The Lark Ascending
To mark a six-month milestone for Rutland Country Life, I'd like to share a personal story with you...
This week, something a little different.
To mark six months of Rutland Country Life (thank you, dear reader, for joining our small and merry community, a perfect reflection of Rutland itself), I’d like to invite you on an awayday to the county of my birth, Sussex, and share a very personal story.
Alongside Rutland Country Life, which are my diary notes of day-to-day life in this part of the world, I’m working on a larger writing project that is close to my heart.
With the guidance of the wonderful teacher and bestselling author Kathryn Aalto (@kathrynaalto), I’m piecing together a memoir about a moment in time from my early twenties that subsequently shaped the path of my life.
Should you wish to read on, I’m happy to share with you the story of how, in 1995, my younger brother Tim and I walked the South Downs Way, 100 miles from Eastbourne in Sussex to Winchester in Hampshire. It was the best thing we ever did together; it was also the last thing we did together.
Four months after we completed the walk Tim died during his first year at university.
In the following essay, I share something of that story, accompanied by the song of the skylark, the sound of which has come to mean much to me.
The sweet, high-trilling song was always in the background of our happiest childhood days, it heralded our week-long walk along the South Downs and it gladdens me that I can now hear the skylark from my garden, singing over the golden barley fields of Rutland. It also accompanied me when I returned to re-walk the South Downs Way in October last year on a personal pilgrimage to remember Tim.
By coincidence, we went to hear Stamford Chamber Orchestra perform The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams last night, with the outstanding violin soloist Charlotte Saluste-Bridoux. I sat in the Georgian splendour of the ballroom at Stamford Arts Centre and was transported back to the South Downs and my walk with Tim.
Dear reader, forgive me for tempting you away from Rutland to Sussex, but I hope you will see that when the skylark ascends and sings, it matters not what where you are, you can only look up in wonder and reflect on all that really matters in life.
Skylarks over the South Downs
Skylarks were always there, singing up on the Sussex Downs, when we were young.
Wherever we picnicked, Ditchling Beacon, Jack and Jill windmills or Alfriston, skylarks danced and trilled above us. In warm, southerly breezes, my younger siblings, Tim, Julie and I would roam freely on the high grasslands, running around on springy chalk-flecked turf.
Then, lying on the ground where wind whipped through the tall fescues, time slowed. On my back, I’d squint up at the sky, sunbursts filtered through eyelashes. But what was that sound? A sweet, high-pitched penny whistle tune tumbled from the air. I shielded my eyes and scanned the big blue. There, a speck in space! Up, up, up it flew. Down showered the notes.
I didn’t know what bird it was then but the skylark’s joyous music always scored our happiest childhood days. Wherever we went for family escapades on the South Downs, the little songster would accompany us. Amberley, Alciston, Birling Gap and Beachy Head, it magicked the merry jingle of sunny, carefree days from on high.
We lived inland of The South Downs, a high ridge of chalk hills that run the length of England’s south east coast. The expanse of high grassland, a panoramic no man’s land, made the perfect hilltop playground. Below the steep northern escarpment we looked down on toytown villages and tiny cars; away to the south, sparkling sea.
Sometimes, when we were walking or playing, we’d disturb a skylark in the grass and it would shoot up like a firework. Up into the air on a vertical song-flight, chirruping and whistling all the way. We’d stop and watch its ascent, tipping our heads back as it lifted itself higher. Fifty metres, one hundred metres, two hundred metres, maybe more. There it would hover, a dot, broadcasting its shrill double-speed tunes over its territory.
Then, after a few minutes, the rapid, stuttering, untidy descent, like a partridge blasted from the sky, fluttering down into the grass at speed. Everything fell silent, except for the wind in the grasses.
Later, when we were older, Tim and I walked the length of the chalk ridge that had been the southern horizon of our childhood. For years we’d seen the backpackers route-marching along the South Downs Way National Trail. It was an ancient highway, 100 miles on foot from Eastbourne in the east to Winchester in the west.
“I’m up for walking it,” said Tim one evening, supping a pint of Harveys Sussex Best Bitter in our local pub, The Linden Tree in Lindfield, when he was nineteen and I was twenty-four.
So, in September 1995, in squeaky new walking boots and with borrowed backpacks we set off along the chalky-white track, one last hurrah before Tim departed for his first year at university.
For a week, we walked all day, every day. We drank ale, we laughed, we ate, we slept. One golden afternoon, after a generous pub lunch we dozed under a gorse, protected from the sun. Waking from beer-enhanced daydreams, the sweet song of a skylark rang out high above the dappled light of my ground nest, penetrating my ears and stirring something deep within me. I slid my hands behind my head, closed my eyes and tuned in to the aerial maestro. In that moment, I don’t believe I had ever felt happier.
