernatural secret after poking round a church in a sleepy Pyrenean town one dark afternoon. Or Archdeacon Haynes from The Stalls Of Barchester Cathedral, who undergoes a gruelling winter, alone and tormented by a guilty conscience, in in a large and poorly lit house.
There is a comfort in the unceasing cycle of the seasons. Like religious liturgies, these reliable transitions give a rhythm and pattern to our lives, providing a counterpoint in the natural world to the changes and chances of our human existence. Autumn is reassuring in this way; the obvious glories and delights of summer are gone, just as everything we know and cherish in this world is ultimately transient, but there is nobility and beauty in the change, and the sure and certain hope of renewal in the midst of decay and loss.
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SubscribeA very eloquent essay, thank you. Regarding Bonfire in East Sussex, the Bonfire societies celebrate the 5th each weekend somewhere in East Sussex from early September until the end of November. They wunt be druv you know!
I’ve always found the autumn comforting in its melancholy – it reassures me that you can grow old and still be beautiful, somehow!
I too find Halloween rather irritating. I often remind people that the real festival falls on the following day… (and above all, as far as I’m concerned, on the day after that, since, although we’re not all called to be saints, we are all souls!).
Lovely piece. Thankyou.
It’s tempting to agree. Living in Hungary the climate doesn’t allow for the glorious effects of an English woodland in October. I really miss that.
Fall in England sounds as beautiful as Fall in New England…there is a certain longing in the last days at summers end…
A beautifully written tribute to Autumn save its denigration of the wonderfully fun and nostalgic (at lease in America) holiday of Halloween.
Yes, I agree that both are very similar to each other. Autumn feels like the calm between the heat of Summer and the hype of Christmas; to me it’s the best time of year for a walk. Halloween has become almost as bad as the latter in its over-commercialisation though.
Thank you – very uplifting and exactly how I feel about the seasons.
Such a shame that the noisy modern world deprives most people of the experience of fully appreciating these precious moments of transition.
Autumn is my favorite time of the year, as well. Thanks for publishing this essay.
Really nice piece. It’s made my day.
I still chuckle at a Private Eye skit from 30+ years ago called ‘Peter Mackay: the World’s Worst Columnist’. Contemplating the turning of the seasons, Peter confronts his readership:
‘Has anybody noticed how the days are getting shorter and the nights are getting longer? I wonder what is going on!’
Wasn’t it D H Lawrence who said it best? In The White Peacock, as i recall.
I’ve not read The White Peacock, but I remember a wonderful letter from D.H. Lawrence on the subject of autumn, literal and metaphorical (he was writing from Garsington Manor to Lady Cynthia Asquith, during the First Word War):
“When I drive across this country, with the autumn falling and rustling to pieces, I am so sad, for my country, for this great wave of civilisation, 2000 years, which is now collapsing, that it is hard to live. So much beauty and pathos of old things passing away and no new things coming: this house of the Ottolines”It is England”my God, it breaks my soul”this England, these shafted windows, the elm- trees,”the blue distance”the past, the great past, crumbling down, breaking down, not under the force of the coming buds but under the weight of many exhausted, lovely yellow leaves, that drift over the lawn and over the pond, like the soldiers, passing away, into winter and the darkness of winter”no, I can’t bear it. For the winter stretches ahead, where all vision is lost and all memory dies out.
It has been 2000 years, the spring and summer of our era. What
then will the winter be! No I can’t bear it, I can’t let it go. Yet
who can stop the autumn from falling to pieces, when November
has come in. It is almost better to be dead, than to see this awful
process finally strangling us to oblivion, like the leaves off the
trees.”
That’s a wonderfully Lawrentian letter.
The famous passage I refer to was one we studied at school. I later recognised it when reading The White Peacock.
Perhaps this is the passage you remembered from school? I’ve never found Lawrence quite as congenial company as most of the other canonical great novelists, but I think I’m going to put The White Peacock to the top of my reading list. After all, it’s September now!
“I was born in September, and love it best of all the months. There is no heat, no hurry, no thirst and weariness in corn harvest as there is in the hay. If the season is late, as is usual with us, then mid-September sees the corn still standing in stook. The mornings come slowly. The earth is like a woman married and fading; she does not leap up with a laugh for the first fresh kiss of dawn, but slowly, quietly, unexpectantly lies watching the waking of each new day. The blue mist, like memory in the eyes of a neglected wife, never goes from the wooded hill, and only at noon creeps from the near hedges. There is no bird to put a song in the throat of morning; only the crow’s voice speaks during the day. Perhaps there is the regular breathing hush of the scythe”even the fretful jar of the mowing machine. But next day, in the morning, all is still again. The lying corn is wet, and when you have bound it, and lift the heavy sheaf to make the stook, the tresses of oats wreathe round each other and droop mournfully.
