Introduction

Tarka the Otter has the distinction of being both one of the best loved and one of the most neglected works of English literature of the twentieth century. Since it was first published in 1927, when it was praised by John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy and T. E. Lawrence, and won the Hawthornden Prize the following year, Tarka has never been out of print, but for many years now it has been widely available in Britain only in a children’s edition. The explanation seems to lie partly with its subject matter – the story of an animal – and partly with the shadow cast over Henry Williamson’s reputation and work by his membership of the British Union of Fascists and his publicly expressed admiration for Hitler in the 1930s. Writers who ally themselves with extremism can expect to be judged harshly, but Williamson’s attraction to fascism was always more a product of his own wounded psyche and idiosyncratic imagination than anything militaristic or totalitarian. He could be a difficult and stubborn character but he had none of the bigotry of a Chesterton or a Pound. One has only to read Tarka the Otter, his best and most personal book, to see the heartfelt nature of what ran deepest in him, and thirty years after his death it is surely time to acknowledge Tarka for the lyrical and visionary novel of strong moral and philosophical worth that it is.

This is not to say that Tarka cannot be a magical read for children. Ted Hughes, who was so deeply influenced by the book that he spent almost forty years living on the Taw, one of Tarka’s rivers, first read it as an eleven-year-old and ‘for the next year read little else’. I still have the Bodley Head hardback I was given at the same age, illustrated with C. F. Tunnicliffe’s wonderfully evocative woodcuttings. Reading it then I was drawn unquestioningly into Tarka’s adventures as I was into animal stories like Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books and Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. Tales of wild creatures have a special enchantment for our readier imaginations as children; that ‘valuable small boy feeling’, Williamson called it – and writing Tarka he drew consciously on the boyhood wonder he had felt roaming the woods and fields along the edge of south London where he grew up. But reading Tarka as an adult is to see it as quite a different kind of animal story from Kipling’s fantastical fables, in which the animals speak to each other like humans, or even Jack London’s more realistic yet still fabulous adventures, his supercanine protagonists the animal equivalents of frontier heroes like Natty Bumppo and Shane.

The realism of Tarka the Otter is quieter, more local, literally more down-to-earth. Williamson’s landscape is the north Devon countryside whose muddy tracks and river-banks and coastal paths he walked every day. His animal protagonist is an ‘every-otter’, without any human or heroic qualities. The trajectory of Tarka’s story is not towards some transformative ending but simply from birth to early death: ‘His Joyful Water-Life and Death in the Country of the Two Rivers,’ as Williamson subtitled the book. Yet out of this ordinary material Williamson wove a story that is both remarkably faithful to that material and transcends it; both an almost uncannily true portrait of a wild animal and a work that, drawing on his experiences a few years earlier on the Western Front, attempts to fathom something of the substance of existence and mortality that we all share, human and animal alike.

Henry Williamson was twenty-eight when he began making notes for the story of an otter in 1923. In the two years since he had left London for the remote north Devon village of Georgeham he had already published two volumes of country stories and a couple of youthful semi-autobiographical novels. He was a tall, thin, awkward man. The villagers called him ‘mazed’ – not right in the head – a reputation he cultivated by washing naked in the stream outside his tiny stone cottage and throwing rotten apples at the village children. Influenced by the mystical nature writing of Richard Jefferies and the romanticism of Wagner he aspired to a high seriousness in his work, but in person he could be impatient, mischievous and unreliable. On an early visit to Georgeham he invented a dead wife about whom he would speak with tears in his eyes. And it was soon after he settled in the village that he first wrote about keeping an otter cub – the otter he later famously credited with inspiring him to write Tarka – though there is no evidence he ever actually had a pet otter and considerable grounds for believing he borrowed the story from other accounts of rescuing and raising the animals.

