Introduction
The following article was published the day after Arthur Machen’s sorrowful report on the lack of wild strawberries in the dry June of 1919. Interestingly, the place-names mentioned below bear connections to Machen’s personal life. The French localities were haunts he favored as a regular traveler to France in the 1890s. Much later, during his retirement, Machen would make a home in Amersham, Buckinghamshire.
Six Weeks’ Drought
by
Arthur Machen
June 19, 1919
I went down to Great Missenden yesterday in a sunlight so fierce that it seemed as if it might have been projected through a burning glass.
And I have known something of hot sunshine too; I have pounded along white roads in August weather by Avignon; I have found Monte Cristo’s village near Marseilles under a sun that made the Mediterranean into a deep glowing blue jewel. And I say that yesterday’s sun in Middlesex and Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire scorched like fire.
And, on the whole, I must confess that the country looked very much better than I had expected to find it.
Six weeks’ drought, with a few slight rainfalls that are hardly worth mentioning; I thought I should find a brown desert; such as I saw in travelling from London to Harwich on a day in August 1914; the day when the news of the Namur was announced. But there was nothing like this.
The hay crops were, indeed, thin and poor; and the fields that had been cleared were bold and brown without the smallest promise of green undergrowth. High-lying pastures, too, were scorched badly; in some of them the only green things were the thistles.
The golf greens by the line were brown, the cornfields looked poor and pale enough, here and there the dry grasses on the embankment were blazing. There were plenty of signs, in fact, of a long drought.
Yet the pastures that lay in lone ground and those by the river were wonderfully green.
And there were parks sloping up to old manor houses, where lawns were green under green trees, by cool pools of water.
But it was the beech woods which defied the drought and the burning sun utterly. Here was a whole world of cool and unharmed green, here the great boughs swayed in the wind as if nightly rains had refreshed them every dusk and dawn.
Cool breaths came from the deep shade under the beech trees, untouched by the sun; under the verges of these woods all green things grew richly, as if there were no burning heat. The burning of the sun has left the green beech wood unhurt, as the flame of the war has passed over the little Buckinghamshire village, leaving it still pleasant and secure.
The Weekly Machen
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