Praise for Wintering
‘Every bit as beautiful and healing as the season itself’
Elizabeth Gilbert
‘Absolutely beautiful’
Cheryl Strayed, bestselling author of Wild
‘A gently unfolding delight: a memoir to savour and inspire, and a warm, witty meditation on the darkest seasons of our lives’ Leah Hazard, author of Hard Pushed
‘This beautiful book has provided a shelter from the storms of the year’ Maggie Smith
‘We all experience periods of ‘wintering’ in our lives and this book shows us how to embrace the uncertainty that can come with it. A beautiful book that can be enjoyed in both winter and summer’
Lara Maiklem, author of Mudlarking
‘An elegant investigation into the consolations of nature and how it can be wonderfully restorative even on the bleakest of days’ Sunday Express
‘Katherine May brings a poet’s eye and unexpected comedy to this enthralling celebration of our fallow season’ Observer
By
the same author:
The Electricity of Every Living Thing Burning Out
Ghosts and Their Uses
A Diary of Slow Progress Enchantment
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First published by Rider in 2020 This edition published in 2025 1
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Extract from Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Prayer’, taken from Meantime, copyright © 1993, published by Picador and reprinted by permission of the author. Extract from Sylvia Plath, ‘Wintering’, taken from Ariel, copyright © 2015, published by and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber. Extract from Eden Phillpotts, A Shadow Passes © 1918, published by Cecil Palmer and Hayward. Extract from Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity, 4th edition copyright © 1987, published by and reprinted by permission of Rider Books. While every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders, the author and publishers would be pleased to rectify at the earliest opportunity any omissions or errors brought to their notice.
For all who have wintered.
Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed
The speculating rooks at their nests cawed And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flowers of grass, What we below could not see, Winter pass.
Edward Thomas, ‘Thaw’
PROLOGUE: SEPTEMBER INDIAN SUMMER
Somewinters happen in the sun. This particular one began on a blazing day in early September, a week before my fortieth birthday.
I was celebrating with friends on Folkestone beach, the start of a fortnight of lunches and drinks that I hoped would avoid a party and see me safely into the next decade of my life. The photographs I have of that day seem absurd now that I know what was about to happen. High on a sense of my own becoming, I snapped the seaside town bathed in the warmth of an Indian summer. The vintagelooking laundrette that we passed on the walk from the car park. The pastel-coloured concrete beach huts that stack along the Leas. Our combined children jumping over the shingle together, and paddling in
an impossibly turquoise sea. The tub of gypsy tart ice cream that I ate while they played.
There are no photos of my husband, H. That’s not necessarily unusual: the photos I take, over and over again, are of my son, Bert, and the sea. But what is unusual is the blank in the photographic record from that afternoon until two days later, when there is a picture of H in a hospital bed, trying to force a smile for the camera.
By the time I was taking those idyllic seaside pictures, H was already complaining that he felt sick. It didn’t signify much; I have found that parenting a child at infant school brings one long succession of germs into the house, which cause sore throats and rashes and blocked noses and stomach aches. He wasn’t even making a fuss. But after a lunch that he couldn’t bear to eat, we walked up to the playground at the top of the cliffs and he disappeared for a while.
I took a photograph of Bert playing in the sandpit, a rope of seaweed tied to the back of his trousers like a tail.When H came back, he told me that he’d vomited.
‘Oh no!’ I remember saying, trying to sound sympathetic, while privately thinking what a nuisance it was. We’d have to cut the day short and head back home, and then he’d probably need to sleep it off. He was clutching at his middle, but that didn’t seem particularly troubling under the circumstances. I wasn’t in
any hurry to leave, and it must have shown, because I have a very clear memory of the sudden shock when our friend – one of our oldest ones, known from schooldays – touched me on the shoulder and said, ‘Katherine, I think H is really ill.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘Do you think so?’ I looked over to see him grimacing, his face sheened with sweat. I said I’d go and fetch the car.
By the time we got home, I still didn’t think it was anything more than a dose of norovirus. H put himself to bed, and I tried to find something for Bert to do, now that he had been robbed of his afternoon on the beach. But two hours later, H called me upstairs and I found him putting on his clothes. ‘I think I need to go to hospital,’ he said. I was so surprised that I laughed.
We had been through this drill before: two trips to A&E with what might have been a grumbling appendix. Both times the pain had passed. This time it didn’t. I dropped Bert off with neighbours and promised to be back in a couple of hours, but soon I was texting them to ask if they wouldn’t mind him staying over.
H sat in a plastic waiting-room chair, a cannula in his hand, looking miserable. It was Saturday night: the place was brimming with rugby players admiring their broken fingers, drunks with lacerated faces and elderly
people hunched in wheelchairs, their carers refusing to take them back to the residential home. By the time I left him it was after midnight, and he still hadn’t been moved to a ward.
