Richard Kerridge’s personal story of life with cold-blooded animals (he wisely doesn’t say ‘poikilothermic’ anywhere) tells how he makes contact with nature for comfort at times of crisis – the first snog with a girlfriend after spotting a Grass Snake, delicately and wittily narrated; or the escapes from his troubled father, who has recurring nightmares of being again in a tank battle in Normandy.
It’s a skilfully told story, with interesting facts about Britain’s native newts, frogs, lizards and snakes, interspersed with personal encounters, mainly from Kerridge’s boyhood, when it was still possible for boys to find, catch and keep these now heavily-protected animals in and around London. It is a shock to realize that Natterjack Toads, now confined to a few wardened sites in the whole of Britain, were a century ago common even in the capital, and everybody knew and seemingly liked their call. Thursley Thrushes, was one of their names: Thursley remaining a fine place for lizards, but sadly too acid for the little toads – did acid rain combine with the natural acidity of the bogs there? All these events are complex and too little known.
I really enjoyed the boyhood adventures, and the boy’s mixed feelings on jumping on a pregnant lizard, only for her to shed her tail, leaving an unhappily bloody stump, a wriggling tail, and disappointment. Kerridge is very good on such moments. I’m less sure I really needed his agonies with his father: not quite convinced there was any organic connection with whatever the wildlife did. Perhaps he was trying a little too hard to make it all into a single story: life can just be untidy. But the fifty-year sweep from the sixties to now, from confused but reptile-rich childhood to mature enjoyment of nature and sober reflection on how much has been lost, is well done. ‘Field herping’ (herpetologising, i.e. finding and photographing reptiles by disturbing them, flipping up stones and the like) is a new term to me: and the fact that it’s illegal in Britain, and pretty much futile given how few species we have, and how rare they have become, triggers another melancholy moment. It’s a matter of everyone’s experience that there is more to see on the continent: that nature in our country is seriously damaged, despite our extraordinary concentration of nature-lovers.
For all that, and the ‘cold blood’ in the title – not exactly a passion-stirring phrase, perhaps – this is a book with plenty of joyful moments, one that gives something of the flavour of what it means to be English and obsessed by nature. As such, it is a book that people who do love nature can read for self-discovery; and people married to nature-lovers can read for explanation.
A young Englishman has been very ill, has spent a long time in hospital, has had the joy of life knocked out of him, is lonely, disorientated. He is brought home by his parents, to the old ironstone house that he loves, in the fields whose names and shapes he knows. Slowly he regains his strength. He reads Paul Gallico’s old tale, The Snow Goose (illustrated by Peter Scott, founder of the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust; Peter Scott Books, 1946).
He decides to go to America to follow the real Snow Geese all the way from Eagle Lake, Texas to the Foxe Peninsula, Baffin Island, three thousand miles on their spring migration.
Here we are in Texas:
“The first sign was a faint tinkling in the distance, from no particular direction, the sound of a marina, of halliards flicking on metal masts. Drifts of specks appeared above the horizon ring. Every speck became a goose. Flocks were converging on the pond from every compass point, a diaspora in reverse, snow geese flying in loose Vs and Ws and long skeins that wavered like seaweed strands, each bird intent on the roost at the centre of the horizon’s circumference. Lines of geese broke up and then recombined in freehand ideograms: kites, chevrons, harpoons. I didn’t move. I just kept watching the geese, the halliard yammer growing louder and louder, until suddenly flocks were flying overhead, low over the shoulder, the snow geese yapping like small dogs, crews of terriers or dachshunds – urgent sharp yaps in the the thrum and riffle of beating wings and the pitter-patter of goose droppings pelting down around me. They approached the roost on shallow glides, arching their wings and holding them steady, or flew until they were right above the pond and then tumbled straight down on the perpendicular. …”
Fiennes writes with glittering perfection: this is a book of rare beauty, taut as a fairytale, a journey back to joy in life, a story of homesickness and longing, of loneliness and company, of the generosity of strangers, of Greyhound bus journeys, and days and nights in a tiny ‘roomette’ in a Canadian sleeper train, of long periods of waiting in small towns and hotel rooms, of wildlife and landscapes, of snow geese themselves, and, marvellously simply, of returning home.
This is a special book that can be read as literature or as narrative natural history. Either way, it’s a marvellous read. I guarantee you won’t be disappointed.
