The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (18 page)

But the solstice . . . I can only say that, as I move towards the last part of my life, its arrival fills me with joy (even if I don’t trek out to Stonehenge), in the way I tried at the outset to define joy in the natural world: a sudden intense love stemming from an apprehension that there is something extraordinary and exceptional about nature as a whole. I can think of nothing more extraordinary and exceptional than the annual rebirth of the world; and in fact, there are a number of specific markers of the rebirth, of the earth’s reawakening after winter, dates in the natural calendar if you like, which for me are occasions of joy almost as much as the solstice is, and which I celebrate in my heart.

The first of them is the appearance of snowdrops. Small white lilies which sprout up and flower in midwinter, even in the bitter cold –
perce-neiges
, snow-piercers, they’re aptly called in French – would be notable anyway, but I’ve long been equally fascinated by snowdrops for their cultural resonance. They are closely associated with a major feast of the Christian church which follows Christmas, although while the world and his wife
cannot remain ignorant of 25 December, indeed, cannot get out of the way of the Yuletide juggernaut, I doubt if one person in a thousand could tell you today what Candlemas is.

Celebrated on 2 February, it marks the purification, under Jewish religious law, of the mother of Christ, forty days after his birth. (It also commemorates the presentation of the infant Jesus in the temple.) But Candlemas long meant something else as well, in practical terms, especially in the Middle Ages: it was the day when everyone in the parish brought their candles to church to be blessed by the priest. This was so that they could become – that splendid word – apotropaic, that is, they could ward off evil spirits; and after a procession, and the blessing, the candles were all lit and set before the statue of the Virgin Mary. Imagine: on a typically murky February day, in a medieval church that was gloomy anyway, this must have provided a spectacle of brightness that left the deeply pious onlookers spellbound; it must have been the brightest moment, quite literally, of the whole year. (You can get a feel for it if you visit Chartres, and come across the luminous flickering throng of candles in front of the Virgin’s statue in one of the cathedral’s darker corners.)

But another source of brightness was also closely associated with Candlemas, and that was the snowdrops, for they were the flowers of the feast. It is easy to see how they were perfect for it, flawless symbols of purity that they are. Once called Candlemas bells, it is not hard to imagine what pleasure must have been taken in gathering them, or in merely having them growing by the church, on the day itself; and even now, although you can find great swathes of snowdrops in woodlands or along river valley floors, especially in the West Country – stirring sights, whole sheets of blooms turning the ground white in all directions, nature with all its flags flying – many of our best displays are still associated with the old faith, clustering around churchyards and ancient religious foundations, ruined abbeys and
priories, where hundreds of years ago they were planted with Candlemas in mind.

All of this has greatly drawn me to them, yet even more than their delicate beauty, more than the traditions which cluster around them, I am most taken with the timing of their appearance, with their place at the start of the calendar – above all, with the first sight of them in any given winter. I can remember, for example, a walk with my children, a few years ago, through a wood on an icy late January day, and the path through the bare trees took a turn and suddenly there they were, the first of them, a small clump poking through the leaf litter, a small splash of brilliant white on the woodland floor’s dull brown canvas, and I smiled at once, as if suddenly meeting an old friend:
Hi, how are you?
I was filled with emotion; I was filled with joy, I would say now. I wasn’t quite sure then why the feeling was so strong, but that evening I sat down and worked it out: here was the earth, still firmly under the lock and key of winter; here was I, huddled inside my coat, adjusted to the cold hard season as if it would last for ever; and here were they, the first visible sign of something else. They were the unexpected but undeniable notice that the warm days would come again, and I realised what it was that made me smile: here against the dead tones of the winter woodland floor was Hope, suddenly and unmistakably manifest in white.

