3
YOUR PATCH OR MINE?
In which our author makes the acquaintance of a fine tree, thrills to the return of ‘his’ swifts, meets dogs of varying degrees of excellence, and visits the patch of Gilbert White, the Patchmaster Extraordinary
It’s a perfectly normal tree in a perfectly normal park in a perfectly normal part of town. An oak, neither massive in the way of the grand old oaks of yore nor stunted by competition from bolder, more dominant trees. It does fine, part of a haphazard line adding interest to the broad descending sweep of hillside. Another oak a couple of metres away overshadows it slightly, and a smaller lime, a little further away, breaks up the continuity. Beyond it, south London, the ne plus ultra of urban sprawl, the twin towers of IKEA poking up rudely from the hazy carpet of suburbia.
Norwood Grove – once the garden of the house at the top of the hill, now a public park. It’s the nearest worthwhile expanse of green to our house and a frequent haunt when I feel the need for the restorative power of nature.
Pre-industry, it was part of the Great North Wood, the sprawling landscape of woodland that stretched across several miles of high ground all the way from Deptford to Selhurst. But suburbia nibbled away at it, as it tends to. It might have devoured it altogether had it not been for the power of community. A committee of local residents set up a fighting fund after the First World War to stave off developers. As a result, Norwood Grove’s thirty-two rolling acres of meadow and wood were preserved in perpetuity for the public’s use.
Attached to Norwood Grove is Streatham Common, with its fragment of ancient woodland, semi-formal gardens and long, grassy open slope leading down to the A23. Together they form what for want of a better word I call my ‘patch’.
Talk to any birder, even a quarter-serious one like me, and it won’t be long before the word ‘patch’ is mentioned.
‘What’s your patch like?’
‘Had a garden warbler on my patch the other day.’
‘Nothing about on my patch at this time of year.’
Your patch is your territory, where you go to watch birds on a regular basis. Mine is, by necessity, urban. It is in fact a patchwork of patches, each local green space attracting my attention in different ways, none quite getting the scrutiny it deserves: the local cemetery, full of nooks and crannies and overgrown bits, home to trusting urban foxes and winter flocks of thrushes; Tooting Common, just too far away for the casual stroll but offering more variety and interest thanks to its pond and more extensive woods; Dulwich Park, Brockwell Park, Crystal Palace Park, each with its own specific flavour and charms, each visited less often than I’d like.*
Some people’s patches are glamorous – areas of great natural beauty, homes to a wealth of breeding birds in a variety of habitats, yielding counts of fifty or sixty species per visit. I’m happy in the knowledge that I’m likely to encounter no more than twenty-five, if I’m lucky, and that the most exotic visitor to the area was a hoopoe in 1886.
It’s mine, and I love it.
I have my routine. To go against it feels somehow wrong. Up the hill, right at the lights, past the Lidl-that-will-never-be-built,† left and along the broad curving road until the gate.
There are distractions en route, nature finding a way even in the least hospitable places. A dunnock perched on a lamp post, raising its voice to be heard through the passing traffic; dandelions poking through between the gaps; street trees dotting the pavement, fighting the good fight all by themselves; lichens colonising the top of the old postbox on the corner – each worthy of at least a moment of my attention. And as I look at each of them, they help mute the noise of the man-made drear: concrete, tarmac, metal.
By the gate, there’s a welcome party – feral pigeons, pecking busily among the debris of a fox-ravaged bin bag on the pavement. I look closely, and notice a stock dove in with them, its black-button eye setting it apart from its uncouth cousins. They’re heckled by an aggrieved parakeet from the branches of a plane tree above.
Clockwise, always clockwise. A row of hornbeams on one side, copper beech on the other, and behind them a meticulously tended bowling green. These greens, like cricket pitches and tennis courts, are largely sterile for wildlife,* but they serve a generally benign recreational human purpose, and the rigorous geometry of the mowing pattern is aesthetically pleasing in its own way.
I say ‘a row of hornbeams’ casually, the lobbing in of a simple fact designed to give the impression that I know what I’m on about,† but it took me ten minutes of concerted consultation with a Tree ID app on my phone to sort out exactly what it was. Unlike birds, trees are happy just to stand there while you examine them for identifying features. But despite this I struggle with them, easily confused by variations in leaf shape and bark texture. And when the app asks me if the bark is green or brown or grey, I silently bemoan the lack of a ‘sludgy-browny-greeny-grey’ option.
