dovegreyreader scribbles

Wild Kingdom - Bringing Back Britain's Wildlife ~ Stephen Moss

Time is galloping on because this Thursday sees the announcement of the winner of the 2017 Wainwright Prize. Just to recap this is a prize of £5000 awarded to the author of the book that, in the judges' opinion,best reflects Wainwright’s core values of Great British writing & culture and a celebration of the outdoors.

And for those who might be asking 'Who on earth is Wainwright?'

'Born in Blackburn in 1907, Alfred Wainwright left school at the age of 13. A holiday at the age of 23 kindled a life-long love affair with the Lake District. Following a move to Kendal in 1941 he began to devote every spare moment he had to researching and compiling the original seven Pictorial Guides. He described these as his ‘love letters’ to the Lakeland Fells.' 

If I was a Lake District walker (which I haven't been yet) I would have all of these on my shelf and would use them constantly. As it is I walk out on Dartmoor every week and bemoan the fact that Dartmoor really has no latter-day pocket-sized, rainproof equivalent. William Crossing did a thorough job in the early twentieth century, and Eric Hemery an even more thorough job in the 1980s, and though both books are fascinating for their detail and description they lack Wainwright's detailed drawings, and neither book is portable. 

Criteria for the Wainwright Prize suggest that the book should be narrative driven with a subject that must be related to nature, the outdoors or travel writing (not guidebooks) covering Great Britain and Wild Kingdom - Bringing Back Britain's Wildlife by Stephen Moss (with another fine Carry Ackroyd jacket design) fits the bill well. As a TV producer (most notably in the BBC Natural History department and bringing us Springwatch) he is well-placed to possess an overview of the current state of affairs... 

'The newspaper headlines tell us that Britain’s wildlife is in trouble. It’s not just rare creatures that are vanishing, hares and hedgehogs, skylarks and water voles, even the humble house sparrow, are in freefall. But there is also good news. Otters have returned to the River Tyne; there are now beavers on the River Otter; and peregrines have taken up residence in the heart of London. Stephen Moss travels the length and breadth of the UK, from the remote archipelago of St Kilda to our inner cities, to witness at first-hand how our wild creatures are faring and ask how we can bring back Britain’s wildlife.'

And the state of affairs can be alarming if stats were all we had to work with...

99% of hay meadows lost in our lifetime

Likewise 96% of chalk and limestone grasslands

500,000 farm ponds...

300,000 miles of hedgerows....

Blame World War Two for some of this...

'For the countryside - and in particular the lowland countryside of southern and eastern England - the resulting transformation was sudden and extreme. Precious, complex habitats, which had evolved over hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, were simply destroyed.'

Dig For Victory kept the nation fed but recovery after the war of what had been lost was nigh on impossible. For wildlife ' the changes were, quite simply, a disaster' but a near bankrupt nation still had to feed itself and sadly that intensive farming soon segued into the widespread use of insecticides, an even louder death knell for species already under threat. It's a sobering thought that for the generation of today the countryside has always looked like this...

'But those who can still recall the years between the wars know that our rural landscape was very different then : richer, more varied, and above all filled with a far greater variety of plants and insects, mammals and birds. This is not mere rose-tinted nostalgia - but a glimpse of the reality of what modern industrial farming has done to our countryside.'

If there is one aspect of reading this short list that I have enjoyed it is the way the books arc across each other and touch on similar themes before exploring them from a different perspective. Read The Wild Kingdom in tandem with The Running Hare by John Lewis-Stempel and prepare to emerge informed and ready to gird up thy warrior loins.

'How have we managed to preside over such a cataclysmic decline in our farm wildlife, a decline that may not be reversible?' asks Stephen Moss...well brace for some revealing and worthwhile reading.

Each chapter, ranging through farmland and grassland, woods and forests, mountains and moorlands, rivers and streams, coast and sea, towns, cities and gardens and through to the edgelands, the 'accidental countryside, spells out the perils facing our wildlife. I have emerged with a plethora of fascinating Did-You-Know that I didn't know before. I'll treat you to some of the random observations that Bookhound has been treated to of late...

There are only 5000 nesting pairs of Nightingales remaining in Britain...

Grey squirrels were introduced in 1876 and haven't left since...

The hedgehog population is down by 97%..

As a nation we spend £150 million on wild bird food

Capercaillie are on the brink of extinction yet again...40 years ago there were 20,000, now there are about 1200. (No, don't worry, I didn't really know what a capercaillie looked like either.)

That is partly because there are too many red and roe deer (750,000 of them) who remove the ground cover...

But deer stalking generates £70 million revenue each year...

Can you see the dilemma here...it's a massive wildlife Catch 22 situation. Solving one environmental problem all too often creates another. Put up a fence to restrict the deer's access to capercaillie ground cover and the birds fly into them and die.

It's not all doom and gloom though, and along the way Stephen Moss weaves in the success stories to be cheerful about...think otters, think peregrine falcons. But the balance is precarious. To be honest I've always thought it a minor miracle that salmon survive at all, let alone find their way back to their spawning beds, whilst that other beloved sight on the river bank, the kingfisher can be all but wiped out by a harsh winter.

Stephen Moss doesn't shy away from controversial topics either, culling for one, the re-introduction of predatory species for another, with the arguments for and against often emanating from the sides you might least expect. He has some interesting thoughts about nature reserves too and theories about conservation arguing that we got conservation policy wrong...

'In a last ditch effort to save what we had left, we focused not on the commonplace, but on the rare...so while we were making sure that avocets and ospreys were safe, the rest of our countryside was being trashed in the name of short-term profit...'

Wild Kingdom is Stephen Moss's valiant and important reveille to the rest of us. It has been time well-spent reading this book and I for one have heard the message clearly. 

