To Everything a Season: A View from the Fen - Hardcover

Moseley, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1913159361 ISBN 13: 9781913159368

Publisher: Merlin Unwin Books, 2022

Synopsis

To Everything a Season is a beautifully crafted personal and reflective account of many years of the changing seasons, from autumn to autumn, in and around a village on the edge of the Cambridge Fenland. It is an uplifting reflection about change: what was, what is, what will be.
It is about the miracle of the rich gift of life. It is also about death, loss, and the rebirth of the old into something rich and strange.

But it is also a book suffused with a gentle humor, with a deep love and sympathy for our fellow creatures. Charles Moseley tackles what we have done to the world of which we are not owners or masters but stewards, not only for our children but for the whole web of life on which everything depends.

About this title

About the Author

Charles Moseley grew up on the Lancashire coast, went up to Cambridge to read English, and never left. His varied career includes being a printer, a publisher and a peasant, but has mainly been teaching literature in Cambridge and attempting to persuade his victims to take this pursuit seriously. He has lived in a little Fenland village for a very long time. He also writes books.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The elemental: a still, frosty evening. On the coast where I grew up the cold sands and mud flats will stretch far out, for this is the time of the spring tides when the sea withdraws into itself before coming back higher and stronger. There, and here, the geese honk as they fly, dark sounding skeins against the sunset coming in to feed. They constantly shift lead position to spread the burden of breaking trail through the resistance of air. A fox barks, and the sound carries far across the Fen. Muntjac deer, newcomers a few decades back and now claiming the place as their own, bark their harsh monotone cry.

On an evening like this, if you are lucky, you may get a murmuration of starlings – no guarantees, for wild things do not run to timetables or TV schedules. A winter congregation from all over the north, from as far away as Siberia, meets outside our back door. Thousands of little lives come together in one great Beast in the Sky. For sometimes twenty minutes, from when the last limb of the sun drops below the western horizon, the great shape swirls, and swoops like a hunting peregrine, and towers up like a wave breaking against a cliff, and flattens, and finally funnels down like a tornado in reverse into the undergrowth where a scrubby growth of reeds and brambles and little trees fringes the small mere the National Trust has constructed on the part of the Fen the turf-farmer had wrecked. A quotidian mystery, awe-inducing, a perennial puzzle – what is an individual when so many, each flying a unique trajectory, seem simultaneously to think and act as one? ‘I am because we are,’ as someone once said? After the first exhilaration, the joy of the rush of speeding wings overhead as the display come to its end with the genie going back into the bottle, a solemn quietness of the mind falls. We rarely speak, for what it there to say about this mystery?

The new moon is setting, thin as a nail paring, in the still luminous west with Venus flaunting her beauty above.

I did give in, as you have gathered, and came back to my desk no wiser, but more grave. And ashamed that my youth never saw such things with these eyes and questions. How could I have missed seeing that? What am I missing this time?

Edition details

• Publisher: Merlin Unwin Books
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1913159361
• ISBN 13: 9781913159368
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224