That week, we drifted across downland and floated high above the south country, as if we ourselves were skylarks on the breeze.
Then, life changed.
Winter came, the year turned and Tim started his second term at Loughborough University. Within two days of his return after the Christmas holidays he fell into a flu-like illness. A sore throat and headache turned into a fever and a blotchy rash came up on his skin. A friend from his hall of residence was concerned enough to drive him the few hundred metres to the medical centre. Seeing the doctors’ evident concern, Tim worried what was happening to him. Panic set in.
Descending into the confusion that is a cruel symptom of the disease that had taken hold of him, he assaulted the female doctor treating him. Naked, except for underpants, he charged outside into the cold January air falling face down into the bare earth outside the university’s medical centre. There he flailed, like a mortally wounded soldier in the mud of no man’s land.
Timothy John Firkins died of bacterial meningitis in Leicester Royal Infirmary on January 16, 1996. He was nineteen years old.
Our lives, my life, changed in an instant. The shock, the numbness of grief, the sheer pointlessness of living in that first year after Tim’s death became all-pervading. Disinterested in news and the triviality of others’ problems, I gave up my cherished first job as a newspaper reporter on the Mid Sussex Times.
Turning my back on home and the South Downs, I left for the Midlands and life in a town where skylarks aren’t heard and where, for a while, my soul was without song. I didn’t know then I would miss the skylark and how, eventually, it would call me home.
It’s said the skylark is the most celebrated bird in music and literature after the nightingale.
Poets, writers and composers have been enraptured by its song. A slender brown bird larger than a sparrow but smaller than a thrush it is unremarkable in appearance except for a tufty crest raised in excitement or alarm and flashes of white on its underwings. Once commonly seen on farmland, it nests on the ground among crops and grasses, the male singing to protect its territory and attract a mate.
The phrase, ‘Up with the lark,’ was coined in 1578 by an early rising John Lyly, prompting Shakespeare to write in Cymbeline, ‘Like to the lark at break of day arising, from sullen earth sings hymns at Heaven’s gate’.
Britain’s poets and nature writers extolled the skylark: Shelley (‘blithe spirit’), Wordsworth (‘ethereal minstrel, pilgrim of the sky’) and Tennyson (‘liftest a glad heart into the skies’).
George Meredith’s 1881 poem The Lark Ascending, inspired Ralph Vaughan Williams to compose music for violin and piano of the same title. Just days after the First World War erupted in summer 1914, before the rumble of big guns in France and Belgium could be heard across the Channel in southern England, Vaugham Williams was walking on the cliffs near Margate. The notes he wrote down that day would become one of the most cherished pieces of music the world over.
The single movement begins with a violin that captures the skylark’s joyful song and rising flight. It was ground-breaking, unrestrained and communed with nature. But for some listeners there was an underlying sadness reflecting Vaughan Williams’ concern for disappearing countryside, the rural way of life and the looming war.
For the Great War poets, young men writing in the trenches, the skylark was a spirit that could uplift the soul. Celebrated South Downs writer and poet Edward Thomas, author of The South Country, wrote ‘the skylarks are far behind that sang over the down’. Thomas was killed by a shell explosion in the Battle of Arras in 1917.
Perhaps the most enduring evocation of the skylark over the battlefields comes in the opening lines of In Flanders Fields, by John McCrae:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
McCrae was a Canadian physician, poet and soldier. He wrote the poem for which he would find fame in May 1915, the day after a friend was killed in the Second Battle of Ypres. The following year, McCrae was posted to Boulonge-sur-Mer, France, to command the No.3 Canadian General Hospital, where he would remain. In January 1918 he died of illness. The cause of death: pneumonia and meningitis.
October 27, 2022: I’m sitting on the stump of a fallen ash tree at Blackcap, high above Lewes. My new backpack lays on the ground like an upturned beetle alongside walking shoes, removed to relieve my blisters. It’s 27 years since Tim and I walked this Way. The autumn sun is setting through grey-purple clouds, spotlighting the distant sea with beams of gold. Beyond, the South Downs stretch into the west, while twilight begins to creep into the Weald.
No skylarks sing. It’s late in the season and late in the day. They may already be asleep on the ground, heads tucked under their wings, sleeping soundly as Tim and I once did under a gorse bush.
Blackcap is a nature reserve of ‘unimproved’ chalk grassland, making it a rare spot. Too high and too out of the way, it was saved from the plough in the Second World War, since when eighty per cent chalk grassland has been lost. Today, just four per cent of the South Downs, a National Park since 2010, are covered by this precious habitat. Wild flowering marjoram grows here, alongside bee orchids and round-headed rampion, ‘Pride of Sussex’. This grassy miniature forest attracts 29 species of butterfly, including the chalk hill blue.
