Reasons to be cheerful in November, Part 1

If April is the cruellest month, November is the glummest.  The mists and mellow fruitfulness have given way to damp, dull, dreariness. The fires of autumn have been extinguished by the cold rain, and the colours in the garden are 50 shades of brown.   

The magnolia stellata is brown – but next year’s furry flower buds are there

November is an in-between sort of a month. It’s not yet time to start fully panicking about Christmas, although there’s a nascent sense of unease about it all.  It’s not yet the full-on hibernation season that January offers.   It’s not the crisp mornings and vibrant colours of October.

The allotment is languishing too, although I have planted onions and garlic in a defiant statement of belief in next year – the gardening equivalent of a two-fingered salute to this year’s rotten weather.

I shouldn’t be too hard on old November though.   Last week I spent a full seven hours at Wisley garden, where liquidambars and acers were still in full radiant colour.  A few days later there was a glorious frosty morning.  I went running through the sunny countryside, watching the deer bound away ahead of me, a green woodpecker flying across my path, mist rising gently from the chilly lake.  The decent days when they come are so much more special.

Today, gardening for the old folks has been rained off, which means missing the green bin collection, which means there’ll be too much to go in next time.  An afternoon walk with a friend has also been scrapped.  On one level, extremely frustrating.

Golden rod is… guess what colour?

But that means unexpected extra time for writing, music, and hunkering down with butternut squash soup and fresh bread and good company.   The Autumn Soup Hunkering Season starts here.

Self-medicating with roast vegetables, red wine and chocolate is an excellent cure for ailing General Outdoors Types who are stuck indoors on long evenings.

And if you do wander round the soggy garden, the buds bearing promises of next year’s flowers are already there. Hidden beneath the soil, the shoots of the daffodils are secretly pushing their way skywards.  Stuff is still happening during in-between seasons – it’s just a lot harder to see and to believe.

Anyway I’m guessing it was on a gloomy day like today when Thomas Hood wrote this poem. Spring is a few short months away, but for now it’s November.

No sun – no moon!
No morn – no noon –
No dawn – no dusk – no proper time of day.
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member –
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! –
November!

Marching to a different beat

Remembrance season reminds me of a story I heard as a child.

A young soldier was marching on a parade ground somewhere in southern England in World War II, when he suddenly noticed that he was completely out of step with the rest of his platoon.  Then in a flash he realised that in fact it wasn’t him who was out of step – it was everyone else.

Instead of marching with their left feet on the first beat of each bar of the music – “Left, Left, Left-Right-Left” – the entire platoon had their right feet first.  And their right feet were the wrong feet.

So here was a dilemma for the young soldier. Should he change feet and join everyone else, making him technically wrong but giving the comforting appearance of being right? Or should he stand his ground, and continue to be the only soldier getting it right even though he would appear to be the only one who was wrong?

This story fascinates me and has stayed with me. It demonstrates so beautifully that it’s possible to be entirely right while looking wrong, and be entirely wrong while looking right.

Anyway the young soldier made his decision:  he stood his ground.  For a few terrifying minutes he remained alone, out of step, the only man spoiling the neat parade.

Then something interesting began to happen.  The men around him began to notice he was out of step, and to realise that he had a point.  One by one they switched feet, until the whole platoon was finally united.  “Left, Left, Left-Right-Left.”

Daring to be different sometimes changes outcomes.  I know this was only a parade but I think the principle holds good.  Because there’s a second story in my head this Remembrance season too.  I only learnt it this year and its details remain sketchy, but I’ll tell you what I know.

It’s about a Frenchman called Georges Blambert.  He was born in 1924.  He lived in or near the picturesque village of Doucy-en-Bauges in the foothills of the Alps near Annecy, reached only by a long road which zigzags its way round hairpin bends amid stunning scenery.  The soundtrack of his childhood would have been cowbells, strapped onto the necks of the grazing cattle with thick leather straps. Months of thick snow would have given way to lush summers, and I can imagine him as a boy, clambering over the rocky hillsides and exploring the thick forests.

Georges Blambert grew up in this stunning scenery in the foothills of the Alps but was deported to a concentration camp which claimed his life shortly after liberation.

Georges Blambert, this child of the mountains, died in 1945 at the age of 21.  He’d dared to stand up to Nazi occupation and was deported to Mauthausen camp in Austria as a member of the French Resistance.  He died a few weeks after it was liberated, and I desperately hope he was not so close to death that he never knew he’d won.

I don’t know what he did or how he was caught.  I only know the fragments of his story because we stumbled on the war memorial in his village during a summer walk in his paradise valley.   In its cold stone it told the usual story: the same surnames repeatedly cropping up, staggering numbers of dead men and boys from a tiny, scattered mountain community.  It listed where they had died: some in the mud of the Somme, others in places which we hadn’t even realised had seen conflict.

Death in paradise: the war memorial in Doucy-en-Bauges

And, unlike many French war memorials, which list only World War I dead, this tiny village had three names added from World War II, one of them the young Georges.

It turned out that this beautiful, remote area had been defiled by many Nazi atrocities: hostages killed; villages burnt to the ground; young men like Georges Blambert taken from their idyllic childhood valleys to brutal life and death in concentration camps.  It’s a stark reminder that there’s no such thing as an Earthly Paradise.  As long as there are people on the planet, there’ll be conflict.

So what links these two stories?  Well, the young soldier on that English parade ground was my father, and I’m so, so proud of him.  He was lucky in the war: while Georges Blambert and his Resistance comrades were on the brutal front line, he was deployed to West Africa, where much time was spent playing football.

But I like to think that a man with the moral courage to march out of step shared something of the physical courage of Georges Blambert: the courage to dare to be different, to stand up for what’s right, and to hang the consequences.  And ultimately, to influence the way things turn out.  They’re both my own personal war heroes this Remembrance Day.