 

 

The Running Hare ~ John Lewis Stempel

I will be dipping into Port Eliot Festival this weekend as well as doing an event there (Tiddy Tent, Walled Garden 1.45pm Sunday) with Chris Chapman and Peter Beacham in conversation about their friendship with photographer James Ravilious. The three of us met for lunch a few weeks ago for a spot of event planning and I had the best time, so it promises to be informative, funny and moving and everything else besides.

I'm also busy getting used to the This Varifocal Life and leading with my nose whilst realising that my feet and the ground beneath them will never be in focus again unless I bend my head forward at the most ridiculous angle. Nevertheless I am persevering and meanwhile have dredged up the fourth of my Wainwright Prize lists reads from the scribbles basement (written last August) so herewith The Running Hare by John Lewis-Stempel with a few italicised updates, and if you have read this one I would love to know your thoughts...

                                     ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The harvest has just been gathered in here (no it hasn't this was last year) The Four Fields to the Woods were left as stubble through last winter before that memorable spring ploughing transformation; six months later and 'tis all done for another year.

We never know what has been sown so it's always a bit of a lottery as to what will emerge Will it be oil-seed rape, or oats, or wheat. One year it was maize and we lived through a summer of walking through what we fondly termed Mother Abigail's after that very scary Stephen King film The Stand. Now of course we have maize everywhere as a cover crop for pheasants. Anyway this year up came the green shoots until eventually we diagnosed it as barley (it's spooky old maize again this year). 

We've watched it ripen and once the combine harvester has been through we go in for the straw for Nell and Rusty's kennel for the winter (with permission and pay for it) and so the cycle will begin again. Maybe they will plough in the autumn and sow winter wheat (they didn't) but whatever happens I have a minute understanding of it all, the process and how it used to be start to finish, thanks to The Running Hare by John Lewis-Stempel. If you enjoyed his previous book Meadowland then I think you will like this one too.

John Lewis- Stempel takes a modern, conventionally farmed arable field and turns it into a traditional wheat field for a year. Following the old conventions of timing, equipment and methods, and weaving in history and literature as he writes, the result is a wonderful eulogy to John Masefield's line that 'the countryside is the past speaking dear.'

'Time does not erode it builds sedimental layers of particulate memory,' suggests John Lewis-Stempel and I was nodding my head in agreement and thinking on it every time I walked out to watch the progress of the highly mechanised fields around us here. It is sometimes hard to peel back that top layer of leased farm land to reveal the past that lies beneath, but we can usually talk ourselves into it ; exhausted to its limits by outside contractors, analysed by agronomists, sprayed and cajoled into production when sometimes I think it would like  a year off,

We'd much rather lean out of the bedroom window, as we did last week, (a year ago ) and watch Farmer Steve haymaking in Mowhay Meadow with his dad's 1960's baler. It's like watching a children's Britain's farm come to life...remember the choking hazard that was the little yellow hay bales...




Frequently the facts presented in The Running Hare are startling...

Withered margins and the erosion caused by the run-off of the top soil...something we see around us here as we watch the fields take off in a muddy stream down the lane in the winter storms. (Earlier this year highways came and 'ploughed' off approx 150 tons of topsoil  from our lane which was becoming impassable. A job they estimated as taking half a day in fact took four and that soil now gone from the fields forever.)

Spraying crops has reduced the numbers of hares by more than a million...

Only half the hedgerows present in 1945 still existed in 1990...

A 50% reduction in farmland birds since 1970...

DEFRA lists twelve birds that should be present. We are lucky I think, I have italicised those we see regularly

Corn Bunting
Goldfinch
Starling
Stock Dove
Grey Partridge
LapwingLinnet
Skylark
Tree Sparrow
Turtle Dove
Yellowhammer (we have these this year...'a little bit of bread and no cheese' ringing out from our  trees)
Whitethroat

JL-S (forgive the initials, I know...it sounds like a boy band) adds a few more...again italics for those we see around us here.

Rook
Quail
Barn Owl
Pheasant
Partridge
Corncrake
Cirl Bunting

And I learned new things too... about an acre being the amount of land one man could plough in a day with oxen and he would walk ten miles doing it. The arrival of horses in the eighteenth century sped things up by a mile an hour. Woven in are references to Shakespeare and Edward Thomas and John Clare as JL-S works to create a field that fills with the traditional wild flowers and butterflies and of course the hares return. The ultimate is to harvest and tie his crop into stooks, like these spotted by the Kayaker last year. It can still be done albeit by machine...

Whilst we might hanker for the past I am under no illusions about the impracticalities and neither is JL-S. The world has moved on as has farming and there are a lot of people out there to feed, but even in the smallest ways differences can be made that preserve what is good and which is so often at risk of being lost in the grand scheme. As JL-S points out, programmes like Springwatch, often based in reserves, give the mistaken impression that nature in Britain is busy and bountiful when in fact it is often not, much of it is under real threat and we must never assume all is well.

Despite that, as the blurb says this really is a rare and joyful book and definitely one for the shelf.

Meanwhile we have been doing our little bit for nature here having just taken part in the  Devon Greater Horseshoe Bat survey.  (this was last year we are booked to do it again this year ).We had a recent occurrence...thinking we had a swallow in the sitting room when in fact it was a very large bat (flew out of a bookshelf). Bookhound was on his own there, you didn't see me for dust and with Magnus under my arm who was looking very interested, but when news of the survey came up here in the Tamar Valley we booked the recording equipment, set it up in the garden for three nights, watched the bats swoop and swerve around the microphone, sent off the SD card and will get the results back later in the year....if we pressed the right buttons that is. (We did press the right buttons and apparently detected thirteen of the nineteen bat species known in the UK).