As I work my way round the grove, I note with pleasure the presence of what one birding friend calls ‘the usual rubbish’. I know what he means – many birders show visible signs of excitement only at the prospect of a rarity – but beg to differ. A song thrush wrestling with a worm? Sign me up. Two wood pigeons having a bit of a fracas in the cypress twenty yards away? Bring it on. A grey squirrel bounding along a branch and springing with grace and elan across to the next tree? Yes, please, even though they’re ubiquitous and widely reviled. If the squirrel’s springing with g and e across to the next t, that means it won’t be terrorising the blue tits in our garden.
For all that city living has its merits, it would be unbearable without these little moments. They nourish me, and I welcome them. I welcome the hornbeams, the argumentative wood pigeons, the song thrush with its worm. And yes, I even welcome the parakeets – their excitable squawkings are simply their way of being. They are the stereotypical noisy Italian family just moved in next door in the formulaic 1980s rom-com of life.
All these and more are available to me as I skirt the grove, ducking deftly under the low-hanging branch of a wonky tree* that might otherwise deliver a numbing blow to the unwary. Down the slope to the yew tree where the goldcrest sometimes hangs out, check the starlings darting to and fro over the road, back up the gentle hill to the little copse the parakeets noisily call home, and then the gentle trudge across the grass.
It’s easy to take for granted the simple benefit to be gained from grass. It’s green. Greener on the other side, of course, but green nonetheless. And as numerous scientific studies have shown, green is good. The health benefits of time spent outdoors are well documented, and the Japanese habit of shinrin-yoku, or forest-bathing, threatens to topple hygge and lagom from their exalted positions in the competitive world of ‘relaxing things people in other countries take for granted that the British suddenly get excited about’.
Grass, in particular, has its attractions beyond the merely visual. There’s the smell of it when freshly mown, the feel of it underfoot on a warm spring day, the sound of it swishing in a light breeze. Whenever I see a sign saying ‘PLEASE DO NOT WALK ON THE GRASS’, I’m tempted to erect a twin sign next to it, bearing the question ‘THEN WHAT THE BLOODY HELL IS IT FOR, YOU DRIVELLING IMBECILES?’ To deprive humans of the simple pleasure of walking barefoot on grass, or lying on it and idly toying with a dandelion, or sitting cross-legged on it with a friend and talking about nothing in particular while eating ham and bread and maybe a good cheese and probably a really juicy pear now you mention it – well, it seems like an act of unthinking cruelty.
But if I’m aware, in a general way, of the health benefits and calming effect of greenery, my engagement with it is generally nonspecific. Greenery is good; look at the greenery; how lovely.
Time to look a bit closer. Time to say hello to the Perfectly Normal Tree.*
I choose the Perfectly Normal Tree over the others because of its main distinguishing feature: on its bark, taking care to fill in the letters over the rough, fissured surface, someone has painted the words ‘HUG ME’.
I’ve walked past this tree many times, often glancing towards it with an unspoken appreciation for its message of amity and peace. But, I realise, I’ve never looked at it. Not properly. As one whose way into nature was through birds – with their flapping and screeching and twittering and pecking and generally being eminently watchable – the idea of appreciating something so fundamentally static requires an adjustment, a change of pace. It’s easy enough to thrill to the speed of a peregrine stooping* on its prey at 200 mph, or the glorious spectacle of half a million starlings murmurating before settling down to roost. But trees just stand there, swaying occasionally.
Except, of course, that they don’t.
Because the Perfectly Normal Tree is a phenomenon.
It’s an oak, which as we all know represents Englishness in a way that nobody can really explain. The tree of navies past, the tree for everyone from monarch to commoner, the most English of trees. It’s our national emblem, so it must be quintessentially English. But it’s also significant in Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Germany and Latvia, among many others, so perhaps we should just get over ourselves.
This particular specimen won’t win any prizes. Neither brazenly magnificent nor pathetically scrawny, it’s an average tree. The presence of the competing lime a few yards away means it hasn’t quite been able to follow its instinctive path, which is for the branches to grow out sideways – so it doesn’t have that traditional rounded shape familiar from illustrations and photographs. It does have a small but discernible list, and the branches on the non-listing side are slightly scruffier than their counterparts in a way common enough in trees that have endured some hardship or are fighting for resources with competitors in an area that is in some way denuded or not in a prime location. If it weren’t for the message of peace daubed on its gnarly bark, I wouldn’t give it a second glance. But if I’ve learned anything in my few years of nature observations it’s not to overlook the apparently mundane. So I hang around the tree and get to know it a bit.