People laugh at the Victorian taboo on talking about sex, while prostitution was rife in London at the time. Today, too, we have curious taboos: people don’t talk about death, for instance. But the taboo I have in mind is different: population control. It’s just not done to speak about it. But I’m going to, and I’m not sorry. It’s vital.
Back in 1972, Donella and Dennis Meadows and Jørgen Randers published a book that, even at the time, I found distinctly curious. It was called The Limits to Growth.
The Limits to Growth, by Donella and Dennis Meadows and Jørgen Randers, 1972
It was commissioned by the Club of Rome, a non-profit think tank. It argued, in a nutshell, that a model of the Earth’s resources and human usage of them predicted, under certain scenarios, ‘overshoot and collapse’ of the whole system in the 21st century. The model was called World3 and it contained subsystems for agriculture, industry, population, non-renewable resources, and pollution.
The basic idea of The Limits to Growth was Malthusian, after Thomas Malthus’s 1798 book, An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus argued that population would continually increase; assuming the ‘means of subsistence’ started ‘equal to the easy support of its inhabitants’ – that food supply and consumption were in balance – then consumption would always tend to run ahead of food supply (and of wages), leading straight to poverty, though war, famine and disease could also intervene.
Malthus observed that either the death rate could increase to cut down a population through positive checks like famine, disease, and war; or birth rate could be lowered by celibacy, late marriage, birth control or abortion, to prevent population growth. He attacked the idea that agricultural production could grow indefinitely. He was attacked, unjustifiably, for being uncaring of the poor, and replied that it was ‘vicious and cruel’ of a government to allow population to grow without preparing to feed (and we might add, to house, educate, and care for) it, in other words for society to rely on human misery instead of proper planning for a stable and happy population.
The Limits to Growth was similarly attacked, perhaps with rather more justification. What seemed to be its ringing certainty about how we would really soon now run into unalterable limits imposed by nature was shredded by the critics. Its over-reliance on what was, after all, only a model into which one could put different numbers was in hindsight distinctly naive. By making itself look like a cranky doomsday prophecy, it became only too easy to dismiss.
But the Malthusian argument, updated a little, is unanswerable. If you have a finite planet and exponential growth – heck, ANY growth – then you must run into limits eventually. If growth is rapid, that ‘eventually’ will be soon. In 2011, Ugo Bardi’s The Limits to Growth Revisited argued that reality seemed to be following the 1972 prediction after all.
What the critics seized on in The Limits to Growth was, especially, its naive assumption that resources were known and fixed. Big Oil argued that new discoveries would (always) be made, only to find that discoveries declined rapidly, and became steadily more inconvenient, polluting or dangerous – far out at sea, high in the Arctic, or as dirty and difficult oil shale, necessitating the invention of fracking.
Big Oil and the economists argued, correctly up to a point, that when a resource becomes scarce, its price rises, and that enables formerly too-expensive alternatives to be developed. In the case of oil, that begins with deep, dangerous and dirty ways to get more oil. Failing all of those, it continues with alternatives to mineral oil, which might include synthesising oil from plant materials, or perhaps directly from sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. Failing that, it could continue with alternative forms of energy, such as wind and solar power used with batteries, and so on, as the excess of demand over supply pushed prices steadily upwards. All of this is pretty basic economics, but it overlooks the real attachment of today’s economy to resources such as oil, and the pain that is starting to result as resources start to run short. Wars and tensions in the Middle East over both oil and water (especially for irrigation) illustrate the point.
The economists further argued that economic growth was not ineluctably tied to population growth, nor to growth in the use of resources. The economy might grow (we could phrase it today) through services like insurance, or banking, or software, or games, or videos, none of which in themselves logically entail physical resources, however much bankers build themselves flashy headquarters and huge IT centres full of hot computers and power-hungry air-conditioning systems. In theory, wellbeing and the economy could improve without using more resources. So while it looks and feels as if every industry and service depends hugely on oil today, in theory, argue the economists, you could have one without the other. So, oil, qua energy, isn’t quite the solid roadblock that it appears, nor are mineral resources like copper, or tantalum, or germanium, or gold, however vital they each may look to today’s world of electronic devices. I hope I’ve stated the economists’ case fairly.