Right, that's quite enough from me...your turn.

 

 

Love of Country - A Hebridean Journey ~ Madeleine Bunting

Confession : I started to read Love of Country - A Hebridean Journey by Madeleine Bunting (published by Granta) soon after we returned from our trip to Orkney last year. I got as far as Rum before realising that my head and my imagination were still full of Orkney and all those amazing images; somehow I just couldn't shuffle off the memory of that beautiful day at Waulkmill Bay and the scattering and nor did I want to...

I set the book aside and decided to wait until I was properly ready for another excursion north, this time from the armchair because it's a very, very long drive from Devon. When you live down here at the other end it is easy to forget that the Midlands are actually the centre of England but the Borders are the centre of Britain. There is as much to drive again to reach Thurso and the ferry for Stromness and if we are being sensible it takes us three days.

That said the road trip did come in handy because Madeleine Bunting recounts several of her own including childhood holidays at Amatnatua sixty miles north of Inverness. We passed nearby as we motored up the east coast towards Golspie and Dunrobin, whist the ring I chose from Ola Gorie in Orkney is aptly named the Carron, also a river nearby. Little familiarities and affinities that I love to find when I am reading a book.

'A ferry departure brings its own frisson of anticipation,' says Madeleine Bunting and suddenly there I am, ready to hop on board as she heads off first to Jura, Iona and Staffa. The Hebrides consist of 270 named islands off the west coast of Scotland, 41 of them permanently inhabited, spread over 241 miles north to south and with 2500 miles of coastline.

With Madeleine Bunting's journey, completed in instalments over six years, come the disparate objects and their potential to shape our histories, the first of which, a family-owned Singer sewing machine made in the factory on Clydesdale, segued nicely into another recent read The Sewing Machine by Natalie Fergie. Natalie (a health visitor too back in the day) has woven a gentle fictional narrative around an old Singer machine, the factory in Glasgow, a hospital and the lives of everyone connected with it that in turn prompted so many memories of the place of my mum's Singer in my life too.

For Madeleine Bunting...

'Now I write instead, but the metaphors of stitching, embroidery and patchwork and the intimacy with fabrics and weave serve my sense of craft.'

Each Hebridean island proved to be a revelation to me as Madeleine Bunting invoked not only a sense of place...

'Islands as places of prestige and status as well as of insight and creative solitude,' 

...but also the echoes of a history which I had never really been clear about. Jura like all of them full of surprises because of course islands can be bought and sold (Jura currently owned by Australian zillionaire Greg Coffey) and thus developed by whoever can afford to own them. Cue, down the ages, much inappropriate building, landscaping, stately pseudo-castle construction, golf courses and high walls to 'defend' them against the intrusive eyes of the locals.

Iona was, in the words of George Macleod...

'A thin place - only a tissue paper separating earth from heaven.'

I loved this one with its legacy of monks and the Book of Kells (now in Dublin) and the spread of Celtic Christianity, though now 'hijacked and re-processed' and far-removed from its origins, but still a great source of comfort to many its translation to more widespread usage. I've read and been consoled by John O'Donohue's Anam Cara and Benediction and I am sure countless others have too; we have Iona and St Columba to thank for the privilege. Iona the burial place of politician John Smith, seen by many as the best Prime Minister we never had, a man whose principles of leadership and service are a perfect fit with the original ethos of the island community.

Onto Staffa... and with it an awakening sense of injustice that would grow as Madeleine Bunting travelled to other islands. Uamh Bhin, the Melodious Cave renamed as Fingal's Cave, cue Mendelssohn and the overture...

...but reminding me of the colonial renaming of New Zealand which effectively attempted to erase the Maori culture. Staffa would become the 'required destination for anyone with pretensions to a cultured sensibility,' and with more of this to come I started to understand the indignation felt by those to whom these islands have been home for generations. To her credit Madeleine Bunting's account felt consistently honest and unbiased, both factual and revealing whilst acknowledging her own prejudices. When a writer achieves that balance it somehow encourages a reader to walk alongside, and there is plenty of walking in Love of Country too. 

Rum is where the traumatic shadow of history most definitely begins to fall...clearances, colonialism, chieftains and clans. The follies and foibles of wealth and the associated shame made for darker days that deny the solace of romanticism invoked by the beautiful scenery (guilty as charged here) and explains much of the ongoing discontent. The beauty of the scenery is self-evident but Madeleine Bunting denies herself (and her reader) that indulgence until a fuller understanding is grasped.

I grasped it and needed to ...because how did I start writing this piece but with a sense of the overwhelming romantic, heart-stopping beauty of Orkney.

Onto Eriskay and Lewis (Donald Trump's mother was from Lewis...just saying).

I won't go into more detail or we'll be here until Christmas, but trust me Love of Country is a splendid read. Madeleine Bunting's final island visit is to St Kilda. I have always desperately wanted to go, but if I never manage it at least I can say I've tagged along from my armchair. If I'm honest, because Madeleine is very honest about it, perhaps I'm not quite so desperate to go now I know what I know... suffice to say that at times, in Madeleine's experience, the reality is slightly at odds with the pictures.

I am hoping you can tell just how much I enjoyed my Hebridean journey via Love of Country. I was engaged and involved and I learnt things I didn't know but in the best possible way, and to boot I emerged with a long list of other books to delve into from the bibliography (click to enlarge)

Seriously, if you are missing out on a holiday this year Love of Country - A Hebridean Journey and the companion reading is as good as and this book another worthy contender for this year's Wainwright Prize to be announced on August 3rd.

 

Related articles

Wainwright Prize 2017 @wainwrightprize

Calling New York...

No, I'm not going but next week the Kayaker is.

He will be busy doing some future work planning while he's there but is hoping to have time to see the sights, camera in hand.