So much has been lost in the century since the Great War. In the pursuit of progress, we have marginalised nature and, as Vaughan Williams feared, built over our countryside and lost touch with the rural way of life. The perennial expansion of the suburbs and a century of intensive farming has squeezed nature into the smallest spaces. ‘Beauty spots’.
While skylarks at Blackcap are blessed with the perfect habitat for ground nesting (grasses and crops of 20-50cm height are what they seek), the species remains in mortal decline, sixty per cent lost since the 1960s. The switch from to spring to autumn crop sowing and the loss of over-winter stubble has had a dramatic impact on the availability of nesting sites. While agriculture once made the skylark a common farmland bird, it has become the cause of its descent. It is on the conservation red list for UK birds.
Now, a new threat looms, within sight of where I’m sat. Below Blackcap’s steep north escarpment, a sweep of farmland opens into the Weald. This is disputed land. Eton College, the elite private school at Windsor that has educated 20 British Prime Ministers, including Boris Johnson, owns the land and there are plans to build a new town of more than 3,000 homes. Between the villages of Plumpton and South Chailey, where there are fields, hedges, copses, lanes and where skylarks nest, one of Britain’s wealthiest schools, which benefits from charitable status, wishes to create a new suburb.
What lesson, I wonder, is it trying to teach its wealthy pupils and future political leaders? That cash conquers all? That it is okay to say and not do, as it is does with its greenwashed sustainability PR? That there is no cost to nature? How many field trips have Eton students made to East Chiltington to see what devastation will be wreaked at the foot of the Downs to pay for ‘the advancement of education’?
Distant, defiant, Eton’s masterplan shows development that would butt up to the border of the National Park and an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It would change the landscape irrevocably, the new town’s street lights diminishing the South Downs National Park’s status as the newest International Dark Sky Reserve. The community has gathered together to fight the proposals as part of a campaign, Don’t Urbanise the Downs.
My sister Julie lives nearby. Her home is surrounded by fields and ancient oaks where nightingales still sing their rich, exotic serenades; the natural world’s opera singers. Like Glyndebourne Opera House, just down the road, people come from London and pay to listen to nightingales, such is their rarity now.
Julie’s daughter Primrose, aged nine, wrote a letter to the then Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, whose sons attended Eton, asking him to help stop the development. Her letter made front page news in the Sussex Express. She wrote, “Dear Prince Charles, we have been thinking about the environment and nature. Eton College is trying to build 3,000 houses on the South Downs and we would like your help. Most people in our community are trying to stop them because just think how crowded Lewes, Plumpton and Chailey will be! Our little community will be ruined.”
I sit looking at the land under threat, contemplating the simple, incisive words of my niece. I used to write the front page news in Sussex, but our family’s youngest generation is now making the news. “Uncle Gary is proud of you, Primrose,” I think to myself. “And Uncle Tim would be proud, too.”
I’m coming towards the end of a week’s trekking on the South Downs Way, the first time I have walked the entire trail in more than 25 years. This time, I am walking west to east, returning to the hills of home. And I am walking alone, a personal pilgrimage to remember Tim and the faded memories of our time together.
Alone, but not lonely. At times, I have felt Tim’s presence alongside me. I have said his name aloud and, for the first time in years, cried over him, picturing him walking out of the photographs that are among my last tangible memories. And I have been accompanied by the skylark along the way, its tune both joyful, reminding me of our childhood freedom, but also of Vaughan Williams’ sorrowful undertones, the sense of loss echoing down the decades.
While I still live in the Midlands, I moved from town to country five years ago. I had felt numbed by life in the suburbs, disconnected from the countryside. But moving to Rutland’s limestone hills and ridges, with calcareous fields and pasture reminiscent of south country downland, my feet and my life found purpose again. And walking the fields, footpaths and bridleways around my village, I heard a sound long absent from my ears and my soul, skylark song.
Walking along to those merry, high-fluting tunes on fair weather days, my mind returned to those happy times as children, playing on top of the Downs, Tim, Julie and I. I knew then I needed to return to the South Downs, to walk the Way again, to remember Tim and rediscover all that really matters. It was as if I was being called home.
This evening on Blackcap, as the late October sun fades, I think of Tim and the quiet country cemetery where he rests. I put on my walking shoes and pick up my backpack. The skylark’s song has been sung and peace settles over the Downs.
• In Memory of Tim Firkins, 1976-1996
Thank you for reading. Should you be interested, I wrote a daily blog with many photographs of my October 2022 walk on Instagram, @garyfirkins
This is so beautiful Gary. I walked down the aisle to the Lark Ascending :)
Thank you Gary, this beautiful piece helped me remember Tim afresh and also made me cry. I have often stood in Mum and Dad's kitchen, entranced by that photo of Tim looking out across the South Downs, and thought of him. Thanks for sharing.