dancingthroughchaos

‘Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it’ – LM Montgomery (Canadian author)

I’ve been house sitting for my friend in the ridiculously beautiful English Cotswolds, where every village is prettier than the last and all of them flirt with the coy confidence of being featured on future postcards or chocolate boxes.

Fortunately, my recently shredded feet have been healing slowly – hurrah, for the extraordinary regenerating powers of the human body – and I ventured back out to beat the bounds, or at least potter along a public footpath or two and wander through a few fields in a very non-Theresa-May-esque way.

I can tell you that the corn is ripening and several farmers have already cut their hay.  The weather, while blistering for mere mortals, has been great for turning and drying out the grass; much of it is now both baled and ‘barned’.  Job done.  The combine harvesters may get an early run at this rate, but then again, we could all be thigh high in monsoons by next week while Europe turns to wildfire ash.  What a gloomy thought.

On a lighter note, I was considerably cheered by the cottage gardens hereabouts.  Everything is blooming and everywhere is splattered with nature’s colour.  Idyllic stone houses are surrounded by tumbling bowers and bountiful beds, all chock-a-block with old favourites.  Now these three remain, it would seem: hollyhocks, roses and lavender; but the greatest of these is/are sweet peas.

There’s no question about this in my mind, whether the multi-hued or single colour varieties, they are the flower that sings of summer.  These are the jewels so carefully chosen and gathered by my grandmother from her own garden in days of long ago, and placed with loving care into a small vase which appeared without fail every summer in the guest bedroom where my sister and I stayed.  I don’t know whether they featured in the room when my other sister and parents slept, but they were regularly there for the two of us.  

When you’re a child of course, no-one buys you flowers and, truth to tell, you’d probably be more open to receiving something in the confectionary, tooth-rotting line; but it was the smell of the sweet peas that always greeted us at the start of our summer holiday at Granny’s.  Opening the bedroom door and inhaling that heady fragrance always signalled the start of another wonderful two weeks. 

Do you recall that unparalleled experience of waking to the sun steaming through your window, and the delicious realisation that school is finished for now and that you have days, if not weeks, stretching ahead of you, to be filled with leisure, pleasure, adventures and fun? How exquisite – yet how fleeting – it was!

Our annual fortnight in Devon was just that.  We had fabulous days at the beach: playing on the sand, swimming – or at least, wave-jumping – eating ice creams, exploring rock pools, devouring simple picnics; days on the farm: milking cows, riding horses, harvesting, baling, stooking the old-fashioned way for local thatchers, tucking into legendary high teas beside which Enid Blyton’s offerings looked pale and unappetising, and days to explore the countryside with its rivers, fish, otters and kingfishers.  Such activities left us tanned, replete and full of stories for that compulsory first piece of writing of the autumn term: What I did in my summer holiday, and considerably more interesting (in our own minds at least), than the shoulder-shrugging, ‘I dunno’; ‘Hung around,’ and/or,  ‘watched telly’.

Imagine my delight therefore, when on one of those aforementioned recent explorations of the Cotswold locale on foot, I came across a generous sprinkling of sweet peas bobbing about in a hedgerow begging to be noticed.  Their vivid pink heads lent grandeur to their grass, plantain and brambley neighbours, and it was with equal delight that I picked a posy to adorn a corner of the house.  These treasures were carried home, introduced to water and positioned in a place of honour.

The power of a smell to transport you to another time and place was demonstrated again.  I may have mentioned this before, but Lux soap always takes me to my grandmother’s bathroom; coal tar soap takes me back to the low-level burning lamp that flicked through cold nights in our childhood bedroom, and cooking cabbage to the school dinners of my primary school.

Alas for the sweet pea treasures, their fragrance wasn’t as strong as some, and they suffered in the excoriating heat, wilting and fading before they’d been with us long.  But, there will be more.  Sweet peas grow on a supply-and-demand basis; the more you pick, the more grow back – for a season at least.  I fully intend to celebrate the weeks of summer for as long as I can, and these colourful, scent-distributing wonders will always stir some special memories for me.  I have much to thank them for.