Meadowland by John Lewis-Stempel Page B

with birdie authors: Hudson, BB (Denys Watkins-Pitchford), Peter Scott, Viscount Grey of Fallodon, and J. A. Baker, the author of one drop-jaw classic,
The Peregrine
. Of course, some science Puritan will aver that British nature writing is diseased by ‘species shift’, or what W. H. Hudson (a leading practitioner) termed ‘extra-natural’ experience – the placing of the author inside the head and body of the being described. The same lab-coated lobby invariably sign off with the dig that ‘nature writing’ and, by extension, ‘nature reading’ are the habit of metropolitans detached from the real Nature of the red teeth and claws.
    Every time I hear this argument I wind back my memory more than thirty years, to the little second sitting room of my grandparents’ house in Withington. They had impeccable country credentials stretching back centuries, although admittedly in my grandfather’s case only to the early 1600s. There were no parish records before then.
    In the second sitting room, there are only three shelves of the dark wood bookcase; on them are a few respectable novels in paper polka-dot jackets (led by Du Maurier and Somerset Maugham), at least ten books about Herefordshire (I must have read
Where Wye and Severn Flow
twelve times by the age of twelve) . . . and an awful lot of books by Romany, aka the Reverend George Bramwell Evens, a BBC radio broadcaster and writer on nature. There was
Out with Romany, Out with Romany Again, Out with Romany by Meadow and Stream, Out with Romany Once More, Out with Romany by the Sea
. . .
    There was nothing unusual about that little library. Everybody in the country had books on nature, farming and shooting, Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald for knowledge, James Herriot for laughs. And theworst anthropomorphizers of all are country people. I have never known a sow badger to be anything but an ‘old girl’, and when the gender of an animal is unknown it is always ‘he’, and never ‘it’.
    And I wonder, is it really so difficult to enter, in some slight degree, into the mind-frame of an animal? Are we not all beasts?
    There’s an evening chorus too, and it is best enjoyed on a day like this, when the light is seductive in white veils, and there is enough moisture in the dusk air to intensify the floral incense of the spring meadow. Two male blackbirds, on opposite sides of the field, one in the Grove hedge, one in Bank hedge, sing against each other in an ecstatic proclamation of their stake in the world.
    Oh, the joy to be alive in England, in Meadowland, once May is here.
    If merry May is the month for listening to the dawn chorus, it is also the time for fox-watching because the adults, with hungry cubs, are forced out in daylight, and the cubs themselves are up above ground playing. They are wholly incautious this evening, having slunk under the fence from the copse to rough-and-tumble in the mattress grass of the field. Their turquoise eyes watch me approach until I can be no more than thirty feet from them; only then do they scamper back to their earth.
    Such unwariness will not last. In a month they will be nervous of me, a human, and they will have an awakened atavistic liking of the night. There are three of them, weaned and about eight weeks old.
    I’m aware that the vixen is watching me watching them. She has emerged from the thicket with a mallard duckling dangling out of the corner of her mouth. A spiv with a fag would look less shifty.
    Mallard ducklings are mainly brown with pale faces. Of the eight hatchlings born to the female who sat under the Elephant Tree just upstream, one was a garish Tweety yellow, which was the same as a death sentence.
    The duckling is for the cubs. Their mother has been scoffing voles or rats, dug out from the river bank at the bottom of the thicket.
    We are old acquaintances, the vixen and I, and she recognizes my face or maybe my smell. Anybody else and she would have warned the cubs minutes ago. As, indeed, she would have done