Autumn

Each year when I see the first conker of the autumn I think: fire up the ancestral ovens! This incendiary thought comes from the Ronald Searle cartoon in Nigel Molesworth’s How to be Topp of a sooty retainer sliding a tray of the young master’s conkers into a brick oven. School cads, Molesworth tells us, ‘are inclined to cheat at conkers having baked them for 300 years in the ancestral ovens. These conkers belong to the National Trust they are so tough and if you strike one your new conker fly into 100000000000 bits.’ What do prep school boys do with their conkers today? Bake them in the ancestral Aga?

Autumn: season of mists and mellow pumpkin soups. Of new leather boots and sausages with red onion chutney, of sheepskin slippers and mushrooms mushrooming through the mulch. ‘So many of us! So many of us!’ Sylvia Plath had her mushrooms cry. So many of them in Kensington Gardens, where I take my morning walk. Leggy little ones with Peking hats and great flat ones for hookah-smoking caterpillars to sit on. Lewis Carroll’s Alice dares to eat her caterpillar’s mushroom, but I am not so brave. What would happen if I tried the Kensington mushrooms? Would I, like Alice, grow to horse-chestnut-height? Or would I just be very ill? I buy my mushrooms at Waitrose to be on the safe side.

The great discovery of this autumn is that it isn’t just hippies and stoners who call them ‘shrooms’. Here is Virginia Woolf in her 1918 diary: ‘I must go and pick ’shrooms, the sun being out.’

For all my cheerful talk of pumpkin soup, I am prone to glooms at this time of year. On a fine mists-and-mellow-fruitfulness morning, I am as high as Bertie Wooster waking up to ‘one of those days you sometimes get latish in the autumn, when the sun beams, the birds toot, and there is a bracing tang in the air that sends the blood beetling briskly through the veins’.