Whatever his original inspiration, and he certainly drew on an earlier book, The Life Story of an Otter, by a Cornwall naturalist, J. C. Tregarthen, Williamson and otters was one of those serendipitous confluences of writer and material that seem to underlie so many great books, especially those that represent an otherwise unachieved peak in an author’s career. In otters Williamson had found a subject that both inspired him and allowed him to reach deep into himself. Ted Hughes, who sought out Williamson and became friends with him in his later life, spoke of a ‘mysterious’ kinship between writer and animal; a claim I might have found fanciful had I not myself witnessed something similar with George Adamson, of Born Free fame, and lions. It was not only that Williamson resembled an otter – with his small dark eyes, upturned nose, overbite and whiskers, ‘that fierce, fiercely alert, bristly look’, as Hughes put it – but that in the otter he had found an animal that shared his own quicksilver nature and playful spirit, his need for freedom, his love of water and wandering.

Chancing on good material is one thing; transforming it into literature is another, and while Williamson generally wrote his books quickly, Tarka was the product of four years and thousands of hours of field work. One of the reasons was that otters, especially where hunted, are wary and mostly nocturnal animals. Picking through Williamson’s writings it is possible to guess that he observed wild otters in peaceful circumstances perhaps no more than half a dozen times over those four years. Instead he took to following the local otter hunt and watching them as they were chased by the hounds (another reason for Williamson applying himself so diligently to researching his story was to win the approval of William Henry Rogers, the master of the hunt and a local squire, to whom he would eventually dedicate the book). He also read whatever he could; on a trip to London he visited the otter enclosure at the zoo and spent hours making notes and drawings; on his wanderings around Devon he interrogated marshmen, water bailiffs, gamekeepers and poachers for their memories and stories of otters; and what he could not learn from observing otters themselves he gleaned by observing their world from an otter’s point of view.

Tarka is a picaresque novel. The otter’s name, Williamson tells us, means Little Water Wanderer, and the story follows Tarka’s adventures as he roams back and forth across north Devon. With the book in one hand and a map in the other it is possible to trace not only Tarka’s route but also Williamson’s travels on the trail of his story. Much of this takes place within walking distance of Georgeham, in the estuaries and lower reaches of the Taw and the Torridge – Williamson’s ‘Two Rivers’ – and around the coast. Williamson liked to say that he walked every foot of Tarka’s journey, though on the longer stretches, where the perspective is from bridges or where the river flows close to the road, it is clear that he took to his motorcycle. But where the narrative slows and the descriptive passages thicken one can almost see Williamson leaving his motorcycle by the side of the road and clambering down the river bank to follow some otter trail through the nettles and reeds, his senses alert to every crackle and scent and shimmer.

Williamson wasn’t the greatest of naturalists. His son Richard – one of eight children by three women – calls his father’s ornithology and botany ‘sketchy’. But he had other attributes that more than made up for any gaps in his knowledge of natural history. For one he had not only a wonderful eye for nature but a storyteller’s eye. Tarka is seamed with descriptions that are not merely observations but miniature dramas in their own right: the death of a moth a moment after it has tickled Tarka’s nose; the ‘two mouse-like birds’ that nest in an old sycamore tree over an otter holt whose life story Williamson tells in three filigreed sentences. And from an early age he seems to have acquired a map of nature in his head that allowed him to fit each new piece of observation into its correct place and to see how it connected to everything else. As a boy I found some of the dense descriptions in the book boggy but reading them now these passages seem to me not unfathomable but veined with light like deep clear water. Tarka is not only the story of its otters but of a world they inhabit that is almost as much a part of them as their own bones and tissues. In one marvellous scene, Tarka, a trout he has caught still held in his jaws, slips away from the hunt through the undergrowth:

among nettles and marshwort, and over soft damp ground. Robins ticked at him, wrens tittered. Burrs and seeds tried to hook to his hair, finding no hold. Warble flies tried to alight on his back, and suck his blood; reeds brushed them off.

