November

November reminds me to slow down. As the year exhales, life here steadies. Every falling leaf marks an ending and the air is tinged with melancholy and woodsmoke. The Cornish lanes are no longer filled with shiny cars crammed with excited visitors and the trees in my orchard have been pared right back, their limbs bare and stark against a sky leached of colour. The cafés are closed. Holiday cottages stand empty. The summer finery of awnings and umbrellas has been stripped away from the riverside beer garden and the Fowey swells with high tides to become a mirror filled with a sky the colour of pewter.

The air is damp, early morning mist hangs heavy over the valley and air force blue clouds swell with rain at odds with the sun which, sharp as Jiff lemon, hems them with brightness. November is a liminal month, not quite the warmth of autumn nor yet the chilly silence of winter. Berries hang heavy on the hawthorn. Trees blaze with fire. Fungii huddle in dank places like conspirators, waiting for pumpkin grins and fireworks fade so winter can begin in earnest.

This is the season of remembering and a time for speaking aloud the names carved into stone and hearts. Poppies are pinned to coats, some red paper and others gaudy knitted splashes, large and clownlike on lapels yet holding a serious message within their petals. Never forget.

Each year I make a space for reflection on the eleventh. Today I rode my horse up to the headland, and when the time came for the two minutes’ silence he grazed quietly while I looked out across the water and thought of those who had once known this view and left it behind, perhaps never to return, so that I could be here in peace on this raw and windy morning. I thought about those who have already gone, what was lost, and the long shadow war leaves behind.

This is the month when memory rises. We stop to listen to the silence of the eleventh hour and feel the weight of absence. We think of names and faces long gone, or imagine those long lost to living memory. I think too about all the unfinished stories, tales truncated or never even started. For me remembrance is not only for those who fell; it is also about remembering those who waited at home and longed for good news that never came and watched the horizon in hope. It is for honouring the lives altered in ways history can never quite record, people like my great-aunt Ella or the fictional Daisy in The Letter.

When I wrote The Letter, I found myself drawn to this landscape of love and loss, and the way war sends ripples down the generations. This novel began with a family story I couldn’t let go of and a promise trapped in time that was honoured against all the odds. It is my homage to a love that never wavered and a lament for a future stolen. I wrote it because I wanted to understand how memory and love endure even in silence and to uncover my great-aunt’s story and the many others like it. An entire generation lost. So many lives shattered. These tragedies, personal and national, echoed far beyond the wastes of the Somme.Each November, as I see poppies bloom again on jacket, I think of the women who kept the home fires burning, the men who didn’t return, and the families forever changed. Their courage is written into our collective story.

And in this story there is beauty just as there is a loveliness to the greyness of November. The low sun spills molten gold across the sea. A last rose clings to the wall of my house. Jaunty orange nasturtiums still scrabble over the stone. Even in this season of loss there is life. We pause. We remember. We gather ourselves for the final push to the festive season.

I have heard this time called wintering, and I like the idea. November is a time to tend the heart and accept the darkness, literal and figurative, as part of the cycle. Perhaps remembrance is wintering too? An act of tending the soul and honouring the past while readying ourselves for what comes next. A beat of calm before the pace begins again.

And in that small stillness, if we listen hard enough, maybe we can hear the past and learn from it before we exhale too and move

forward.