Autumn riches

A few days ago, on the Dorset/Somerset marches, autumn was still in orderly retreat. Although a pear tree’s leaves had turned sere and yellow, the last fruit was still peeping through. Across the lawn, a horse chestnut was undressing, festooning the lawn with bronze. Out of a cloudless sky, a mild seasonal sun blessed the scene with a gentle glow, as if it were pouring Sauternes. Along the Ladies’ Walk, the yellows and greens were reinforced by bushes in russet mantles and by the triumphant redness of acers and liquidambar. We could have almost been in the New England fall, at least for a few yards.

Autumn, fall: the two have profound resonances from different histories. As one might expect from its French name, autumn is full of good eating. This does not always take forms which the French would recognise, for it includes Brussels sprouts. Curious as it may seem, my friend Eyzie has an elective affinity with that vegetable. She is the Brillat-Savarin of the sprout. More generally, autumn is redolent of full barns, of well-stocked log sheds, of well-fattened pigs scoffing the last windfalls, heedless of their doom. Slaughtering day approaches. With the defences against winter well-prepared, wise households can approach the great feast of Christmas in a complacent spirit.

There would have been little of that in nascent New England. The fall of man: the fall of the year. It may be that the embattled colonists had lost the easy English assumption that spring would return. Across the Atlantic, the fall meant an impending exposure to the furious winter’s rages. Splendid red trees, certainly, but how many red men were lurking among them? Admittedly the Puritans arrived with a harsh religion, but at least in the first era, there would have been nothing to mitigate the bleakness.