Helen Macdonald: the six books that made me
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Version 0 of 1. Three months ago the fieldfares arrived in rattling flocks through gusts of hail, their chak‑chak-chak calls like handfuls of pebbles flung on a frozen pond. I love these migrant thrushes because they’re scraps of the arctic flown to my fenland home, and because they bring history with them too, a bewitching mess of it. They’re built of all the fieldfares I’ve ever known: birds in paintings, photographs, field guides, migration maps, books, conversations, articles in magazines. And they’re made, too, of all the times I’ve seen them before, and for an flickering instant as the fieldfares blow in, I’m a child standing on tiptoe on the edge of a playing field, squinting to work out what these bold, patterned birds in the frosted trees might be. I’m 10 years old again. It took me half a lifetime to understand that each encounter with the natural world pleats together all the things you’ve read and heard, and adds to them, making something more of the bird or leaf or landscape in front of you, so that the older you get the more meaningful these things become. A few of these nature books inspire me because they were there at the beginning; childhood favourites that taught me what things were. Others are here because they tussle with the questions at the heart of it all: who has the right to interact with nature, to define what it is, explain it, speak for it – all questions, ultimately, about who we are. AA Book of the Countryside (Drive Publications, 1973) Early on Saturday mornings our family piled into the car and set off on trips that crossed landscapes far from the heath and pine forest near our home. Wheatfields and fences spooled past us, herds of friesians, rocketing turtledoves, vast, spooky flocks of lapwings uncoiling across snow-heavy clouds or packed tight on ploughed winter fields. As we drove, Dad and I played our favourite bonding game: pointing things out and identifying them: birds, trees, windmills, crops, breeds of sheep and cows. This gentlest possible game of one-upmanship started with I-Spy books, but The AA Book of the Countryside was at the heart of it all. I memorised the pictorial guides to farm animals and beetles, poisonous and inedible berries, canals and castles, and pored over the hundreds of subject entries in this encyclopedia of surreally related objects: Abbey. Acacia. Aconite (Winter). Acorn Worm. Acre. I still rejoice that a book exists in which Adze can sit happily as a category next to Air. From it I learned to identify crops, clouds, the record yield for British wheat (71.4cwt per acre from 9.5 acres near Doncaster in 1962) and that moorhens can “sink when alarmed, leaving only their bill above water”. The AA Book of the Countryside and other books published by petrol companies and motoring organisations were part of a flourishing postwar literature that tempted readers out on to the road to seek the “authentic” English countryside. When I was a child I wasn’t sure what the AA was, but in large part the organisation made the countryside for me. Even today some of my memories of landscapes turn out to be photographs from this book, and every time I walk into a beechwood I remember its watercolour diorama of the animals that live there. It is foundational, too, in that it is written in the dispassionate, expert, avuncular voice of the old-school nature writer. It’s a voice you are always working with, or fighting with, when you write about nature. You slip into it so easily. Those vast flocks of lapwings this book describes have gone. So have the turtledoves. The AA Book of the Countryside has turned into a painful record of what has disappeared. Since its publication we’ve lost more than 420 million birds from Europe. As a child I was told the countryside was in crisis, ravaged by myxomatosis, Dutch elm disease, pollution and the uprooting of hedgerows – but our empty, pesticide-soaked fields now make the 1970s seem a lost Arcadia. My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George (Puffin Books edition 1968) This book bewitched me as a child. It’s the story of Sam Gribley, a boy who left his family in New York City and set off for the Catskill mountains to live on his grandfather’s abandoned farm, taking with him an axe, a flint-and-steel, $40, a ball of string, and a store of wilderness survival tips garnered from books in the New York public library. Sam lives off the land with disarming ease, taming a falcon called Frightful to hunt for game, catching trout, boiling mussels, making lamps from turtle shells, smoking venison, and hiding from wardens and hunters in a hollowed-out hickory tree. My Side of the Mountain taught me that I could learn nature from books and make the outdoors home; that roaming the woods and fields to watch birds and catch newts and snakes was an OK Thing To Do. It’s a simple story told with considerable narrative sophistication, a tapestry of Gribley’s conversations with himself across myriad registers and times: addresses to the reader; notes on how to make fires; diary entries; recollections; sketches; recipes; remembered lines from books; imagined conversations with people and animals, whose introjected voices tell him things he cannot otherwise think. Jean George –who came from a family of naturalists, worked for the White House Press Corps and filled her family home with animals – shared the ecologist Aldo Leopold’s view that American children should re‑enact their national history through “Daniel Booneing in the willow thicket below the tracks”. For Sam Gribley, striking out into the solitary wild inevitably brings