September

So that’s it. Summer is gone, deceased, dead, and is no more. The first day of September is a bittersweet turning point for me; my own personal equinox. It is the day the summer dies and I mourn its passing. The day when in years past, the long, lazy weeks of indolent leisure would be replaced abruptly with a return to the stuffy environment of the school classroom; where children with new uniforms and freshly scrubbed faces mingled in the tired atmosphere of buildings that had been closed for the summer and were now prison cells smelling of wood polish and chalk, confining us while the warm afternoons drifted by with their tantalising reminder of the outside world of the summer holidays.

Unfortunately as far as school was concerned, “outside” meant physical education lessons and with them came (unimaginatively) football; a game I learned to loathe; repugnance I still experience today. Kicking a ball around for ninety minutes left me bored witless, so I usually opted out; wandering off to the side of the pitch where I daydreamed of more intellectually challenging pursuits while ignoring everyone else, much to their annoyance. Well, if you force someone to play a game in which they have no interest, what do you expect? Whatever it was that they did expect, what they got was rebellion and a stubborn refusal to cooperate – skills I have honed to perfection in adult life.

Occasionally those of us who disliked football and made ourselves sufficiently irritating to the majority who did, were allowed to disappear on a cross country run. This became a carefully timed amble as we were sufficiently far from any supervision for anyone to realise just where we were going or what were weren’t doing (running). I cannot help wondering whether the games teachers were complicit in this deceit as it made their lives easier. They cannot, surely, have missed the possibility that we were not running the full course and were simply biding our time until the end of the lesson? Certainly they never bothered to check, confining themselves to refereeing the inconsequential game going on back at the school playing field. I suspect that we were an irritant better out of the way and forgotten. It was an arrangement that, unspoken as it was, suited both parties. Apart from our being stripped down to skimpy shirts and shorts in the middle of winter, those cross country runs were almost like the exploratory rambles in the woods during the more amenable summer months and anything; anything at all; was preferable to the mind-numbing tedium and bombast of football.

This time of the year when the hedgerows start to turn russet under a blanket of heavy dew and the horse chestnuts ripen among gently reddening leaves is redolent with those memories. I no longer have to return to school, no longer have to dread the High Street posters, full of smiling children modelling the new school uniforms with apparent pleasurable anticipation of the impending new term; and no longer do I have to endure football and the testosterone soaked machismo that accompanies it.

Yet still those feelings haunt me. Still, I dread September; the harbinger. Chill misty mornings and lazy warm afternoons are a hint of the dark winter to come when trees reach their naked branches against sullen, leaden clouds full of snow, rain and sleet, and night falls at four in the afternoon; when, riding home, I see the streetlamps cast pools of neon on the wet pavements and caught in their pale glow, raindrops hang orange against the indigo sky. The early mornings stutter to the sound of chattering starter motors and running engines while motorists defrost their windscreens and mutter under breath that hangs misty in the glacial air. In the ferocity of mid winter, summer will be a warm memory and spring, a promise somewhere on the distant horizon.

I hate September for what it forebodes and for the memories it dredges unbidden from my past. Conversely and perhaps paradoxically, I love September for its mellow colours, afternoon warmth and the memories it dredges unbidden from my past. It’s like the song says; September mornings still can make me feel that way.