'Where are the primroses that used to carpet that wood?' he’d written, in the end. 'Why don’t you coppice it if you say it is yours? You think it doesn’t matter, that it is just a wood. You think things will always be the same. You think you have dominion – that you’re not part of things. Like in that book. But if there is no light the primroses can’t come. Is it spring you are afraid of or something else? Life finds a way but not like you think. I am still here.' [p. 59]
It starts where it ends: an early-morning car crash on an A road, a Roman road, just as the sun is rising. The crash ties together three stories: the story of Howard and Kitty, incomers who've retired to the countryside; the story of Jamie, who's grown up in the village, knowing every lane and leaf; and the story of Jack, an indigent wanderer, who's always felt close to the land, 'less like a modern man and more like the fugitive spirit of English rural rebellion'. At Hawthorn Time is above all a novel about connecting to the natural world: not the airbrushed pastoral fantasy that Kitty imagined, but a place where humans live and work and love and die. Jack, when he encounters Kitty in the wood, tells her she's not looking properly, and it's true that her art blossoms after that, from anodyne paintings of bluebells to pictures that show the countryside as it is, a plastic bottle bobbing in a woodland pool, new growth around the steel base of a pylon.
Howard, Kitty's husband, would like to belong in the village, but doesn't. He and Kitty sleep in separate beds (though they'll have to pretend that they don't when their children come to visit) and Howard drinks too much, mends vintage radios, and yearns for the life he left behind -- but doesn't have a place there any more, either. Jamie, who's nineteen, works in a windowless distribution centre and spends his spare cash on customising his car. He still misses the childhood friend with whom he roamed the countryside. (Alex's father, a farmer, killed himself.) Jamie loves listening to his grandfather's stories of the old days, before the war, but he knows his grandfather is declining.
And Jack ... Jack hates being indoors; makes a living of sorts doing casual farm work; has walked the length and breadth of England, navigating 'by a kind of telluric instinct, an obscure knowledge he had learned to call on even when the land he walked through was unfamiliar: the wind on his face; the pull of the water table deep beneath the ground; the change from chalk to greensand to lias under his feet'. He's constantly aware of the land around him, and the stories it tells: a patch of nettles marking the site of an ancient midden, the reflections of human life in birdsong, the double-trunked oaks that have grown from stillborn babies buried with an acorn in each hand, the memory of his mother telling him never to bring hawthorn blossom into the house ... I can make a good case for Jack being something more than a mere tramp, but -- like much in this novel -- it's never explicitly stated, and I think the book is better for that sense of immanence.
I've been craving a country walk this spring (unlike Kitty, I did grow up in the countryside) and reading At Hawthorn Time both assuaged and sharpened that urge. I love Harrison's ability to evoke the unpleasantnesses of the natural world -- landfill, litter, neglect, poverty -- as well as its beauty and the way it can surprise humans with simple joy. I enjoyed Harrison's All Among the Barley, but At Hawthorn Time drew me into it, and maybe into my own memories of spring away from main roads and traffic and noise. I'll look out for Clay, Harrison's first novel, which is set in London but shares the focus on nature.
Fulfils the 'about the natural world' prompt of the Reading Women 2021 Challenge.
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