Oil as a chemical feedstock is another matter: many years ago one of my science teachers observed that when we have burnt all the world’s oil, our descendants will bitterly regret our folly in using millions of years of chemical wealth just for energy. Paint, plastics, dyestuffs, fertilizers, medicines (yes, and pesticides and explosives) – oil has a hand in thousands of manufactured substances and materials that we all rely on every day. It sounds grim: no oil, no feedstock. Well, not quite: we already have ‘plastic’ bags made of cellulose from plants. With enough effort, chemical feedstocks like methanol can be made from wood, or carbon dioxide and water: we could one day learn to recycle carbon endlessly, and carbon will then be enthusiastically scavenged from the atmosphere as a vital resource.
Ah, carbon. The outpouring of carbon dioxide has already warmed the planet, changed the climate, moved ecological zones towards the poles, acidified the oceans. It is apparently in the process of sending perhaps half of all the species on the planet to extinction in the coming centuries. It seems incredible that such verifiable facts should be disputed; or that such urgent warnings should be ignored. But disputed they are, and ignored too, drowned out by the incessant tinnitus of wars, elections, recessions, politics, selfishness and greed, and simply the sheer bustle of daily life.
But carbon contributes to one thing that humans are definitely tied to: food. If the population rises, more food is required. Even this, though, is not a straightforward 1972-style equation, N people x C kilos consumed = F kilos of food required. If we all became vegetarians with the modest diet of a traditional Indian villager (just rice or chapatis every day, with a little oil, a few onions and chilis, rarely anything else) then the world could sustain many more of us than if we all demanded Texan portions of steak made from methane-producing cows, each animal guzzling the grain that might have fed dozens of vegetarians.
Still, for any given agricultural productivity and any given area of land there is a maximum population that can be sustained. Let’s try a thought experiment: say we achieved optimal efficiency in converting sunlight to grain, over the whole land surface of the earth, deserts, forests and all, we might increase productivity fivefold, and the productive area fivefold, for a 25fold increase. Perhaps we could grow food all over the oceans, hard as that might be; the production would double again. If we could reduce our food needs through genetic engineering (I am not advocating this) or other means, more people could be fed. Now, the human brain accounts for about 20% of our energy intake, and can hardly be changed; but let’s suppose we could halve the food used by the rest of the body, we’d then use just 60% of what we eat today: the population could increase by 100/60 or 1.66fold. So how many people would that be? Much more than now. If the current population is 7 billion then we could have 7 x 25 x 2 x 1.66 = 580 billion people on the planet; it could be more if the proportion of vegetarians increased, rather than decreasing as it is doing today. No doubt you can argue for still greater numbers. The theoretical limit is enormous (nothing at all like the 1972 view), and full of uncertainties: still, it is an extraordinary prospect. And it ignores what we are already seeing, which is increasing shortage of resources.
But even assuming that the agriculturalists and engineers did their work splendidly, and none of the terrible shortages of oil or water or minerals, or fights over shortages that The Limits to Growth implied ever occurred, I should not like that world, and I can’t believe you would. There would be no room for wildlife or non-food plants: no place to go for a walk in the sunshine: indeed, no call to go to the agricultural surface at all, except to drive a tractor, if humans still did such a job in a robot-rich world. For with the land all devoted to growing food, we would all live underground (but for a few super-rich, who would still enjoy unimaginable luxuries like fresh air and sunshine and flowers), work, play and probably fight down there. For any mass emergence on to the surface would spell starvation for billions as crops were crushed underfoot. Unbearable? If so, that is the limit to growth.
We could ask, why should all the planet’s resources flow to just one species, us? What makes us so special that we should take the shares of all other species, for that is what the grow-as-we-like until the hundreds-of-billions scenario means? At the least, it is a bit selfish.
For we have one more professional to convince, after the oilmen and economists, and all the work to be done by agriculturalists and engineers to set up such a world. It’s the ecologist.
A famous book on this subject was also published in 1972: Barbara Ward and René Dubos’s Only One Earth.
Only One Earth argued (much more solidly than The Limits to Growth) that development should be limited to ensure basic human rights, an ‘inner limit’ within the ‘outer limit’ of the Earth’s carrying capacity. Much later talk has grossly diluted the idea of ‘sustainable development’ to allow almost anything: it is much easier to claim that something is sustainable than to stop consuming more. Ward and Dubos argued for ‘the careful husbandry of the earth’, sharing wealth fairly and conserving wildlife carefully. It was pretty radical stuff for an economist like Ward. In effect, she broadened economics to include human wellbeing – a domestic and individual ‘economy’ – as well as ecology – the wellbeing of animals, plants, and ecosystems.