civilisation in its wake. As the book progresses he begins to receive visitors, eventually seeking them out and hollowing out another tree for them to stay in. “What made me happily build a city in a forest?” he writes. “Because that was what I was doing.” Ultimately his family leaves New York to build a new house for them all in the woods – making the book a perfect recapitulation of the myth of the American frontier. A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines (Penguin Books, 1969) I adored Sam Gribley but the problem with being a small girl obsessed with nature in the 1970s was that you had to choose heroes to be like – because there weren’t any heroines. All my books made this clear. It was public school boys who ran off to live in the woods in Brendon Chase by BB, the pseudonym of children’s writer Denys Watkins-Pitchford. In Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising it’s a boy who assumes the mantle of arcane knowledge and is crucial to the Matter of Britain. There were girls in some of my books, but mostly they were content to stay in the camp, sweep paths, fill jamjars with flowers. That was how the world worked. I couldn’t challenge it because I couldn’t even see it; I had to find a way to work around it. And how I did it was this: I knew I was a girl; was happy to be one. But the part of me that loved being out there in the green, the part that climbed trees and watched birds and dug holes and built dens I thought might probably be a boy. In order to love the landscape you had to queer yourself, split yourself into different beings. Slowly it dawned on me that nature could be a place of resistance to stories about the way you are supposed to be – a central concern of Hines’s Billy Casper in A Kestrel for a Knave. Billy is a persecuted soul, a loner, a troublemaker, a failure at school. He won’t keep goal, won’t work down the pit, fiercely resists the models of masculinity that surround him. Training a kestrel is an escape for him, but it is not a simple one. Hawks in literature so often stand in for emotional absences, are tutelary spirits of the lost or dispossessed. Kes grants Billy a contagious power. Explaining how he trained the kestrel lets him speak to his class with sudden, spellbinding authority, and Kes gives him a figurative and literal ability to silence his persecutors: “Steady on, Sir,” he admonishes Mr Farthing, “you’ll frighten her to death.” Hines is as spectacular a nature writer as he is a writer of domestic drama and he has a masterly command of pace and scale: Caspar’s dissociative daydreams provide the book’s backstory, and the boy makes his constrained world infinite through a fugue-like concentration on small physical details: he loses himself in a drop of dew suspended from a blade of bent grass or a soap bubble on his hand. At heart, like TH White’s The Goshawk – a direct influence on Hines – it is a meditation on models of education. The violent attempts used to tame and train a small boy at school and at home are contrasted with the careful taming of the kestrel by Casper himself. “Gentling” is the old word for taming a falcon, and the word has never been more poignant than here. Alone, he strokes the backs of fledgling thrushes, and the kestrel is the sole protector of his vulnerable soul; “it’ll have thi hand off it tha tries” he warns a boy who wants to stroke it. The tenderness in this book is Caspar’s secret; only through nature is he allowed to feel it. Landscape and Englishness by David Matless (Reaktion Books, 1998) Some of the best field naturalists I know grew up in working-class rural communities, skipping school like Billy Casper to practise forms of natural history that bent or broke the law: they ferreted rabbits, collected eggs, broke into quarries, kept pigeons, reared finches, climbed fences to poach for fish. Today they can still spot a linnet’s nest in a furze bush at 50 paces and possess fieldcraft skills that would put many a birder to shame. There’s little room for them in today’s culture of nature appreciation and even less so in nature writing, which tends to entrench a sense that the correct relation to the landscape is through walking and distanced looking. I treasure books such as A Kestrel for a Knave, Cynan Jones’s The Dig and Melissa Harrison’s forthcoming novel At Hawthorn Time for engaging with this marginal pastoral tradition, showing the depths of its attachments to nature, and for refusing to treat those attachments in a romantic, nativist way. Nature is not a singular thing; nor are we and nor are the practices that take us there. Landscape and Englishness is an essential read for anyone interested in why some kinds of interaction with nature are celebrated and others are frowned on. Drawing on a huge diversity of sources – books, films, preservationist tracts, walking guides, novels, music-hall songs, Ministry of Information pamphlets, maps and festival guides – Matless reveals how our assumptions about landscape and national identity were forged in the decades between the Great War and the 1950s, and how deeply they’ve been shaped by history, class and politics. He uncovers a complex history of rurality marked by a careful policing of who is allowed to be in the countryside and what they are allowed to do there. “I have seen charabanc parties from the large manufacturing towns …playing cornets on village greens”, wrote HV Morton in horror in the 1930s. Things we take for granted as part of the countryside – The Country Code and youth hostelling, nature appreciation, field archeology, orienteering, birdwatching and the scout’s “dibdobbery of observant walking” – all played their part in educating