So a favour to ask. In order to make the best use of limited time and budget...

Where should he go...

Where is off-the-beaten-track lesser-known New York..

What shouldn't he miss...

Any photography or other exhibitions...

He says all suggestions gratefully received and thank you.

 

 

The January Man - A Year of Walking Britain ~ Christopher Somerville

This the second of my musings on this year's Wainwright Prize Short list, and I don't often splay a book out like this for your delectation but first things first with The January Man, A Year of Walking Britain by Christopher Somerville, and this delightful dust jacket...

The artwork is by Carry Ackroyd and this is one of those book covers that dawned on me as I read, realising that I was traversing the months across the jacket, written as they are chapter by chapter as Christopher Somerville 'walks' his father's life. Interesting that Carry has another book jacket on the Wainwright short list too, more about that one soon.

I was always going to love a book of memories, written by someone of my era (almost, Christopher Somerville four years older than me) and with the narrative structured around the scaffolding of a folk song.

Cue more diversions as I seek out renditions of The January Man. I knew I had heard it sung by Bert Jansch back in the day (I eventually find it on the Moonshine album)  and more recently by Rachel Unthank & The Winterset (now The Unthanks) on Cruel Sister..

'Oh the January man he walks abroad in woollen coat and boots of leather
The February man still wipes the snow from off his hair and blows his hand
The man of March he sees the Spring and wonders what the year will bring
And hopes for better weather

Through April rain the man goes down to watch the birds come in to share the summer
The man of May stands very still watching the children dance away the day
In June the man inside the man is young and wants to lend a hand
And grins at each new comer...'

  

It's a clever premise which drew me in and along with ease...

 

'The book follows a circle of walks around Britain, month by month through the course of a year, recording the nature, people, weather, landscape, music, and local traditions I came across, and whatever else called out to me along the way. It’s also a very personal account of a post-war father-son relationship, exploring the character of my father John, and the long walks we shared over many years which brought us closer together.'

 

The chances were high that at least some of Christopher Somerville's memories might chime with mine and I wasn't disappointed, and as a consequence there has been a lot of time spent meandering back through my own childhood too, and also my relationship with my dad. A sense of the values impressed upon him by his father's attitude to life... perseverance, strength in adversity, a belief in 'doing one's duty', a throw-away modesty about one's own achievements and a never-say-die approach all reminded me so much of my dad, despite their very different personalities and their post-war lives 

 

Somerville senior worked for GCHQ and was deeply involved in Cold War 'information' whilst my dad went into chemical engineering, but I understood this much...

'In the springtime of hope after the war young parents wanted to make everything perfect.'

And nor did they talk about the war for a long time... 

'We didn't have an inkling of how the war had stayed bubbling under the post-war lives of our parents' generation until, much later, hesitantly and by modest degrees, some of them began to talk about it.'

Like my dad, Christopher Somerville's father waited forty years before addressing 'the elephant in the room', his over a second pint of Old Peculiar, my dad's on a blog post that he wrote for me here back in 2006 entitled 'The Day War Broke Out'. To our amazement  Bugle Boy followed, and with thanks as always to Susan Hill who read that post and insisted that he should write a book, and if he did she would publish it. It was Susan who nicknamed him The Tinker, a name that he loved and certainly lived up to. 

 

The walks take Christopher Somerville to places various, the Lake District, the Long Mynd, Somerset, the island of Foula in Shetland, the Pennine Way, Lindisfarne and each with local history, folk-lore, geography and nature woven into the personal memories, and as the song makes its own way through the year too..

 

'And in July the man in cotton shirts he sits and thinks on being idle
The August man in thousands take the road and watch the sea and find the sun
September man is standing near to saddle up and lead the year
And Autumn is his bridle.'

 

I'm about an inch away from getting my guitar out of the loft as it is with my Summer of Joni pending but now it's imminent since reading this...

'The guitar was the instrument that liberated my whole generation of would-be music makers who never learned to decipher the dots...'

 

YES. YES, it absolutely was  My dad bought me my first guitar in the middle of my O Levels, who knows how much better I might have done in Physics had I not been busily wearing away the tips of my fingers learning C, F, Am, G in order to play Leaving on a Jet Plane. But it's still in there...when this guitar emerges I reckon I'll still be able to tune it and play it.

 

And so Somerville Senior ages with the song, and as the winter verse approached I was deeply engaged and braced for what December would bring...

 

'The man of new October takes the reins and early frost is on his shoulder
The poor November man sees fire and wind and mist and rain and winter air
December man looks through the snow to let eleven brothers know
They're all a little older...'

 

Strangely, given that I am already feeling a synchronicity and connection with The January Man, it should have come as no surprise that the death of Christopher Somerville's father would be almost identical to that of my own dad, three months from a diagnosis of cancer to the end.

 

And so the song moves through the year coming full circle...

And the January man comes round again in woollen coat and boots of leather
To take another turn and walk along the icy road he knows so well
The January man is here for starting each and every year
Along the way for ever.

 

Yes indeed, along the way for ever.

 

I'm not sure The January Man would have found me had it not been for the Wainwright Prize so how delighted I am that it has. I would love to know your thoughts...

 

Making a spectacle of myself...

Would you mind if we had a conversation about spectacles...as in glasses, as in opticians and eye tests and things.

Having chugged along happily with very simple reading glasses for years I have suddenly plunged into the realms of definitely needing distance glasses for the first time. This is probably at least a couple of years after I should have had them but I really just thought it was the quality of the TV that blurred the words.

I had an eye test last November, a very slick computerised affair that said not enough change to warrant a new prescription, even though my left eye was definitely misbehaving. I soldiered on, even went back to an older pair of glasses, but was having so many ocular migraines I finally caved last week and have to thank the very kind and patient optician ( a different one) who suggested I had my blood pressure checked (it was fine) and painstakingly tested my eyes in the old-fashioned way.