I would like to imagine that the arguments for healthy ecosystems rich in life of every kind are becoming obvious: I feel they are already painfully clear to anyone who looks at the question. Still, here they are, very briefly. Crops need pollinators, like bees, bumblebees, moths and butterflies, flies, beetles. Pests need to be controlled by predators, parasites, and pathogens. Materials need to be recycled by saprophytes. We need genetic diversity – wild plants, old cultivated varieties, not to mention animals and fungi too, to combat pests and diseases, to supply unknown future crops and crop varieties, medicines, and other useful substances. In short, all ecological roles, species of every sort, are needed, not just crop plants, our primary producers, creators of food: they can’t survive alone.
More than that, more than those desperate agricultural and economic requirements, we need beauty and delight; birds, bees, butterflies, dragonflies and Komodo dragons, tigers and tiger-lilies. Without them, life isn’t worth living.
We are already in serious danger of losing all these things, as neonicotinoid insecticides join the already long list of disastrously dangerous substances we have created, manufactured in stupidly large amounts, and released onto the land with blithe ignorance (or worse, reckless lack of concern, with contrary evidence left unpublished, covered up to preserve profit). Already neonicotinoids are proving as deadly as the organochlorine insecticides of the 1950s and 1960s, that led Rachel Carson to write her 1962 classic Silent Spring.
The veterinary drug Diclofenac has destroyed almost all the vultures of the Indian subcontinent; now its use is spreading disastrously to Africa, as countries that should know better are doing the cheapest and dirtiest thing, in the face of incontrovertible evidence of harm. We do seem to be a terribly stupid species, like Douglas Adams’s mindless military robot.
Are there limits to growth? Of course there are. It’s more than time we started acting as if there were. The taboo on population control did have some slight justification: of course we cannot want a world with compulsory sterilisations, euthanasia, even a China-style One Child policy. But there’s no need for such drastic and terrible methods. Population can be controlled far better by persuasion, by taxation, by education, by informing people of the consequences of their choices, by understanding the pressures on nature and man’s place in the world.
Let us decide how much room we want to give to forests, to prairie, to tundra, to wetlands, to deserts.
Let us decide where we want seabirds by the million to have undisturbed cliffs and seas full of fish to feed on.
Let us decide that we shall have a world full of lions and bears and howler monkeys and sparkling damselflies, of buzzing bumblebees and naturally-pollinated fruit trees, of pristine forests full of undiscovered species, rich in species and substances whose uses we have not yet even imagined.
Let us choose life, and start to live lightly on this beautiful planet.
Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage, by Peter Forbes
The effect of natural selection on how animals look has attracted the
attention of naturalists from the birth of modern natural history, starting even before Darwin’s Origin of Species.
Visual appearance can affect an animal’s survival in numerous ways.
Camouflage makes it hard for predators to find a prey animal; warning coloration advertises that a potential prey is poisonous or distasteful; Batesian mimicry allows an edible species to pretend to be distasteful; and Müllerian mimicry allows a distasteful species to be sampled less often by young inexperienced predators, by resembling a more common distasteful species. And within these areas, there are infinite possibilities.
Butterfly Mimicry: mimics on the right, the imitated ‘models’ on the left
But as the cover art suggests, Forbes does not stop there. Camouflage has military uses; and the history of two World Wars reveals extraordinary interactions between naturalists like Hugh Cott (author of the greatest twentieth-century book on camouflage, Adaptive Coloration in Animals, 1940) and Peter Scott with the military – Scott was a naval captain, so he had a foot in both camps.
Much of the book concerns the natural history and biology of butterflies – they include many of nature’s best mimics, and provide incredibly complex examples of visual evolution at work, as the mimic species adapts to each of the many geographic variants of the host or model species. It’s even possible for multiple forms to appear in a single brood. Forbes describes the research workers, their controversies and their heated opinions, right or wrong. Truth wins in the end, but that doesn’t prevent a messy process along the way, just as in evolution.
