Well, it is the season of mists as well as mellow fruitfulness.... Doreen Wallace looks at the first fog of autumn in this nostalgic essay from October 1960.

Before the last rose of summer is finally shattered, we usually have our first fog of autumn. But in the country we don't have dark, dirty, black-and-yellow fogs; ours are grey-white and not without charm: they leave the lawns thick-silvered and patterned all over by bird-feet — and they don't last long, until we reach, perhaps, a few bad patches in winter. To me, not wanting to drive cars in the small hours of the morning, our early fogs are a great joy.

This year, in our valley, we had our first on the night of October 16th. The next morning, I had to sally out across our broad common to our little town before the mist had quiet cleared: and believe me, I never saw anything so lovely. (Well, I'm always saying that. At every season of the year, there is something so breath-taking that it seems to crown everything I've ever seen before).

I set out into a landscape of silhouetted ghosts in varying greys very faintly touched with gold, the trees along the sides of our valley. But nearer, and clearer to the view were the gorse bushes on the common hung all over with spider-webs, moonstone-beaded, like tiny washings put out to dry - fairy Shetland-shawls. Not a gleam of brightness anywhere, only silvers and greys and grey-greens except in the sky, which was gradually turning from grey to a burning white.

And all at once the spider-webs sparkled, all at once the dewdrops on the heads of dead grass and dead wheel-shaped umbelliferous plants turned to diamonds, all at once the sides of the valley took shape and the far trees took colour: the sun had come through.

Soon the zenith was blue and everything was laid on for a rich-hued autumn day.

You don't get this in dirty great towns with polluted air: but you do in many suburbs where the atmosphere is not so bad. It is fashionable to look down on suburban life, I can't think why. I know a great many suburbs which resemble villages; you can live informally, you don't have to wear hats and gloves, you can smile at your neighbours and you even know a lot of them to speak to, you have your own shops for daily needs, very like village shops, you combine the best of both worlds. Father has to work in a town because that is his kind of work and he must do it in order to live the human life with a wife and family, but he can have a home in a road with trees along it, where every house has a garden, where the daily sight of beauty is not lost to him and his family.

It is true that the houses are often architectural disasters, mock-Tudor or what have you, but who cares? If the insides have a modicum of comfort and show the individual tastes of the occupants, then the occupants can be happy.... I wouldn't care if my house had a Gothic tower and a Palladian porch, provided it was private and in a place with trees and flowers.

One of the loveliest things I ever saw, some years ago, was a little 'non-adopted' road on the outskirts of Ipswich, after a heavy spring rain. Every house would have given a well trained architect a pain in the neck. Each one was the architectural enemy of its neighbour, there was no unity, there was no style. But each one had had love lavished on it (pink curtains, yellow curtains, and the gardens were little dreams) and I was assailed by the heady scent of wet lilac on all sides, while the Mums, smiling in the new sunshine, wheeled out their prams through the brilliant lakes in the non-adopted road. No one was complaining about taste or style or even the weather. I, an amateur painter, would have liked a couple of hours to try to put on canvas the mirror-bright wet roofs and the tender-bright wet road, the small sparking trees and the gumbooted little brats splashing around.

Simple joys, I think, are worth far more, in terms of the point we have now reached in civilisation. We may pass through the phase of simple joys, but just now we have them and ought to recognise them. Country people have heaps of them, if they have the eyes to see. Suburban people do have the eyes to see: they do make the most of what they have. Big city life, well, that's another story.