south east – Mick Canning

I tested one of the few apples on our tree in the middle of the month to see how ripe it was, and it came away from the branch easily. We shouldn’t be picking apples in mid-August, surely? But it’s a poor year, too. There are barely a dozen apples on the tree, whereas last year we must have had at least five times as many. And our crab apple, usually weighed down with fruit which we leave in situ for the birds over winter, is almost equally bare. Our neighbour’s Rowan tree looks beautiful, although Rowan trees always do, but it definitely has fewer berries on it than usual. Our Hazel tree also seems to have far fewer nuts than last year.

And in the wild?

Bit of a mixed bag, really. Some of the hazel trees near us are fairly heaving with nuts, while others have very few. The oaks have a good crop of acorns, but nothing on last year when the woodland floor was covered an inch or two deep. But last year was a spectacularly good mast year. This year the hawthorns have a decent amount of berries but nothing special, much like the elders, while the hollies seem to be loading up with a whole mass of them. That, at least, is the picture in my little corner of South East England. Last winter was quite mild. But even should we have a harsh winter this year, the outlook for wildlife seems not too bad from the nuts and berries perspective.

These things do often seem to follow a cycle of alternate years, although I don’t know why that should be. I had thought the apple blossom was a little late this year, but I really don’t know whether that’s just my imagination.

On Tuesday evening I went for a short walk. It had been a hot day and earlier I had seen three tiger moths, which was rather a treat. By the time I left the house, though, a little before eight, the air was cool, the birdsong seemed a little louder than usual, and there was a magical light in the sky as the sun disappeared below the horizon. The church clock struck eight as it did so. In the woods, there were now patches of sudden night where the trees grew close together, through which the path could be seen like a pale wisp of misty light. By the time the church clock chimed the quarter hour it was quite dark, although patches of daylight still showed in the clearings. Soon there was so little light I headed out of the woods and homeward.

A few minutes before half past, a mixed flock of jackdaws and rooks flew over, the jackdaws chuckling and gossiping noisily as usual as they headed east towards their gathering place on the edge of the town. There, they will be joined by other flocks and once all are there, just before dark, they will all fly off together to their night’s roost.

Although it is still August, the air already seems to have an autumnal feel to it.

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For anyone who loves the English South Downs – and whodunnits – this book makes an interesting read.

On the one hand, it is a fairly average 1930’s detective murder mystery, although I have certainly read much worse, but on the other it provides some marvellous insights into the South Downs in the area specifically around Chanctonbury Ring in that time, which is really what took my interest.

Personally, I prefer murder mysteries involving ‘normal’ people, rather than the typical country house full of assorted Colonels and ladies and royalty and such-like, so popular at the time – other than the thought of bumping off the Upper Classes, of course! But this book delivers in that it is set on a downland farm, where the farmer goes missing, believed murdered. It even has, as a cover, an adaptation of one of the fabulous Leslie Carr railway posters of the 1930’s – what’s not to like?

The introduction mentions its ‘sense of place’, and the writing seems to me especially good at conveying an accurate feel of the landscape. One thing that comes over very strongly is the emptiness of the countryside at that time. The Downs have been sparsely inhabited since Roman times; before then, much of the population chose to live on the higher, drier, lands of the chalklands of South and South East England, away from the forested and frequently marshy lower areas where travel was difficult and clearance very hard work. After the arrival of the Romans, however, all this changed, and since then the chalklands have been left largely to a small population living mainly by farming sheep.

We now have many people visiting for leisure purposes and on fine days popular routes such as the walk to Birling Gap from Eastbourne (or from convenient car parks much closer!) may easily see hundreds of visitors striding along the footpaths and hanging off the edge of the cliffs taking selfies (other stupid ways to kill oneself are available). On the same day, though, nearby footpaths may see no visitors at all. It is still a sparsely populated area.

John Bude evokes this sense of emptiness well. His descriptions of the roads and paths on and around the area really allow the reader to feel this. His characters walk the lanes and roads of the downs frequently without meeting anyone else on their journeys. Farms and houses are ‘isolated’, and even at a time when most people would travel by public transport to cover any distance, the population is so small that when questioned by the detective on the case, a bus conductor can remember who was on his bus several weeks before.

There are four lime kilns near Washington, on the edge of the area described in the story, which I suspect were the inspiration for the lime kiln featured on the farm in the book. No spoilers, but you might well guess their relevance to a murder mystery.

But it is the descriptions of the roads and paths that particularly take my interest, roads and paths virtually empty of footfall or traffic even during the day, emphasising how lightly populated the area was, and still is today, to a degree. Other than popular footpaths such as the long distance South Downs Way, and those footpaths running between popular tourist spots, it is still easy to find solitude in this quiet area of the otherwise heavily populated South East England.