Sunlight

Sunlight blesses the old churchyard. The road next to the ancient church of St Mary Magdalene is unusually silent. Closed – for bridge reconstruction. The wind, a cold, autumnal wind, is the dominant sound in the landscape now. No rush hour traffic escapes the strictly-worded ‘Road Ahead Closed’ signs straddling the tarmac. No pedestrians pass by on the pavement, either. I am alone, and welcome it.

The wind lifts and plays through the foliage of one mature, lofty ash tree with a friendly-seeming particularity. It crisps itself through the tinselly leaves of a silver birch, a dwarf in comparison, as are most of the other trees in the churchyard – the lime, the yews, the hawthorn and even the oak. Just glimpsed behind a gable at one end of the church are the branches of the only other tall tree here, another species of birch, whose leaves have now turned to a paper-dry yellow-gold. The uppermost boughs of both this tree and the ash are persuaded by the wind into the motions of what looks like a kind of ongoing greeting to one another, each canopy leaning toward the other, as if each needed constant reassurance of the other’s presence. A cool, measured sunlight falls on the rabbit-cropped turf of the graveyard, a light without physical warmth, but endowing the kind of spirit-lifting brightness that I feel I need at the moment. There is illness in the family. We have ‘housing issues’ and uncertainty about where we will live in the future. I needed to sit somewhere and think, to contemplate, and this was the first place I came across when I set out from home a short time ago. In between the patterns of the wind’s light though exuberant currents, other sounds slip in. The ululation of a siren, from a nearby busy A-road. The contact calls of hidden birds – a blue tit, a goldfinch. The slow, noisy eruption of a woodpigeon trying to take flight through some obstacle of foliage. The ‘sprawk’ call of a moorhen, from some typically covert location.

Beyond the trees that fringe the churchyard, beyond the trees inside it, beyond the untrimmed, fruitful hedge, the Chilterns form an undulating spine of forested hills. Regularly, for the last fourteen years I have looked out upon the profile of these familiar elevations, noticing how their variations in height, tree cover or grassland features change with the view-point. This looking, and the hills’ seemingly eternal presence, feels like a comforting thing. The course of the river Thame passes close to the churchyard, but long gone are the summer’s swifts – and I think now the swallows too – who hawked for insects around it’s waters. The swifts high in the air, and the swallows low, minutely skimming the meniscus to pick out insects from the clouds of gnats who helped to feed the birds and their broods throughout the summer. I miss their presence. I feel rather hopeless – about our family’s ‘prospects’ - but I can sense too some subtle cleansing effect of this negative mind-set quietly taking place as I sit here on this ageing, lichened wooden bench, enveloped by the refreshing coldness of the wind and the illumination of the early evening sunshine. This skin-stinging easterly makes me feel alive again in a way I haven’t for a while, and open to the possibility that in our lives there is still the potential for new ‘possibilities’, no matter what I am thinking right now.

I decide to walk home along a different route, cutting through the field next to the church. Something, some small locus of alternative thought, opens. Though the ‘fizz’ of foraging swallows is a sound that won’t be heard here again until next spring, now here’s a new thing instead. A flock of pied wagtails, whirling around a patch of sky and landing and departing repeatedly from the branches of a thicket of riverside willows, fills the sky with it’s garrulous, voluble collective. Their calls, a sparky, twittering dialect accompanied by undulating flights and constant tail-flicking, seem like vocalised electrical impulses working through a complex circuitry of birds. Each bird plays it’s own part in the group dynamic of this energetic dusk ritual. It is not something I have seen in the village before, and it is unexpected; exciting.