First snowdrop
A week of miserable January weather, soaking under oppressive skies, but with signs of spring to lighten dull days.
Birds are active in the garden, swinging from columns of nuts and seeds suspended under the cherry tree, and exploring prospective nesting sites. The house sparrows, whose slapdash nest building under the eaves always seems to end in disaster for their unlucky chicks, are taking a keen interest in the newly erected Great Tit box. They rather fancy the convenience of a newbuild, I suspect.
Meanwhile, a song thrush has piped up, heralding the sweet sound of spring to come.
The first snowdrop in our garden has also emerged, pushing up through dank earth and decaying leaves. I crouch down to take a closer look and take a picture. It’s like a miniature street light in a toy village.
An interesting Instagram post by Karen Meadows (@britishgardeninghistory), who lives nearby, reveals that ‘Galanthus Ketton,’ a variety of snowdrop named after the Rutland village of the same name is often one of the first to show. It was discovered in a garden in the village in 1948 by renowned plantsman E. A. Bowles, Karen writes.
I comment that plant names are my blind spot; unlike my wife, Tina, who absorbed all the Latin names from her mother when she was young. So I am delighted to learn that my absurd aide-mémoire for forsythia (I call ours Bruce, after the TV personality) is intuitively rather good. It is, in fact, named after the late entertainer’s great Grandfather, William Forsyth, head gardener to George III.
Spring watch
Someone else who took a close interest in plants and the first snowdrops in Rutland was Thomas Barker (1722-1809) of Lyndon Hall.
For 60 years Barker kept a journal, observing trees and crops, recording when the first cuckoo is heard and when the swifts returned. But it is for his meteorological records, the details of which still inform climate studies, that he became best known.
Barker was one of Gilbert White’s trusted correspondents, referenced in The Natural History of Selborne (1788), a seminal work which throws opens an historic window and lets the sights, sounds and smells of the English countryside from 200 years ago waft in.
Barker records the Great Frost of 1739-40, when snow fell in January and freezing temperatures persisted until February 16. At first glance, his night time thermometer reading of -4 C° on December 31 seems unremarkable – until you realise the thermometer was indoors.
I wonder what Barker would have made of the past year, reported this month to be the warmest on record in the UK, and the first to surpass an average annual temperature of 10 C°.
Farewell, Michael
Finally, I was sad to learn of the death of a neighbour, Michael Clayton, aged 88.
It’s not often you get to read the memoir of someone who lives a few metres away, but Michael’s final book, My Life in the News was published before Christmas. I had nearly finished reading it when I happened to meet his wife, walking around the village.
She told me the news. I had no idea. In the cold January air, we hugged.
Michael was a distinguished journalist, first in newspapers, then as a broadcaster and war correspondent, reporting from Vietnam and the Middle East, as well as presenting BBC Radio’s Today programme.
Leaving news, he followed his passion for country sports into magazines, as Editor of Horse and Hound and then Editor-in-Chief of Country Life and The Field.
When we moved to the village, we invited neighbours over for drinks during Tina’s Open Studio weekend. Michael came over and was delighted to find out that, like him, I had started my working life as a trainee reporter on a local newspaper. We sat next to each other that summer evening, in warm sunshine, and he pummelled me with questions.
Reading the obituaries, including in the Daily Telegraph, there were pictures of Michael meeting Queen Elizabeth II and other members of the Royal Family, with whom he became well acquainted.
There were also photos of him, a tall, elegant man, on horseback, jumping fences, in his top hat, for which he was renowned.
On the one hand, an establishment gentleman. On the other, entirely down to earth, and the same 16-year-old trainee reporter, without a university education, he had started out as. I used to meet Michael walking around the village wearing his denim jacket, which he loved – the antithesis of top hat and hunting attire.
What moves me when I think of Michael now is what inspired him to become a journalist, vividly described in his book.
Growing up during the war on the south coast of England – he recalls his Quaker family hosting soldiers who had escaped the hell of Dunkirk and he himself narrowly avoiding injury during a deadly attack by a lone Luftwaffe plane taking pot shots at families in a park on a Sunday afternoon – one of his great pleasures was a regular trip to the cinema, on his own, on Saturday afternoons.
Aged 10, the newsreels would be accompanied by morale-boosting items, Charlie Chaplain films and Disney cartoons.
Except that one afternoon there was no entertainment, only an extended feature on the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Michael writes, “I can recall as vividly now, as I saw it then, the monochrome scenes of the hideous suffering of Belsen’s starved, skeletal inmates still just about alive, and obscene mountains of human bodies of hundreds of others being carried into pits by former guards.
“I left the Bournemouth newsreel feeling shattered, among a totally silent group of adults who stumbled into the daylight with grim faces.”
Michael said he did not regret the experience, counting it as a necessary understanding of the true nature of war, but admitted images of Bergen-Belsen were a recurring nightmare throughout his life.
He didn’t appreciate anyone making light of the war and had little time for the ideological politics and prime ministers of recent times.
I wish I had been able to spend more time with Michael and talked more about the events and experiences he describes in his book.
Michael Clayton, 1934-2022.
Thank you for the mention. Tina's snowdrops are stunning!