Looking Back at Summer!

Edward Potthast, The Beach at Brighton. Potthast was an
American impressionist. I like the way these children look as
if they've rushed into the sea for a cooling paddle.

I was going to post this way back in the summer, when we were having a heat wave and it was hot, hot. hot - far too hot for me!!! However, life got in the way, and now it's winter, and the temperatures have dropped, which suits me fine, and I can look at the heatwave a little more fondly than I did at the time, so here's a summer anthology, which is a bit of a mish-mash of prose, poetry and pictures. 

First up is the opening from one of my favourites, The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson. It's a delightful book, following the daily lives of six-year-old Sophia and her grandmother as they spend a summer on an island in the Gulf of Finland. Its's full of wisdom and wonder and, as author Robert Robert MacFarlane says, it 'distills the essence of summer'. This bit always reminds me of holidays spent in a caravan at Walney Island, in Cumbria,  when my daughters were small, and we would get up very early, walk through a field of cows, and scramble down to the beach for a couple of hours or so, before making our way back to the caravan for breakfast. Not, I hasten to add, that the vegetation on Walney (or anywhere else in and around Barrow) could be described as lush, but there is a kind of connection, honestly! And we were always dropping things in the field, or leaving them on the sand, and having to go back and hunt for them.

It was an early, very warm morning in July. and it had rained during the night. The bare granite steamed, the moss and crevices were drenched with moisture, and all the colours everywhere had deepened. Below the verandah the vegetation in the morning shade was like a rain forest of lush, evil leaves and flowers, which she had to be careful not to break as she searched. She held one hand in front of her mouth and was constantly afraid of losing her balance.

"What arer you doing?" asked little Sophia.
"Nothing," her grandmother answered. "That is to say," she added angrily, "I'm looking for my false teeth."

One of Tove Jansson's illustrations for her iconic Moomin books.
It looks suitably summery I think,

And here's Rumer Godden's classic coming-of-age novel,  The Greengage Summer, where a family of English children are stranded in a French hotel while their mother is ill. The novel, like much of Goddden's work, has a dark side, but this excerpt is full of light.  And it evokes more memories -when I was young there was a greengage tree in the garden, and every year my brother and I would get hot and sticky as we fought off angry wasps to pick (and eat) the luscious, greeny gold fruit so Mum could make jam.

On and off, all that hot French August, we made ourselves ill from eating the greengages [...] In the orchard we had not even to pick fruit — it fell off the trees into our hands. The greengages had a pale-blue bloom, especially in the shade, but in the sun the flesh showed amber through the clear-green skin; if it were cracked the juice was doubly warm and sweet. Coming from the streets and small front gardens of Southstone, we had not been let loose in an orchard before; it was no wonder we ate too much.

Orchard in Bloom, by Vincent van Gogh. These, apparently, are
plum trees, in an orchard near Arles, but greengages are a type of
plum, so I like to think the orchard in The Greengage Summer
may have looked something like this. Anyway, I love these 
twisty old trees.

I've included a brief quote from Elizabeth von Arnim's enchanting The Solitary Summer because I never can resist the opportunity to reproduce one of Cicely Mary Barker's flower fairies! 

A garden might be made beautiful with sweet-peas alone, and, with hardly any labour, except the sweet labour of picking to prolong the bloom, be turned into a fairy bower of delicacy and refinement.

The Sweet Pea Fairies, by Cicely Mary Barker.

And here's more flowers from Shakespeare's The Midsummer Night's Dream (what else!) To be honest, these flowers don't all grow in the same place at the same time, as any gardener will tell you, but the magical words conjure up the sights and perfumes of summer.

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight;
And there the snake throws her enamell’d skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in, 

Titania Lying  Asleep, by Arthur Rackham.

Laurie Lee, in Cider With Rosie, recalls the hot, dry June days of his childhood: 

Outdoors, one scarcely knew what had happened or remembered any other time. There had never been rain, or frost, or cloud, it had always been like this. The heat from the ground climbed up one;s legs and smote one under the skin. The garden, dizzy with scent and bees, burned all over with hot white flowers , each one so blinding an incandescence that it hurt one's eyes to look at them.

The Poppy Field, by Monet. When Laurie Lee was young, it was
common to see scarlet poppies growing in fields of golden corn.

There's more corn and poppies in Penelope Lively's Heat Wave, as a daughter's life falls apart during a long, hot summer, echoing the long-ago disintegration of her mother's marriage. The heat seems to permeate every page of the book, fuelling passions and bringing hidden memories to light, and there are some wonderful descriptions of the rural landscape.  

July has slid over into August. And the place is burnt up. The verges are bleached now - buff plumes of grass and the brown candelabra of hogweed, The blue lakes of flax have drained away. Instead there are the poppies -scarlet threads on a field of  ripe wheat, or a brilliant flush along the roadside. And much of the wheat is down - there are sweeps of golden stubble dotted with bales of straw.

Hidden secrets are also revealed in Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell, which is set in 1976, when temperatures broke previous records and the  water levels of rivers, lakes, streams, ponds and reservoirs dropped to never-before-seen lows as the drought stretched on and on. 

It is the third month of the drought. For ten days now the heat has passed 90F. There has been no rain - not for days, not for weeks, not for months. No clouds pass, slow and stately as ships, over the roofs of these houses.

Despite the heat, Gretta Riordan bakes soda bread, just as she has done three times a week throughout her married life,and her husband Robert sets out to buy his morning newspaper, just as he has done throughout their married life. But this time he doesn't return... he vanishes without a trace...

During the 1976 drought standpipes provided water for many people
throughout the UK. Note that despite the heat these women were still
dressed very respectably in cardigans, jumpers etc! (Mirrorpix)

Finally, a poem: Adlestrop, by Edward Thomas, which paints a picture of a long ago hot summer day, when a train unexpectedly stopped at a deserted country station. 

Yes. I remember Adlestrop -
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop - only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

The station is no more, but the sign and bench are a bus shelter.