Snowdrops are singular. They alone are the flaunters of this optimism, which can seem gloriously defiant, in the heart of the time when the earth is anaesthetised and numb. But as the world starts to stir again, to wake, to warm and to open, there are an increasing number of signals of spring, for some of which my feeling is so intense that I would readily describe it as joy. One is the appearance of the first butterfly, especially if – as is often the case in Britain – that butterfly is a brimstone (which, being bright yellow, the colour of butter in fact, is perhaps the origin of the
butterfly
term – or perhaps not . . . nobody really
knows). This event has on occasion had a peculiar effect on me: it has produced an elation so powerful that I have found myself longing for an unconventional way to account for it, to do it justice, in the conscious knowledge that what is available – science – is inadequate for the task.

It has been well said, that science gives us knowledge but takes away meaning. Certainly, since it began to explain the world in rational terms in the seventeenth century, it has subverted or done away with many parts of our imagination, and there are numerous non-rational ways of looking at the world, once widespread, once resonant traditional beliefs, which we have now ceased to engage with, such as alchemy, or magic, or the power of curses, or the story of Adam and Eve. All of these provided fertile ground for the imagination to flourish, and with their inevitable suppression I think – as with the conquest of the moon, with Neil Armstrong and his great fat boot – that something has been lost.

One day, I found myself wishing that one in particular was still available to us, and that was the idea of spirits. By that I mean disembodied beings, supernatural entities able to speed through the world and appear and disappear at will, some malevolent maybe, some benign, and if you ask me to give you an example, I have one ready to hand: Shakespeare’s Ariel, attendant spirit of
The Tempest
.

Ariel, you may remember, is bound to serve Prospero, the magician-duke who has been deprived of his dukedom of Milan by his evil brother and exiled, with his young daughter, to a desert island. Ariel flies hither and thither doing Prospero’s bidding – he whips up the storm which brings all the characters together so that the story can be resolved – but he is also desperate for his freedom, which in the end Prospero reluctantly grants him.

Ethereal, insubstantial, even androgynous (I’m saying ‘him’ for the sake of convenience), unbound by gravity, unburdened by
human clay, Ariel is a creation who brings to life the ephemeral longing in us to be lighter than air. But
The Tempest
being what it is, there is more to him than a pet sprite, especially if we see the story of Shakespeare’s last play, as most of us do, as autobiographical: Prospero giving up his magic at the end, is Shakespeare saying farewell to art. In this reading, it is not hard to see the attendant spirit the magician is so reluctant to set free as Shakespeare’s own imagination, to which, as old age approaches, he has to say goodbye. His great gift had roamed the world at his bidding, creating storms of his own, and unforgettable characters and unforgettable poetry, but now, willy-nilly, he has to say farewell to it and go and be an ordinary citizen – albeit the wealthiest – living in a small market town in Warwickshire and waiting for death (it took four years to come).

That Shakespeare could choose a spirit, a ‘tricksy spirit’ to represent his own extraordinary, soaring, wandering gift, creating such a dazzling metaphor, was singularly fortunate, and due to the fact that science had not yet consigned such beings to the dustbin of superstition; but to us, such choices are not open. For us, spirits are over and done with, alas, and we cannot compare anything to them; and one spring, I spent several days thinking of this with regret, as I struggled to find some way of expressing my jubilation at seeing, on a sunny Sunday morning in March, the first butterfly of the year.

For it was indeed a brimstone, a bright yellow brimstone. Using science, and rationality, I could have told you quite a lot about it: that it was an arthropod, and among the arthropods, it was an insect; that it belonged to the insect order Lepidoptera, and in that, to the butterfly family Pieridae, the whites; that its scientific name was
Gonepteryx rhamni
; that it had overwintered as an adult, one of only five British butterfly species to do so (the other fifty-three pass the winter variously as eggs or caterpillars or pupae); that in its caterpillar stage it had fed on the leaves of buckthorn or alder buckthorn; and that it had
hibernated disguised as a leaf, probably in an ivy clump, until the first warm day woke it up.

But that didn’t remotely get it. What I saw electrified me instantly; it was the thrilling sign of the turning year, not just of the warm times coming again but of the great rebirth of everything, the great unstoppable renewal, and the brilliance of its colour seemed to proclaim the magnitude of the change it was signalling. It was like a piece of sunlight that had been loosed from the sun’s rays and was free to wander, announcing the spring, and I realised that science, which has now given us so much knowledge about such organisms, did not have any way of conveying its meaning at that moment, at least to me.