As I worked with my friend through the still mornings we talked endlessly. I would give him the gist of what I knew of chemistry, and botany, and psychology. Day after day I told him what the professors had told me; of life, of sex and its origins; of Schopenhauer and William James. We had been friends for years, and he was accustomed to my talk. But this autumn fruited the first crop of intimacy between us. I talked a great deal of poetry to him, and of rudimentary metaphysics. He was very good stuff. He had hardly a single dogma, save that of pleasing himself. Religion was nothing to him. So he heard all I had to say with an open mind, and understood the drift of things very rapidly, and quickly made these ideas part of himself.
We tramped down to dinner with only the clinging warmth of the sunshine for a coat. In this still, enfolding weather a quiet companionship is very grateful. Autumn creeps through everything. The little damsons in the pudding taste of September, and are fragrant with memory. The voices of those at table are softer and more reminiscent than at haytime.
Afternoon is all warm and golden. Oat sheaves are lighter; they whisper to each other as they freely embrace. The long, stout stubble tinkles as the foot brushes over it; the scent of the straw is sweet. When the poor, bleached sheaves are lifted out of the hedge, a spray of nodding wild raspberries is disclosed, with belated berries ready to drop; among the damp grass lush blackberries may be discovered. Then one notices that the last bell hangs from the ragged spire of fox-glove. The talk is of people, an odd book; of one’s hopes”and the future; of Canada, where work is strenuous, but not life; where the plains are wide, and one is not lapped in a soft valley, like an apple that falls in a secluded orchard. The mist steals over the face of the warm afternoon. The tying-up is all finished, and it only remains to rear up the fallen bundles into shocks. The sun sinks into a golden glow in the west. The gold turns to red, the red darkens, like a fire burning low, the sun disappears behind the bank of milky mist, purple like the pale bloom on blue plums, and we put on our coats and go home.”
Who was it who recalled that when visiting Garsington as a young man in Autumn, and, while walking in the garden with Lady Ottoline, remarked that autumn was his favourite season? Lady Utterly observed that it was the young who found autumn romantic: as she got older, she found that more and more she preferrred the spring. But I can’t recall the memoirist.
Now that’s a question I can’t answer. I’ve loved the autumn in childhood and youth and still do in my early forties. I wonder if I’ll shift toward a springtime preference as I age further!
Apparently, it the Autumn when the young feel at their lustiest (and not the Spring as traditionally quoted) because a woman conceiving in September will give birth in the early summer ensuring her baby best chance of survival. This of course a throwback to pre NHS days.
They have Virgo Privilege. And Libra Privilege. This is incredibly unfair and they need to be levelled down, or is it the other ten should be levelled up? Always have trouble remembering which one of these it’s supposed to be.
Thank you for recalling Dennistoun. If one visits the church,one finds that the French don’t regard James’s story as worth recalling. But on a dark afternoon even in September the image that inspired the dispute Salomonis cum demonio is still visible. In the light of morning, it becomes clearly something different.
Beautifully observed. Let’s also not forget the marking of the season represented by the Harvest Festival. For years I lived in an industrial town where its celebration was arbitrary, if not non-existent, which sat oddly with this West Country girl and left me with a profound sense of something missing. Now happily settled in rural North Bedfordshire, surrounded by fields and farms, I’m hopeful that CV-19 regulations will have eased enough that we should be able to take our produce to church on the relevant Sunday and merrily sing about ploughing the fields and scattering!
No doubt about it. Autumn is the best season here in country Victoria, where you have passed the heat of summer and luxuriate in the still, chill days & nights of April and May.
The only quibble is the skulking intrusion of the occasional “fall”.
A beautiful paean to the most beautiful of seasons. I have always loved it, for a multitude of reasons, many of which are mentioned here.
My late mother, God rest her soul, always hated it – perhaps because “more than other seasonal transition, the end of summer feels a little sad” – but then she always was a bit of an Eeyore, bless her.
Nice touch to bring in the great M R James, and The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral is one of my favourites.
What a lovely piece of writing. From the heart and so simple but so evocative of this – to my mind – most melancholy of seasons. Thank you.
Wonderful evocative piece of writing, I think I’ll dust down my copy MRJames Ghost Stories, really cheered me up…