The Jay, The Beech and the Limpetshell (eBook)

CHAPTER 1

Chaffinch nest

Hirst Wood, September 2020

PC McGarry arrives at Colley’s Mill to ask whether Windy has seen two boys fishing without a licence. ‘If I had,’ replies Windy, a little belligerently, ‘do you think I’d tell you? Weren’t you a boy once?’

Windy Miller, as well as absolutely not being a grass, is the archetype of the English countryman, wedded to traditional ways (and often contrasted favourably with local agribusiness magnate Jonathan Bell). Windy ‘loves everything about the country’ – we see him fishing, photographing a thrush’s nest and deftly gathering up a bee swarm (and drinking homemade scrumpy until he passes out, but that’s another story). Camberwick Green was made and originally ran in the 1960s but it was still being repeated when I was little; despite my earnest efforts to not be a Nostalgia Dad (‘put down your Peppa Pig book, pet, I’ve downloaded a BBC Acorn simulator’), my kids watch it on DVD. They may, as a result, absorb the same half-formed idea that I did: something about the lawlessness of nature, something to do with rules and society and the countryside and wildness.

I was a rule-following kid (I’m a rule-following grown- up). The countryside I came to know when I was growing up wasn’t obviously lawless; rather, it was a place of uncertain rules, muddy boundaries. Can I walk in this field? Whose path is this? I lived in fear of being yelled at by a farmer (‘salt pellets,’ other kids whispered warningly, ‘they shoot at you with salt pellets’). I knew my Country Code, of course I did: I guarded against the risk of fire, I took my litter home, I enjoyed the countryside and respected its life and work; but I could never shake the sense that I might, in some unknown but important way, be trespassing. I have always quailed before a Private Property sign.

Toddlers, of course, are naturally lawless. ‘Want it.’ ‘But it isn’t yours.’ ‘Yes, but want it.’ And there they go, toddling off with a fistful of next door’s daffodils or the cat’s biscuits or whatever it might be. Toddlers are barbarians and enemies of civilisation. This goes without saying.

Take only photographs, people say. No, say the kids (say all the kids). We want sticks, sticks that look like swords, sticks that we can ride like horses, sticks for waving and running and going raaa. We want dandelion clocks, we want wisps of sheep’s wool, we want poo (‘NO Dan’ ‘But want it!’ ‘NO Dan it’s DIRTY’), we want stones, we want shards of bark, we want leaves, every kind of leaf, we want every kind of berry, every kind of pinecone. Our basic manifesto, the kids say, in so many words, is that we want to find things, and we want to keep the things we find.

We might, on our way through the woods, find a flower, a wood anemone or a cowslip. Want it! Hang on, I might say. Let’s see. We are on another person’s land and are bound by the provisions of the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act, which states, Danny, Genevieve, that we may not uproot – that is, dig up or otherwise remove from the land – this plant without permission.

‘But want it!’ Danny might say.

Genevieve might suggest that we take a little bit of it, a leaf or a flower or –

At which point I might clear my throat and produce a checklist: are we on land designated a nature reserve? Are we on land owned by the National Trust or Ministry of Defence? Are we on land designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest? Is this plant [licks finger, turns page] a red-tipped cudweed, is it a marsh earwort, is it a meadow clary, is it a small alison, is it a Norfolk flapwort, is it a stinking goosefoot (‘You’re a stinking goosefoot,’ Genevieve might say), is it a cheddar pink, a tufted saxifrage, an oblong woodsia, a Martin’s ramping-fumitory? Is it otherwise a Schedule 8 protected species? No? Then, very well, children: you may pick the flower.

Danny has lost interest and has wandered off into some nettles. Genevieve triumphantly claims the anemone, or whatever it is (I’m not very good on flowers). We’ll put it in a jam-jar of tap water on the kitchen windowsill and forget all about it.

Or we might, low down in a thick bush, or in a hole in a beech tree, find a nest and a clutch of eggs. What then?

