THE GREENHOUSE AND THE FIELD
WHEN I MOVED from the Chilterns to Norfolk in 2002, I took with me a longing to see a barn owl on my home patch again. They’d become scarce in Middle England, and I missed their pale vigils over the twilit fields. I’d been a year in my new patch before I heard about one. I was tipped off by our window cleaner, who glimpsed it most evenings when dog-walking. It proved to be a late riser, only materialising on the cusp of darkness. When I first saw it, the last light from the west was shining through its almost translucent wing tips. I became rhapsodic about the way it was ‘shuttling night and day together’, and scribbled notes about how it seemed to be ‘winnowing the grass, threshing it for food’. I was burying the real bird – which would have rapidly starved if it had behaved like a threshing machine – under bushels of thoughtless visual metaphors. I could have done with some scientific ballast at that moment to ground my flights of fancy.
So when I’m occasionally called a ‘Romantic naturalist’ I wonder whether it’s an accusation as much as a description: the meticulous observations of the natural scientist corrupted by my overheated imagination; objectivity compromised by my Romantic insistence on making feelings part of the equation.
Well, I suppose it depends what you mean by Romanticism. I rather incline towards Sam Coleridge and John Clare’s view – that nature isn’t a machine to be dispassionately dissected, but a community of which we, the observers, are inextricably part. And that our feelings about that community are a perfectly proper subject for reflection, because they shape our relationship with it – a more troubled relationship now than it ever was for the eighteenth-century Romantics.
In principle these ideals shouldn’t conflict with scientific rigour. Feelings can precede or follow the moment of exact observation without necessarily contaminating its truthfulness. But in practice marrying these two approaches is tricky work, and raises all kinds of puzzles about the terms of our experience of nature. Can you, for instance, closely observe a living organism without in some way taking it out of context, literally or perceptually? Can emotional engagement with nature amount to a kind of subtle take-over? Is it possible for us to sympathetically take another creature’s sensory viewpoint without becoming anthropomorphic? Do the technological devices by which we enlarge our understanding of nature enhance or diminish our sense of kindredness with it? Running through these conundrums is the issue of the primacy of our senses, the only channels through which we can relate to the physical world. The natural scientist depends on them for information, but mistrusts their subjectivity and fallibility, and is chiefly interested in how they lead to explanations of nature. The Romantic revels in them for their own sake. They provide sensual experiences as well as sensory data, and are agencies we share with the rest of nature. Wolves and owls and bumblebees stare, sniff and listen too, and the Romantic wants to be part of that great global conversation.
In these six essays I want to reflect on my own rickety attempts to marry a Romantic view of the natural world with a mite of scientific precision. Each essay concentrates on a particular sense – sight, taste, smell, hearing, finding your place. In this essay in an oblique way, I’m thinking about touch, which is unique among the senses in being both passive and active, about feeling and manipulation.
I began to be fascinated by the natural world in the wasteland that lay at the back of our family house in the Chilterns. This quartermile square of unkempt grass and free-range trees had an exotic history, though I didn’t know it at the time. It had been the grounds of a Georgian mansion owned by Graham Greene’s uncle Charles, and, before the First World War, the young novelist-to-be was a frequent visitor. He had a secret eyrie on the roof of the Hall, from which he’d gaze across the familial parkland and dream of being an explorer.
The estate was broken up in the 1920s, and the old park abandoned. By the time our neighbourhood gang occupied it in the 1950s it was a thrilling wilderness of feral trees, unplumbable wells and shoals of mysterious dells and mounds that were like the tumuli of a lost civilisation. We called it simply ‘The Field’, as if there wasn’t another one worth bothering about, and used it as our local common. I saw my first barn owl there, hunting over what had once been the Hall’s tennis courts. I learned how to make dens under the roots of fallen trees, how to walk painlessly over flints, and dreamed, just as Graham Greene had forty years before, of being an explorer. We had a Romantic life out there, playing at noble savages.
But at the edge of The Field I had another kind of den, where the business was more formal. My father’s greenhouse backed onto the wasteland, and when I was about eleven he let me turn one end of it into a makeshift laboratory. As scientific establishments go, it must have been one of the strangest. I’d garnered all kinds of household chemicals from Mum’s kitchen – washing soda, borax, vinegar, lime, Epsom salts – and put them in jam jars, carefully labelled with their scientific names. They sat in neat rows on the breeze blocks where Dad’s flower-pots had been. In those days Boots sold chemicals and apparatus over the counter, even to kids, so my pocket money turned into phials of potassium permanganate and sulphur and a gleaming array of flasks, pipettes and funnels. But no dissection knives or collecting bottles. I was mad for chemistry then, but not biology, and it would never have occurred to me to take any living things out of The Field for investigation on the bench. They belonged out in that wild savanna beyond the fence.
