Doris Lessing - The Temptation of Jack Orkney - Collected Stories Volume Two

That was December. Around Christmas, after several heavy frosts, I went up to see how things went on, kicked one of the clods – and it crumbled. The boy from the country who, being not a farming boy but a country-town boy, and who therefore had not believed the book either, saying the garden needed a bulldozer, came on my telephone call, and about an hour of the lightest work with a hoe transformed the heaving scene into neat areas of tilth mixed with dead grass. Not really dead, of course, but ready to come to life with the spring. But now we had faith in the book, and we turned the roots upwards to be killed by the frost. This happened. Each piece of stalk or root filled with wet, and then swelled as it froze, and burst like water-mains in severe cold. Long before spring the earth lay broken and tamed, all the really hard work done, not by the spade, or the hoe, or even by the worms, but by the frost. The thing is, I knew Africa, or a part of it, and there you can never forget the power of sun, wind, rain. But in gentler England you do forget, as if the north-slanting sun must have less power than a sun overhead, as if nature itself is less drastic in her working. You can forget it, that is, until you see what a handful of weeks of weather can do to smash a seventy-by-twenty-foot bit of wilderness into conformity.

It rained in January, and in February it did not stop. If I set one foot off the top of the steps that came up from the flat, I sank in clay to my ankles. The light was strained through cold coud, but it was strong enough to drag the snowdrops up into it. I walked in Regent’s Park along paths framed with black glistening twigs which were swelling, ready to burst: the shape of spring, next year’s promise, is exposed from the moment the leaves fall. The park was all grey water, sodden grass, black trees, and the water-fowl had to contend for crumbs and crusts with the gulls that had come inland from a stormy sea. In March it rained, and was dull. Usually by March more than snowdrops and crocuses are showing from snow or mud; and already the paths are loaded with people staking claims in the spring. But it was a bad month. My new garden was calling forth derisory remarks from friends who were not gardeners and who did not know what a month’s warmth can do for water-filled trenches, bare walls, sodden earth. April wasn’t doing anything like what the poet meant when he said, ‘Oh, to be in England’ – certainly he would have returned at once to his beloved Italy. April was not the beginning of spring, but the continuation of winter. It was wet, wet, wet, and cold, and it all went on the same day after day. And in the park, where I walked daily, only the lengthening evenings talked of spring, for in spite of crocuses everywhere, the buds seemed frozen on the bushes and trees. It would never end. I don’t know how they bear it in northern countries, like Sweden or Russia. It is like being shut inside a caul of ice, when the winter lengthens itself so.

And it was so wet. If you took one step off the paths you squelched. No air, you knew, could possibly remain in that sponge. There was so much water everywhere, tons of it hanging in the air over our heads, tons falling every day, lakes underfoot.

Suddenly there were some days of summer. No, not spring. Last year was without spring. In no other country that I know is it possible for things to change so fast. And when one state holds, then the one just past seems impossible. In the garden, from which baths of steam flew up to join the by now summer-like clouds, bluebells, hyacinths, crocuses and narcissi had sprung up, and if you turned the earth, the worms were energetically at work. Weeks of growth were being concentrated into each day; nature did overtime to catch up; and if things had gone on like that, we would have been precipitated straight into full summer, with fruit blossom and spring flowers flying past as in a speeded up film but no, suddenly, we were in a cold drought. And it went on for weeks. A cold sunless drought, a dry cold, with sometimes a cold, withdrawn sun. In the garden the water sank back fast in the newly turned, loose earth, and you could walk easily over the clay. The pear tree hung on the edge of blossom, but did not flower. The trees at the bottom of the garden had a look of green about them, but it was like the smear of moss on soil soaked and soaked again. When I turned a spade of earth, the worms were sluggish. The birds, dodging plentiful cats, snapped off each new blade of grass as it appeared, and slashed the crocuses with their beaks. In the park, the black boughs had frills of leaf on them, but walking along the shores you could see the ducks and the geese sitting on their eggs on leafless islands. The waters were still tenanted by adult birds, who converged towards their providers on the lakes’ edges, and climbed up on the banks with their coloured beaks open, hissing and demanding. Soon, off the little islands would tumble nestfuls of baby birds, who would learn from the parents to follow the stiffly moving shapes along the banks with their expectations for bread. But not yet. And the blossoms were not yet. Everything was in check in that no-spring of last year when first it rained without sun, and then held a chilly drought for weeks. Yet we knew that spring must have arrived, must be here. Slowly the chestnut avenue unfurled shrill green from each stiff twig’s end. The catkins were dangling on branches inhibited from bursting into leaf. The roses had been pruned almost to the earth, but very late. The fine hairlines of the willow branches trailing into the water had become yellow-green instead of wintry yellow-grey. And everywhere, on hawthorn and cherry, on plum and currant and white-beam and apple, the buds of that year’s flowering stood arrested among leaf buds. The park’s gardeners bent heavily-sweatered over flowerbeds that had a cold dusty look, and the grass wore thin and showed the soil, as often happens in late summer after drought, but not often so early in the year. The evenings had already nearly reached their midsummer length – for just as spring stands outlined in black buds on empty branches in November, so the lengthening evenings of April, May, then June, spread summer light everwhere when the earth is still gripped with cold, and you are clutching at summer before it has begun, marking Midsummer Day as a turn towards the dark of winter before the winter has been warmed from the soil. The earth is tilted forward, dipped completely into light, light that urges on blossom, leaf, grass, light which is more powerful for growth even than warmth. The avenues are filled with strolling people until nine and after; the theatre is open; the swings in the children’s playgrounds are never still. England’s myriads of expert gardeners visit the rose gardens to match those paragons with the inhabitants of their own gardens – but last year found that the cold was still holding the roses, tightening their veins and arteries, and giving the long reddening shoots the pinched look of a person short of blood. And it all went on and on, the dry cold, just as, earlier, the wet winter had extended itself, and the park seemed like a sponge that could never dry.