Despite the invitation, I don’t hug it. I’m keen on it, for sure, happy to love and appreciate it, but such a public display of affection seems, at that moment at least, a bit much. I do, however, feel it, laying my hand on the bark, probing the deep fissures in its rough, hard surface, then cast my eyes upwards towards the canopy, the branches intertwining as they reach for the sky. I contemplate its intricate geometry – as individual to each tree, no doubt, as fingerprints to humans – allowing myself to get lost in its patterns until everything is tree, branches and leaves. I’m not looking for or at anything in particular – just drinking it in, exploring the delicate lattice pattern the tree’s offshoots form against a backdrop of light blue sky.
It’s a slow game, at odds with the pace of modern life, inducing a palpable deceleration, a banishing of urgency. And as the tree becomes, however briefly, my world, something floats into my head – the memory of a mini-anecdote about Anton Bruckner, the nineteenth-century Austrian composer whose long and spiritual symphonies either send listeners into paroxysms of quasi-religious fervour or bore them to tears. As an old man he liked to go for long walks in the woods and count the leaves on the trees, a task as apparently fruitless and time-wasting as counting the notes in his symphonies. This story was told to me as evidence of his increasing madness. But now, standing under this oak and losing myself in its bosky embrace, it seems to me an entirely logical and sane thing to do. The people who don’t do this kind of thing, who resist these moments of connection and, however unconsciously, associate with nature only in the loosest possible way, if at all – they’re the mad ones.
The only drawback is that after ten minutes I have a stiff neck.
If I’m fascinated by the externals of a tree, my reaction to the workings of its innards is more akin to an explosion of awe. How many times have I walked past a copse or through a wood, or even looked out of the window into the garden without giving a second’s thought to the constant, frenetic activity taking place underneath the trees’ calm exterior?
We see a tree’s bark, its twisted branches, fluttering leaves, flappy catkins, the satisfying slotting of an acorn in its cup. Sometimes we see the top of their roots surging up through the soil, and occasionally, when circumstances conspire to leave them exposed, we’re granted a privileged glimpse of the knotted, subterranean complexity that reaches deep into the earth – further than we imagine. But for every bit of a tree we do see, there’s an invisible counterpart, doing miraculous things to keep it surviving in a tough world of depredations and hostility.
While the spread of an oak’s crown is a heart-warming and delightful thing, it’s mirrored – doubly so, in fact – by the roots, whose underground spread far outstrips the crown’s skyward reach.
And of course it’s not just about the roots. The complexity and extent of a tree’s relationship with its surroundings boggles the mind. Where the roots go, there too goes an astounding network of mycorrhizal* filaments, transferring water and nutrients from plant to plant, protecting them from disease by filtering out the bad stuff, fending off bacteria, and generally being a boon to the forest community. Not that the fungi don’t get their reward from the bargain, gleaning whatever nourishment they need from the trees as compensation for their contribution to the well-being of their environment. And then, when the time is right, they fruit, and we, on a damp, blowy autumn walk, might see them and say, ‘Oh look, what a gorgeous mushroom’, paying scant attention to the miraculous network of activity beneath our feet.
Speaking of miracles, think of the way a tree distributes water from roots to leaves, in defiance of gravity. We take it for granted, but the process remains more or less a mystery – whether it’s by capillary action (extremely narrow tubes drawing liquid upwards), transpiration (tree breathes out water vapour, dragging the water supply through the tree), or osmosis (magical levelling out of sugar concentrations from cell to cell), or a mixture of all three, it’s the kind of thing that if I think about it for too long I need a bit of a sit-down and a cup of tea with extra sugar.
I straighten out the crick in my neck. The screech of a jay rips through the air from the wood opposite. The jays have been out in force recently, the coming of autumn prompting a cascade of acorns. The oak has scattered them far and wide – up to ninety thousand of them in a season. Most are eaten; lots of others rot above ground. Still others are buried by squirrels and jays. Their ability to remember the location of these acorns and come back to them later is enough to impress someone like me, who has difficulty remembering where he put the car keys. But even squirrels and jays sometimes forget, and so an oak tree is born. If there were wild boars knocking about the place they would play their part as well, trampling them into the ground as they ran amok among the green spaces of south London.
I take a step back and look at the oak. In its lifetime it will host millions of animals from maybe a hundred or so species. It was here long before me; it will be here long after me.
