What Spring Means to Me

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 892, 7 September 1956, Page 6

What Spring Means to Me

-----_-- A symposium to greet the hopeful season

Spring Atishoo

Wind and sleet, squelching feet; the faint hope that another summer may come, and that I may survive to see it. What in Europe is an annual excitement, a miraculous rebirth of the world, is here a miserable in-between season of showers, puddles and wet

trouser-legs, of blustering winds and cold, sloppy back-yards. I speak of the North Island. To be accur-

ate, there are parts of the South Island -for instance, the Botanical Gardens in Christchurch-that look more English than the English in September or October. And, to be scrupulously objective, that bit about a "miraculous rebirth" may sound good, but it usually happens in a sort of twilight sleep. Turning to my Oxford Book of Quotations to see what other noble minds have thought about the matter, I find that William Cowper, writing to the Rev. W. Unwin on 8th June, 1783, made reference to "our severest winter, commonly called the spring." As another poet put itWhen the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces You can bet that it’s going to be wet fof the races. In the North Island, "spring" should always be written in inverted commas. This present winter has been unusually "spring’’-like. Indeed, the Weather Office might well save wear and tear on the human larynx by getting a record made of that bit about "winds from a westerly quarter, with occasional showers." In Auckland, Nature herself has been in a confused state of mind: one saw, in June, young green foliage on oak trees from which last season’s leaves had not yet fa‘.en. Personally, I blame the Bomb. Not on any sordidly rational grounds, but simply because I happen to be one of the 2,000,000-odd people in New Zealand who are victims of that last infirmity of the unphilosophical mindgrousing about the weather. I have an emotional need to blame somebody. The

Bomb fills the bill.

A. R. D.

Fairburn

Never a Dull Moment

SPRING-TIME no longer spurs me towards hat shops or frock departments. I just bring out those bought at last Summer’s sales, and-substitute a cotton, blouse for a wool-jumper with my lightest costume. New gloves and handbag finish me off. What really occupies me about 12 hours per day is

coping with the floods of most interesting letters asking questions about Spring-

4 time meals. Nowadays, the young ones con’t necessarily ask for informationthey are able to give it! And the experienced housewives welcome the new ideas of the travelled youngsters, as well as.coming to the rescue when things go wrong. Vitamins take a back seatpeople want lamb and asparagus and green peas and new potatoes and Spring onions and young lettuce and radishes. "What joint of lamb should I buy for just us?" writes the newly-wed; and how. do you preserve asparagus? And what was the French way of doing green peas you gave Us two years ago, and how do you make a really light asparagus souffle? How do the Americans do that minted peas recipe, using cream? One girl told me how delightful spring mint can be if very finely chopped and sprinkled over fruit salad as well as

savoury. Another discovered the different flavour of the tender stalks of pink Spring rhubarb after being brought up on the ordinary kind. And, of course, there are plenty of eggs to be used in all manner of recipes-Spring-time is eggtime, they say. Never a dull moment

in the kitchen!

Aunt

Daisy

Strong Westerly Winds

NYONE professionally engaged in forecasting the weather finds it possible to greet the coming of Spring with only mild enthusiasm. It at least enables one to forget the winter-time story of intense depressions moving on to New Zealand from the Tasman Sea and to end the indiscriminate scattering of rain

(heavy at times) over the entire country. However,

one is obliged to substitute a new story about deep depressions passing far to the south of New Zealand with strong westerly winds over most of the country. And certain snags still remain. These westerly winds almost invariably contain numerous cold fronts, and as they are moving rapidly in the strong westerly flow their speeds have to be estimated with more than usual accuracy if the timing of the forecasts is to be reasonably correct. Southland is usually the chief sufferer from errors of this nature. Of course, in eastern districts there is normally less rain around; but then again more people are interested in knowing just where and when it is going to fall. So all in all, one is not much better off than in winter. In the same way there are the frosts to think about. All through the winter one has been forecasting frosts (big ones, too) almost every night, and although great success was achieved nobody seemed much interested. But in Spring, with frosts fewer in number, smaller in magnitude and harder to forecast, suddenly every farmer in the country seems interested! Ah, yes, for the weather forecaster, Spring is rather like the other seasons of the year-there just ain’t no justice.

