Eton escorts, SL4: a town that keeps its year in three halves

Here the year opens in September. The Michaelmas half begins while the trees along the Brocas are still green, and within weeks they have turned and the playing fields beyond the college wear a morning mist that lifts slowly, if at all. This is the season of the Field Game, the college's own kind of football, and of collars turned up against the wind.

When the clocks go back at the end of October, darkness comes before most dinners do. The chapel, which stands higher than anything else on this bank, becomes an outline against the last of the western light, and the castle across the water holds the sunset a moment longer than the town beneath it. Autumn asks for a table taken early and a good coat for the bridge afterwards.

Winter announces itself at Eton with the Wall Game, the strangest thing the college owns. It is played against a long brick wall at the edge of the fields, in a heaving scrum where a goal is so rare that whole matches pass without one. The great fixture belongs to St Andrew's Day, at the close of November, and after it the town knows the year has turned.

The half ends before Christmas and the boys go home. The antique shops and galleries along the street are left to townspeople and to visitors strolling over from Windsor, and after dark the bridge, which carries no cars, is nearly empty. Frost whitens the fields. The river runs high and brown after rain. December Eton is the most private version of the place, and the one a Londoner is least likely to have seen.

January brings the Lent half and the shortest, greyest weeks of the year. The water meadows beside the Thames can lie sodden or flooded for days after heavy rain, the towpaths turn to mud, and the Brocas is left to the swans and the occasional walker with a dog.

It is, though, the season in which Eton is most itself. There are no day trippers, no queues at the bridge, no picnics. An evening here is an indoor evening by nature: a long table, a slow meal, a short walk in cold air to finish it.

The clocks go forward at the end of March and Eton gets its evenings back. Between the Lent and Summer halves the school is away again, and the town has a few weeks of lengthening light almost to itself. The mute swans are nesting on the banks by April, the meadows dry out, and boats begin to reappear on the reach above the bridge.

Spring is the gentlest time to walk here. The ground has firmed, the wind has lost its edge, and the Brocas, still empty of summer crowds, gives the view of the castle to anyone who stops for it.

In the Summer Half the college divides itself in two. Dry bobs play cricket, and on a warm afternoon the playing fields are dotted with white. Wet bobs row, and eights and single sculls work the reach of the Thames above the town.

The Fourth of June, named for George III's birthday, is the summer's great day. Families arrive with hampers, the river bank fills, and the boats go by in procession with their rowers standing upright in hats heaped with flowers. For a quiet evening it is the one date to avoid.

By midsummer the sun sets well after nine, and the Brocas becomes the town's garden. People sit on the grass with bottles and rugs, rowers carry their boats down to the water, and across the river the castle turns from grey to gold and back to grey as the evening goes. No view of it is better.

When the school breaks up for the long holiday the town slows again. Each July the swan census known as Swan Upping works its way up the river past the meadow, counting that spring's cygnets, and then August settles over Eton like a held breath.

A guest who can choose should choose by the light. Autumn and winter suit an evening that starts indoors and ends with a brisk crossing of the bridge. Late spring and summer suit the reverse: out first, while the meadow is still bright, and indoors once the castle has faded.

Give Octavia the date and the plan when you write, and your companion comes dressed for that particular evening: a wool coat for December frost, something lighter for a June meadow.