There’s nothing like nature to make you feel inadequate.
I leave the tree behind and enter the wood, the continued screeching of the jay luring me in. It’s not a large wood, but if you stand in the right place it’s possible to believe you’re not in London at all.
It’s here I come in spring for the occasional pre-dawn immersion in birdsong; here I stop off at the end of each walk before re-emerging to a world of tarmac and bus stops and discarded Calippo wrappers on the pavement; here, with eyes closed and imagination working overtime, I can think myself in a larger place, the mix of oak and beech and ash* and plane and sycamore extending far beyond its current, fragmentary existence.
A man is walking towards me, a dog close at his heels. Young, stocky, heavily tattooed, roll-up in mouth, baseball cap backwards on head, white Apple earbuds.
And that’s just the dog.
My general approach to random greetings is mixed. Some days I’m happy to avoid eye contact, to mind my own business and let them mind theirs; occasionally I’m nauseatingly chipper, fixing my adversary in my gaze from twenty yards away and assaulting them with a cheery ‘morning!’ that positively demands an appropriate response. But most of the time I’m non-committal, happy to say hello if hello-saying is called for, but equally content not to invade the personal space of strangers.
With Tattoo Guy I don’t even get a chance to choose a tactic. He’s seen the binoculars loosely held in my left hand.
‘Birdwatching?’
I nod. He stops, ready to talk. His dog sniffs around my ankles. I am a dog lover, but six months earlier a dog of exactly this type – small, yappy, irresistibly attracted to middle-aged male flesh – bit through my trousers into my calf, necessitating a five-hour Sunday evening stay in A&E, and I’ve been wary ever since.* I maintain my sangfroid with what I consider admirable restraint, and brace myself for the inevitable opening gambit, the default words, the ones that should be printed in bold letters in the information leaflet when you buy a pair of binoculars: ‘WARNING: CARRYING THESE IN PUBLIC WILL INDUCE PASSING STRANGERS TO ASK IF YOU’VE “SEEN ANYTHING INTERESTING?”’
But life is full of pleasant surprises. He dives straight in.
‘Tell you what I like. Pigeons. Not the scrawny ones, but those plump ones with the white collar.’
‘Wood pigeons.’
‘That’s right. When you hear their wings. You know that? Great sound. Loads of them about, aren’t there?’
‘Th—’
‘And those parakeets, rowdy buggers, but aren’t they beautiful? That green.’
‘I—’
‘They’re nesting just over there.’ He points across to the other side of the wood. Right on cue, a parakeet jinks across our sightline in the distance, a bright green dart in the morning shade. A shrill squawk and it’s up into the canopy. There’s a short silence. ‘And the crows, I like them.’
‘Me too.’ A carrion crow chooses that moment to hop up onto the temporary fencing a few yards away. We look at it for a while.
‘I always look out for the birds when I’m taking him out.’ He gestures towards the dog, which is sitting patiently in a ‘not about to bite anyone in the leg’ kind of way. ‘It’s just really nice, isn’t it?’
I agree. It is really nice. And this everyday, inconsequential encounter cheers me more than I can possibly let on, not least because he’s barely let me get a word in edgeways. The people I see in this area, whether strolling through this bit of woodland, taking the dog for a walk round the common, or sitting on a bench by the more formal garden area, don’t yield their secrets willingly. I wonder whether they’re actively appreciating their surroundings, whether they’re there just because a greenish backdrop is more pleasant than a greyish one, or whether they just come there out of habit and because there’s a cafe nearby. It’s near impossible to tell just from looking at someone what their level of interest is. Unless, like me, they’re carrying binoculars. My binoculars are a signifier – I rarely see anyone else carrying a pair in London, and if I do, I’m 99 per cent certain they’re a birder – and on this occasion they’ve enabled an interaction that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. I toy with the idea of telling him how grateful I am for his contribution to my day. Because that ‘seen anything interesting?’ question is one I’ve always found impossible to answer.