J. W.

Hutchings

In a Far Country

CELEBRATE past Springs in a faroff place, simply from a strong wish to become again a close and present part of that country; a little valley under Mt. Cuchuma, about twenty miles from the Pacific in the Mexican State of Baja California. Spring lasts five minutes there; six minutes if the win-

ter was exceptionally wet and precipitated eight inches of rain on the surprised ground. If you blink

on a sunny day in the first week of February you may miss the moment of blossom of the almond trees. Blink again, and you'll find under your feet a purple carpet of minute star-shaped flowers the Mexicans call filaria. The colour of winter there is the colour of the earth, a tawny brown with occasional slashes of red. Most mornings when I got up and looked out of my front door, like a high dive platform above the valley, there would be a light frost powdering the earth colour. Then one day soon after a rain, when I came back later in the morning, the frost gone and the sun high, I'd see a green haze on the earth colour, Next day it

iti would be more definite, and the third day the valley would be green. One Spring I walked each day in the valley with a St. Bernard, who dropped his expression of gravity when he only had my company, and gambolled and caracoled among the willows in the creek bed. There we made progress through our brief Spring. The filaria came first and lasted longest. Instantly, lasting only a few days, were white and gold varieties of what I took to be poppies, the purple wild pea, occasional briar roses, and white moonflowers in the creek. Sometimes we walked higher up the hillside, along tracks made by a neighbour’s herd of cows as they went to and from grazing each day. As I waited on the dog’s investigations I could see the pink and white fuzz of fruit blossom blowing in the little orchards by the Tecate road. It was a quick completion. A week or two of these walks and the dog brushed by me smelling of sage, which is the beginning of sume mer, a much longer, drowsier story.

G. leF.

Y.

A Bird Singing

EETHOVEN’S Spring Sonata, the Spring Symphonies of Schumann and Britten, Rondes de Printemps, Sacre du Printemps, Yvonne Printemps -Spring has enough in the way of musical associations to warm the heart of the most winter-bound musician. "There are at least three composers who

have set all four seasonsHaydn turned out an oratorio, Glazounov a _ ballet, and Vivaldi. of all things,

a series of violin concerti. But Spring leads summer by a head as the seasonal source of. inspiration. It is partly the fault of the poets. Were I a composer, I could scarcely resist having another go at "Spring, the Sweet Spring," or "Now is the Month of Maying." In connection with May, the vernal month of the European poets, we of the Antipodes are in a quandary. We either resign ourselves to singing nonsense, or we try "Now is the Month of Novembering," which does not fit very well with the tune. Troublesome, too, is the cuckoo as a symbol of Spring-not the long-tailed cuckoo, mark you, nor yet the shining variety, but the ordinary English rapscallion, the only one of the three who is blest with a voice. Yet, though he reiterates his two-note melody 12,000 miles away, and six months too soon or too late, I would not be surprised if many of my New Zealand colleagues agreed that the joy of Springtide finds its happiest musical expression in Delius’s exquisite little piece, "On Hearing the First Cuckoo in

Spring:

James

Robertson

How Should | Know?

