Every Now and Then, the Bluebells Wait for You

Every Now and Then, the Bluebells Wait for You

Like most people of romantic bent, I fell headlong in love with the Merchant Ivory film interpretation of E. M. Forster’s wonderful novel, Howards End, the first time I saw it.  Every frame, whether verdant or urban, enchanted me. Vanessa Redgrave’s long white gown trailing through the evening dew in the opening scene.  The charming rooms of the Schlegel sisters' home in Wickham Place.  Poor Leonard Bast, influenced by George Meredith’s Richard Peverel, walking all night through a Spring carpet of bluebells stretched out on a forest floor, a forest that “drooped glimmeringly”.  As a child of the American South, my Springtime carpets have always been green.  The limes of new moss; the emeralds of clover.  Seeing a shady forest blanketed in blue was something straight out of fairy tale to my mind.  Could it be real? I could not empirically say.  

Though prevalent in an English spring, bluebells are early bloomers and as my plane followed the moon across the Atlantic in the middle of May, I had no hope of seeing them.  They would have already flamed and gone, remaining but one more of those memories of imagination not unlike Scrooge’s door knocker or the celestial pathway to Neverland, just a wonderful snippet that sits in one’s mind and often seems more tangible that fact.  

But my journey by plane, tube, train and car led me to a magical place.  Through a diamond shaped window in my charming bedroom, I could see an Elizabethan tower presiding over a legendary garden, a garden in which the footsteps of literary giants once pressed the grasses and climbed the tower to a room full of books and ideas.  The wind beat the windows as I slept that night, blowing any remnant of the commonplace away like the ashes of a cooled fire.  I awoke to the beckoning call of the garden, dressed quickly and headed out under a sky full of rolling clouds..

All morning long I wandered through rooms of green, along great swathes of yellow and lime.  I entered a walled garden of bridal gown white, emperor tulips nodding in the wind.  I was lost in daydream when, out of the corner of my eye, just beyond the garden wall, I spied a pathway.  Prone as I am to drift apart from the others, to duck under fences and wander away, naturally I followed it.  A grey farm dog ran past me, looking over his shoulder as he went as if to say, 
“This way.  Come this way.”  
The birds sang a lyrical welcome as I went.  Crossing meadows and rounding past ponds, I followed magpies over wooden bridges that lay like cupped hands cross rippling streams.  I strolled past the lambs of a new season and ducked under willows only recently dressed in ball gowns of green till, suddenly, tall trees closed in around me and everywhere, everywhere, I looked was blue.  It was just as I imagined, just as I dreamed.  Bluebells.  In every corner of the forest, waving in the wind a greeting of memory, imaginary and real, ancient and new.  I stood, transfixed, and laughed.

“It’s been a late Spring here”, my innkeeper told me later.  “We thought they’d never bloom.  It’s lucky for you that you came when you did.  Any earlier and I’m afraid you would’ve been disappointed”.

Sometimes the sights we dream of seeing are just outside our reach.  On the banks of a country river, we look round for Ratty and Mole, but find they’ve sailed round the bend just before we arrived.  If indeed Number 17 Cherry Tree Lane exists in a London borough, I have no confidence we’d find Mary Poppins minding the children inside if we knocked on the door, even if the wind was blowing in from the East.  But I’ve found it best not to give up hope, for every now and then the seasons and stories combine and conspire to surprise.  Every now and then, the bluebells wait for you.

I stayed here and it was wonderful!