Meadowland (33 page)

Foxes have been doing this for a long time. Remains of the red fox have been found in Wolstonian glacial sediments from Warwickshire, meaning they were around between 330,000 and 135,000 years ago.

Something in the atmosphere changes, and the fox on the far bank looks up and sees me, and bounds off. Reynard disappears into the shadow of the thicket.

Then I go to my earth.

27 D
ECEMBER
At night the temperature dips below freezing. The pulse of life is stilling, slowing. Over the field sits the rusty-iron smell of the year’s finish. The field would be an almost empty scene if I could not see my memories superimposed upon it. This is the field I cut by hand, the field I was part of, where I learned the pleasure of simple things. If you want to know what happiness is, ask the fellow who cut the hay.

31 D
ECEMBER
New Year’s Eve. I put the sheep in the field, and a load of hay in their feeder. In a sort of virtuous circle the hay is from this field – the hay I made in the summer, pulled down on those now indispensable tarpaulins.

The sheep and hay are in. The raven croaks. I shut the gate and leave. This is how it is, has been, how it shall be evermore.

alder

apple

ash

autumn hawkbit

bird’s-foot trefoil

blackberry

blackthorn

bluebell

bracken

bramble

bryony

bugle

burdock

bush vetch

camomile

cleavers (goosegrass)

cock’s foot

common bent

common meadow rue

common vetch

cow parsley

cowslip

crab apple

crested dog’s tail

cuckoo pint

dandelion

deadly nightshade

devil’s bit scabious

dock

dog violet

dog’s mercury

dyer’s greenweed

elder

elm

eyebright

field forget-me-not

field maple

field scabious

fir

foxglove

goat willow

ground elder

ground ivy

hawthorn

hazel

hemlock

hogweed

holly

honeysuckle

ivy

Jack-by-the-hedge

Jew’s ear mushroom

knapweed

lady’s smock

lesser celandine

liberty cap mushroom

lords and ladies

marsh thistle

meadow buttercup

meadow cranesbill

meadow foxtail

meadow grass

meadow vetchling

mistletoe

mouse-ear

nettle

oak

pignut

primrose

quaking grass

ragged robin

red campion

red clover

red fescue

ribwort plantain

rosebay willow herb

rough meadow grass

rye grass

saxifrage

sedge

sloe

snowdrop

sorrel

St George’s mushroom

stitchwort

sweet vernal

thistle

timothy

tormentil

tufted hair-grass

turf mottlegill mushroom

velvet shank mushroom

white clover

white daisy

willow

wood anemone

woodrush

yarrow

yellow archangel

yellow rattle

aphid

backswimmer

badger

barn owl

bilberry tortrix moth

black slug

blackbird

blackcap

blackfly

blue tit

brimstone butterfly

brown-spot pinion moth

bullfinch

bullhead

bumblebee

buzzard

cabbage white

caddis fly

Canada goose

carrion crow

chaffinch

chalcid wasp

chalk hill blue butterfly

chameleon frog

chiffchaff

cockchafer

common blue butterfly

common partridge

crane fly/leatherjacket

cuckoo

curlew

damselfly

Daubenton’s bat

dipper

dor beetle

dragonfly

dungfly

dunnock (hedge sparrow)

earthworm

field mouse

field vole

fieldfare

fox

fox moth

frog

frog-hopper

gall midge

gall wasp

gatekeeper butterfly

glaucous shears moth

goldfinch

grass snake

great crested grebe

great spotted woodpecker

great tit

greater horseshoe bat

green bottle fly

green woodpecker

Hebrew character moth

hedgehog

heron

horsefly

house martin

house sparrow

hoverfly

jackdaw

jay

kestrel

kingfisher

ladybird

lapwing

large-jawed spider

leaf bug

least yellow underwing

lesser cream wave moth

little owl

loach

long-tailed tit

magpie

mallard

mandarin duck

marsh fritillary butterfly

mayfly

meadow ant

meadow brown butterfly

meadow grasshopper

meadow pipit

meadowsweet

merganser

merlin

midge

minnow

mole

money spider (5)

mosquito

newt

nightjar

noctule bat

nuthatch

orange-tip butterfly

otter

palmate newt

peacock butterfly

pheasant

pied wagtail

polecat

pond skater

powdered quaker moth

rabbit

rat

raven

red grouse

red kite

redwing

robin

rook

rove beetle

satyr pug moth

scarce vapourer moth

short-tailed vole

shrew

silk cell spider

six-spot burnet moth

skylark

slug

small copper butterfly

snipe

soldier beetle

sparrowhawk

spotted flycatcher

springtail

squirrel

starling

stoat

swallow

swift

tawny owl

thrush

toad

tortoiseshell butterfly

treecreeper

trout

violet ground beetle

water boatman

water vole

weasel

willow warbler

winged agate (flying ant)

winged meadow ant

wolf spider (2)

wood mouse

wood pigeon

woodlouse

wren

yellow wagtail

yellowhammer

You are what you read. So I offer the following in explanation.

