Adrian Bell > Quotes

“Suddenly a little wind stirred the trees: it shivered the fringed fingers of the yews where goldfinches were perching and pecking: then it smacked against the half-open window and the old loose frames muttered in their grooves. A current of air swept through the bedroom, cool from under a grey sky, almost cold. It was refreshing and smelt of freedom. If rocks were alive and breathed, they would exhale just that air, smelling of moss and running water. My bedside book seemed redundant suddenly; the morning's paper even more so. I banished the printed word, lay back and remembered . . .”
― Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Summer Notebook

“March' is a sharp word, brusque and bracing, like its month. 'January', "February'; they meander like rivers; 'April' is like the sound of raindrops on the windowpane; but 'March' is a gust of wind flinging grit.”
― Adrian Bell, A Countryman's Spring Notebook

“There we were last summer, having a picnic in a sylvan setting. Birds were singing, the atmosphere was full of soft colours; there were children in gay cotton frocks, their laughter filled the air. Elders sat in a kind of Elysian abstraction. I remember it so well. I remember a certain old lady who sat with her back against a tree, her profile to me. I sat desultorily conversing but gazing at that face which was gazing at her grandchildren. And there came to me out of that old face the face of the young woman she had been. I saw that she had been beautiful, bright and humorous - and it was all there still as she watched her grandchildren. Old age was merely a veil which a moment of vision could snatch off.”
― Adrian Bell, A Countryman's Spring Notebook

“Old leaves are galloping over the new grass.”
― Adrian Bell, A Countryman's Spring Notebook

“There was wonder in that insubstantial pointer; it gave me news that no clockwork could do. Time was not a fixed series of moments, it said, but something moving like a flower that grows, growing perhaps even like a flower; or traveling the minutes like the spokes of a shadowy wheel turning once a day, and perhaps going somewhere or somewhen, carrying me along with it”
― Adrian Bell, A Countryman's Spring Notebook

“I have carted mangolds many times since then, and it is an occasion that always marks for me the beginning of winter. I recall those twilights, the gaunt yet tender-coloured sky, the still air, pheasants calling in the distance, or a hunting-horn sounding for home. The last of summer's wealth is housed, and ahead lies frost and early dark, shooting, hunting, forelight; ploughing and cross-ploughing, the breaking of ice for the creatures' drink, the carting of straw for their warmth.”
― Adrian Bell, Corduroy

“He sings till the cherries begin to colour,' he said as we listened to the nightingale.”
― Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Summer Notebook

“How often we have to thank the sense of beauty of some former country worker for sparing a sapling when cutting a hedge or taking a slip of some doomed tree and setting it 'quick i' the earth' to bloom for those who have come after.”
― Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Summer Notebook

“She could no more escape the conviction that rhubarb was a herb of all the virtues than the modern generation can avoid the illusion that Lady Chatterley's Lover is great literature.”
― Adrian Bell, A Countryman's Spring Notebook

“The last footfall dies into silence. The stillness tingles with the aftermath of noise. All around stand the new cornstacks, unfamiliar shadows, ramparts thrown up suddenly round the yard. An owl detaches itself silently from the darkness of a beam, swoops down into the moonlight and away, now white against a shadow, now black against the moon. A mouse scuttles somewhere in the straw. The gaunt shape of a binder stands in the corner, angular as a skeleton under its cloth. Its work is over until next year.”
― Adrian Bell, Corduroy

“A very old wisteria rose snaking over an arbour. Nearby were tiny roses on a wall, mere tufty buttons that smelled of one's childhood in a horse-pace village. Thin bricks were set on edge around a bed of irises, bricks which had been stamped on by Tudor horses, when they had formed the floor of the old stables. Traces of them could be seen also in the path in the churchyard, like the backs of small old books packed in a bookshelf.”
― Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Summer Notebook

“This imaginary colour film of the past would need to have a soundtrack too, which would record the crunch and crackle of iron tyres on a macadam road, the sudden hush as the wagon turned off into a field, leaving just the creak of the wooden framework, and the clack of the hubs against the axletrees, or the swish of hooves and wheels through stubble. It would record also the voice of the driver as he spoke to the horses, a murmur of words which we should not recognize as words today, an earthy form of plainsong, as he guided the team over ruts, humps and hollows, through the twists and turns of the slow trek from field to barn.”
― Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook

“The sun slants to the horizon early. There is a sense of the world turning a shoulder away from the sun. Twilight comes quickly. Another year is passing away. At first the ground of the stubble is hard underfoot. The corn’s roots sucked its moisture. Showers fall. Day by day the stubble-walker feels a softening of the surface he treads. Latterly it is like walking on a pile carpet. As it softens, the day when the plough will enter it draws nearer. These pleasant strolls are doomed. A man may have made a little daily route for himself, such is habit. At first he goes this way one day, another way the next – across the middle of a stubble today, yesterday along by that hedge, tomorrow beside the ash trees. Yet in a week or so he comes to take a favourite route at a favourite hour. Evening is best. There is half an hour of twilight. The sun, fallen into a welter of clouds, scatters fire into the tree-tops. The glow, at setting out too bright to look on, swiftly fades to cool colours. Watching the sky, dwelling on fat woods, a man can let his feet stray; no path to miss, no clod to stumble over. Called back to earth by a whirr of wings or the swish of a surprised rabbit, he can note speedwell and charlock, pluck a leaf of wild mint and smell it, mixed with an inhalation of wood smoke from afar.”
― Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook

“It was a day when, if a man travels, he cannot go slowly enough. At anything faster than a foot pace a man seems to lose life as he goes, on a day like this. So quick and prodigal is nature now. It would make of man a pilgrim. Not only daffodils and the wild arums sought notice, but the blue bird's eye tiny in the grass, the pink and intricate ground-ivy flower. In a cleared coppice perfect bright ovals of severance shone on the hazel butts, and told of expert work with a sharp tool.”
― Adrian Bell, A Countryman's Spring Notebook

“How long had his widow lived on here, beside the silent forge, with the grass growing up against the closed double doors, and six-feet-tall mallows drowning the hen-run, the potato-plot, the drying-ground? Piles of washing there must have been in the old days - husbands toiling with horses in smoke, children in and out of dikes and marshes. I imagined her coming through the tall grass of the orchard, with an apronful of windfalls, petals and pollen, and a wispy moth stuck to her skirt.”
― Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Summer Notebook

“And yet, what are the true joys of life? By what does a man in all sincerity measure his standard of living? For myself, I would say that the good life is a small house, a cottage, and in that cottage a hearth that will burn wood, and a lamp or two and a shelf of books.”
― Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook

“Outside, the moon is up - the harvest moon over harvest fields. It casts a sheen upon the empty stubbles, the bare rounding slopes, so altered from the close-crowded landscape of standing corn. It has glimmering secrets among the trees, and pierces into every entanglement of foliage, and lays faint shadows across the paths. Each finds a ghost of himself beside him on the ground. An elusive radiance haunts the country; the distances have a sense of shining mist. The men move homeward from the field; the last load creaking up the hill behind them, the hoofs of horses thudding, their breath sounding short. Peace comes, a vision in the fairy armour of moonlight, the peace of 'man goeth forth unto his work until the evening.”
― Adrian Bell, Corduroy

“So those three milking under the trees seemed actually present to me for an hour. As Giles 'tugged' (how his polite diction slips from him when he gets down to the job) he would see what I saw, gazing up into that elm; gleams of near-crimson lighting the budding tips of the boughs, boughs that go gesturing up mightily form the trunk, then curve over and hang down delicately. For the eye dwells on a thing as one milks, a bit of bruised concrete, a big spider in a cobweb up in the cowhouse roof; I can see them yet. To look up into such a maze of boughs day by day, and see the bare wood bursting open with new life: wine-dark buds, then the first green, till later he sat under a roof of the small elm leaves scattering coin-like shadows all around him, such would have been Giles's lot.”
― Adrian Bell, A Countryman's Spring Notebook

“The morning sun drew up the moisture and made the country smell of earth. I passed an ancient elm half in sun, half in shadow. Its knots looked like gargoyles and its bark like dried lava. But the limbs were covered with ivy. The bunched ivy buds, like tiny drumsticks, were some of them smooth, others bristling with flower. It was the hum which drew my attention to the tree. Then I saw the bees, their wings filmy as they flew in through the sunlit leaves. The sun shimmered on the outlines of their tawny bodies as they pulsated, taking the last nectar of the year. There was a sudden flicker of red where an admiral butterfly also partook of the feast. Flies were darting about, but more aimlessly. They seemed to have nothing to do but dance their last sunny hours away in a frenzy. But the bees were hard at work getting provisions of which they are very short after the wet summer.”
― Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook