A Countryman’s Summer Notebook 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

“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

“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

“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

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