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Meadowland

Page 17

by John Lewis-Stempel


  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

  TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

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  www.transworldbooks.co.uk

  Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies

  whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

  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

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781448152582

  ISBN 9780857521453

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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