This sense of the connectedness of nature is a common idea today but Williamson was perhaps the first writer to weave it so vividly into a work of literature. It is no surprise that Rachel Carson, the matriarch of the environmental movement, should have cited Tarka as one of the most important influences on her thinking and writing.

Tarka is not, though, only a product of observation and an instinctive feeling for otters, but also of great craft. Writing it Williamson employed every tool available to him. At the same time as he gathered his material he also collected words of local dialect that give the descriptions an authenticity of sound and suggestiveness that standard English could not have conveyed, such as ‘channered’ for the worm-like marks in the marsh turf or ‘ream’ for the ripple made by the nose of a swimming otter. And where he found no words for what he wanted to say he made up his own, like ‘glidders’ for the smooth mudbanks of the estuarial creeks. The narrative is in the third person but much of it is seen through the eyes of the otters, the viewpoint a few inches above the ground or below the surface of the water. Even the images are the images of an otter’s mind: water has claws, paws, a tail; the bubbles an otter makes are ‘the size of hawthorn peggles;’ the buzz of a car is ‘like a blow fly in a spider’s web’; an owl is a ‘great blunt-headed moth’. Williamson’s claim that he wrote the book seventeen times is probably fanciful and the writing can be overdone in places but at its best it is forged and moulded with the precision, delicacy and seriousness of a poet.

The result is a book freighted with an extraordinary sense of truth telling. There is nothing sentimental or anthropomorphic about Williamson’s portrait of the otters. Rather by an alchemy of craft and imagination Williamson succeeded in writing himself inside a wild animal’s skin as no other writer had done before or has done since; in making us feel, or at least believe utterly that we are feeling, the physicality and unblinking curiosity and wildness of an otter. ‘The feeling of actuality,’ Ted Hughes called it. ‘The ice feeling of the moment of reality.’ Eighty years after it was written Williamson’s depiction of otters still stands up well to the scrutiny of natural history but the reality Hughes is talking about is something more powerful and poetic. One of the most remarkable scenes in the book is when Tarka, high up on Exmoor, alone after the harsh winter has taken his mate and cub, forms a curious friendship with a raven. Whether Williamson actually witnessed such a dance of play between otter and bird, or imagined it – whether this is real or fantasy – does not matter, for it has a feeling of truth that is deeper and stranger than reality:

The cockbird talked to Tarka whenever he saw him, and pestered him when he was sunning himself on the bank. He would hop to within a few feet of him with a frog in his beak, and drop it just to windward of Tarka’s nose. Once, when Tarka was playing with a frog and had turned his back on it for a moment, the raven picked it up and threw it to one side. Bird and otter played together, but they never touched one another.

Tarka the Otter is rooted in the topography of north Devon as deeply as Hardy’s novels are native to Wessex or Wordsworth’s poetry is bred out of the landscape of the Lake District. In a less obvious but equally important way Tarka is also, like the work of many of Williamson’s contemporaries – he was born within a year or two of Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden and Robert Graves – a product of the plains of Flanders. For all its enduring popularity as a children’s classic Tarka is a dark and bloody book. Almost all the otters in it die violent, brutal ends. Tarka’s sister is caught in a trap and despite dragging herself and the metal gin ‘out of the ditch and slowly away among the saplings’ is shot and killed. His first mate, Greymuzzle, is cornered in a shed and beaten to death with a ferreting bar. Tarka himself survives as long as he does only because Greymuzzle gnaws through the sinews of his toes to free him from the jaws of a gin. Most of the men we encounter are shown trying to kill otters or other animals, including the otter hunters in whose company Williamson carried out much of his research for his novel. Williamson had conflicting feelings towards the hunt. While writing Tarka he met and married the daughter of a huntsman and formed a respect verging on hero worship for the master of the hunt. He admired the hunters for their knowledge of otters and country lore and approved of the hunt as an expression of the rural tradition. But as he had learned at war the idea of something is not always the same as its reality and there is increasingly a sense in the book that in writing about the hunt, in working out his feelings towards it, he is also working through his troubled experiences of war.

