Guest blog – On Nature Writing and Reading by Nicola Chester

Nicola lives with her family in the North Wessex Downs, in the far west of West Berkshire. She has written for the RSPB and her local newspaper for over a decade, has written a book on Otters and features in each of the Wildlife Trusts’ Seasons Anthologies, edited by Melissa Harrison. As well as writing and wilding her family and everyone around her, she helps out on a farm and works as a School Librarian. Twitter: @nicolawriting

 

On Nature Writing and Reading.

Wildlife, literature and place twine like wild clematis through a blackthorn hedge for me; they are inseparable entities. From the small brown Observer’s Book of Birds my Grandad gifted me to the ‘bedwine’ that twines through the stories of the local, recognisable place in Adam Thorpe’s classic Ulverton; from The Wind in the Willows that mapped the chalkstreams of my childhood village, to the intensity of Tarka’s world in Devon, reading about nature goes hand in hand with experiencing it.

I like to read a book ‘in season’ or in ‘place’: Wuthering Heights in a storm on the Yorkshire Moors, The Return of the Native on a glow-worm-peppered heath, where I can still, just about, find them – and Tess of the D’Urbervilles with my back to the gibbet on the high chalkhill above our home. But nothing maps the narrative landscape of my life quite like Richard Adams’s Watership Down. On re-reading, the battles, protest and odyssey take on fresh meaning for a book so local to me, I have lived in every location it maps. I grew up where it starts and made my own pilgrimage to the ‘high, lonely hills’ where it ends; myself a refugee from human development (this time a mighty road) searching for my place of greater safety. As with the map in my Hardy Novels, I trace the real landscape through the imagined.

And I write it. To know a place intimately is everything. It holds family, memory, history; it is home. I envy those who have lived here for generations, whose connections are richer and deeper than mine.  Yet move me and I’ll start a relationship with a place immediately, reaching out tentative tendrils that curl into words and wrap around syntax, with an ache for home and a need to get the dirt, moss and grass seeds of the new landscape under my fingernails and onto a white page.

I have a Patrick Kavanagh quote stuck to the wall of my writing hut, pitted with drawing pin holes and greased with blu-tack from being on the walls of rooms I no longer remember: “To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields – these are as much as a man can fully experience.”

I’ve ‘hefted’ my children here, too, with wild words and stories. The natural artefacts of shepherd’s purse, needle and crown are their own touchstones, ancestral badger paths that round the breast of the old hill like silver stretch marks, the curve of an ancient seabed we can still smell, plunging our faces, laughing, into the wild herb garden of chalk grassland in the summer. I want the place, its meanings, stories and connections to emanate a strong pull for them – magnetic home – not to hold them here, but to make sure that, wherever they end up, the nature of the place will be a talisman for them, a touchstone they will care for, their own place of greater safety.

I cannot experience nature without it coming out in words, similes and metaphors. I am compelled as a reader and a writer to try and reproduce, record, interpret and hold the experience in my senses, fresh as the moment they occurred. It’s how I orientate myself.  Sometimes, this means I am lost. Not to myself, but to others. Tenant, flitter, plover, I can be found, roaming the down, my head stuck down a badger sett, feet in a furrow, hair tangled in the hawthorn, following a hare. Or on the hill shaped like a loving arm, the combe, a hollow beneath a collar bone. My library, my ivory tower is a chalk hill of stacked geography. I converse with nightjars and green plover, writing the calligraphic curve of crest and looping flight, grown cursive. When I lay my head on the hill and breathe in an old oceans’ worth of loving, crushed basil, wild thyme, I glean words, not grain; I make sense. Like Heaney’s Antaeus, I cannot be weaned off the earth’s long contour.

Now, as the season moves on, circling kites and buzzards are gap winged, moulting single primaries on alternate sides, so they are not compromised. I keep my eyes open for feathers on the ground. But as I do, I get an uneasy shock.

The newly drilled field, tilth fine as apple crumble, is covered in a blue haze of slug pellets in industrial quantities. Another field is being sprayed with a pre-emergent before any green shoots have even breached the soil. It stains the flints yellow, the smell lingering for days.  The hares lick their feet and die. It is a toxic landscape.

I try to concentrate on the extraordinary success of beetle banks, wildflower and nectar strips and lurch from despair and frustration to exhilaration and delight. A love for this landscape rewards and hurts in equal measure. And I’m all in.  What can we do but resist, resist?

Other lines of Heaney’s compel me: ‘A comet that was lost should be visible at sunset, those million tons of light like a glimmer of haws and rose-hips.’ I do not want to miss the ‘comet’s pulsing rose’. The time is now. We writers must speak, make connections, move people and, bar the occasional impassioned act of direct action, I feel it’s the only thing I can do. I write in order to live.

What remains is that it matters, to record all this. It matters to delight in and sometimes, despair of it all; it matters to set down words – along with others that write and mediate about nature. It’s vital. Because what will survive of us is love and possibly, the evidence of the printed word. And in that love recorded, there is a kind of ecology.

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