Lake District Poetry

One of the most absorbing commissions I have ever had was to assist in what was to be an award winning radio programmed of Norman Nicholson's Lake District poetry, entitled 'A Wall Walks Slowly'. Norman was to read his own poems interspersed with the sounds of the Lake District and the voices of local people. The program was the brainchild of Desmond Briscoe, director of the BBC's radio phonic workshop. My main task was a challenge. I was given a list of local sounds which they needed to record. This included water fast running, slow running, water¬falls, lapping on the shore, small streams, splashes quarry noises, sheep dogs barking, sheep, the mewing of a buzzard and more.
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The list was formidable. I arranged to meet Desmond, his wife/assistant, Geoffrey, his sound recorder, and Gavin, the local naturalist, in delectable Dunne dale where I felt sure that we would get all the sounds if we worked from morn• to evening. In fact we did it. The only real failure was the buzzard who flew about our heads for a long time but only mewed when the equipment was packed away at lunchtime. But what I enjoyed most of all was learning to listen and appreciate sounds anew. When Geoffrey actually stood in the river shallows at the head of Dunnerdale and lowered his twin microphones almost to water level I thought he was going too far. But he beckoned me into the water and put the earphones over my ears.

It was a revelation. Directly close to the microphones water was pouring, spouting, spurting and bubbling over boul¬ders. Each gush came at regular intervals but the rhythms of each was different. The notes were also different but they all fitted together into a regular pattern of time and tune.It was like a piece by Bach. Ever since I spoke to the visually handicapped, and assisted in the collection of sounds for radio, my apprecia¬tion of the feel and the sound of nature has been height¬ened. A walk up a river can become a music festival. A blackbird's extempore song becomes a serious, masterly recital. I note the difference in the cascade of sound from a birch tree in the wind to the murmuring outburst of an oak. And I can appreciate the sharp edged crystal feel in a piece of granite, or the silk smooth finish of a sand scoured volcanic tuff, or the abrasiveness of a hand full of beck gravel, or the coolness and yielding velvet feel of wet moss. We are part of all we have experienced. Enthusiasm thrives on sharing. Every encounter adds to our secret store. It is there when we want it.

The trees have spoken all night, dead leaves hissing, limbs creaking and whipping the storming wind until it howled. The rage continued for hours, coming in great waves like breakers on the shore. Sometimes I thought that all would go, trees and house and all. It was, I knew, a north wind with a bit of Icelandic seas in it. The sort of fleeing wind that hurls down from the awful north and slices off the tops of the great sea waves to throw them in a spray like steel bars against the pitching bows of struggling ships.

I have feared the north gale and it seems in my haunted dreams that it has followed me to invade the sanctuary of my sheltering trees and to rock the foundations of my piece of earth. Sometimes, in my dreams, I fear that the great sea wastes have followed me to beat against my house; my house is suddenly a small ship and Geordie is shaking my hammock to tell me that I have the middle watch, and I can feel the decks struggling and shuddering to heave out of the hundreds of tons of pounding hammering waters. I drag myself out of this nightmare with a happy smile of relief and turn over. In my mind's eye I can see my bending trees spreading out their arms and hands and throwing the great winds upwards in great eddies above my roof. In one great gust I hear a 'crash!' which wakes me with a start.

Come morning I awake and marvel at the silence. I go out and the trees are standing still and firm and I wonder that they who fought hard all night should be so calm and still, as if nothing has happened. The trees stand like the giants they are, veterans of a thousand campaigns, taking their quiet ease. I expect to see the debris of a battlefield with trunks lying on the ground. But at first sight all looks intact. I remember the cracking noise and see that a large limb has been torn from a Douglas fir and has dropped into a hedge. For the rest there is only a carpet of dead twigs, and dead brown leaves piled in drifts on the lee of the walls. The air has cleared and as the morning lightens I look out beyond the lake to the hills and see that overnight they have been covered by new snow as white as a tablecloth at Sunday teatime.

'Why is wind?' my young son once asked me when we were having a good blow. I tried to answer him. That nothing on the earth stays still, not even the mountains, though sometimes movement is so slow that we cannot see it. That the earth is surrounded by a layer of air that was always in a state of disturbance because it is dragged about by the spinning earth and is pushed into waves by the shape of the land and the differences in temperature. That air piles itself up here, then spills down, flowing and some¬times rushing into hollows there.

'Somewhere,' he mused, 'there must be a very big hole in the air. ‘If we are affected by all that we experience, what then of the wind? For the air is always ebbing and flowing and perhaps unknown to us it helps to shape what we are and what we are destined to be. Its effects are subtle, rarely extreme. Climate influences the racial characteristics of a nation and the flowing air makes its mark. Strong winds certainly disturb normal bird and animal activity; deer particularly get restless. Wind pressures surely influence human behavior patterns too. Gypsies, I was once told, who more than anyone else live in the free air, will work and move unprotected in rain, hail, snow or fog, but they hate a strong wind and are morose and depressed if they have to struggle with one.

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Adrian vultur writes for luxury themed boutique hotels in the lake district

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