Today, new light is being shed on the mechanisms of mimicry and coloration in general by evolutionary developmental biology, which Forbes insists on calling “evo devo”. The result of such inquiry will one day be an explanation of the observed, very complex, natural history at multiple levels – genetics, developmental biology, visual appearance, and natural selection, all of which will have to fit together exactly. Pieces of the puzzle are becoming clear, as in the genetic and developmental mechanisms for producing eye-spots. These can be “impressionistic” – they do not have to mimic a cat’s face, as long as a wing-flash gives a bird predator an illusion of eyes-suddenly-jumping-out-at-me; for we suppose that birds have
an escape reaction triggered in some such way. Thus the explanation must take into account ecology too – the behaviours of both predator and prey are needed to explain why eyespots evolved.
Forbes can’t resist putting an artistic and literary take on the natural
history and science: Sir Ernst Gombrich the art historian was deeply
fascinated by visual illusion, while novelists like Vladimir Nabokov (a keen naturalist) were intrigued by truth and lies. Sometimes the analogies go rather far from natural history (electronic warfare is a case in point: it may be deception but it certainly isn’t visual). But Forbes is always precise, and invariably entertaining.
Macfarlane knew Roger Deakin (see my review of Wildwood), and was inspired by meeting him and visiting his extraordinary house. As a young, tree-climbing academic in the distinctly tame countryside of Cambridge, just sitting in the top of his favourite tree outside the city simply wasn’t enough to satisfy his craving for wildness.
The Wild Places, by Robert Macfarlane
So, for The Wild Places, Macfarlane sets out to the farthest shores of the British Isles, trying both to redraw his map of these islands – not with roads and cities, but coasts and mountains and woods and bogs, linked by ancient footpaths and holloways (roads worn down into the land by centuries of feet and cartwheels), and to define for himself what wildness really means.
In the space of fifteen carefully-crafted chapters, with titles like
Beechwood, Moor, Grave, Holloway and Saltmarsh, Macfarlane introduces us to some of his favourite places, views, treasures – in the form of found stones and shells and bits of wood, in a Deakinesque manner.
Where Jay Griffiths (see my review of Wild) is passionate, even overheated, and Deakin is calm but subtly warm, fiercely rooted in wood, Macfarlane can seem at first rather cold and intellectual: skilful with words, but oddly bloodless. It takes some chapters to start to realize the quality of The Wild Places; a desire to immerse oneself in wildness (both Deakin and Macfarlane favour swimming the wild way, Deakin notably traversing many of our wilder rivers
in his book Waterlog).
There is a plan to the book: around the British Isles, upside down; around the different kinds of wild place – high, low, wet, dry, hard, soft, empty, populated. The last is plainly a surprise to Macfarlane, who travels from an initial rather romantic conception of the places unaffected by man (as if), to places with strong energies of their own, and the people who naturally go with them. There is a bit of dialectic about all this – a thousand student essays on Man vs Nature, perhaps – but it becomes clear that Macfarlane is coming down to earth, and warmth creeps into his writing.
Macfarlane is at his best describing the wonderful diversity of life in the Burren: a rainforest in miniature, in the deep narrow grykes between the clints, the hard, dry exposed slabs of limestone pavement: an endangered habitat if ever there was one. And his love for Coruisk, beyond The Bad Step in the Cuillin Hills of the Isle of Skye, shines out despite any clever word-schemes or devices.
Deakin died just after finishing Wildwood, so this book is automatically poignant: not just a celebration of life and wildness, but also an epitaph for this wonderful, crazy, brilliant, down-to-earth
craftsman of wood and words.
Wildwood, A Journey Through Trees, by Roger Deakin
Deakin was very comfortable with wood, and in woods. Indeed there was a timber merchant named Wood in his family, and one of his father’s Christian names was Greenwood, so he tells us. It is at once personal, uncompromising, and captivatingly narrated. There is no academic or intellectual lamentation about how we have lost touch with nature, no vague generalisation: but the truth emerges, clearly and naturally.
He rebuilt his ancient moated house, from a mossed-over, wooded-up ruin, into a lovely, light, airy place: in the process getting to know every one of the 300 beams (“300 trees: a small wood”) that made up the ancient oak frame of the house. He describes the carpenter’s marks on the beams – cut ready to fit together, then transported and assembled on site.
His wanderings about Britain may seem random, but are highly directed: to the places where the Green Man may be found in a dozen churches; to the home of that most English of plants, the Cricket Bat Willow; to the places where those old badgers, Cobbett and Ruskin, protested the injustices meted out to the common man. There is nothing “quaint”, no “folklore” here: just a constant delight in nature, a steady slow-burning fuse of evidence, of hard-won knowledge lightly worn.