I went home and didn’t sleep. Returning the next morning, I found that things had got worse. H was vague and hot with fever. The pain had built up through the night, he said, but by the time it was at its peak, the nurses were changing shift, so nobody could give him the medication to make it bearable.Then his appendix burst. He felt it happening. He screamed out in agony, only to be scolded by the ward sister for being rude and making a fuss. The man in the next bed had to get up to advocate on his behalf; he was calling through the curtains to us now, saying, ‘Terrible state they left him in, poor fella.’
There was still no sign of an operation. H was afraid.
After that, I was afraid, too. It seemed to me that something dangerous and terrible had happened while I had deserted my post. And it was still happening; the nurses and doctors appeared to be drifting around as if there were no hurry at all, as if a man should lie back and allow his internal organs to rupture without a whimper. I felt, suddenly and furiously, that I could lose him. He clearly needed someone at his bedside to defend him, so that’s what I did. I planted
myself there, ignoring visiting hours, and when the pain got unbearable, I trailed behind the ward sister until she helped him. I’m usually too embarrassed to order my own takeaway, but this was different. It was me versus them, my husband’s suffering versus their rigid schedule. I was not going to be beaten.
I left that evening at nine o’clock, and called every hour until he was safely in theatre. I didn’t care that I was being a nuisance. Then I lay awake until he was out again, and I’d heard that he was comfortable.Then I couldn’t sleep anyway. At moments like this, sleep feels like falling; you sink into luxurious blackness only to jolt awake again, staring around at the darkness as if you might divine something in the grainy night. The only things I could find were my own fears: the unbearable fact of his suffering, and the terror of being left to survive without him.
I took compassionate leave from work, and kept up my vigil all week between school drop-offs and collections. I was there for the surgeon explaining the extent of the infection with something approaching awe; I was there to fret over H’s temperature refusing to fall, his blood oxygen levels failing to return to normal. I helped him to take slow walks around the ward, and watched him sleep afterwards, sometimes drifting off mid-sentence. I changed him into clean clothes, and brought him tiny quantities of food to
eat. I tried to soothe Bert’s fear of his father, suddenly hooked up to so many wires and tubes and bleeping machines.
Somewhere in the middle of this catastrophe, a space opened up. There were hours spent driving from home to the hospital, from hospital to home; sitting by the side of H’s bed while he dozed; waiting in the canteen while the ward rounds took place. My days were simultaneously tense and slack: I was constantly required to be somewhere and awake and vigilant; but I was also redundant, an interloper. I spent a lot of time staring around me, wondering what to do, my mind churning to categorise these new experiences, to find a context for them.
And in all that space it suddenly seemed inevitable that this would happen. A strange, irresistible hurricane was already blasting through my life anyway, and this was just another part of its wake. Only a week ago, I had given notice on my job as a university lecturer, trying to find a better life outside the perpetual stress and noise of the contemporary university. I had just published my first book in six years, and had another imminent deadline. My son had only recently returned to school after the long summer holiday, and I had all the usual maternal worries about his ability to step up to the challenges of Year One. Change was already happening, and here was its cousin, mortality,
not so much knocking on my door as kicking it down like some particularly brutal extrajudicial force.
I have long told the story of how I managed to gatecrash a wake on my thirtieth birthday. I had arranged to meet a friend at a pub, and blundered my way in to find that it had been booked out to host the aftermath of an Irish funeral. The whole room was dressed in black and a band was playing in the corner, two young women on fiddles, singing folk songs. I should, of course, have turned around and walked out, but I was worried that my friend wouldn’t find me then, and it was raining outside. I thought I might just lurk near the door and try to pass unnoticed. Actually, I don’t know what I was thinking; any sensible person would have left and sent a text. But I stayed and thought this was just my luck – some kind of harbinger of death to mark the end of my youthful twenties.
The situation only worsened when my friend arrived, and it suddenly became clear that she bore a remarkable resemblance to one of the women in the band, which had now stopped playing. This wasn’t just my own view; it seemed that the family of the deceased had mistaken her for the now-vanished fiddler. My friend was hugged and hand-shaken and back-patted, and it was positively insisted upon that she stayed for a drink. Having no idea what on earth was happening, and assuming, I later learned, that
this was just the warm hospitality of the Irish, she agreed, and even managed to field questions about her musical talent with what looked like modesty, but was actually flat denial.We only managed to leave because we had theatre tickets that could irrefutably prove we ought to be elsewhere.
The whole episode had the air of a Shakespearean farce, staged just for me. But in retrospect, it was light relief. I passed the cusp of my fortieth birthday with H freshly out of hospital, and all my celebrations cancelled. At ten in the evening, Bert called me upstairs and promptly vomited all over me. He carried on well into the night. But by then, it didn’t matter, because I had given up on sleep anyway. Something had already shifted.
There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into Somewhere Else. Somewhere Else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries on. Somewhere Else is where ghosts live, concealed from view and only glimpsed by people in the real world. Somewhere Else exists at a delay, so that you can’t quite keep pace. Perhaps I was already teetering on the brink of Somewhere Else anyway; but now I fell through, as simply and discreetly as dust sifting between the floorboards. I was surprised to find that I felt at home there.
