The simple flowers of our spring are what I want to see again…

How astonishing does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties on us. Like poor Falstaff, though I do not 'babble', I think of green fields. I muse with the greatest affection of every flower I have known from my infancy - their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and happiest moments of our lives. I have seen foreign flowers in hothouses of the most beautiful nature, but I do not care a straw for them. The simplest flowers of our spring are what I want to see again.
John Keats: A letter to James Rice, 14 February 1820
A year later, in Rome, on February 23rd 1821, Keats died.

‘I would I had some flowers of the spring that might become your time of day’, said Perdita in The Winter’s Tale. On a country walk in mid-January we came across a bank of pale yellow primroses coming into flower that filled that dark drear day with the promise of spring: ‘bold oxlips’, 'violets dim' and ‘daffodils that come before the swallow dares and take the winds of March with beauty’.

(Originally published in The Hedgerow, February 2003)


It is nearly forty years since I visited Wentworth House, where Keats lived in Hampstead. And now I have seen Jane Campion’s stunning film, Bright Star, it is all coming back to me again: the tree where the nightingale sang that inspired Keats to write his famous ode, delicate Georgian chairs and the poet’s letters to his dearest love, Fanny Brawne who lived next door. The film is visually beautiful and yet restrained: bluebell woods, bare trees. Butterflies fluttering in an airless room recall Keats’ poignant words: I wish we were butterflies and could live but three summer days…
I have lived with his poems for many years: autumn and nightingales and La Belle Dame sans Merci, evocative of Pre-Raphaelite paintings I loved in my youth.
A few years ago I visited the house where Keats died at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome, stood in his bedroom, imagining the scene when he was bed-bound, haemorrhaging badly, longing for death.
Read Andrew Motion’s acclaimed biography and also his account of Sailing to Italy (published by Faber and Faber in Salt Water) undertaking the same voyage that Keats and his companion Severn took from Gravesend to live in a warmer climate for the winter months. Keats was dying of consumption. He recognised that first drop of blood he coughed as his ‘death warrant’. How little time was left.
The sedge is withered from the lake and no birds sing...
But when the warm weather comes I will go back to Hampstead and find that tree, sit on the grass and read those poems again in the company of the youth who took me there years before.

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

I think this novel is very underrated and brilliantly done. I reread it so much as a teenager I could have given a guided tour of Manderley and the Happy Valley scented with azaleas. I loved the descriptive early scenes in the library and morning room when a vase is broken and later, as tension mounts, when Mrs. Danvers shows the young bride Rebecca’s evening dresses in the west wing of the house. It made me want to visit more stately homes and places associated with Daphne Du Maurier in Cornwall. And so I did. Lots. I fell in love with Cornwall and old houses such was the influence of this book. I enjoyed Susan Hill’s sequel: Mrs. De Winter, especially a scene in a London hotel when Jack Favell shows up again. More shattered harmony. I’m so glad I bought this novel when it first came out in hardback in 1993. I can’t wait to read it again. There have been some good television adaptations of Rebecca but I like Hitchcock’s black and white film best. But not half as much as reading the novel.

A Summer Birdcage by Margaret Drabble

First published in 1963, this is a short, first novel about a girl coming home to attend her older sister’s wedding. I reread this lots when I was a teenager, identifying with Sarah in the shadow of an older sister and enjoying the glamorous descriptions of London. I loved the easy style in which the novel was written and eavesdropping on all the characters’ conversations. I knew I too wanted to learn Italian, visit Rome and have a friend like Simone. I loved the quote from Webster too: Tis like a summer birdcage in a garden: the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out.
And so, as it happens, I went on to study Webster, visit Rome and learn some Italian. And tried not to end up like Stella, Louise’s friend, who married Bill, ‘the physics man’, and lived in Streatham.
I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed Margaret Drabble’s early novels and how they must have subconsciously influenced me over the years.
Perhaps that is also why I like short novels. And rereading them.