Or he shares his visit to the Pilliga forest in New South Wales,
describing in careful but lightly-told detail how the forest of today is not what it seems; how Charles Darwin saw an open park-like woodland, not the dense and lovely tangles that people imagine is the ancient wooded landscape of Australia. He tells from intimate knowledge of the species of trees that used to dominate; of the skill of the Aborigines in managing the land with fire; of the extinction of the local Kamilaroi language, ironically just as the first and last dictionary of that lost tongue was published.
Deakin is not afraid of seeming tame: he is as much at ease telling us about a Bluebell picnic – on a lawn with a woodland view, accompanied by a posse of Cambridge botanists – as roaming the Outback. His knowledge is deep, even encyclopaedic: he collected facts as he collected interesting pieces of wood, stones, feathers – kaleidoscopically. It’s just a pity that there’s no index in the current paperback edition – let’s hope the publisher rectifies this soon.
Wildwood is, quite simply, a delight. You will want to visit the places described; you will look afresh at the wild places you know; and you will be glad that you met Deakin, in the only way that is now possible, through his graceful and supple writing.
Griffiths gave up her job and sold everything she had to go and spend seven years of her life travelling in the world’s wildest and loneliest places, and living with the rugged, capable and wonderful peoples who still know how to survive in the wild.
In the Amazon, she asks what is the worst thing that could happen to her. La muerte, claro (Death, of course) is the blunt reply. It does not put her off.
Jay Griffiths
The parts of Wild are Earth, Ice, Fire, Air, and Mind. Each one takes
fifty or eighty pages in the telling – and represents a year or more of
Griffiths’ life. It is an astonishing undertaking, indeed truly “elemental”.
Griffiths was a journalist, but in Wild she consciously chooses to abandon “the bounds of my tribe (physical bounds and intellectual bounds)”, preferring “the real outside”. Her descriptions are accurate, but intensely coloured by her experiences – alone on the ice or in the rain forest; in the company of the Inuit, the Aborigine, the Amazon tribes.
She is not afraid of ‘purple prose’ here and there, nor of admitting anger with white man’s racism – the despoliation of Australia, the scorn for “the idea of there being a famously large number of words for snow in Inuktitut”. For there really are many:
“When Igloolik residents were asked for [a] compilation of words for ice and snow, they provided a hundred or so.”
It really shouldn’t be a surprise – skiers know half-a-dozen words (powder, crust, firn or neve, ice, junk, sugar, slush, piste, drift, mogul …) and that is based on far less experience than the Inuit’s.
“Pukakjiujaq is hard snow turning ever so slightly soft; the
best for igloo-building because it will heat faster.”
This is precise knowledge, both on the part of the vanishing Inuit hunters – nowadays they live in heated houses in towns, with freezers and televisions – and on Griffiths’: her journalist’s eye for attributable facts serves her well. Wild is a unique book: passionate, informed, deeply-researched, intellectual, scorched by the earth’s wildest places. It’s not easy to put down.
Right, I don’t review poetry books, and I don’t read them that often either, though I have my favourites. But this one is extraordinary. I very nearly read it in one sitting, as Claire Tomalin claims she did on the back cover, but I had to make do with two sittings instead. Gushing newspaper critics often say they couldn’t put a book down. In the case of Padel’s Darwin, it was almost true for me.
Padel is Charles Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter. She heard her grandmother (and Darwin’s biographer) Nora Barlow, aged 95, reminiscing about her grandfather. Reading this book, I was in no doubt that Padel, too, could easily have written a prose biography of her ancestor. But I’m very glad she didn’t. What she has achieved in Darwin, A Life in Poems is a miracle of conciseness. We say a picture is worth a thousand words: a good poem, more so. With a poet’s and a granddaughter’s sensibility, Padel builds up, step by step, poem by poem, a glittering portrait of the great man. Each moment is encapsulated, seemingly without effort, certainly without a wasted word, in a short poem.
I read the first one or two, and felt — they were quite good, and I might soon stop for a cup of tea. I read the next few and the little marginal notes attentively, and started to feel these were rather enjoyable, easy to take in, giving quite a nice picture of the young Darwin in Shrewsbury. I began to reflect on the choice of imagery, how collecting allowed him “to assert control over what’s unbearable.” Unbearable. Collection was about pain? I read a few more. Barmouth: “A child on a beach, alone.” Five lines of the eleven in the poem were a single extended quote from Darwin’s own notes, laid out as verse. Ingenious. Did they scan? Yes, they seemed to have a kind of metre. How subtle were her rhythms? An hour later I was still reading.
