"chidden"

Ray both loved poetry, and was fascinated by language.  Only the other week he was reprimanding me, as he cried over some Housman, for not getting sentimentally moved.  I knew he wouldn't follow (by that point) if I explained to him that the reason I don't teach much poetry, and don't read it a great deal, either, is that it can ambush me and make me far too upset... One of his fairly recent favorites was Hardy's "Neutral Tones": "We stood by a pond that winter day, / And the sun was white, as though chidden of God ..." - and those might be the most cheerful lines in it.  What, he asked, is "chidden"? ["rebuked," "chastized," since you too are asking.  I had to look it up].  Rest assured, this bleak lyric won't be making it onto the funeral order of service (but the Housman may).

On Wimbledon Common this morning, everything in sight - apart from embarrassed dogs wearing Santa hats - looked decidedly chidden.  It wasn't actually raining, but ... I sat on a bench for a gloomy while, and recollected the stories about the times that Ray used to bring me up here for a walk: the time, when I was about 3, I apparently said, excitedly, "look! look! a black seagull!" (I was glad to find the Zeiss binoculars today: that'll help me recognize crows when I see them). Or the time when he said that he could turn on the street lights as dusk fell by treading on a metal water plate on the ground - stomp - and (by pure coincidence, or well-timed guesswork), on they came.  But I don't really remember these: only the anecdotes.  I do remember, though, after we returned to London after four years in Cumberland, coming to the pond with him to sail my model boats: a yacht with a wooden hull, and a tug boat - I would have thought made from an Airfix kit, but I can't discover the precise model on line.  Maybe it was just model airplanes that I made from sticky plastic-and-glue Airfix kits, and the tug was bought at Peggy Bowbrick's, the toy shop at the corner of the Ridgway and the High Street.

And yes: I'm strongly aware that in starting to dismantle the contents of this house, I'm dismantling 61 years of my life.  I doubt I'll find those boats, though.

And no - not all the day was "edged with grayish leaves" - a daffodil came out.