In Pursuit of Today’s Spring by Ned Vessey

I can distinctly remember where I first heard it.

I was standing in a damp Surrey lane, surrounded by the dark drip of rhododendrons, sandy gravel underfoot. I had been walking for an hour or so, ears tuned to the air as soon as I was away from the road noise coming from the town. Listening, waiting for a sound I had only just learned to recognise. For a time, nothing.

Then the song came. Its notes swung back and forth like a pendulum. Chiff-chaff chiff-chaff chiff-chaff. The song gives the bird its name and the bird itself is a symbol of spring’s arrival.

In late March 1913, after a long and dreary winter, the writer – and later, most famously, poet – Edward Thomas cycled from Balham in London. Over eight days he travelled haphazardly towards the coastline of Somerset, westwards. He hoped to meet spring, coming eastwards.

His aims for this journey were various. There was, materially, the need to fulfil a book commission from his publishers. This he duly did, recording his experiences in In Pursuit of Spring, which was published in 1914. However, Thomas also wanted to escape what had been a dull, hard winter, and in doing so find new inspiration and motivation. This he also found; the book set him on the road to writing the poetry for which he is best remembered.

In early April 2024, after a winter I also had found long and dreary, I retraced Thomas’ journey, albeit on foot rather than on a bicycle. Much of what Thomas described and photographed – he took a camera with him – is now gone or is changed irrecoverably. But I wanted to see whether some of the spring he described remained, and the extent to which the spring of 2024 contrasted with that of 1913. I wanted to gain a sense of how the climate, the landscape and our relationship with it had altered since Thomas wrote his book.

I began to plan the journey on an unseasonably warm February day, leafing through a stack of OS maps in my local library. As I tried to work out Thomas’ route, the sound of the busy street outside and the heat from the pavements drifted through the open windows. My jacket hung useless on the back of my chair as I finalised the route I would take – not quite the same as Thomas’, but as close as modern roads and paths would allow me to get.

In Pursuit of Spring is a strange book. It begins densely and darkly in crowded London streets, Thomas’ melancholic mood evident. It picks up pace once Thomas sets off on his journey, before the narrative catches on Thomas’ need to reach the page count required by his publishers. If you want lengthy digressions on graveyards, clay pipes and the inadequacy of early twentieth-century waterproof clothing, you’ve come to the right book. Sometimes I found these digressions frustrating. I wanted Thomas to get on with it. As I re-read the book over the course of my own journey, however, I came to see these passages in a different light. They seemed not so much filler, but inadvertent reflections of the way the mind moves when you walk alone for a length of time, drifting from unexpected topic to unexpected topic, often shaped by your changing environment.

There was something reassuring about them too, a fussiness to Thomas’ thoughts on the best kind of clay pipe that makes you feel that – if there is time for such prevaricating –  things might be alright with the world. It’s easy to romanticise what has gone: Thomas himself notes ‘our capacity for seeing the past and the remote in rose-colour’.[1] Therefore it was important not to view In Pursuit of Spring too nostalgically – Europe was already politically unsettled when Thomas made his journey. He also lived in a less tolerant, crueller age than my own; most of the great social shifts and reforms of the twentieth century were yet to come.

Despite this, I occasionally found myself yearning for specific elements of the time he travelled in and the things he could do; his lingering on roads unhurried and undeafened by traffic, his easy conversation with strangers, his passing through a less crowded, less urgent London which retained a ‘half-country’ feel.[2] Most significantly, he did not walk with the flaming spectre of climate breakdown burning in his mind.

The lanes down which Thomas cycled and walked were wide and open in 1913. The roads gleam with emptiness in many of his photographs and in his book the passing of a car is enough of an event to warrant a mention. If Thomas was to cycle now, he would struggle to hear the birdsong he so often describes – not to mention competing with some heavy traffic. The transformation of the roads he travelled into noisy constants, rather than quieter spaces punctuated by ‘genial muscular Christians’ and ‘country people walking…to see friends seven or eight miles away’, made me choose to walk rather than cycle.[3]

This was a major departure from Thomas’ journey, and would require significant amounts of extra time and effort, but it was one I was comfortable with. There were, firstly, the realities of both not owning a bike and of being an enormously incompetent cyclist. Secondly, walking somehow felt closer in spirit to Thomas’ rambling journey. Taking the deviations and diversions that he did would be much harder on the busy roads of today, and observing the hedgerows would be out of the question with a string of motorists behind you keen for the overtake. Walking felt significantly more straightforward and would also afford me the opportunity to observe the landscape in the deep, thoughtful way that Thomas was so adept at.

