It has been said often that there are times when the familiar suddenly becomes unfamiliar.
This is Church Green in Witney. I took the picture after almost two months of summer heat and scarcely a drop of rain. That great sweep of grass, normally such a reassuring green, has been bleached to the colour of straw. An English town green waiting for water.
Yet the trees around it have held their colour. Their deep green foliage frames the dry expanse, while the benches sit quietly at the edges, as though waiting for the Green to become itself again.
But above this exhausted landscape, dark clouds are gathering. A patch of blue remains visible beyond them, and sunlight still catches the trees and buildings, but the storm is unmistakably approaching. A few hours after I took the picture, the rain finally came, a sharp, welcome shower after weeks of dryness.
It brought to mind, inevitably for me and to the annoyance of friends who remark on my obsession with the poem, the closing section of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. There, after the desolation of the poem's dry landscape, Eliot gives us his image of the Ganges:
'Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.'
Absurdly disconnected, of course. This is not the Ganges, nor are these clouds gathering over Himavant, the snow-clad mountains of the north. There is nothing here resembling mountains at all. This is Church Green, Witney. There is no sacred river disappearing into the dust, no Himalayan range looming beyond the horizon. There are parked cars, village houses, benches and — somewhere just out of sight — probably a dog waiting for its owner.
And yet Eliot's lines catches something that this photograph catches too: the strange stillness before rain. There, the Ganga is sunken and the limp leaves wait. Here, the grass is bleached to straw, the trees stand heavy with their leaves, and the clouds gather as in the poem, Crouched, humped in silence. We could be here, or there, or elsewhere*.
* T.S.E - East Coker