Spring came to me this morning in one its stranger but also perhaps more sensuous guises. I lifted the lid on our compost bin and there were several hundred earthworms wound almost continuously around the lid. It was as if the warm dank rotting mass in the bin – the fractured eggshells and papery outer leaves of the leeks – had exhaled all that richly squirming life for the first time this year.
Judging from the number of segments in their bodies they belong to a species that goes by the name brandling earthworm. I suspect that they are taking time out from their sumptuous diet to breed and, as they writhed in unison, they inscribed slow-moving purple-pink hieroglyphs against the black plastic.
Other earthworms have already made a mark on my sense of season, if a little more subliminally. Charles Darwin, himself a great devotee of these humble creatures, estimated that the cumulative wormcasts produced by the population in each acre amounted to about 16 tonnes of shifted soil a year. While the rain washes some of the soil nutrients downwards, the worms carry them back to the surface. So the first stands of red dead-nettle and lesser celandine along the Claxton paths owe some of their April colour to the work of worms.
Another way in which the creatures have unconsciously staked their place in my sense of moment is in the bulging pouch, suspended below the bone-white beaks of our breeding rooks. The birds feed constantly on earthworms, and young rooks are merely black raucous transmutations of worm. Since I once ate rook pie I have, I suppose, eaten worms myself. However, the form in which I love them most is the heady soft meditations that rise at dawn like mist from the throats of our local blackbirds.