OW should I know what this Spring will mean to me until it comes? For all I can really say is that this Spring or that Spring have meant this or that thing to me. But Spring itself, Spring in the abstract? What I should like it to mean it usually doesn’t. Spring is the time when one hopefully

takes off one’s winter underwear and hurtiedly puts it on again. There are new

leaves on some of the trees-but others have kept theirs all winter. There are flowers-but there have been flowers all

winter, though not so many. A Dutch friend told me lately that in Holland there are no outdoor flowers from Oc‘tober until late March. There, the dramatic, resurrecting meaning of Spring is patent. In our own countryside it means specific jobs. But I’m an urban New Zealander, and I doubt if Spring can mean anything much to me, except as a rather untidy lead-in to our Summer, which really is a season. We have no festivals in Spring, except the Ranfurly Shield, and that is the climax of an old season, not the blossoming of

a new,

Dennis

McEldowney

No Good for An Anagram

PRING ...S.P.R.I.N.G ... no good for an anagram-five consonants and only one vowel. Hair spring? Main spring? Spring board? Springbok? ... might be something there, Spring. . Spring, the sweet Spring, is the year’s pleasant king. The year’s like a Ferris wheel with the months hung on it like

those seat things. Spring comes where nine, ten and eleven come on a clock face.

Away back in primary school days Spring meant coming out of the dark tunnel of Winter into the wonderful months of bare legs and sandals, bathing, tea on the beach. Even at High School, end-of-year exams looming up hardly cast a shadow. At "Varsity," last minute swotting in the Gardens, the Spring Meeting, Relax Ball, boronia at sixpence a large bunch-the- price of three morning teas. Then later Spring was the season that somehow got lost between the annual balance- July 31-and the Christmas rush. You knew it was there, but before you could find a minute to pause and look at the blossom here was Christmas, and once again you hadn’t had time to buy nearly all your Christmas presents. Blossom? That reminds me. Our flowering apricot began flowering in May and our pear tree burst macly into bloom last Autumn with the fruit still hanging on it. Even the seasons have no sense of responsibility these days. . . Oh, well, it’ll have to be a quotation: "When the hounds of are on winter's traces." Or should it be "Winter’s traces?" Where’s my Swin-

burne?

R. W.

H.

It All Depends on the Lambs

JHAT one feels about Spring is conditioned by one’s calling and station in life. The lawyer reflects with complaisance that Spring is the season of vagrant fancies and will probably give rise to a reasonable crop of divorces. The undertaker smiles fondly at his stock of "caskets,’ sure that the aged

and ailing who have survived the rigours of winter will almost

certainly tall victims to the vacillations of Spring. "Spring," proclaims the purveyor of nostrums and elixirs, "is the season of gastric upsets; take Brown’s powders; they will fix you’"-they probably do. No, the only people whose thoughts can stray to the most hackneyed and seasonable of themes are the very young, the very poor or the very rich, the uncommitted; those people who are beyond poverty or wealth, which is almost tantamount to being beyond good and evil, or those very great men, like Melchizedek or Monsieur Sartre, who co not have to refer their destiny to the caprice or anger of a_ higher authority. As for me I am a sheepfarmer. Spring to me means lambs and lambs mean

practically everything: success or failure, rage, exultation, despair; champagne and oysters or Franciscan poverty. Their plenty or paucity will mean a new car, a new coat, a holiday, or making do with old ones and staying at one’s own fireside. In other words, Spring means to me the chances and changes, the beautiful diversity of life itself.

Cotsford

Burdon

No More Than a Necktie

T’S inexcusable the way the seasons down here in the South are beginning to conform so much: not one of them wants to step out of line and pretty soon there won't be any seasons; only weather. The run-up to Spring starts now around the end of June, when the first blossom comes out; and

weve had hres on Christmas Day. The heart could leap to the advent of Spring,

to a spring that came rushing out of the gardens in all its gladrags, but no heart can keep up a flutterment over this Prufrocky, anxious putting on and putting off of a slightly daring neck-tie. In the heart of Canada, now, things really spring. I spent months there, in a temperature that never got as high as freezing-point. Then one. inspired morning the houses, the alleys, the garcens up and chucked the lot ‘into the roadway, the whole white, weighty, inert, stupid mass of the winter, and it poured away over your boot-tops into the rivers. The rivers fractured into icebergs with a ceremony of cannonshots, and like Tom the Piper’s Son, Spring went roaring down the street. And I roared, too. Everybody roared. It was something to write home about.