And then, the year having swallowed spring whole, the sun and rain came together and all at once, the whole park burst into flower, as did the pear tree in my garden, and the laburnum over the wall.

In each year, there is always a week which is the essence of spring, all violent growth, bloom and scent, just as there is one week which is quintessential autumn, the air full of flying tinted leaves.

But last year, trees whose flowering is usually separated by their different natures flowered at the same time; the cherries, currants, hawthorns, lilacs and damask roses were out with bluebells, tulips, stocks, and there were so many different kinds of blossom that it seemed as if there must be hundreds of species of flowering tree instead of a couple of dozen. We walked over new grass under trees crammed with pink, with ivory, with greenish-white flower; we walked beside lakes where crowds of ducklings and goslings swam beside their parents, minute balls like thistledown tossing violently with every wind-ripple, threatened by the oars of rowing boats launched into the waters by the spring. It was all spring and all summer at the same time, with flying, rolling, showering clouds, and lovers lay everywhere over the grass, rummaging and ravishing, while the squirrels leaped about like kittens after cotton reels, up and down the trunks of the chestnut trees that had belatedly achieved their proper summer shape, pyramidal green with pink and white candles. The squirrels were as fat as house-cats, fed full from the litter baskets, and their friends’ offerings. From all the streets around the park, and from much further afield, came people with bread, biscuits, cake, each with a look of private, smiling pleasure. One woman who had, not the usual few bread-slices or stale cake, but a carrier-bag full of food, confided to me as she stood surrounded by hundreds of pigeons, sparrows, geese, ducks, swans, thrushes, that her children had recently grown up and left home and her husband and herself were sparse eaters. Yet years of cooking for uncritically ravenous teenagers and their friends had got her used to providing and catering. She had found herself ordering much more food than an elderly couple could ever eat; she suppressed urges to create new and wonderful dishes. But she had found the solution. Each time the need gripped her to give a dinner party for twelve, or an informal party for fifty, she filled a bag and took a bus to Regent’s Park where, on the edges of the bird-decorated waters, she went on until her supplies ran out and her need to feed others was done. The birds, having swum or flown along the banks beside her until they were sure she had no more food, turned their attention to the next likely provisioner, or floated and bobbed and circled to the admiration of humans who all around the shores were bound to be exclaiming: ‘Oh, if only I could be a duck on a hot day like this, right in all that cool water!’ – while these same waterfowl might quite reasonably be expected to be muttering: ‘If only I could be a human, with naked skin for the wind to blow on and the water to touch, and not a bird encased in feathers in such a way, that nothing but my poor feet can ever feel the air or water …’At any rate, these birds certainly have a fine sense of themselves, their function, their place. Accustomed to seeing them on the water, or tucked into neat shapes drowsing on the grass around the verges, I imagined that that was where they always stayed. But not so, as I discovered one very early morning when I got up at five to have – or so I imagined – the park to myself. There were five or six people already there, strolling about, talking, or at least acknowledging each other, in the camaraderie of those who feel themselves to be out of the ordinary. Meanwhile, the geese and the ducks were all over the grass, and under the trees, where in the day they are never seen. Mother ducks and geese, each surrounded by their blobs of coloured down, were introducing these offspring to the land world, as distinct from the watery world they inhabited when the park was busy. Greylag geese stood under the Japanese plums. Black swans were under the hawthorns. A squirrel came to investigate a duckling that was disconsolately alone under an arch of climbing rose. It was not six in the morning, but it seemed as if things had been busy for hours – as probably they had, now the nights were so short, and hardly dark at all from a bird’s point of view, who probably can’t tell the difference between dusk, dawn, or the shimmering dark of a summer’s midnight. While people still slept, or were crawling out of bed, there was the liveliest of intimate occasions in the park, which the birds and animals had more or less to themselves.