‘Ah, well, now you’re asking, my friend. Now you are asking. I’ve seen the first smile on the face of a newborn child; the internal workings of a Wankel rotary engine; morning frost on a pristine lawn; the effect of top spin on a ping-pong ball; the haphazard geometry of a pile of books; sand behaving like a liquid when you pump air through it; Jack Nicholson’s face; the rise of the people and the collapse of nations; Tiger Woods’ miracle shot on the sixteenth at Augusta that time; a seven-year-old child solving a Rubik’s cube in ten seconds; Portland lighthouse rising from the fog as if suspended in mid-air; the mass mourning of Princess Diana; the tears of joy in the eyes of a woman when, after a life of deafness, she hears for the first time; Rembrandt’s self-portraits; golden syrup being poured into a bowl; the behaviour of people at bus stops; the languid majesty of David Gower; the miraculous effect of a word of kindness towards a stranger in distress; The Princess Bride; the Cruyff turn; a dog on a skateboard; a really good dry-stone wall; a lone butterfly striking out to sea against a deep blue autumn sky; an amplifier that goes up to eleven; the fractal geometry of Romanesco broccoli; the everyday miracle of oh wait hang on you just meant have I seen any interesting birds today, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, right. No, nothing, I’m afraid. Sorry.’
One day I might say it. But for now I just take my leave with a smile and we go our separate ways. In another universe, the encounter might have consisted of no more than an exchange of grudging London nods. But I’m glad it didn’t. This short, inconsequential meeting, a shared point of contact between two strangers, gives me cheer. And I realise that four years earlier, when I was shy about my enthusiasm and kept my binoculars hidden until the last possible moment, we would have passed each other without acknowledgement.
*
I’ve been twitchy all week, hoping they might somehow come back a couple of days early, but knowing, from previous years, that they’re not due yet. There’s a nervousness, too. What if they don’t make it? Numbers countrywide are down. Something to do with weather systems in southern Europe, maybe; something to do with a general decline in recent years; something to do with ecological collapse.
But ours will make it. They have to.
They do.
Some years, they announce themselves with a scream and a fly-by and an exuberance entirely out of keeping with the distance they’ve travelled. If I’d just flown in from Africa, I’d barely have the energy to dump my bags in the hall before flummocking on the sofa for a week. But then I have the luxury of a freezer full of food and, should the need arise, a takeaway menu. The struggle for survival is rather more claw-to-beak for birds.
This year their arrival is more discreet, and I see them only because I’m looking for them – and I mean really looking, with the kind of attention that nearly gets me run over by an incredulous, gesticulating cyclist as I cross the road at the bottom of the hill. And there they are, wriggling punctuation marks high over the house.
Why swifts? Why not swallows, house martins, sand martins, nightingales, redstarts, chiffchaffs, willow warblers, whitethroats, blackcaps and any of the other birds that make a similar, equally hazardous journey every year?
Well, they’re all great too, obviously.
But swifts have something about them. That sickle shape, their astonishing speed, the brevity of their stay in this country* – all contributing to my blind, unrequited love for them, my desire to stand outside the back door looking gormlessly upwards, drinking in their every appearance. Perhaps it’s their mastery of the air, the sheer audacity of their aerobatics, the impression they give, with their high-pitched squeals, that they’re having enormous fun.† They are, more even than kestrels and albatrosses and hummingbirds, the embodiment of flight. They fly the way I’d like to, if I had the ability – fast and free and screaming with the thrill of it all.‡ Swifts abhor the ground to the extent that if they land on it they need a helping hand to get up again, and when not sitting on eggs they spend the majority of their lives in the air – not like those lightweights, the swallows, with all their perching and whatnot.
I started noting the date of the swifts’ return a few years ago, and it proved the beginning of what for want of a better word I call a ‘nature diary’. It’s a haphazard, woefully inconsistent mishmash of notes and photos and question marks and incomplete lists that would horrify any true naturalist, but it is still, in its own way, a nature diary.
From it I know that on 3 October 2015 I was excited by a blackbird singing from the top of next door’s tree, that on 14 April 2018 I saw the first orange tip butterfly of the year in West Norwood cemetery, and that every year for the last six years the swifts have arrived on either 6 or 7 May. They’re nothing if not consistent.
From it I also know that I have a tendency to forget about my nature diary for about three months every July. ’Twas ever thus.
Sometimes my entries comprise nothing more than a list of birds seen – a dull, efficient way of keeping records, but sadly lacking in the ‘fond memories’ department; sometimes the shortest of notes evokes a particular image, and I can remember the occasion clearly: ‘blue tit on bathroom ledge’, or, even more memorably, ‘magpie in kitchen’; and when I read the words ‘buggy mummies – swans’, I remember the warm day in March 2017 when, while admiring two mute swans preparing their pitch for the season’s nest in Crystal Palace Park, I heard a young mother say to her friend, ‘Oh look, the swans are making a nest. I suppose they’ll be laying eggs soon . . . Do swans lay eggs? I should know this.’