For if I say to you, I saw an insect, which is strictly true, what will that tell you? Nothing. The categorisation, which conveys the knowledge, immediately begins to flatten the meaning. But if I say to you, I saw a spirit, which is what it felt like, then at once we are in different territory, we are in the territory of the imagination, and we begin to approach the wonder of the event, and the joy of it: that on a Sunday morning in March, in a mundane suburban street in Surrey, I saw the spirit of the spring.

•

Part of the allure of the first brimstone, and of the first snow-drops (and of the winter solstice, for that matter), has been that their coming is annually awaited, and the response is accordingly intensified; but there have been one or two isolated or unexpected events, equally marking the year’s rebirth, which have also been exceptional experiences and have produced in me an elation I would readily call joy.

One was to witness mad March hares. For at least five
hundred years, ‘mad as a March hare’ has been a commonly used simile in English, referring to the excited behaviour of the brown hare in the fields as the breeding season arrives, which – legend has it – is so energised as to seem unhinged. Lewis Carroll reinforced the notion by giving the March hare literary identity in
Alice in Wonderland
, and now it is a character and a concept everyone is familiar with without ever glimpsing the creature in real life. Or hardly ever. The March version of it, I mean.

I had seen many hares and had always been greatly taken with them (and glad of them in a country hardly over-endowed with characterful wild mammals). I think it’s partly because we have something to compare them to instantly in our minds, which is the rabbit; we encounter rabbits, and become familiar with them, as young children, long before we ever meet up with their hare cousins, and when we do, the differences are apparent at once: hares are much
bigger
, and we have to readjust the rabbit template squatting in our brains. Hares’ towering ears and expandable hind legs seem enormous by comparison, as do their bulging amber eyes, and the body is leaner and rangier than the rabbit’s: they’re all muscle. Built to run. They seem wilder, too, like adventurers compared to rabbits, which seem like stay-at-homes; yes, I read
Watership Down
just like you did, and briefly thought there might be drama in rabbit society, but ultimately, I know you shouldn’t really say this, but don’t you think that rabbits are just a teeny bit
boring
? When did any rabbit ever do anything interesting?

Nothing boring about your hare. Not only a dashing wild rover of an animal, but also a hint of the supernatural, with any number of magic legends clustering about the beast, not least that hares were actually witches in disguise – something I first came across when I began to read Walter de la Mare and his children’s poems, in my late teens:

In the black furrow of a field

I saw an old witch-hare this night;

And she cocked a lissome ear,

And she eyed the moon so bright,

And she nibbled o’ the green;

And I whispered ‘Whsst! witch-hare’,

Away like a ghostie o’er the field

She fled, and left the moonlight there.

But for all that, and for the great pleasure I took in seeing hares, throughout my life, I had never actually witnessed the behaviour that gave rise to the legend, that in March they were mad – above all, the ‘boxing’, when they rise on their hind legs and square up to each other like prizefighters in a ring. I thought of it sometimes; it felt like a notable gap in my experience. So when, one year, circumstances arose in which I was offered the chance to go out with a regular and expert hare-watcher, in March, I jumped at the chance.

Gill Turner was a friendly woman in her early sixties living in Hertfordshire, about twenty-five miles north of central London, and she had been watching, recording, and photographing hares ever since a chance close encounter with an animal nearly two decades earlier had sparked her interest. She was devoted to them. There were hares in her own area, but to show them to me at their best, she took me another twenty miles north to where the great arable plains of eastern England were beginning, the vast hedgeless fields, the ‘wheat tundra’. There she had made friends with a farmer who, unusually, liked his hares too much to shoot them, and so they were flourishing on his land; but because there was a significant threat to the animals from men illegally engaged in coursing – the competitive pursuit of hares with dogs, usually pairs of greyhounds or lurchers – she was keen for me to give nothing away about the location. ‘It can be pretty grim,’ she said. ‘They come from all over the country
to do it. If he [the farmer] calls the police, they [the coursers] dump the dead hares on his doorstep.’