Snowdrops on Candlemas Day

This had been the day of the ‘water-music’, the music of the field drains, the splash of tyres though puddles and temporary fords, the rush of the swollen Welland.

I cycled in the overhanging gloom of last night’s hurtling darkness, as the biting east wind continued its troubled buffeting into this half-day.

I cycled up the north side of the Welland Valley, turning off to Gumley before reaching Foxton.

Crossing over the canal bridge, I could glance to the right to glimpse the top of the famous flight of locks.

I passed through Gumley, once a centre of Mercian power, where historical matters of church and the Saxon kingdom were debated and passed into charters and law.

Some contend that the great King Offa lies buried here, and that his hilltop sanctuary high above the wet and once forested claylands below may have provided the model for the Norman French rendition of the Arthurian legends, this place being Camelot, this thin place where old crosses into new and reality into legend.

But at the summit of the climb above Gumley, by the laneside, was another meeting place, this time between old and young, where the dead leaves that had been swept into swirls by the wind all the cold half-day, met the year’s new show-offs.

On this the dankest, darkest, drizzle-ridden half-day of deep winter, the snowdrops were flaunting themselves across the sodden verge of mud, leafmould and molehills.

Lamp-lights in the day’s overcast, so chastely white… and yet inwardly not without blemish. For the fanfare to Spring blown by those small shining bands of trumpeters can be a cacophony of false notes. After their praised but short-lived blooming has passed, we can still expect the worst of weathers, the gales which trouble the dark and fox haunted wood, and drive sleet across the sodden fields to greet the first footfall of new born lambs.

But still, the snowdrops are the first flower, harbingers of the life-renewing cycle, billions of sunrises in miniature. Here they were on Candlemas Day. Candlemas Bells, once planted thickly in monastery gardens to decorate the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin, they ring in the great awakening and the new life to come.  

© John Dunn.  

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