My second deviation was more significant. Indeed, it made my own journey a failure from the outset. While the signs of spring became more evident to Thomas as he travelled – there are significantly more references to greenness in the second half of the book – to me there was no notable change journeying from east to west. As I walked out of London, through the Surrey hills, Hampshire woods and Wiltshire chalk, spring was everywhere.

‘Copses, hedges, roadsides and brooksides were taken possession of by millions of primroses,’ and flowering blackthorn constellated the hedgerows.[4] I smelled wild garlic and saw the first stitches of bluebells beginning to thread the woodland floor. I heard the chiffchaff on the morning of my second day. Despite travelling just a few days later than Thomas had done, spring had still caught me, rather than the other way round.

I had mostly expected this. If I had wanted to pursue spring, I should have set off at least a month before. Spring now is very different from Thomas’ day. A twenty-first century spring is marked by both earliness and absence.

Spring arrives significantly earlier than it used to, and in the UK is experiencing the swiftest rise in temperatures of all the seasons, meaning that the effects of climate change upon the cycles of the natural world are most evident.[5] Plants flower a month before they used to.[6] Milder winters and warmer springs result in the earlier appearance of wildlife such as swallows, bumblebees and of course the chiffchaff.[7] Far more significantly than disrupting my pursuit of spring, this change leaves wildlife vulnerable to unpredictable fluctuations in temperature – used to increasingly warming springs, a late and sudden cold spell can prove calamitous. That February when I sat and planned my journey turned out to be the warmest and wettest on record in the UK.[8]

I knew what the rapidly changing climate was doing to the spring and while I tried to simply enjoy what I saw and heard, I felt an undercurrent of worry. Every time I read parts of In Pursuit of Spring along the way, and whenever I compared my surroundings to what Thomas described, I was reminded of the irreversible changes wrought on the world’s climate since 1913. I viewed all I saw with mixed feelings, envying Thomas the certainty with which he was able to look at spring. He knew that spring and all the things that make it so would eventually come, would be there the following year. ‘Good Friday brought the swallow,’ he wrote, ‘Saturday the cuckoo, Sunday the nightingale’. Now? Swallow, yes, for the moment. Cuckoo, unlikely. Nightingale, even less so.

It was not all doom and gloom. Hearing the chiffchaff’s song was a thrilling moment, and I also found myself growing calm, moving into the strange kind of serene state walking can sometimes bring on. Each step brought new sights and experiences, prompting new thoughts and responses; at times I thought at walking pace, a steadiness of movement dictating the rhythm of thought.

At the very end of the journey, stumbling off the busy train towards my Bristol home, I knew that despite all the noise, in other places, down quiet lanes and greening woods, small, beautiful things were happening. I recalled moments from the journey. Of feeling genuine warmth when the sun fell on my face, of standing and smelling the scent from the hedgerows, released by falling rain.

A twenty-first century pursuit of spring is also marked by absence. Having Thomas’ book close to hand gave me a second viewpoint – I saw it from my own perspective, and also how spring might have appeared in Thomas’ time.  I found my attention drawn to what was absent. I saw the odd farmer, usually in the cab of a tractor, but nothing like the farmhands and woodsmen that Thomas describes. Except around  towns and cities, I often would walk for several hours and see no one, reflecting the big shifts in agricultural practises and rural populations that have taken place in the last hundred years.