These records play their part in the gradual accrual of familiarity with my patch. But if my efforts to get to know it have been earnest and sincere, and if I am beginning to recognise subtleties, changes and patterns, can tell you which birds are most likely to be found doing what and where and when, and if I have started to identify butterflies, trees, flowers and even the occasional bee, then these efforts can only be considered paltry when placed alongside the man whose observations of his patch led to him being known as ‘the father of ecology’.
Gilbert White liked a swift. In the second part of The Natural History of Selborne – the sequence of letters to Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington published near the end of his life in 1789 – there are four letters about the ‘hirundines’, the family then thought to include not just swallows and martins but swifts as well.* The letter about ‘the swift or black-martin’ is a fine example of White’s powers of detailed observation, or as he put it, ‘watching narrowly’.
Here he is on swifts:
It is a most alert bird, rising very early, and retiring to roost very late; and is on the wing in the height of summer at least sixteen hours. In the longest days it does not withdraw to rest till a quarter before nine in the evening, being the latest of all day birds. Just before they retire whole groups of them assemble high in the air, and squeak, and shoot about with wonderful rapidity.
I like that. I like the observation itself, made without optical aids of any kind, but with an understanding not just of what to look for, but of how to look for it; I like everything the two simple words ‘and squeak’ bring to the sentence; but most of all I like the pleasure redolent in ‘shoot about with wonderful rapidity’. These monographs were published in the journal of the Royal Society. They were scientific by inclination, but White’s relish of the subject at hand bubbles up from time to time, adding an extra dimension to his descriptions of life on his local patch. The Natural History of Selborne combines keen observation with meticulous but not exhausting description, the ability to see details others had missed, and the willingness to devote many years* to the apparently commonplace – and its presentation as a series of letters† gives it a personal touch where a drier record might have made for dull reading.
Very little escaped White’s attention, and his interests encompassed all manner of species.‡ He discusses the drinking habits of pigeons, the hibernation of hedgehogs, the tonality of owl hoots, the mysteries of migration and much more besides.
White wasn’t the only one recording the ways of nature. He corresponded with other naturalists, comparing notes, learning from them, exchanging ideas. But he mostly stayed at home. Not for him the grand tour, travelling the world recording the exotic and outlandish. Despite suffering from coach sickness he did travel around the country, but his real interest was the area around the village of his birth, Selborne in Hampshire, where he was the curate for forty years. There he observed and recorded, beginning with his Garden Kalendar in 1751, and gradually expanding it to include meticulous weather records and eventually a general nature journal.
The breadth of his records, the perception of his observations, and the style with which he recorded them, set him apart. But most of all, it’s a record of a single place, compiled over many years by someone who knew how to look, look once more, and look yet again.
It would be rude not to pay him a little homage.
The swifts are long gone when I visit Selborne. We’re deep in the heart of autumn, with all that entails: the colours, the leaf carpet, and very much the mud. While the allure of White’s house is strong, I’ve deliberately arrived just after dawn so I can spend as much time exploring the village and surrounding area as possible. Eco-tourist I might be, but I’m keen to put myself out just a bit.
My reward is instant. It’s a stunning morning, the kind of dawn that gives autumn a good name. Honestly, there are times when nature seems to be taking the piss.
‘Here you go – have something of unfathomable beauty. Here’s another. And another. Careful not to faint.’
And so it is that morning. The vista at the top of the Zigzag – the path that White and his brother cut into the steep hill behind the house in the 1750s – would be enough on its own. It’s one of those ‘looking across the rolling countryside’ ones that England does so well.* The balance of fields and woods and white cottages dotted about the place is just right, stretching away to the horizon without the interruption of pylons or power stations or out-of-town shopping centres, and enhanced by the kind of soft, misty, early-morning cloud that hasn’t yet decided whether it’s going to clear up or close in. It’s the kind of scene that would fetch at least a hundred grand at auction if it had been painted by a seventeenth-century Dutchman.†
It gets even better as I make my way along the top towards Selborne Common. The light frost on the grass is one thing; the sun slanting at a low angle through the gaps in the trees, highlighting the russets and yellows and golds and reds, is another; and the halo of light just beyond the bushes, beckoning me to receive a message from God to the accompaniment of a heavenly choir, is one of those One More Things designed to make me crack and admit my helplessness in the face of excessive natural beauty.