Williamson had crossed the Channel as an excited eighteen-year-old, eager to ‘fight like a devil’, and the extended description of the gathering of the Joint Week hunt that introduces the final act of the book conjures up images of soldiers being waved and cheered off to war. The huntsmen, in their bright uniforms, carry hunt poles ‘stained and polished with linseed oil and shod with iron and notched from the top downwards with the number of past kills’. People laugh. The sun shines. We feel the excitement of the moment. But as the hunt proceeds a different reality begins to intrude. The noble hunter becomes the ‘sweating huntsman, grey pot-hat pushed back from his red brow’. When Tarka goes to ground with his son Tarquol the earth above them is pounded with an iron bar. ‘On and on went the pounding’ until the shell-shocked otters ‘could bear it no longer’ and flee their refuge. Tarka escapes this time but Tarquol does not:

Among the brilliant hawkbits – little sunflowers of the meadow – he was picked up and dropped again, trodden on and wrenched and broken, while the screaming cheers and whoops of sportsmen mingled with the growling rumble of hounds at worry. Tarquol fought them until he was blinded and his jaws were smashed.

Williamson served in the army throughout the war but he spent only a few months at the front, as an infantryman near Ypres in the winter of 1914–15 and a transport officer on the Ancre in 1917, and both times was invalided out without any serious physical injury. His daughter-in-law and biographer, Anne Williamson, writes that he was ‘constantly afraid’, and he brought back with him a confused mix of guilt and anger. The suffering and sacrifice he had witnessed was set against his experience of the Christmas truce of 1914, when he had met and spoken with German soldiers in no-man’s land, and come to understand that most of the justifications for war were fallacious, and in some ways the rest of his life can be seen as a search for a cause to make up for that disillusion.

It was a search that would lead him astray in his politics, but it also led him back, more productively, to nature, to the landscape of north Devon, its consoling beauty and natural morality. Williamson’s nature is red in tooth and claw. His otters drag rabbits ‘squealing’ from their burrows and kill them. But crucial to the moral fabric of the book is the distinction it makes between the unnatural violence of man, as embodied in the hunt, and the natural violence of nature, which is depicted most dramatically in the great winter chapters. Winter is a battleground. The cold north wind breathes ‘annihilation’. The deadly Greenland falcon ‘drops out of the storm’. The ice cracks with a ‘boom’. Deer come down from Exmoor and are shot in gardens or ‘sleep into death’. But for all its terribleness there is a grandeur and beauty to these scenes. As the winter deepens the language takes on an almost religious quality. Tarka and Greymuzzle, starving, their tongues blistered from licking ice, kill a swan in the estuary and drag it to shore ‘where they bit into its throat and closed their eyes as they drank its hot blood’. There is something ritualistic, even sexual about the image, and though the swan is stolen by a badger, and Greymuzzle and her cub both die, Tarka survives, not damaged like Williamson from the war, but strong and lithe, ready to take joyous part in the coming of spring.

Henry Williamson published some forty more books, among them The Patriot’s Progress, an admired morality tale of the war, and Salar the Salmon, another popular wildlife story, but he never again reached the sustained heights of Tarka the Otter. The last two decades of his writing life were devoted to producing a fifteen-volume novel cycle, A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, which draws heavily on his own social, intellectual and controversial political journey through the first half of the twentieth century. This work, which is considered by some to be Williamson’s masterpiece, seems to me dated now beyond its years, its writing mannered and its arguments from another age, though in some, like the sense of European fraternity he took from the Christmas truce of 1914, Williamson was ahead of his time. Tarka, though, has not dated at all. Its writing is still fresh and vivid, its story of an otter still bristling with life, and its message, of the elemental value of nature, not merely as something to be enjoyed, but something to be learned from, is worth finding the time, and the quiet, to listen to.