Neighbourhood: A year's life in and about an English village

They come in families, in amorous couples, in collective friendships of each sex and every number and age. They bring baskets of provisions, cameras, balls wherewith to play rou...

Coming over the Downs one winter’s morning, I saw a thin blue spiral of smoke rising from the very centre of a great patch of gorse on a hill-side; and threading my way through...

Invisible through the dense tangle of the brier-bush, to me a voice and nothing more, the nightingale sat in her nook on the sunny side of the hedgerow, pouring out her song on...

I dozed off, and woke again where, in the drowsy afternoon sunshine, I had rested under a great pollard ash weighed down with ivy. Upon the grass about my feet there shone an in...

At noon to-day, after a long tramp through the fields, I came up the village street, and paused irresolutely outside the Three Thatchers Inn. The morning had been hot, and the w...

Yes, the summer is gone, in very truth. With every day now, and every hour of the day, the writing on the wall shows plainer. While the hushed, hot times endured, it was still p...

The trees stretched across the entire field, and every twig on every branch had its perching songster, the combined effect being as though the trees had suddenly shot out a magi...

But having made all these exact preparations, I chanced to turn to the open window for a final look down the street, and knew at once that I was lost. It was the steady far-off...

The first small boy set forth over the sunny stretch of grass that lay between the tent and the waiting team. Very small and insignificant he looked in his school-corduroys, and...

To get the true spirit of the Sussex Downs, you must become a lover of the wind, loving it in all its moods. There are rare moments, even on Windle Hill, when the sun glows in a...

‘I see grass—fresh new growth pushing up everywhere. Young nettles too: they are coming up green amongst the old dead stems. But they cannot sting yet—yes, they can! and badly!...

I looked at the white spot, and if I could have saved the tree by obliterating it there and then, I would have done so gladly. Carved deeply into its wood, and so long ago that...

On this fine Whitsunday morning I got to my corner in the grey old church earlier than my wont, before, indeed, the bell began its measured tolling. The school children were in...

Scratching away in the cosy fireside quiet of the old room, there comes to me at length a sound from the chimney-corner, to which I must needs listen, no matter what twist or qu...

And when I took a last look at the night some hours after, I beheld the faint glow, from the windows of the caravan upon the green, with dismal foreboding. A month of that prosp...

I had turned and strolled back with him under the pale December twilight. The new quiet of things, the frosty glimmer of the moon, here and there a star beginning to show, the r...

PAGE INTRODUCTION xi JANUARY 1 I. Hard Times—Wild Life and the Frost—The Thaw at Last—Solitude and a Fireside—Cricket Music—Fiction and Life—Wood versus Coal. II. Truantry—Sprin...