A light wind creeping over the meadow face: Country diary 100 years ago

Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 23 December 1916

Surrey, December 21
Rabbits could be seen playing in the meadow at the bottom of the down right up to the time when darkness came. There was no evening. The afternoon sky was just tinged with a strip of dull red in the west, and this patch of colour moved a little towards the north; then it died out. Nothing was visible except a planet and a few stars shining faintly, and seemingly very far away. Clouds in the higher sky came and completely blotted them; you lost all sense of direction; a mist began to spread upward; it was only by the tread of grass underfoot you had knowledge of being on the earth at all. The light, cold air died away; there seemed to be nothing but a chill, dead vacancy for almost an hour. Then a rustle, very slight, came moving along low down, as of something creeping over the meadow face. Bending, it was possible to discover that this was but the first movement of a light wind, just playing along the grass and hardly to be felt a few feet above the ground. But before the top of the down could be reached it could be heard sweeping among the elms a few yards on the other side; it had driven off the mist, and the great limbs could just be perceived swaying now this way and now the other. In the bottom, by the farmstead, strangely, a barnyard cock crowed hoarsely and twice, with a long pause in between. After another interval a bantam sounded a long shrill note. The wind dropped. But this morning it was wild again, scurrying heavy rain through the bare hazels. We knew then why the rabbits had been so frolicsome.