On grasslands I almost forget my fear of drowning. Grasslands have waves and hollows, but the shape of the land under the waves is easy to dream of seeing. If the shape of a grassland changes, it changes too little to be noticed during a lifetime. When the wind makes waves in the grass, I lie under the leaning stems. I am not afraid of drowning in grass. On grasslands I have solid soil under me, and under the soil rock – the one thing I have always trusted.

I walk long distances across grasslands before I come to a creek or a river. And even I, who was always too frightened to learn to swim, can wade across a stony bed and poke a short stick into the deeper holes, and can find bottom and come out safely on the other side.

Ponds, swamps, bogs, and marshes frighten me, but I know where to look out for them. Much more alarming is to learn from seeing a subsided place or a sudden, cream-coloured cliff at my feet that for some time past, while I thought I was safe, I was walking over limestone country.

After I had written the sentence above, I remembered a thin book of poems by W. H. Auden that I had put on my shelves twenty years ago. I found the book and I turned to a long poem I had remembered as praising limestone country. I began to read the poem, but I stopped half-way through the third line of the first stanza after reading that the poet is homesick for limestone because it dissolves in water.

I did not want to read the words of a man sick, or pretending to be sick, for stone that dissolves in water. I did not want to hear from a man wanting to stand at the site of the wearing away of the thing I most trust; at the site of the melting of the most solid thing I know into the thing I am most afraid of.

I did not read any further into that poem, but I turned to another poem I had remembered: ‘Plains’.

This time I read the whole of the first stanza, but I did not read past the poet’s announcing that he cannot see a plain without a shudder and his pleading to God never to make him live on a plain – he would prefer to end his days on the worst of seacoasts in preference to any plain.

I put the book back on the shelf where it had stood unopened for twenty years, and I thought of all the poets who have stood on the seashores of the world watching the sea pulling idiot-faces at them or listening to the sea making idiot-noises at them. I thought the reason for my never having been able to write poetry must be that I have always kept well away from the sea. I thought of all the lines of poetry in the world as the ripples and waves of an idiot-sea, and all the sentences of prose in the world as the clumps and tussocks, leaning and waving in the wind but still showing the shape of the soil and the rock underneath, on a grassland.

I am hardly frightened of the creeks or the slow, shallow rivers of grasslands. But I prefer not to think of the underground streams of limestone country. The worst death would be to drown in a tunnel, in darkness.

I am not likely to die in limestone country. I am more likely to learn one day that the grass of the world is all one grassland. For most of my life I have looked at strips and patches of grass and weeds among the outlying streets of districts or beside railway lines or even in corners of graveyards. Or I have looked at the bare spaces between streams on maps of landlocked districts and great plains far from my own district. More likely than my being tricked by limestone country, I expect to find one day that I can walk easily across all the grasslands of the world: I can walk easily because the seas and the deep rivers have shrunk to the corners and the margins of the pages of the world.

Even the rain on grasslands seems no threat.

From a certain cloud high above the horizon a grey feather hangs down. The clouds around are whitish and drifting steadily, but one grey cloud drags a wing like a bird trying to lead the eye away.

Later a fine rain falls. The drops cling to skin, or they slide slowly down the sides of grass-stems. The feel of rain on grasslands is no more than the brushing past of a wing of water.

Whenever I want to read about the rain on grasslands, I take down from my shelves the book Proust: A Biography, by André Maurois, translated by Gerard Hopkins, and published by Meridian Books Inc. of New York in 1958.

In the last paragraph of that book I read the words:

Yet it is his exaltation that has brought us the perfume of the hawthorn trees that died long years ago; that has made it possible for men and women who have never seen, nor will ever see, the land of France, to breathe with ecstasy, through the curtain of the falling rain, the scent of invisible yet enduring lilacs. (Inland)