Clearer on the red...or the green...

With...or without...

Line through the middle...

...to the left...

...to the right.

With...

Or without.

And I had to keep saying could you just do that again...

But I wasn't mistaken, though in fact it was my 'best' right eye that had changed and my 'less best' left eye that was struggling to balance things. Anyway new prescriptions for reading (this might partly resolve the small print in books problem) and for the first time distance glasses, so I'm probably approaching that all-the-time-wearing-glasses point in my life.

Anyway, I ordered a pair of each in a simple, unexciting largish frame ( I look nothing like Kate Silverton reading the news...but like to think I do) and took them away to experiment before making any further decisions.

The first time I put the distance glasses on my brain did an odd sort of somersault and my heart sank, this will take weeks I thought. Except isn't the brain clever (not mine especially, everyone's) because after a while the world was crystal clear and it seemed as if I had been wearing them forever.

Well would you get me. I can read the tiny boxes in the corner of the TV  screen with the Wimbledon scores on for the first time in aeons. Suddenly the world has sharpened up a notch and I feel a bit of a fool for not sorting this sooner.

'You see that woman in the sixth row from the front on centre court....'

'Don't tell me,' said Bookhound, 'she's got a fly on her nose.'

'No I think it's someone I was at school with.'

Now there speaks a man who has different glasses for reading, computer, shopping, eating, driving... to say nothing of the polarised lens pair, and I won't say it drives us nuts, but it generally does.

'Have you seen my glasses?'

'Yes, several of them, which pair of the six have you lost?'

When we go out you wouldn't believe the palaver, much opening and shutting of different boxes and a resistance to varifocals. Well there isn't room for two of us like that in this marriage because if I have to keep swapping my glasses I'll just get cross, so I hot-footed in to order a pair. 

So all you varifocal wearers out there, what are your top tips for getting the hang of them, because when I tried some years ago I took them back within a week because I was like a nodding dog, but this time I'm going to have to make them work and I have a month to do it or I can take them back (again).

All tips and suggestions welcome, plus helpful encouragement along the lines of 'I love my varifocals,' or 'My varifocals changed my life' would be good to hear.

But in the interests of balance I really should listen to the tales of varifocal woe too...

 

 

Where the Poppies Blow - The British Soldier, Nature, The Great War ~ John Lewis-Stempel

'Few today would go to war for the fields, woods, brooks of Britain. Or, rather, what is left of them. We have become de-natured and über-urban.'

I take extra convincing to read a book about the First World War these days. That might sound callous and narrow-mined but that's not the case... the truth is that though I have read so much over the years the older I get somehow the more harrowing I find it. I felt I knew enough, almost too much and so, when I saw that Where Poppies Blow by John Lewis-Stempel was on the Wainwright Prize shortlist, I have to own up to a moment of heart-sink at what may be ahead.

Because surely every book that could be written has been written...

Can there possibly be an unexplored angle to this conflagration...

But I had committed to reading as many books as I could and writing thoughts on them here so there could be no exceptions, and I think it is to John Lewis-Stempel's credit, and on reflection to the ordering of the chapters, that I succeeded and with honours, because Where Poppies Blow quickly became a compelling and memorable reading experience over two special days.

Nature, unchanging, 'assured and permanent' and had I ever really given a thought to how reassuring that immutability might have been to the soldiers in the trenches. There was solace and consolation in the seemingly most ordinary of details. 'We've the stars to share,' writes Second Lt. Max Plowman in a letter home. And for the British soldiers it was the landscape  that was their identity and heritage. As JLS (we are on initial terms for the forseeable) elaborates, and it was something that explained a great deal, when the British viewed the countryside they saw nature, they saw God...

'British patriotism, unlike the patriotism of other countries, was not based on race, but shared values and love of countryside.'

After introductions JLS turns to the birds of the battlefield among them the nightingales who carried on singing regardless, and the skylarks...

'The song of the skylark was the soundtrack of the war on the Western Front wherever and whenever...'

The birds however were not a comfort to all, for many the sound of birdsong would invoke homesickness and melancholy, though Captain Charles Raven saw the swallows nesting in entrance to company HQ differently...

'These birds were angels in disguise. It is a truism that one touch of nature makes the world kin: those blessed birds brought instant relief to the nerves and tempers of men.

What a sobering thought that in peacetime we seem to have achieved what the war could not, with both nightingales and skylarks now on the RSPB endangered Red List. Indeed in another Wainwright short-listed book, The Wild Kingdom (more about it soon) Stephen Moss suggests that nightingale numbers are down to just 5000 birds in the UK.

John Lewis-Stempel moves on to horses ...160,000 rounded up in August 1914 and I was instantly reminded of a painting Bookhound and I saw recently at Torre Abbey in Devon. 

August, Gold of Earth was painted in Plymouth in 1914 by Katherine Maud Hogarth Clay (1880-1930) a direct descendant of the 18th century artist William Hogarth...

As we sat and looked (Torre Abbey's art collection is beautifully laid out, spacious and with strategically placed sofas) we both wondered whether those horses had been sent off to war, whilst having a wry smile at the information alongside with its correction...

What a relief it was to learn that despite the undoubted suffering involved for the horses at least lessons had been learned from the Boer war. With the establishment and training of the Army Veterinary Corps, care of the animals was paramount, with casualty and evacuation protocol when injured mirroring that offered to soldiers. 

Out of consideration that some may be eating while reading I'm going to gloss over the Lice and Rats and Microbes chapter but that's not to say I didn't find the details about Clostridium perfringens, Borrelia vincenti and Bacillus fusiforms fascinating and informative in that way that nurses do. Life was miserable for the men but they had ways of dealing with it all.

