Redder than remembrance poppies, riper than a bunch of tomatoes, poisonous as hell – the hedge is swagged in black bryony berries. After what feels like weeks of rain, the first day out of the murk is a spark blown on tinder.
The day brightens from scattered embers of sunlight caught in distant places: the market tower and church spires of Shrewsbury, the stumbling block of Haughmond Hill, the smokestack at Chirk across the border and high slopes of the Berwyns beyond. Gradually, with a sense of release from torpor, the last of autumn sunlight sets fire to November. Most of the tall trees have been shredded by the downpours, but many thorns and oaks are stubbornly green. Birch and sallow on the stony quarry sides glow ochre. Field maple are turning butter-yellow, but a few of them become redbrick. Beech are coppery-russet and an old one up Edge Wood has a bough bigger than most trees broken at a splintered keel. Along hedges where the bryony berries shine, the sunlight is snagged on spiders' webs. They float in the air and stroke against the skin. Thousands of spiders, spinning, weaving, casting gossamer to trap light.
All this silence is too much for the birds. After days of lockdown they are ready to burst with sound. It begins with the cough and growl of a raven above the brook. Rancorous wrens bolt from ivy holes to zigzag across lanes. Gangs of redwings go scrumping through trees. Buzzards ditch the plaintive to sound fearsome firework screams. Soon the birds of hedge, field and wood are tearing about with reckless abandon in this new light. In a cluster of red bulb bryony, a spider feels the twitch of silk through its long reach and suddenly, as only spiders can, throws itself into the present. In some strange way this movement is the fragment of a song, a bite, a flash – an inspired act of insurgence.