Augustus

Untidy, Uncertain, Unconstant .. .

N Y uncle left me a cuckoo clock. The clock wouldn’t go, it’s true, but I never cared then what time was, so the gift was perhaps not unseasonable. Came my favourite season of the long winter nights-cosy, warm, longer than seemed usual because crammed with 2YC, 3XN, 1ZB, 2ZA and other audible

manifestations of man’s ingenuity. No _ horologist, I decided to fix the

cuckoo clock. It went for a while, then "Cuck-," the bird said, and there it stuck, with its silly wooden head half out. The seasons seem to me to go round and round like a chain letter, but if there’s one season I dislike it’s the Spring. Somewhere ahead, I knowabout six or seven months ahead-is the summer, full of heat and flies and holiCay trains and other things I prefer to miss. (Yet who could not be fascinated by a stuck cuckoo, a _ half- harbinger in a half-mended clock?) Yes, I dislike the Spring. It overrates itself as much as a woman in a new hat. It smiles, freezes, or bursts into tears for no apparent reason. It is un\tidy, uncertain, unconstant, unutterable. Spring reminds me too much of myself. P.S. I forgot to tell you what was wrong with the clock, It was the spring.

Denis

Glover

Time for the Floral Dance

‘THE first touch of warmth in the air and I realise with lightsome heart that it is now too late to start sewing

all that corduroy I bought in the autumn to make into slacks for the children for the winter, and instead, I can go down town and feast my eyes upon the floral prints blossoming in all

the windows, and allow sleek young salesmen with hair smelling spring -like

of Mimosa and Wild Violets that competes with the intoxicating factory-fresh smell of dimity and organdie and polished cotton to sell me yards and yards of vernal dress-lengths which I can store in my cupboard and pull out every now and then to gladden my eyes during the long dull drizzly summer days till they are buried in their turn beneath the brown and russet drifts of autumn’s corduroy. And if some grossly materialistic member of the family to whom Spring suggests the need for a new lawnmower should ask why I don’t first use up some of the stuff I bought Jast spring I shall reply that only the aesthetically obscene would dream of exhuming last year’s blossoms to greet this year’s

rersepnone,

M

B.

Far Behind and Miles Away

OT much, living nowadays where there’s no Spring to speak of. Win.ter sales of woollen remnants yield to swimsuits, cottons, but no Spring. Spring cleaning’s urged in advertisements; but until the kowhai blooms and we realise

we haven’t done ours yet, Spring itself’s not with us. Maybe _ this

year the seasons on a Ihursday, or we miss it altogether. So Spring for me is forever far behind and miles away. One Cambridge afternoon, perhaps, wider and lighter than any yet, urging us to grease and put away skates in winter box (which until now was the summer box), spend a week’s pocket money on four coloured wooden tops, swipe leather thongs from Father’s mountain. boots (not needed till July, then the row breaks), and issue imprudently barefoot into the green light, there to whip tops till dusk. Or Spring in the woods of Gottingen, spread with yellow, white and blue, the undergrowth crashing to the stout boots of Teutons who yell "Entzuckend!" at every other step. Or Spring in South Africa, every sluit gurgling yellow water, daisies in impossible colours blooming where you'd swear none could, apricots flowering in millions, the baboons descending from the mountains to play horrid pranks on foothill-tethered goats. Or Spring in Toronto, dirty snow yielding to squid-black mud, overheated, fur-covered women slushing among dreams of identical navy-white Easter outfits, flowered bonnets, and the later blessed offloading of children into summer camps. Or Spring in North Queensland, pink yams blooming in each abandoned tinmine, striped September lilies in the grass, snakes under every log. Or Spring in the air! Sir, Spring in the air! Why the devil should I, young man?-ceftainly not in Auckland.

Sarah

Campion