The warmth has descended. Hover flies hang in the air like drones, their wings a blur beside their tiny bodies. They fly sideways in sudden bursts appearing and disappearing from the pools of light. Already there is a litter of crisp dead leaves across the path. The smell of the fir trees in the garden at May Tree House reminds me of being a boy aged 4 or 5 playing in my grandparents’ garden at Rose Cottage a few doors down. Riding mum’s old trike, hiding a cowboy’s revolver with ‘The Cisco Kid’ written along the barrel, playing on the olive green painted swing.
Isn’t it funny how certain memories are imprinted so strongly on our minds while so many more are lost?
I can feel the heat on my skin and the welcome coolness under the trees across the path. It seems hardly any time ago that I was here in the silent mist. And then again when the daffodils clustered along the roadside and path. Every year summer surprises me in the extent it transforms the near world.
Pigeons are cooing lazily. The path is cracked from the warmth. The tennis courts look unplayed on as always, the Wiltown House court’s net sagging forlornly in the middle.
I meet Mike by the back gate into Windmill Cottage. As we talk he bends automatically with secateurs to prune the ends off a tuft or head that is sticking out of the hedge in the same way barbers talk and snip simultaneously.
He tells me he’s been gardening in this garden for thirty years since “Mrs Lang first enquired about me.”He’d had a herd of cows which he would look after and milk but it became too complicated with all the checks and so on that had to be made on the cows. “So I decided I would do some gardening.” He pronounces gardening with a long “aaah” sound that goes down in tone, his voice quiet and soft and deliberate. An instantly recognisable Somerset accent.
He also used to rear pheasants for Anthony, Jane’s husband. He is from Hambridge, a mile from here but his uncle’s father was from Curry and was a sparmaker – spars being the thin bits of wood that staple the thatch down on thatched roofs.
He has gardened for some of the great and the good of the local area including a paper magnate, a retired ambassador and the boss of the local estate agents. However now he only does for those people he first started with. I think he is 85 (I’m sure he said he retired from dairy farming when he was 55).
When I arrive in the field on the other side of the house he is washing his arms with water from the hose before he carries on with his work. When I first bumped into him I notice he had cuts up his arms one with a plaster over that wasn’t sticking. He must have been pruning roses.
They are everywhere. Pale pink ones all over the wall of the old windmill base that gives the cottage its name. Large pink ones – a tone darker – those wonderful petals neatly folded into one another their centres brighter than the petals on the outside smothering the end wall of the barn. Then rich crimson ones rising vertically like a bouquet at the gable end of the barn. They would make a good buttonhole for a jazz singer.
At the Furlong Lane meadow that looks down to the cricket pitch time has moved on. The chestnuts have lost their great white and pink candles. Their leaves are blotchy with brown spots. The buttercups have also gone on – their bright yellow lights put out. And the ewes and lambs have disappeared. And summer strides on.
The Slow Walker 