the citizen in the correct way of reading the landscape and interacting with it. The book has deep theoretical underpinnings but is a joy to read, particularly when Matless turns an arch eye on the assumptions underlying much of the material within: “If one enjoyed, for example, loud music and saucy seaside humour,” he writes, “one could not and would not want to connect spiritually to a hill.” I first read this book while researching the history of ornithology in postwar Britain. It was a revelation. It made me think that writing about nature might perhaps recognise – and kick against – the constraints imposed by these postwar stories about the right way to see the world. Collins Bird Guide by Lars Svensson and Peter J Grant, illustrations by Killian Mullarney and Dan Zetterström (HarperCollins, 1999) It’s been called the best bird book of the 20th century. It probably is. Originally published in Swedish, the Collins guide describes every bird found in Britain and Europe and portrays them in all their plumages. It conjures something of the joy of children’s crazes for dinosaurs, early obsessions that give small brains purchase on names, on understanding same versus different, on how humans carve nature at the joints. Birding is a fascinating pursuit – and the instructional field guides it rests on are fascinating too. They are sophisticated, 20th-century inventions that could not exist without binoculars. Their conventional format – grouped paintings of representative individuals of different species in different plumages, with descriptions and distribution maps laid out on the facing page –seems transparent to me now, but you need to learn how to read field guides just as you need to learn how to read graphic novels or Renaissance paintings. To birdwatching novices this book can be terrifying. There are hundreds of birds here you’ll never see near your home. You need to learn what to look at to identify a bird, develop the kind of expertise that enables you to ask the right questions of it; assess its size, behaviour, habitat, and break it into relevant details – bill shape, tail length, leg length, particular patterns of plumage. In real life you don’t see birds tabulated in groups, in the same light, stamped out on a white background and all facing the same way. Most of the birds you ever see are, to you, no bigger than your thumbnail. So the Collins guide also includes small paintings showing “typical habitat and what the birds look like when far away and when seen in poor light”. These tiny vignettes of birds in flight, hopping about in snow or hiding in grass in shade operate like birdwatching in miniature, folding together birds, landscapes and memories, and animating them. I love this book because it is about the importance of knowing the names, of making distinctions between things. “You have to do it,” Barry Lopez writes of such distinctions, “to be able to talk about the world.” Journals by RF Langley (Shearsman, 2006) The nature poems of RF Langley are acknowledged as masterpieces. His journals are less well known, though equally astonishing. In them his eye for the world is most clearly seen: generous, curious, attentive to the shape of seasons, the passage of the smallest lives, the precision of everyday miracles. You think there can be no new words to describe the moon, then you read his entry for 9 January 1982, in which “the disk was left full, like a softly burning quartz pebble, waxy, greasy even, lit from the edges in reflected light”. It is all that good. These journals, Langley wrote, are concerned with “what Ruskin advocated as the prime necessity, that of seeing”, and pay “intense attention to the particular”. They speak of wasps, of thrips, grass moths, stained glass, nightjars, pub lunches and church monuments, everything deeply informed by etymology, history, psychology and aesthetic theory. The prose is compressed and fierce, and its narrative movement is concerned with mapping the processes of thought, the working out of things. It is founded on careful, close observation of things that typically pass unnoticed through our world. On 16 October 2002 he writes of watching a tiny insect walking along the brick wall of a Suffolk railway bridge. “There is nothing for it to look forward to,” muses Langley. “It will never be seen by anyone who has words again.” Later he tries to work out what it was. He cannot. He finds a similar species. Its Latin name is Ambulans. A piece of live stuff, like us, it cannot perceive the trains crashing underneath it that render its own life absurd. It is this movement that thrills me in Langley’s journals, whereby perceiving one tiny insect can lead to a deep disquisition on scale, sense and the mystery of life. We are all something like Ambulans, walking uncomprehendingly on our way to somewhere unknown. “Wonder?” said Langley in a 1992 interview in the magazine Angel Exhaust “Yes. Oh yes. it’s the chief thing, isn’t it? The thing I value. Joy, Wordsworth might have called it.” He goes on to paraphrase a section from Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good. “You’re wrapped up in your own affairs, you’re screwed up by your own subjective feelings, and you know that you’re colouring the world with your own thoughts and resentments, and you see a kestrel outside the window, hovering and … ‘The world becomes all kestrel’ … it takes your selfishness away, removes your self. And that’s really what this wonder might be.” It’s a truism that the stories we tell about nature are stories about ourselves, but still those stories are full of singular moments out in the world, when wild things look at us and we look back, mute and astonished. |