January beginnings: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,…" (Charles Dickens)

January:  This  month is named after Janus, the two-headed  Roman god who looks both ways, to the past and to the future.  So too do novelists, and I will mark each new month of 2019 not with famous first lines, but with  opening paragraphs, chosen almost randomly, from a wide range of authors.
Wishing you all a Happy New Year.

Spring Woodland,  Ivon Hitchen  © the artist's estate    Manchester City Art Gallery

"About a mile to the north of the village of Rapstone there was an area of mixed woodland and uncultivated chalk downs.  The woods included some beech, birch, field maple and yew.  The grassland, owing to the centuries of peace it had enjoyed from the depredations of farmers and builders, was rich in plant and insect life.  The violet hellebore and the bird's-nest orchid did well there and gentians and wild thyme proliferated. The Duke of Burgundy's fritillary and the Chalkhill blue butterflies were to be seen, as were the trapdoor spider, fallow and muntjac deer, badgers, foxes, adders and slow-worms.  At the foot of the hill there was a stream said to be haunted by two kingfishers, although their nesting place had never been found.

One afternoon in April a Volvo stopped on the road by the stream." 

So begins the battle for Rapstone Woods, between the Society for  Countryside,  Rural and Arboreal  Protection (SCRAP) and  the department for Housing, Ecological Affairs and Planning (HEAP), and the Minister, Leslie Titmuss MP. is caught in the crossfire.

Quotation from John Mortimer's 1998 comic novel, Titmuss Regained, part of his Paradise trilogy.

Images for a wet April

April, 2002  Wilhelmina Barns-Graham 

Courtesy the Barns-Graham Charitable Trust

Here are some poems from a gentler age to console us during this endless wet, grey April,  beginning with Thomas Hardy's counterpoint second verse to his Maytime "This is the weather the cuckoo likes" .

"This is the weather the shepherd shuns
And so do I,
When beeches drip in browns and duns,
And thresh and ply;
And hill-hid tides throb, throe on throe,
And meadow rivulets overflow,
And drops on gate bars hang in a row,
And rooks in families homeward go,
And so do I."

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Budding elms, Mayfield, April 1901   Sarah Paxton Ball Dodson 1847-1906

© Manchester City Art Gallery

If Hardy does not lift the spirits a little, Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Inversnaid" is a great poem to recite to vent frustration:

"This darksome burn, horseback brown
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, fell frowning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew,
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet."

Inversnaid  G. M. Hopkins  1876-1889


And writers and artists travelling in distant countries dream of English springs:

Taj Mahal from the Fort,  April 1878,    Marianne North, botanical artist

On loan to the British Library from Kew Botanical Gardens

"Oh shall I never, never be home again?
Meadows of England shining in the rain
Spread wide your daisied lawns: your ramparts green
With briar fortify, with blossoms screen
Till my far morning - and O streams that slow
And pure and deep through plains and playlands go,
For me your love and all your kingcups store,
And - dark militia of a southern shore,
Old fragrant friends - preserve me the last lines
Of that long saga which you sung me, pines,
When, lonely boy, beneath the chosen tree,
I listened, with my eyes upon the sea.
Brumana   James Elroy Flecker

This month too saw sailors, far from home, fight the deciding battle of the American War of Independence, when Admiral Rodney defeated the French in the West Indies in 1782.

Battle of 'the Saints', April 12, 1782    Thomas Lunn

©  National Maritime Museum   Greenwich