willow
wood anemone
woodrush
yarrow
yellow archangel
yellow rattle
Fauna
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
A Meadowland Library of Books and Music: a List Raisonné
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 th
at 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
A. R. Clapham, The Oxford Book of Trees, 1986
John Clare, The Shepherd’s Calendar, 1827: the countryman’s year, tasks, festivals, rhythm, in verse.
John Clegg, The Observer’s Book of Pond Life, 1967
William Cobbett, Cottage Economy, 1822: the original classic of self-sufficiency. Rural Rides, 1830: a splendidly splenetic and entirely accurate portrait of Georgian England from the back of a horse.
John Stuart Collis, The Worm Forgives the Plough, 1973: working in the British countryside during WW2.
Country Gentlemen’s Association, The Country Gentlemen’s Estate Book, 1923
R. S. R. Fitter, Collins Pocket Guide to British Birds, 1973
Roger Deakin, Wildwood, 2007
G. Evans, The Observer’s Book of Birds’ Eggs, 1967
George Ewart Evans, Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay, 1956: the oral history of a Suffolk village.
Thomas Firbank, I Bought a Mountain, 1959: hill-farming in Wales.
W. M.W. Fowler, Countryman’s Cooking, 2006: originally published in 1965, and quite fantastically politically incorrect.
Sir Edward Grey (Grey of Fallodon), The Charm of Birds, 1927: the man who led us into WW1 was an ardent ornithologist; this is his study of birdsong. His eyes were in decline, his ears were perfect.
Geoffrey Grigson, The Englishman’s Flora, 1955: always the Flora I turn to.
Lt-Col Peter Hawker, Instructions to Young Sportsmen, 1910: possibly the most popular book ever on shooting.
George Henderson, The Farming Ladder, 1944
Otto Herman and J. A. Owen, Birds Useful & Birds Harmful, 1909: This was the first book on birds I ever encountered, since my father’s copy, which he inherited from a relative, was on the bookshelf on the landing outside my childhood bedroom.
James Herriot, If Only They Could Talk, 1970
Jason Hill, Wild Foods of Great Britain, 1939: an early and inspirational book on foraging.
Barry Hines, A Kestrel for a Knave, 1968
W. G. Hoskins, English Landscape, 1977
W. H. Hudson, Adventures Among Birds, 1913
Richard Jefferies, The Gamekeeper at Home, 1878; The Amateur Poacher, 1879; The Life of the Fields, 1884
Rev. C. A. Johns, ed. J. A. Owen, British Birds in Their Haunts, 1938: every entry is nature literature.
Richard Lewington, Pocket Guide to the Butterflies of Great Britain and Ireland, 2003
Ronald Lockley, The Private Life of the Rabbit, 1964: the inspiration for Adams’s Watership Down
Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places, 2008
J. G. Millais, The Natural History of British Game Birds, 1909
Ian Moore, Grass and Grasslands, 1966: from the New Naturalist series.
Ernest Neal, The Badger, 1948: also from the New Naturalist series.
George Orwell, Coming Up for Air, 1939
Eric Parker, Shooting Days, 1918; The Shooting Week-End Book, n.d.
E. Pollard, M. D. Hooper and N. W. Moore, Hedges, 1974
Major Hesketh Prichard, Sport in Wildest Britain, 1921
Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside, 1986
Arthur Ransome, Great Northern?, 1947: In the last of the Swallows & Amazons series, the children believe the rare great northern diver is nesting on a Scottish loch. And that they must protect it.
Romany (G. Bramwell Evans), A Romany in the Fields, 1927; Out with Romany by Meadow & Stream, 1942
Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, 1928
Peter Scott, The Eye of the Wind, 1961: the man who founded the Wildfowl Trust commanded RN gunboats in World War Two, winning a Mention in Dispatches and a Distinguished Service Cross. His father was Scott of the Antarctic, who in his last frozen notes had asked his wife to ‘make the boy interested in nature’.
John Seymour, The Fat of the Land, 1961
Henry Stephens, The Book of the Farm, 1844: the vade mecum of Victorian farming.
Paul Sterry, Collins Complete Guide to British Wild Flowers, 2006
David Streeter and Rosamond Richardson, Discovering Hedgerows, 1982
Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, 1908: Traherne might be described as ‘The British St Francis of Assisi’.
Edward Thomas, Collected Poems, 1920
S. Vere Benson, The Observer’s Book of British Birds, n.d.
Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald, Game Birds, 1946; The Book of the Horse, 1946
Paul Waring and Martin Parson, Concise Guide to the Moths of Great Britain and Ireland, 2009
Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selbourne, 1789: the fountainhead of British nature-writing.
Raymond Williams, The People of the Black Mountains, Vols 1 & 2, 1989–90: the local boy made good. Williams hailed from the railway village of Pandy, at the bottom of the Black Mountains, to become a drama don at Cambridge and a Marxist philosopher. These two volumes of fiction can be self-consciously literary; nonetheless they articulate the history of the Black Mountains landscape in a way that really works.
Henry Williamson, Tarka the Otter, 1927
William Youatt, Sheep: Their Breeds, Management and Diseases, 1848
Music
J. S. Bach, Sheep May Safely Graze, 1713: the aria from the Hunt Cantata, in praise of the good shepherd.
Samuel Barber, Adagio for Strings, 1936
George Butterworth, The Banks of Green Willow, 1913: Butterworth was killed in action in 1916.
Hubert Parry, Jerusalem, 1916: yes, he was a relative; or at least claimed to be.
Henry Purcell, When I Am Laid in Earth, 1688: the aria from ‘Dido and Aeneas’.
Supergrass, Alright, 1998: I should coco. Especially on a warm spring day when the grass is singing.
Ralph Vaughan Williams, Fantasia on Theme by Thomas Tallis, 1910; Folk Songs II: To The Green Meadow, 1950
Thomas Tallis, Spem in Allium, c. 1570: ‘Hope in any other’.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Society of Authors for granting me a Foundation Award.
My thanks go to Susanna Wadeson and Patsy Irwin at Transworld, to Julian Alexander and Ben Clark at LAW, to my wife, to my children, and to all the not so dumb beasts of the field, wild and farmed, who tolerate me. To the flowers, grasses and trees too.
Lastly, I thank Faber & Faber and Viking for their permission to reproduce short extracts from, respectively, Ezra Pound’s The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius (‘The Decade of Sheng Min’) and John Stewart Collis’s The Worm Forgives the Plough.
About the Author
John Lewis-Stempel is a writer and farmer. His many previous books include The Wild Life: A Year of Living on Wild Food, England: The Autobiography and the bestselling Six We
eks: The Short and Gallant Life of the British Officer in the First World War. He lives on the borders of England and Wales with his wife and two children.
Also by John Lewis-Stempel:
England: The Autobiography
The Autobiography of the British Soldier
The Wild Life: A Year of Living on Wild Food
Six Weeks: The Short and Gallant Life of the British
Officer in the First World War
Young Herriot
Foraging: The Essential Guide to Free Wild Food
The War Behind the Wire: The Life, Death and
Glory of British PoWs, 1914–18
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First published in Great Britain by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © John Lewis-Stempel
John Lewis-Stempel has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Illustrations and map by Micaela Alcaino
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