Illustration by Laura Carlin
‘‘Look! We have come through.”
Some years you can smell it before you see it, like a traveller scenting land after months at sea – a smell of greenness that suddenly catches you unawares. Sometimes it’s the sight of the early-morning sun striking the corner of the window for the first time in months and you realise that the earth is swinging back towards the equinox once more. Sometimes it’s a sound: the birds beginning to sing again in the darkness before a February dawn. Or a feel: the texture of the claggy earth rubbed between finger and thumb, feeling dry and crumbly at last. Every year there is something that makes you think, “Yes! It’s here.”
But this winter has never seemed to end – no tidemark of returning sun, no sudden smell of greenness. Paradoxically, it never even seemed to begin. The grass went on growing; the horticultural fleece lay unused in piles in the shed; tender plants, unprotected, went unscathed. There were roses in bloom at Christmas and Lent lilies in January. Six weeks of gales and floods but never a frost.
The bell-ringers’ annual service was on 1 February, the Saturday before Candlemas. Parts of the garden were still underwater and the wind was so strong that it almost blew the plates out of my hands as I carried them into the church for tea. There was to be an hour and a half of ringing, then the service, then tea – mounds of sandwiches and scones, cakes and quiches, all laid out on tables in the back of the church – then the AGM and another hour or so of ringing. It was already dark when we sat to listen to the sermon. The vicar took for her text the story of Candlemas: how Simeon and Anna, two superannuated temple attendants who have been hanging on to see the birth of the Messiah, recognise him at last in the baby Mary brings.
And that’s when Simeon says the Nunc Dimittis – the lovely canticle that gives Candlemas its name:
Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace: according to thy word:
For mine eyes have seen thy salvation
Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people;
A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.
The words are familiar from compline and evensong and from funerals and memorial services. But we don’t know how old Simeon was. It’s always assumed that he was ancient. Perhaps he was young, the vicar said, one of those fervent young men who hang about and make a nuisance of themselves – a fan, a geek, just someone determined not to go away until he saw the Messiah. The point was that he persevered. Whatever age he was, she said, she felt God would have said to him: “Well done. You made it. You came through.”
Earlier in the day I had gone up the garden to check if the bees needed feeding again. I have been feeding them since before Christmas. Disease and the vagaries of the weather nowadays mean that every year a high proportion of bee colonies fails to survive the winter. One colony in particular was a cause for concern – a late swarm that hadn’t had time to make enough honey to last it through to spring. Cautiously, trying not to let the cold air in, I tilted the roof of the hive just enough to be able to slide another pot of bee candy over the hole in the crown board. I hadn’t seen the bees themselves since long before Christmas.
Waiting to see if the bees will re-emerge in spring is always an anxious time. Whatever I am doing in the garden – pruning roses, cutting out dead wood – I always find myself drifting up to look at the silent hives. This year the unceasing rain and wind had kept me, and them, penned indoors longer than usual. But then one day – a gap in the rain – it was a little warmer and suddenly there they were, like a wisp of smoke above the hive. Creeping closer, I watched them coming and going on the alighting board. The queen was laying. All was well.
On my way back to the house I saw that the sudden warmth had also brought out the blossom of the cherry plum, a froth of white against the winter-dark hedges. There were red shoots of peonies in the rose border and silvery tufts of growth on the woody stems of the clematis. There was even a solitary snake’s head fritillary in bud in the sodden Lammas meadow.
Nothing to eat in the vegetable garden yet but as I passed the spinney I picked hawthorn buds, Jack-by-the-hedge and wild garlic leaves and made a wild salad to add to the last of the apples in the fruit store – Norfolk Beefing and Lane’s Prince Albert – together with a handful of walnuts picked last September from the trees behind the hives, and added them to the shop-bought celery languishing in the fridge: the taste of spring, that sharp mixture of old and new, hope and regret. It’s here, arrived at last, slipped under the wire when I wasn’t looking.
I fetch from the bookshelf D H Lawrence’s cycle of love poems – the chronicle of his first stormy months with Frieda – and read “Spring Morning”: “We have come through.”
Katherine Swift is the author of “The Morville Hours: the Story of Garden” (Bloomsbury, £9.99)
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