I grew up in a house full of natural-history field guides, everything from Locket and Millidge’s 1951 two-volume guide to British spiders, with its hairy, many-eyed line drawings, to illustrated books on trees, fungi, orchids, fishes and snails. These books were the unquestioned authorities of my childhood. I marvelled at the names entomologists had given to moths – the figure of eighty, the dingy mocha, the dentated pug – and tried to match their descriptions to the drab living specimens I found on the walls of the porch on cool summer mornings. The process of working out what things were often felt like trying to solve a recalcitrant crossword puzzle, particularly when it involved learning technical terms like scopulae and thalli. The more animals and plants I learned, the larger, more complex and yet more familiar the world around me became.
It was a long time before I understood that even the simplest of field guides are far from transparent windows on to nature. You need to learn how to read them against the messiness of reality. Out in the field, birds and insects are so often seen briefly, at a distance, in low light or half-obscured by foliage; they do not resemble the tabular arrangements of paintings in guides, where similar species are brought together on a plain background on the same page, all facing one way and bathed in bright, shadowless light so they may be easily compared. To use field guides successfully, you must learn to ask the right questions of the living organism in front of you: assess its size and habitat, disassemble it into relevant details (tail length, leg length, particular patterns of wing cases or scales or plumage), check each against images of similar species, read the accompanying text, squint at tiny maps showing the animal’s usual geographical range, then look back to the image again, refining your identification until you have fixed it to your satisfaction.
The process of identifying animals in this way has a fascinating history, for field guides have closely tracked changes in the ways we interact with nature. Until the early years of the twentieth century, bird guides, for example, mostly came in two kinds. Some were moralised, anthropomorphic life histories, like Florence Merriam’s 1889 Birds Through an Opera-Glass, which described the bluebird as having a ‘model temper’ while the catbird possessed a ‘lazy self-indulgence’. ‘If he were a man,’ she wrote of the latter, ‘you feel confident that he would sit in shirt sleeves at home and go on the street without a collar.’ The other kind of guide was the technical volume for ornithological collectors. In those days birds were often identified only after being shot, so such guides focused on fine details of plumage and soft parts. ‘Web between bases of inner and middle toes,’ runs the description of the semipalmated plover in Chapman’s 1912 edition of his Color Key to North American Birds. But with the rise of recreational birdwatching following the First World War, when the morality of killing birds was increasingly questioned and the advent of inexpensive binoculars brought birds into visual range, such details were of limited use. A new way to identify birds was needed.
The first of the modern field guides was Roger Tory Peterson’s 1934 Field Guide to the Birds. It was inspired partly by a chapter in the popular 1903 children’s book Two Little Savages, written by Ernest Thompson Seton, first chief scout of the Boy Scouts of America. In it, a nature-minded boy despairs of learning the birds from books that require you to hold them dead in your hands. He decides instead to make ‘far-sketches’ of the ducks he sees in the distance and arrange them into a ‘duck chart’ that shows the characteristic ‘blots and streaks that are their labels . . . like the uniforms of soldiers’. Peterson’s paintings, like Seton’s charts, tabulated and simplified birds, and he went further, adding small black lines on the page that pointed to distinctive characteristics that were most easily visible: the black band on the end of a crested caracara’s tail, the ‘ink-dipped’ wings of the flying kittiwake.
When he was a young man in the 1920s, Peterson was a member of the Bronx County Bird Club, a group of competitive, iconoclastic young naturalists. In the days before portable guides, field identification aids could take unusual forms: one club founder carried around an envelope containing coloured plates cut from a copy of E. H. Eaton’s lavish but unwieldy ornithological guide Birds of New York that he had found in a trash can. The group was mentored by Ludlow Griscom, a stern, exacting teacher who became renowned for inventing the technique of identifying a bird instantly in the field, even when flying. ‘All the thousands of fragments we know about birds – locality, season, habitat, voice, actions, field marks and likelihood of occurrence – flash across the mirrors of the mind and fall into place – and we have the name of the bird,’ Peterson later explained of Griscom’s method. This split-second, gestalt ability to recognise a species built from combining book knowledge with long field experience became the mark of ornithological expertise, and was at the heart of a growing culture of competitive bird-spotting that lives on today. For there’s an immense intellectual pleasure involved in making identifications, and each time you learn to recognise a new species of animal or plant, the natural world becomes a more complicated and remarkable place, pulling intricate variety out of a background blur of nameless grey and green.
