Delicious September afternoons: Country diary 100 years ago

Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 9 September 1915

A curiosity of this season is the number of flies that come into the house. Flies do not seem to be conspicuously more numerous elsewhere, yet the window panes in the room where I am now writing are black with them, and there is a constant peppering against the glass from outside as though half-a-dozen pea-shooters were making a concerted attack upon me. I fancy that as the mornings and evenings grow chillier flies are more and more attracted to the warm and sunny surface of the house-walls and beat the windows in intervals between sun baths.

The whole countryside seems to take the sunshine like a bath these delicious September afternoons, and here in Oxfordshire we associate the grateful autumnal heat with the sleepy sound of the slow rolling of loaded waggons along all the roads that lead into the village. Our farmhouses are mostly in the village street, with their rick-yards beside them, and the corn is brought in from the outlying fields and stacked at the homestead. This system no doubt has its conveniences, though it must delay operations immensely at a critical season. It has its merit to the outside observer in this long low rumbling which now fills all our ears - as though content and plenty had found a voice.