Moving swiftly onto flowers... well this chapter was a happy revelation though it should have come as no surprise, given the number of gardeners who enlisted, that trench flower beds were prolific and tended with great care and pride. Seeds were often sent from home, the gardens creating a sense of the familiar in the midst of the unknown and uncertainty, as well as offering opportunities for some control over the environment and a means of self-expression in the midst of an externally ordered and regimented existence. 

There's much more about dogs, cats, rabbits, hunting, fishing, and I've barely touched on the hidden depths and delicate nuances in Where the Poppies Blow, or the quotes from letters home; nature in all its forms giving the soldiers something to write about as a beacon of hope in the midst of the carnage. Ordinary men writing about seemingly ordinary things which for them had become lifelines to hope and home; the gardens in particular creating a sense of sharing... soldiers could be moved up the line at a moment's notice but knew that their gardens would be tended and enjoyed by those that followed them.

It all reminded me of the gardeners of Heligan in Cornwall and the sadness I often feel as we walk around there. The gardening workforce enlisted en masse in 1914, signed the wall in the thunderbox room and left for the trenches, leaving the garden deserted and derelict until its restoration began in the 1990s. I might not be quite so sad now if I can think about those gardens on the Somme, but a sobering fact nonetheless, and one to which Heligan is a witness, was that whilst nature was somehow thriving on the Western Front, on the Home Front it was under threat. Meadows under the plough and thus irreplaceable, and the estates about to be broken up with the loss of the heirs in battle.

The sad reasons for the rise of the poppy as a symbol of remembrance here in the UK are well-known...the land effectively ploughed to great depth by artillery bombardment, the nitrogen from the ammunition and lime from the rubble of buildings fertilising the soil, the bones and blood of the men and horses doing likewise, and the flower proliferating where it hadn't before. Something that the Lost Gardens of Heligan will never forget either. Where the Poppies Blow the perfect testimony, and an extraordinary (and different) elegy to the lives of the Fallen.

 

 

 

 

Our Horses in Egypt ~ Rosalind Belben redux

As I was writing my thoughts (for your delectation soon) on the Wainwright shortlisted Where Poppies Blow The British Soldier, Nature, The Great War by John Lewis-Stempel, I remembered that one book had come to mind constantly throughout the chapter on horses. I eventually found the book, Our Horses in Egypt by Rosalind Belben, and then donning my overalls I braved the dusty blog cellar and found this post from 2008. Given that this was written nine years ago I'm hoping anyone who was reading here back then will have forgotten all about it, so I am bringing it back into the light of day because I think it's a book that deserves to be read.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I don't quite know where to start and it's not often I say that.It's taken me about a week to recover enough to write this.

First up, I feel I need to seek complete absolution for never really liking horses that much and for ever linking them to tins of dog food. Now I'm having to stop myself flying out of the door every time a horse trots along the lane just to gaze at it and love it and then cry. If you read this book prepare to shed a vale of tears.

Our Horses in Egypt is an unusual, less-is-more book and I had to concentrate hard because Rosalind Belben has a unique narrative style and the dialogue often doesn't quite seem to make sense. In the early chapters I often found myself reading it aloud to really grasp the meaning and then it dawned on me, this is pure dialogue, a conversation as you would really hear it. It's pared down and spare, often unfinished, the voicing of a seemingly random thought.

Here was a writer who wanted me to work.

Rosalind Belben a writer who is constantly challenging her reader to fill in the gaps and silences and make the connections for themselves.You most certainly do not get it all on a plate, the challenge of ambiguity and the potential for confusion all far more representative of real life.It is often several chapters on before one moment of confusion becomes a eureka one. Just hold on to it in a state of unknowing and trust that it will sort out and it does. I can't tell you how pleased I was the moment I understood about the Billy Harris in the drinking water.

Alongside the story of war widow Griselda Romney dragging daughter Amabel and Nanny off to Egypt to track down her old horse Philomena, is the story of Philomena herself. Philomena had been requisitioned for Allenby's 1916 desert campaign from the Romney country seat, where she was more used to hunting to hounds than charging the dervishes in the Western Desert. Thankfully Rosalind Belbin doesn't offer a talking horse but somehow you know exactly what Philomena is seeing, thinking and experiencing without her being given an actual Black Beauty voice.That somehow wouldn't have done at all. I've had to read in very small chunks because the flavours here are so intense and concentrated it's almost too much to take in.

For a start there's the land itself, this is the Levant torn apart by the Great War but a land with a radiant beauty that often shines through at the most desperate moments. Rosalind Belbin is not daft, too much horse suffering too soon would have had even this non-horsey-but-now-warming-to-them person closing the book with a fit of the staggers.The accumulation is gradual and by the time you reach the height of battle you couldn't bear to leave Philomena's side for a minute. Fortunately each chapter of equine derring-do interspersed with the often hilarious adventures of Griselda, four-year old Amabel and Nanny and of course out of the mouths of babes, Amabel tells it like it is with that childlike innocence and Rosalind Belbin nails it.

Likewise you stay alongside Griselda as the full horrors of the life of the horses in post-war Cairo are revealed and her search for Philomena becomes increasingly desperate, with it comes that complete understanding for those of us not quite so devoted to family Equidae.

In fact Rosalind Belben doesn't miss a beat right the way through Our Horses in Egypt and I was constantly marvelling at her plotting, her characters, the voices, the settings. Everything fitting together to perfection and a pure mastery of words.Nothing to excess, those moments when I had to stop and think and work it out for myself became the norm, slowed me down and made me think very hard about the book. When you reach the final page you absolutely have to turn, sniffing and snivelling, back to the beginning and re-read at least the first few chapters.