When, much later, I began rationalising my memories of that time, I thought of the strand of barbed wire separating my lab from The Field as a symbolic boundary between science and romance, as decisive as the line between C. P. Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’. But now I realise it was nothing of the kind. I was up to the same business in both places. Out in The Field I may have been ravished by the wild luxuriance of it all, but I was also learning about nature by sheer physical experience – by touch. I began to appreciate the properties of different kinds of wood – which burned well, which were best for the roofs of dens, which bent into weapons. I succeeded in making a modest pat of butter by spinning a jar of cream on the wheel of an upturned bicycle. And I unwittingly did the first research for a book I was to write twenty years later, by learning to eat hawthorn leaves. They were weird, but they made a change from fireblackened potatoes.
And just as I was a naturalist in the field, I was a Romantic in the lab. I was fond of the theoretical side of chemistry, and had begun to grasp the rudiments of the Periodic Table of elements (and memorise it: my dad would give me half a crown for a recital). But this wasn’t the kind of thing I was up to in the lab. My end of the glasshouse was a magician’s chamber, a theatre of metamorphosis, where I could wave a wand and revel in the sensuous transformations of matter. The orange crystals of potassium dichromate would produce lurid pigments when mixed with lead and zinc salts and various acids. Powdered sulphur turned into a gooey plastic when heated, and iron filings plus a dash of sulphuric acid released the uproarious rotteneggs stench of hydrogen sulphide. As for the reactions of mercury, well, I shouldn’t have been in possession of this toxic liquid metal at all. But Boots sold it, and I’d filched some from school. I was able to hide the heavy globules – as mobile as small ferrets – in my pocket. I even made some of my own apparatus, blowing small flasks and thistle funnels from glass tubing (Boots again) held over a Bunsen burner fuelled from the gas-socket in the kitchen.
My professionally made magic wands were more sophisticated, thanks to my dad, who was an insatiable collector of gadgets. They were often stuffed into his briefcase with bizarre bits of meat he picked up at Smithfield Market, and were a kind of technological offal themselves: eye-surgeons’ scalpels, war-surplus dynamos, vast spools of copper wire … anything that would, as he always put it, ‘come in useful one day’. It usually did. I once rigged up a bit of ramshackle apparatus for electrolysing water into its basic elements. I cut down an old glass aquarium to bowl size, and put in one electrode of copper, and another of zinc – the latter made from one of the flanges that held the greenhouse roof-glass in place. When they were covered with water, and wired up to my hand-cranked dynamo, they would fizz with fine streams of oxygen and hydrogen. I collected the gases in jars and burned them carefully together. They turned back into water – one of the reactions that underpins life itself.
For me the romance of these experiments wasn’t just their spectacular revelation of the wonders of matter. I had made them happen. I’d discovered the ambivalent power of touch, the basis of all technology.
In my late teenage years the pull of The Field, and of my greenhouse laboratory began to wane. But when I went up to Oxford I opted to study biochemistry, in the hope that I might bring those two halves of my life together — and promptly changed to philosophy when I saw the animal experiments I was expected to perform. Those were the years when the threat of nuclear war was at its height. Rachel Carson’s prophetic book about pesticides, Silent Spring, had just been published, and the public image of science was at a low. And I’m sad to say that for a while I shared the widespread view of scientists as clones of Dr Frankenstein.
When I became a writer myself I felt that I wanted to explore our perceptions of nature as much as the natural world itself, and especially the sense of sympathy, and what it says about the experiences and needs common to all living things. But all too often it led to events like my Norfolk barn owl encounter, where nature’s own agenda got buried under my own, with its pall of aesthetic and emotional metaphors.
I wish I’d become acquainted earlier with the nineteenth-century poet John Clare, who perfectly balanced an intense Romantic imagination with a sympathetic naturalist’s eye. Clare is often thought to be an enemy of science, partly because he once called it a ‘dark system’. But, as he wrote himself, ‘I puzzled over every thing in my hours of leisure that came my way. Mathematics Astronomy Botany and other things with a restless curiosity that was ever on the enquiry and never satisfied.’ What he did object to was the oppression of living things in the name of science, whether by collecting and killing, or by obscuring them with arcane classification systems. Clare was always excited by finding new species of plant and insect, but insisted that he had ‘no desire further to dry the plant or torture the butterfly by sticking it on a cork board with a pin’. Instead he’d prefer to watch the ‘butterfly settle till he can come up with it to examine the powdered colour on its wings’.
Clare is credited with the first county record of sixty-five birds and more than forty plants purely from the compelling accuracy of his poetic descriptions. Part of this record is the extraordinary catalogue he made of local orchids. He disdained unpronounceable Linnaean names, which he believed took living things out of their own and our cultural context. His twelve orchid species are described by their vernacular names, and by their addresses. The butterfly orchid, for example, ‘Grows in low part of Mr Clark’s close at Royce wood end & … was very plentiful before Enclosure on a Spot called Parkers Moor near Peasfield-hedge and on Deadmoor near Sneef Green … but these places are now all under plough.’
A canny Linnaean might object that these homely descriptions are more human-centred than any Latinate name. But what Clare did was find a way of seeing and talking about nature in which humans and other organisms inhabit, equitably, the same spaces, and I’ll be visiting him again.