And as if that weren’t enough, a marsh tit – unknown in my area, so a sighting of some significance for this poor town boy on day release in the countryside – calls to get my attention, pops out in front of me, holds the pose for long enough that I can drink it in, then disappears into the undergrowth. Overcome by picturesqueness, I imagine fondly that this marsh tit is directly descended from the one observed by White, which ‘begins to make two quaint notes, like the whetting of a saw’. And maybe it is. It’s not lost on me that this description, a reliable touchstone in White’s day, would barely be recognisable to anyone nowadays. The nearest equivalent I can think of would be the sound made by the tiniest of laser guns in a cheap video game on your phone, which I’ll admit doesn’t quite have the same evocative ring.
What with the marsh tit and the frost and the sun and the everything, I near as dammit start a jaunty whistle. It’s that kind of morning. All it needs is a dog.
Oh look, here’s a dog.
I like dogs. I grew up with one – the sweetest, stupidest, loveliest dog a child could ever hope to grow up with* – and while I haven’t succumbed to the joys of dog ownership as an adult, I’m always happy to stop and spend a minute or two communing with one.* Truth be told, they’re often better company than their owners. Dog ownership has many benefits, not least of which is the opportunity – obligation, really – for daily exercise. And as long as they’re not rampaging through the undergrowth, disturbing nesting sites in the breeding season,† they’re a welcome addition to any walk.
This one’s a labrador – a good one, too. It’s one of those dogs who elicits an involuntary smile and a ‘hello there’; the kind of dog who might look at you with big brown eyes and make you, by some mysterious process, reach for the lead; the kind of dog you want to squat down beside and nuzzle; the kind of dog, in short, who might be seen as the purest embodiment of ‘good boy’. It responds to my welcoming head-ruffle with a pair of muddy paws on the front of my jumper.
Good boy.
I only have myself to blame. No dog can be expected to resist a squatting human with their arms held open in a welcoming embrace. I brought it on myself. In recognition of this, the owner, following a few yards behind, doesn’t bother apologising, instead inclining his head as if in assessment of my behaviour. The old adage about dogs resembling their owners doesn’t hold here. The dog is warm and friendly; its owner reserved and tweedy.
Nevertheless, still breathless from the combination of the obscene beauty of the morning and the briskness of my walk, I ride roughshod over his reserve. Perhaps I’m a bit over the top. Perhaps ‘absolutely stunning’ is hyperbole. Whatever the reason, he’s not biting. There’s a feeling of ‘steady on, old chap – wouldn’t want to get carried away’ about him, and now, before it’s even started, our conversation is over. All I get in reciprocation of my enthusiasm is a non-committal ‘hmm’ through pursed lips, and a ‘come on, boy’, which I presume isn’t aimed at me.
I have a sudden hankering for Tattoo Guy, Apple earbuds and baseball cap and all. We might discuss the bracken, fronds curling and turning to gold in the mid-autumn sun. Or perhaps the little flurry of redwings that choose that moment to tseep their way overhead. Or any one of a hundred things that have made the outing so worthwhile. But no. ‘Hmm’ and ‘come on, boy’ put paid to that.
And now, as if to punish me for my babbling enthusiasm, the weather turns.
The indecisive clouds have made up their minds. Thick mist it is, with a corresponding drop in temperature. And the early morning briskness I felt when buoyed by the slanty-sunny-misty-frosty idyll at the beginning of the walk dissipates fast, a process aided by a slight turn I give my ankle tripping over a tree root. The ground is boggy, my feet are wet, and I have a hurty ankle. The combination of deserted autumn woods, an empty path snaking round the corner ahead of me, and corvids circling above the misty treetops, grawing and chacking as if they’ve smelled blood, give me the feeling I’m only a wobbly handheld camera away from a starring role as ‘Middle-Aged Victim’ in a low-budget horror movie.
Seized by a strong sense of melancholy, and a sudden distaste for all things outside, I turn back, descend the Zigzag – fourteen zigs, thirteen zags – and walk along the road to the warm haven of Gilbert White’s house.
Someone has erected a plaque on the wall of the house opposite Gilbert White’s – a comical and sly rejoinder to the hagiography of those whose lives were spent in apparently relentless achievement: ‘SULLIVAN BLACK, 1720–1793, LIBERTINE, OPIUM-EATER, DRUNKARD, DUELLIST, GAMBLER AND WASTREL, LIVED AND DIED HERE’.
