APRIL AGAIN.


The ghost harrier loses its own silver in the rolling, rippling, silver underside of the meadow, on the slopes ahead. He is there daily, sometimes dropping and vanishing in the long grass, other times rocking on the wind just above, sweeping and checking, head down, elegant dark wing tips on such a wide span.

Larks rise and trill in the warm sunshine but are silent when the clouds gather and a typical April day turns grim and shifty. Plenty of swallows swoop in and over the slopes and roofs, chattering all the while. Nesting time not yet started so I can leave the windows open. A cuckoo or two sound out the territory but the grey, cold days silence them. When the sun comes out, it is suddenly warm, hot even, and the song of spring begins again.

Carrots, onions, lettuce are all sown or set and I am painstakingly removing, one by one, the rank weeds from the flower meadow with a nifty tool that will twist out each deep root while not damaging the crowding other valuables. Echinacea, Rudbeckia, Aster, Corn Marigold, Cosmos, Corncockle, Liatris, Flax, Cornflower, Sweet William, Oxeye Daisy and Toadflax - all mingle with grasses, Yellow Rattle and Nigella - to make, or to begin to make a thick sward. The list is here, named, so that you might try the wild look garden yourself! I've mowed it once over, last week when it was dry, and now I won’t cut again until September. I have to know exactly the look of the leaves of the desirables, so those broad leaved, pernicious ones can be taken out now. And I do know them all, like I know the backs of my hands. Meanwhile my lower back gives me pain and my legs ache as I crouch; such is the ageing process, especially cruel to those who have always been so active.

I am re reading Primo Levi’s IF THIS IS A MAN. If one wants to talk about physical strain and pain, look there. The indifference of one sort of man to another is clearly there: ‘every stranger is an enemy’. ‘For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager’. The concentration camp. Or a different genocide.

I have spent the last 3 months back in Britain, giving my time to my mother and son, who for very different reasons have been more than low.