There was also absence in the land itself. I found myself seeing what was not there: the tall elm trees which Thomas mentions so often in In Pursuit of Spring are long gone, taken by Dutch Elm disease. This absence will grow. If in ten years I recreate my recreation of Thomas’ journey, the landscape will be further deprived; between Leatherhead and Dorking, I often found my way blocked by signs warning of woodlands being felled due to ash dieback, a fungus that is spreading through the UK and, according to the Woodland Trust, likely to claim up to 80% of its ash trees.[9]

Many of the hedgerows which appear in Thomas’ photographs as he cycled along are gone too –  the RSPB estimates that up to half of English hedgerows were removed after the Second World War.[10] Their loss, alongside a raft of other habitats destroyed due to postwar agricultural expansion, meant I walked through relative silence too. Thomas references cuckoos, nightingales, chiffchaffs, peewits, larks, sand martins, meadow pipits; he travelled through an auditory richness that made my own journey seem poor in comparison. I took many joys from my travels, but repeatedly I found myself reflecting on it in terms of what I had not heard, had not seen, will not hear, will not see.

It troubles me still, a year later, this state of knowing only through absence. I have seen a towering elm tree only in photographs, have heard a nightingale only in recordings.  At first, In Pursuit of Spring, despite its many other appealing factors, seemed to function mostly as a reminder of what has been lost from the natural world since 1913. I felt despair at this loss and developed a sense that, ecologically speaking, all was good in 1913 and all bad in 2024.

Leaving aside the fact that such binary thinking is not the way the world works, I eventually came to understand that this perception was not helpful. I had to remind myself, and be reminded, that the picture is more subtle. The red kite, which often wheeled in the skies above me as I trudged westwards, was reduced to just a few breeding pairs in Wales in Thomas’ day, but is now on the up.[11] Meanwhile woodland cover has doubled in the last century, and while this does not necessarily result in benefits for biodiversity, it is still a reminder that Thomas journeyed in a barer landscape than I did.[12]  This complexity made me realise that sinking into despair was both useless and hopeless.

Decay has to be seen, loss recognised, absence defined. Crucially a recognition of what is absent also has to result in action to preserve what is still present. Thomas returned from his journey with full notebooks, with the beginnings of poetry gleaming within the prose of his book. I returned with a greater understanding of the way the changing climate is upending the natural world, and a desire to confront it.

This helped bring certainty to a decision I was already making, to shift from an unsuccessful attempt to write full-time – most of my days were in reality spent as a retail assistant – into my current job as a gardener. The absence that my pursuit of spring made evident to me provoked a strong desire to act, to fight back against the losses. For me, working in horticulture seemed the best way to go about this, acting in tiny but tangible ways to promote presence and prevent absence.

This decision has strengthened my belief that one of the best ways to counteract the despair provoked by pursuing spring today is, wherever possible, to work on and in the land. To plant the right plants and trees in the right places, to work in a way that protects the spring we have now and all it brings . The chiffchaff can still be heard, the blackthorn still blossoms. Some of the things Thomas saw and heard could still be seen and heard again.

Leafing through In Pursuit of Spring recently, I found myself reading its final passage where Thomas meets the spring in the Quantocks, drawing a source of strength from his metaphor:

‘Winter may rise up through mould alive with violets and primroses and daffodils, but when cowslips have grown over his grave he cannot rise again: he is dead and rotten, and from his ashes the blossoms are springing’. [13]

***

References:

[1] Edward Thomas, In Pursuit of Spring (Little Toller, 2016), p. 121.

[2] Thomas, 43.

[3] Thomas, p. 62.

[4] Thomas, p. 34.

[5] https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/articles/clyzn3qn61no

[6] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/13/early-spring-changing-behaviour-flora-fauna-climate-change

[7] https://blog.metoffice.gov.uk/2024/03/01/wildlife-banking-on-a-warm-spring/

[8] https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/news-and-media/media-centre/weather-and-climate-news/2024/february-2024-warm-and-wet-for-the-uk

[9] https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/trees-woods-and-wildlife/tree-pests-and-diseases/key-tree-pests-and-diseases/ash-dieback/

[10] https://www.rspb.org.uk/helping-nature/what-we-do/influence-government-and-business/farming/farm-hedges/hedge-history

[11] https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/trees-woods-and-wildlife/animals/birds/red-kite/

[12] https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/state-of-uk-woods-and-trees/

[13] Thomas, p. 228.