For a moment I think it’s dedicated to a real person. Then I make the connection between Gilbert and Sullivan and White and Black, realise that the dates are the same as the great ecologist’s, and give a little smile and a nod of acknowledgement to the person who thought it up and went to the trouble of installing it, and it serves as a reminder that many lives are lived in a way that won’t be remembered, and that there’s nothing wrong with that.
I visit the house. It does all the things it needs to, and more. I read about White’s life, his prodigious fruit and vegetable growing, with particular emphasis on cucumbers and melons; I read about the pests – cockroaches and house flies – that infested his kitchen; I read about his desire to emulate in a small way the grand gardens of places such as Blenheim and Stowe, with the building of a ha-ha and a wooden cut-out statue of Hercules.* I’m reminded of his appreciation of the earthworm – ‘though in appearance a small and despicable link in the chain of nature, yet, if lost, would make a lamentable chasm’ – and think of Charles Darwin, who, having read The Natural History of Selborne, wondered ‘why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist’. I amuse myself for a while with the interactive test on birdsong, and am relieved to get them all right.
And then I visit the rest of the house, the part devoted to Captain Lawrence Oates and his uncle Frank, and I read about the expedition to the South Pole on which Lawrence Oates and all his colleagues lost their lives, and I think about human bravery – inevitable when contemplating the Scott expedition – but also about the urge to explore, and how it manifests itself in different ways in different people.
And having done all these things, I realise that while this place is wonderful and fascinating and steeped in history, and has offered me an experience not available on my own patch, I will always be a tourist here. And I have a sudden urge for the familiar.
So I drive home and walk around my patch once more, with its view of urban sprawl and its feral pigeons and its Perfectly Normal Tree. In deference to Gilbert White I watch it all as narrowly as I can. There are bees buzzing around flowering ivy, and I lean in to look closely. There are at least three different species, and I make a note to look them all up on my bee chart when I get home, and if the person who walks past at that moment, talking on the phone about interest rates and commission, looks at me a bit oddly as I do all this, then that, frankly, is their business.
* The astute reader will now be able to work out roughly where I live. Drop in for a cup of tea the next time you’re in the area.
† Reader, it was built.
* Although, to judge by the ubiquity of pied wagtails at cricket grounds countrywide, they must have something going for them in the invertebrate department.
† I do know that they thrive in the clay soil that is the bane of the London gardener’s life.
* As yet unidentified – watch this space.
* Readers of Douglas Adams will know that I have appropriated and adapted his ‘Perfectly Normal Beast’ for my nefarious purposes. I apologise to his memory.
* Not to be confused with a swoop, a stoop is a controlled dive performed by birds of prey in pursuit of their quarry.
* A word that, no matter how I write it, always seems to be spelled wrong.
* The tree whose scientific name, Fraxinus excelsior, I can only hear roared in the voice of Brian Blessed.
* The dog’s owner said, ‘Oh he never does that’, an assertion I found it easy to contradict on the grounds that the dog had literally just done it.
* Late April to early August, and then they’re gone. Sand martins are here from March to October.
† I know it’s not scientific, but we cannot discount the possibility. Who knows? I certainly don’t.
‡ In my head, that is. The reality would be that I’d be slow and lumbering at best, and would have to stop regularly for a breather and to make ‘oof’ sounds and complain about the pain in my wing.
* White notes in the letter the suggestion from ‘a discerning naturalist’ that the disposition of the swift’s toes (all four facing forward) might mean that ‘this species might constitute a genus per se’. The discerning naturalist was Giovanni Antonio Scopoli, and he was right.
* He prefaced the above excerpt with ‘my assertion is the result of many years’ exact observation’, and similar phrases are dotted throughout the book, as if keen to establish his credentials in the face of disbelief.
† The book is, in part, a sort of fiction. While most of the letters are part of a real correspondence, the first nine to Pennant were written specially for the book by way of scene-setting, while others later on were also never sent.
‡ With the exception, strangely, of butterflies, which are completely absent. So I’m one up on him there, at least.
* Other countries might excel at them, too, but this one feels particularly English. Please don’t write in.
† Who would no doubt have enhanced it with a cow or two.
* He was a cross between a border collie and a Norwegian elkhound, and displayed vestigial instincts of both those fine breeds. He could most often be found chasing rabbits round the garden – chasing, but never catching.
* Except small yappy-type ones that bite me on the calf (see above). They, and their appallingly unapologetic owners, can fuck off.
† The dogs, not the owners, although you can never be too sure.
* He couldn’t afford a stone one.