I could go on and on but I won't because Rosalind Belben doesn't but right now, this very minute, I am reminded of another author who writes like this, Penelope Fitzgerald.

My Joni Summer...

There has been a fine conversation on social media various about Joni Mitchell in the last few days. 

I can't remember how it started but lots of people have been drawn in and are commenting and we are all in a state of huge excitement about a forthcoming radio programme (September apparently) to which Linda Grant has contributed. Linda wrote this piece about Joni a couple of years ago when Joni's health had us all worried, and if I'm honest still does because Linda articulates something that I find hard to express myself. It's all in there, I'm not going to grab quotes or paraphrase.

But yes, sixth form common room at Nonsuch Girls, one copy of the LP Blue doing the rounds, being able to take it home on the 408 bus (we were the generation that clutched LPs under our arms weren't we) and listen for one night. I expect I recorded it via a microphone on to the old reel-to-reel tape recorder that my brother and I eventually exhausted into extinction,  and I would have pleaded for the whole house to be quiet for the time that it took to play through.

As so Joni and I have chugged along together down the years. There was a time when I missed or was too broke to buy the albums; busy with babies in the 1980s and work in the 1990s, but a few years ago I caught up. I was at a friend's house and there was her Joni collection...where had I been to miss Chalk Marks in a Rainstorm or Turbulent Indigo?  Whilst the received opinion is that Joni's music changed post Hejira that didn't stop me being a completist, but if I'm honest I haven't listened to these later albums properly.

Anyway there I was in Waterstones a while back when I saw this on the magazine shelf...

Now I can't say I've ever bought a fanzine...or maybe I did when I was a teenager but not now surely, except I picked this one up and realised it was a bit different. 

Then I gathered together all my Joni CDs...

...and had a dig around in the LP cupboard and quickly blessed my nerd-like qualities for tucking this 1991 article into my copy of Blue...

I'm going to have a bit of a blog break through August, occasional pictures rather than words and get on with some stitching, so no prizes for guessing what I'll be listening to as I sew. I'll start at the beginning with Song for a Seagull and work my way through in chronological order with an informed listen... who knows maybe a Joni quilt will emerge, we'll see. I've started a notebook anyway which is always a good sign.

Meanwhile...over to you... favourite Joni album, track, words, moments, memories...

 

 

On the Marshes - A Journey Into England's Waterlands ~ Carol Donaldson

'I wanted to walk a songline into my past, peeling back the layers to touch the places which had been important.'

Carol Donaldson, a woman on a journey of self-discovery and in On the Marshes (published by Little Toller) offering a varied and different perspective to the 'journey'  which takes her to the Kent Marshes. This is not an area I know at all, and its one I might have been in danger of dismissing as 'uninteresting' if I'm honest...now I actually want to buy a map and have a really good look around.  

The break-up of a long-term relationship, employment and housing difficulties, some decisions that seemed right at the time but which have gone sour and Carol embarks, deciding to head out walking from Gravesend to Whitstable and exploring 'the different ways we live on this tribally divided island.' 

Carol quickly gets into her stride...

' Suddenly I had fallen into step with a person who had always been walking alongside me, just out of reach.'

...first passing through an area known as the Plotlands; small plots of land bought by working-class London families often as refuge from the war but also as a place to escape to at the weekend and for holidays. Author Lena Kennedy was a Plotlander, living happily among the self-built huts and sheds though sadly, but not unexpectedly, the Plotlanders way of life has been eroded by the encroachment of the city ..

'competing interests co-existing unsuccessfully in a an overcrowded corner...'

'When did we change?' asks Carol, 'when did we stop believing that we could do things for ourselves and instead give the reins of our lives over to others?' as she explores the simple things in life and where it had its origins.

But there is beauty to be found along the way too and in the most surprising places, we don't have a monopoly on the skylarks out on Dartmoor.

But what do you think...is it my imagination...

Because one of the aspects of On the Marshes that struck me time and again was how much easier it is for a man to up sticks and walk it all out of his system than it is for a woman. There are different risks and threats, different constraints. I'd like to think it wasn't more difficult ...but it would seem to be, and there are certainly moments when Carol Donaldson is fearful and wonders what she is doing and why. It is at these moments that Carol offers a very different, and to me fascinating, perspective on the whole Journey Memoir in this book which was a compelling read.

There is a hair-raising, and I mean really hair-raising, encounter with a tidal causeway being crossed with a male friend who urgently needs to get back to land (car in car park, car park locked at night, no mobile, worried wife and child) and the fear is palpable. I could feel my heart racing as if I was there...it's writing that segues perfectly into any reader's own near-miss encounters (mine probably getting caught walking and camping in the middle of Dartmoor on the weekend of the 1979 Fastnet storm) and equally fascinating is the male-female dynamic at play that Carol Donaldson describes, and her part in the decision-making process which would end in rescue by the coastguards.

A spade is a spade and Carol certainly doesn't mess about calling it a shovel because unlike so many of these memoirs, which often only meet nice, friendly, welcoming people (and perhaps seem obliged to stay on the side of political correctness ) she is not afraid to call out mean-spirited-ness when she finds it. I actually found this tell-it-like-it-is honesty very refreshing and along the way Carol is equally open and honest about her relationship and employment difficulties...

...and I wonder if this is another difference between the male and female writers...

...perhaps Amy Liptrot led the way with The Outrun, perhaps there are others who were already forging the path and I am blinkered.

...or perhaps I have been reading the wrong books and there are plenty of men out there sharing not just their physical journeys but the emotional journeys too.

I am sure you will be able to suggest plenty more reading in comments...

And if you know and love the Kent Marshes now is the moment to say so and persuade us all to visit...