I wish I could remember which master at school read
The Little Grey Men
to us (stories about gnomes for twelve-year-olds, absurd!), though I think it must have been the keen, young Mr David, who wore the bottle-green cord jacket. While BB’s gnomes amused me, they did not interest me as much as the book’s subtext: the natural history of the British countryside.

I was not a stranger to that countryside; it was outside the door of my house, it was what my grandparents farmed, it was what my family had lived in (the Herefordshire variant) for around nine hundred years. What BB did was make me see interconnectedness. If gnomes could communicate with wild animals, then why not me? It was a way of thinking about nature which is not Us and Them, but We together. It was the natural world from the inside out, not from the outside in.

I was already a ‘nature boy’, given to rambles with my black Labrador dog, Rover (of course), usually alone, though sometimes with cousins or friends. My standard equipment, aside from the dog, was an outsize pair of Boots Empire 10 x 50 binoculars, which always swung hurtingly when I climbed trees to peer into birds’ nests, especially the twig shanties of wood pigeons in the tops of the elms. I still have my
Observer’s Book of British Birds’ Eggs
, given to me at seven, just as I have the
Observer’s Book of British Birds
, of
Wild Animals
, of
Pond Life
. Plus the
AA Book of Birds
which was my tenth birthday present from Auntie Eileen and Uncle George, which sits on the bookshelves next to those other indispensable bird-identification guides from the 1970s:
The Hamlyn Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe
and the
Collins Pocket Guide to British Birds
. The latter was a school prize, won in a surprising and never equalled moment of scholarly success.

No sooner was I introduced to BB than I was off to Hereford Library, to come home with my school briefcase fat with
Down the Bright Stream, The Wild Lone
and
Brendon Chase
. It is the last two of these books, really, which means that BB is the author to have most influenced me.
The Wild Lone
is still, to my money, the best attempt to get inside an animal’s head and life, while
Brendon Chase
is the classic of boy’s adventuring in the British countryside, the story of the Hensman boys living wild in the woods. (I admit Arthur Ransome’s
Great Northern?
runs it close.) As a very big boy in my forties I finally got my chance to live wild, spending a year surviving on what I could forage and shoot, an experience recounted in
The Wild Life
. Being outside should never be anorak-dull. Being a bird watcher should not mean one is predestined to be a character in a Mike Leigh play. The outside should always be an ecstatic experience.

If BB (properly Denys Watkins-Pitchford) remains the nature writer I most admire, others have stuck to me over the passage of time, rather like goose grass sticks to the coats of sheep as they pass along hedges. The inherent anarchist in me loves William Cobbett’s self-sufficiency classic
Cottage Economy
, the middle-aged conservative shooter adores Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald’s
British Game
. (The latter book was Number 2 in the New Naturalist series, any and all of which deserve a place on a nature lover’s bookshelf.) I have made both my children read Barry Hines’s
A Kestrel for a Knave
– I read it too as a child – to make them understand the privilege of having a pet. You are never lonely if you have the love of an animal.

George Orwell once wrote to the effect that autobiography should never be trusted unless it reveals something outrageous. My small confession is that I distrust science, and in my science-free A levels I discovered English pastoral poetry: Thomas Hardy, John Clare, Edward Thomas and the honorary Briton, Robert Frost.
(Thomas and Frost had lived as part of the circle of Dymock Poets, only miles from where I grew up.) Don’t they all communicate truths about nature too?

You read what you are. I have the bad habit of reading books about farming from another world: Britain before DDT. George Ewart Evans’s
Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay
, John Stewart Collis’s
The Worm Forgives the Plough
, George Henderson’s
The Farming Ladder
are always reassuringly close.

The full list of meadowland books to be found on my own shelf is:

Richard Adams,
Watership Down
, 1972: the lapin
Aeneid
.

J. A. Baker,
The Peregrine
, 1966: Baker’s account of a year spent following peregrine falcons, in which he elides the distinctions between man and bird, won the Duff Cooper prize for 1967.

BB (Denys Watkins-Pitchford),
The Wild Lone
, 1938;
Manka the Sky Gypsy
, 1939;
The Little Grey Men
, 1942;
Brendon Chase
, 1944;
Down the Bright Stream
, 1948

Ronald Blythe,
Akenfield
, 1969: the last days of traditional agriculture in Suffolk.

Maurice Burton,
The Observer’s Book of Wild Animals
, 1971

Geoffrey Chaucer,
Parlement of Foules
(trans. C. M. Drennan), 1914