‘And your English summer's done'

Deciding to ignore Kipling’s gloomy assessment of August, John Lewis-Stempel and his labrador cool off after a day’s combining with a dip in the stream

- John Lewis-Stempel

OUT in the fields, the post-harvest hush and that sense of summer ending. On a strand of sagging barbed wire, a single yellowhammer drone: ‘A little bit of bread and no cheese. A little bit of bread and no cheese.’ Everywhere, that incipient melancholy of August, which Kipling noted in The Long Trail:

There’s a whisper down the field where the year has shot her yield, And the ricks stand grey to the sun, Singing: ‘Over then, come over, for the bee has quit the clover, And your English summer’s done.

Everywhere except the stream, that is. Nature does not work to a uniform, all-enveloping timescale. By the stream, there is no such stillness, no such sense of summer being over. August is the stream’s lush time. Along the banks, the flowers bloom like a herbaceous border by Gertrude Jekyll, and a benefit of the year’s rain is that the water is as deep now as in March, rather than being its usual late-summer trickle.

It has been a long, hot afternoon (helping a neighbor with the combining, segued into grooming horses—the lot of it breathless work on a breathless day). I’ve come down to the stream for a swim and, I suppose, a dose of invigoration. A swim in a time and place such as this is a recapturing, albeit temporary, of the vitality of spring and early summer. When the views were all forwards.

Perhaps ‘swim’ is an over-description; the stream, at best, widens and deepens into a grey stone basin three strokes long, 3ft deep —a plunge pool made by Nature.