Where would be a good base...

I gather Whitstable quite on-trend and up-market these days, Carol has this to say...

'I reached the Seasalter beach huts and entered the invisible force field of Whitstable, the Emperor's New Clothes of seaside resorts...'

If we visit what should we see...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stanhope Forbes : Father of the Newlyn School

Our summer is racing away with us so Bookhound and I need to get a wriggle on and see everything we want to see before the rest of the world arrives for some well-earned rest and respite from the rest of the world. To that end we headed off to the Penlee House Gallery in Penzance for their latest exhibition, Stanhope Forbes : Father of the Newlyn School (on until 9 September 2017). On a good day it takes us about ninety minutes to reach Penzance, on a mid-summer tourist day we would turn round and come home again before we'd reached Launceston.

In keeping with our new rule we take a packed lunch and spend the lunch money on the catalogue...good economic strategy eh... though we did allow ourselves coffee and cake because there have to be some treats in life.

Born in Dublin in 1857, Stanhope Forbes arrived in Newlyn in 1884 intent on setting up an artistic community. Like many creatives of the day he had studied in Paris, settling for a while in Brittany but ,having decided that French subjects weren't going to sell well, Stanhope Forbes set off for Cornwall in search of an ideal location. Falmouth, Helston, Portleven, Penzance and thence to Newlyn where he found rooms and a studio for fifteen shillings a week, plenty of attractive models and ideal locations down the narrow cobbled streets, along the quayside and, with the fishing industry as a backdrop, many of his most iconic paintings emerged.

We have loved Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach for as long as we have lived down here, the picture for many years prominently displayed in Plymouth Museum and now on extended loan to Penlee House so it was no surprise to see it at this exhibition...

We tend to say 'ahh there it is,' whenever we see Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach, as if it's ours, just unhooked from the sitting room wall and generously loaned by us for everyone else to enjoy. That sense of ownership feels like one of the hidden glories of our art galleries and museums, especially those we revisit frequently. This one of the first pictures that Stanhope Forbes painted on his arrival in Newlyn...

' Anything more beautiful than this beach at low water I never saw and I can only paint figures against such a background as this shining mirror-like shore makes, the result should be effective...got blown about and rained upon, my model fainted...'

Welcome to the South West Stanhope.

However in amongst the familiar were the new; pictures generously loaned from private collections that we had never seen before, and as the years progressed how fascinating it was to see the colours lift, the hem lines shrinking, life changing..

The Pond, 1930 Newport Museum & Art Gallery

...as the exhibition traced Stanhope Forbes painting out of the Victorian era, into the Edwardian and thence into the early years of the Second World War. I'm not sure I had really appreciated the vast time span of his creative career before.

Village Rendezvous, Copperhouse Creek 1938 ( Plymouth City Council) 

Frank Johns, the little boy in the blue shirt who sat for this painting, remembers Stanhope Forbes 'paying the children 6d, provided that they turn up again the following week for a second sitting.'

There were too many new favourites to mention them all...

The Harbour Window (1910) (Royal Academy of Arts, London) 

This is Annie Blewett, painted in the upstairs window of The Ship Inn, Mousehole (say Mowzell if you want to be proper job Cornish) and is Stanhope Forbes's diploma painting that would gain him Associate Membership of the Royal Academy in 1911.

 

Causewayhead, Penzance 1943 (Private Collection)

An idyllic summer street scene in a Cornish town carefully punctuated by reminders that this is wartime.

There was sadness too. Stanhope Forbes had been devastated first by the death of his wife, Canadian artist Elizabeth (Armstrong) in 1912 who he had meet soon after his arrival in Newlyn; this one of her most well-known pictures and perhaps familiar to some of you...

School is Out  1889 ~ Elizabeth Forbes (Penlee Gallery)

...and then by the loss of the couple's only son Alec in September 1916 during the Battle of the Somme.

A Portrait of My Son Alec in Uniform, 1916  (The Stephenson Family )

The portrait is full of poignancy, added to by the exhibition notes which reveal that Alec had sat for the painting during a visit home the previous Christmas...letters to and from the Front reveal that his father was working on the painting and was very pleased with it. 

I have just turned the final page of Where the Poppies Blow The British Soldier, Nature, The Great War by John Lewis- Stempel and the book has really surprised me. I was beginning to think I might have read all I wanted to about the First World War and then along comes a book like this which offers a completely new perspective. I can't recommend it highly enough and I'm so pleased that someone reminded me of that incredible nationwide event on the anniversary of the Somme on July 1st last year. The one that was kept a huge secret, did anyone else see and hear the ghost soldiers...

As always, at exhibitions like this a new favourite painting emerges and this one might be new to everyone.

Christmas Eve 1897 (on the right in this catalogue picture)

In the ownership of the Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton and Hove, Christmas Eve 1897 was seriously damaged whilst in storage in Brighton's aquarium during the Second World War (I'm thinking damp might have been an issue). Both Penlee House and the Royal Pavilion & Museums have funded its conservation especially for this exhibition; this the first time the painting has been displayed in over seventy years so a real privilege to see it.

I could go on and on, so much to see, so much to think about and the catalogue well worth forgoing bought-lunch for because we took our picnic to the cliffs at nearby Lamorna Cove and marvelled at what we'd just seen, what we were looking at this minute and how right the Cornish artists got it all and then I could come home and read all about it.

If you are heading west this summer then don't miss Stanhope Forbes at the Penlee Gallery, though hand-on-heart I'm not sure what the steep and narrow hill down to Lamorna Cove might be like on a busy day (two-way traffic not catered for) but meanwhile...

Do you have that feeling about a particular painting in a gallery...

One that you know so well and enjoy so much that actually it's yours...