Winter had begun. *
Everybody winters at one time or another; some winter over and over again.
Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. Perhaps it results from an illness; perhaps from a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you’re in a period of transition, and have temporarily fallen between two worlds. Some winterings creep upon us more slowly, accompanying the protracted death of a relationship, the gradual ratcheting up of caring responsibilities as our parents age, the drip-drip-drip of lost confidence. Some are appallingly sudden, like discovering one day that your skills are considered obsolete, the company you worked for has gone bankrupt, or your partner is in love with someone new. However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely and deeply painful.
Yet it’s also inevitable. We like to imagine that it’s possible for life to be one eternal summer, and that we have uniquely failed to achieve that for ourselves. We dream of an equatorial habitat, forever close to the
sun; an endless, unvarying high season. But life’s not like that. Emotionally, we’re prone to stifling summers and low, dark winters, to sudden drops in temperature, to light and shade. Even if, by some extraordinary stroke of self-control and good luck, we were able to keep control of our own health and happiness for an entire lifetime, we still couldn’t avoid the winter. Our parents would age and die; our friends would undertake minor acts of betrayal; the machinations of the world would eventually weigh against us. Somewhere along the line, we would screw up. Winter would quietly roll in.
I learned to winter young. As one of the many girls of my age whose autism went undiagnosed, I spent a childhood permanently out in the cold. At seventeen, I was hit with a bout of depression so hard that it immobilised me for months. I was convinced that I would not survive it. I was convinced that I didn’t want to. But somewhere there, in the depths, I found the seed of a will to live, and its tenacity surprised me. More than that: it made me strangely optimistic. Winter had blanked me, blasted me wide open. In all that whiteness, I saw the chance to make myself new again. Half-apologetic, I started to build a different kind of a person: one who was rude sometimes and who didn’t always do the right thing, and whose big, stupid heart made her endlessly seem to hurt, but also
one who deserved to be here, because she now had something to give.
For years, I would tell it to anyone who would listen: ‘I had a breakdown when I was seventeen.’ Most people were embarrassed to hear it, but some were grateful to find a shared thread in their story and mine. Either way, I felt with great certainty that we should talk about these things, and that I, having learned some strategies, should share them. It didn’t save me from another dip and another dip, but each time the peril became less. I began to get a feel for my winterings: their length and breadth, their heft. I knew that they didn’t last forever. I knew that I had to find the most comfortable way to live through them until spring.
I was always aware that I was flying in the face of polite convention in doing this, and that the times when we fall out of everyday life remain taboo. We’re not raised to recognise wintering, or to acknowledge its inevitability. Instead, we tend to see it as a humiliation, something that should be hidden from view lest we shock the world too greatly. We put on a brave public face and grieve privately; we pretend not to see other people’s pain. We treat each wintering as an embarrassing anomaly that should be hidden or ignored. This means we’ve made a secret of an entirely ordinary process, and have thereby given those who endure it a pariah status, forcing them to drop out of everyday life
in order to conceal their failure.Yet we do this at a great cost. Wintering brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience, and wisdom resides in those who have wintered. In our relentlessly busy contemporary world, we are forever trying to defer the onset of winter. We don’t ever dare to feel its full bite, and we don’t dare to show the way that it ravages us. A sharp wintering, sometimes, would do us good.We must stop believing that these times in our life are somehow silly, a failure of nerve, a lack of willpower. We must stop trying to ignore them or dispose of them. They are real, and they are asking something of us. We must learn to invite the winter in.
That’s what this book is about: learning to recognise the process, engage with it mindfully, and even to cherish it. We may never choose to winter, but we can choose how.
Our knowledge of winter is a fragment of childhood, almost innate: we learn about it in the surprising cluster of novels and fairy tales that are set in the snow. All the careful preparations that animals make to endure the cold, foodless months; hibernation and migration, deciduous trees dropping leaves. This is no accident. The changes that take place in winter are a kind of
alchemy, an enchantment performed by ordinary creatures to survive: dormice laying on fat to hibernate; swallows navigating to South Africa; trees blazing out the final weeks of autumn. It is all very well to survive the abundant months of the spring and summer, but in winter, we witness the full glory of nature flourishing in lean times.
Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.
Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season when the world takes on a sparse beauty, and even the pavements sparkle. It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order.
In this book, I set out to understand winter by talking to those who know it intimately: the Finns who start preparing to winter in August, for example; or the people of Tromsø in Norway who don’t see the sun from November to January. I will meet people
who have lived through illness, failure, isolation and despair, and have come out renewed, and the people who work most closely with the brutal processes of the natural world. I’ll explore how to prepare for winter, how to endure its bleakest days, and, finally, how to emerge again into the spring.
Doing those deeply unfashionable things – slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting – are radical acts these days, but they are essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin. If you do, you’ll expose all those painful nerve endings, and feel so raw that you’ll need to take care of yourself for a while. If you don’t, then that old skin will harden around you.
It’s one of the most important choices you’ll ever make.