No ifs, no buts. We must, of course, leave them well alone. There was a sort of sanctity to birds’ nests in my mind, as a kid – nests, eggs, baby birds, these were remote and forbidden things, a conception that didn’t spring from any internal devotion (I wanted to seize them!), but from relentlessly consistent messaging across kid culture: kids’ TV, magazines, bird books, the organs of the Young Ornithologists’ Club. There were some things about the countryside that I just came to know, as if by instinct: you don’t swim in the canal, because the weeds will drag you down; if you see a Colorado beetle, you must inform the government; and you don’t go anywhere near birds’ nests or baby birds, because no good will come of it. I still feel the awful force of these commandments, down in my bones (if I ever do see a Colorado beetle I will certainly inform the government).

So, we leave nests be. So much about this makes sense, and so much about it makes me terribly sad.

We know, living through this post-war age of ecological nosedive, that we will never see the countryside that our great-grandparents saw. We shouldn’t expect to, of course: the one constant in nature is change, and as the human world is reshaped and rebuilt over and again we know that the more-than-human world will, in its turn, be remade too. This is not so much about change as it is about loss. We have lost so much.

Let’s take a walk along the river, across the canal, to the woods. It’s our walk, one we’ve walked again and again, just the two of us, me and Catherine, and then me and Catherine and Genevieve, and then the three of us and Daniel, too – our walk, to our woods. It’s about a mile. Call the start 1921, when my granny was born, and the end, the gate at the foot of the woods, 2023. Before you’ve walked a hundred yards the Kentish plover has been lost to England, the black-veined white butterfly, the Mazarine blue: all gone. For economy, I’m omitting the species that have no common name, only Latin (that’s most of them, mosses, fungi, liverworts, ferns). The pig’s ear fungus and steppe puffball are extinct here by the time you’ve passed the flower meadow and are in sight of the steps to the bridge, that’s 1,500 yards or so. The marsh dagger moth, the union rustic, the red-headed chestnut are on the way out as you cross the footbridge over the river, and as you go up the little path under the trees that smells of wild garlic – you’re about halfway there – mosses are vanishing from the British landscape, lesser-curled hook moss, flat-leaved bog moss, sickle-leaved fork moss, helmet-moss, many more. The Norfolk damselfly and the dainty damselfly have gone by the time you get to the road. As you go up past the houses and the derelict plant nursery, this is, what, the 1970s, 1980s, the wryneck goes and then the red-backed shrike, the chequered skipper butterfly, carrion moss, matted bryum. The black-backed meadow ant and the great yellow bumblebee vanish from the United Kingdom just about where you cross the lock on the Leeds–Liverpool. Then it’s a short stroll across the car park and into the shadow of the trees. Here’s the gate, and here’s the wood, and to carry on the metaphor, it’s dark in there – there are a lot more losses ahead. All of our remaining reptiles, whales and dolphins, 57 per cent of our amphibians, 43 per cent of our freshwater fish, 37 per cent of our land mammals and seals, 35 per cent of our bumblebees and 33 per cent of our butterflies are depleted or at risk. And the thing to remember is, these were only the species losses, the UK extinctions – we still need to talk about decline, so you have to imagine, as you walk, a falling silent of farmland birds, turtle doves, skylarks, of commoner birds like starlings and tree sparrows, of flying insects like bees and beetles; and you have to imagine a dying away of hedgerows, grasses and wildflowers (between the mid-1930s and mid-1980s, about 97 per cent of the UK’s wildflower meadows were lost).

We’ve lost so much abundance. This is what I find so sad: that there used to be so much – so much that we took it for granted, of course we did, how could we not, take the egg, uproot the wildflower, what’s the worst that could happen? – and now, in comparison, there’s so little, and we have to walk so carefully, and feel so worried.

Don’t touch. Step away. It’s the right thing and the wise thing, I know that. I wish we could take these things for granted, that the larks will nest here again next spring, that the bluebells or harebells or ragged robin will flower again, but...