Rhythm, metre, the feel of the words; the choice of topics; the use of materials; the different shapes of the various poems. Many are short, in three-line stanzas: “The forms are themselves. They do not change with the changing light / but unfurl in the mind. They swirl and settle new / in the kaleidoscope in his head” — it could be the start of something quite abstract, something about a drug addict or … a visionary. That poem is “The Tiger in Kensington Gardens”, Darwin’s thought wandering to imagining “if a tiger stalked across the plain behind / how feeling would be ignited”. It is light as thistledown, compact, dreamy.
One or two poems are longer: Alfred Russel Wallace’s “Journey up the Sadong River” — Padel travelled extensively in the East, wrote a nature book, Tigers in Red Weather — has four-line stanzas, more of a plodding rhythm, an earnest self-taught Victorian: it is with a shock I realize the first 27½ lines are a direct quote from Wallace! What a marvellous, virtuoso trick: what confidence as a poet, what insight to feel and to share Wallace’s prose for what it is, at its best: exciting poetry.
And the pieces fit together to make the puzzle: the wood comes into focus from the individual trees: Darwin the man emerges from the hundred-odd poems. How did she do that? I suppose a prose writer can occasionally get away with a flabby analogy, a woolly opinion, a soggy simile. A poet cannot: certainly not a modern poet, writing short pieces: each must work, or fail utterly.
I have read a few ‘natural history poems’, some simply bad, some cheerfully zoological, like Walter Garstang’s The Ballad of the Veliger (The Veliger’s a lively tar, the liveliest afloat… ), some, like Ted Hughes’s animals, enjoyably insightful. But I’ve never before experienced the life of a naturalist, perhaps the greatest one at that, in a whole book of poems, and it works wonderfully. Darwin, A Life in Poems is quite simply a triumph.
The Worm Forgives the Plough, by John Stewart Collis (Vintage Classics edition). The fine linocut of teasels is by Angie Lewin.
I promised myself I would only review books I really loved, that I would urge a close friend to read, sure they wouldn’t be disappointed. Few books pass this test.
John Stewart Collis was an educated man, born in Ireland in 1900, living and working in England. He wrote some biographies and pottered along quietly in the literary life. Then the Second World War came along. Wanting to work for his country, but too old to fight and not fancying a dull desk job, he volunteered for the Land Army. It consisted mainly of women, “Land Girls”, as thousands of farm labourers joined the armed forces.
“We could do with thousands more like you: Join the WOMEN’S Land Army”. Second World War recruitment poster
Collis makes the long-gone era of scythes and horses immediately accessible. As a professional writer, he is from our modern urban world, familiar with politics, technology, change, middle-class angst. As a man experiencing the daily toil of following the plough or harrow, hoeing by hand, harvesting, pacing oneself while looking out for the owner’s car (a good moment to appear busy), he is in that rural world painted in such a golden light by the wartime posters.
And he’s funny. He notes that farm work is not an exhilarating form of exercise — he recommends a game of tennis for that; instead, you go at it steadily, never hurrying, whatever the weather. He is perfectly capable of writing wide-eyed descriptions, as when he kneels down beside an ancient tree-trunk and admires the insects hidden under the bark “building their Jerusalem in these countries of decay which must represent for them the acme of perfection”, the strange world of the fungi. But much more often he is direct, matter-of-fact: he likes to test the rotten wood with his boots.
Collis has the gift — I’d say it was rare — of noticing that the ordinary aspects of life and work all around him are strange and temporary. Here he is on what it is like trying to harness a farm horse by yourself:
When I came to harnessing for the first time I was surprised at the weight of the harness. I found that the breeching and attendant straps were as heavy as a saddle. When I tried putting the collar on I found I had put the bridle on first. Having taken off the bridle, the collar still wouldn’t go on — for the simple reason that you must reverse it while negotiating the head, which I had not done, thus following the example of Wordsworth who also failed in this matter. I was no more successful with the hames; I got them the wrong way round, and when at last I got them the right way round, I failed to pin them under the collar in a sufficiently tight notch. This done, I was now ready to put the horse into the cart. But I was not prepared for the difficulty of backing it straight between the shafts nor for the weight of the cart when lifted up by one of the shafts, nor for the difficulties confronting me in continuing the good work. For, having thrown over the long chain that rests on the breeching, and dodged under the horse’s neck to catch it on the other side, I missed it and it rolled back so that I had to throw it over again, all the time holding up the shaft with one hand while I went to the other side. And after this came the fixing of the remaining chains, all of which I put into the wrong notches.
I don’t know about you, but I’m sweating and powdered with stable dust just reading about it.
With the arrival of the first combine harvesters, which Collis admires, he perceives that the old way of life is going to be utterly disrupted, even while he and the other farm labourers continue to work on the farm, while the village pubs were still full of countrymen. It would be nostalgic, only the writing is quite unsentimental, and we are right there alongside Collis, looking up from our work as we watch the new machine as it roars and rattles along doing the work of twenty men, and reflect on what it will mean. This is something special. And I promise you’ll want to go out and buy a well-balanced axe and billhook, to try the pleasure for yourself.
I made a mental note a while ago only to review books that I really loved: books that were special, that I’d go back to, that I’d wholeheartedly recommend to close friends. Life is too short to review books that were merely so-so, acceptable, somewhat informative, useful as background. I read (parts of) many of those, “researching” subjects and places, and for the most part once I’ve done what I wanted the book goes on a shelf and stays there.
Books that stick in the mind, that quietly speak to me long after I last dipped into them, are a small proportion. It is only too easy to buy something that looks inviting, only to find after a chapter or two that it’s a bit overblown, poorly argued, limply presented. Books that are specially trumpeted are particularly at risk here. Amazon reviews tend, on average and given sufficient quantity, to be truthful: of course authors ask friends to review their books (we all do it) so you need a good sample to get a genuine impression from readers, and, caveat emptor, you should read between the lines to see if the reviewer is real and appreciating the book in the same way as you.
I mention all this because I took a look at my most recent shelf of books with an eye to writing a review. The internal dialogue went something like this. “Um. No. Gulp, not that. Reviewed that already. no. No. no. Ah.. no, did that back in 2007. No, no, no, no, no. Erm, not much here. Hold on, did I ever do Notes from Walnut Tree Farm? Time I did.”
Roger Deakin wrote two marvellous books, Wildwoodand Waterlog. It isn’t accidental that they both have something to do with wood in their names: Deakin was very close to wood, and had carpenters and men named Wood in his family. He then died suddenly, leaving 45 notebooks full of daily observations of all kinds, written in the last six years of his life. Alison Hastie and Terence Blacker took on the task of selecting extracts and arranging them into a composite year.
Walnut Tree Farm was Deakin’s house in the Suffolk countryside. It was timber-framed, in other words made of local wood. He bought it in ruinous condition, and rebuilt it himself: a mediaeval house, with a moat that he liked to swim in. Every corner of his life was of a piece, intensely personal, fully and passionately experienced. His writing is cut from the same sturdy oak.
Fire: nothing gives me more comfort or more anxiety than fire.
Look up Cobbett on the laying of fires — talk about bread ovens and faggotts of furze for bread-making.
The fireplace has been subsumed by the TV, pushed out of the nest as by a cuckoo. People now contemplate the TV, not the fire.
What is it about Deakin’s notes that is so compelling? Reading him on fire just now, I can hear the crackle of logs in the grate, smell the woodsmoke, feel the pleasure as the flames flicker red and yellow. I would call him a sensuous writer, at the risk of being misunderstood: he does not write purple prose. He feels life directly and communicates his sensory experience in clear, straightforward words, the opposite of rambling, yet he conveys the impression of relaxed thought, of coming upon interesting things and reflecting on their possibilities. Reading him feels very private: it’s like being in his mind, a privileged position.
Deakin takes us — me, you —to Suffolk; to walk in the woods, to reflect on a dead, trapped fox, to watch the carp in his front pond, to listen to a willow warbler which “sings in the spinney by the old goat sheds”, to join him scything his lawn by hand, cooking on a “little cast-iron stove” from Morocco, having “singing lessons with Mrs Gillard, who put her hands on my stomach as I sang”. It’s extraordinarily varied, authentic in every corner, always warm, always intelligent.
There is nothing else like Notes from Walnut Tree Farm: fresh, insightful, funny, stimulating, informative, peaceful, full of life and nature. Please read it.