Today, electronic field guides are becoming increasingly popular, and photo-recognition apps like Leafsnap and Merlin Bird ID let you identify species without the skills required to use field guides. They can do what print guides cannot: play animal sounds and songs, for example. But they also make it harder to learn those things we unconsciously absorb from field guides: family resemblances among species, or their places in the taxonomic order. When I was growing up, the materiality of these guides, their weight and beauty, was part of their attraction. I spent hours staring at their coloured plates of butterflies and birds, distinguishing each from each and fixing the painted images in my mind. The first time I saw a silver-spotted skipper butterfly basking on bare chalk on high downland pasture, I instantly knew the name of this dusty-golden dart with pale, ragged patches on its wings. Field guides made possible the joy of encountering a thing I already knew but had never seen before.
Back in my hotel room, I pull two Australian field guides from the bottom of my suitcase, eager to find out what it was that I had seen. Flicking through the first, I find a page of honeyeaters: nine birds arranged on a pale green background. That striking pattern of white and yellow and black is found in two species, but those round silver eyes are distinctive. I check against the distribution maps and the short description on the facing page. What I saw was a New Holland honeyeater. And turning to the plant guide, which describes only a few hundred of the thirty thousand different plant species found in Australia, I decide, tentatively, that the shrub it sat on was probably a waratah, and the banksias I saw by the path were hairpin banksias, with their ‘protruding, wiry, hooked styles’. These species are well known here, but for me they are small triumphs. Now I know three things. A few hours ago, I looked over a valley at sunset and knew nothing at all.
Tekels Park
I shouldn’t do the thing I do, because motorway driving requires you to keep your eyes on the road. I shouldn’t do it also because pulling at your heart on purpose is a compulsion as particular and disconcerting as pressing on a healing bruise. But I do it anyway, and it’s safer to do it these days, because this stretch is being transformed into a smart motorway so the long slope of the M3 as it falls towards Camberley is packed with speed cameras and 50 mph signs, and when I’m driving there on my way somewhere else I can slide my car into the outside lane to bring me closer and slower to the section of fence I’m searching for, running west and high under skies white as old ice.
Perhaps a hundred thousand vehicles pass this place each day. Back in the mid 1970s I could lie awake in the small hours and hear a single motorbike speeding west or east: a long, yawning burr that dopplered into memory and replayed itself in dreams. But like snow, traffic noise thickens with time. By the time I was ten I could stand by Europe’s second largest waterfall, listen to it roar, and think, simply, it sounds like the motorway when it’s ra
ining.
I shouldn’t look. I always look. My eyes catch on the place where the zoetrope flicker of pines behind the fence gives way to a patch of sky with the black peak of a redwood tree against it and the cradled mathematical branches of a monkey puzzle, and my head blooms with an apprehension of lost space, because I know exactly all the land around those trees, or at least what it was like thirty years ago. And then the place has passed, and I drive on, letting out the breath I’d been holding for the last thousand feet or so, as if by not breathing I could still everything – movement, time, all of the dust and feet that rise and fall in a life.
Here’s an early memory. A ridiculous one, but true. I learned to speed-read by trying to decipher military warning signs that bordered the roadside on my way to primary school. keep out was simple, but danger – unexploded ordnance took me months. I needed to read the words all at once, because my mother’s car was moving and the signs were very close. Each weekday morning I’d stare out of the window as the army land approached and wait for the words to appear so I’d have another chance at them. And the feeling I had then, of wanting to apprehend something important that was passing by me very fast: that’s the feeling I have now when I look for the place behind the motorway fence where I grew up.
I was five in my first summer in the Park. It was 1976. Cape daisies bloomed and died in the flowerbeds, and pine cones in the trees behind the house crackled and split through endless indigo afternoons. Standpipes, orange squash, dry lawns, and a conversation in which the matter of drought was explained to me. That’s when I realised for the first time that not every year was the same, or perhaps that there were such things as years at all. My parents had bought this little white house in Camberley, Surrey, on a 50-acre walled estate owned by the Theosophical Society. They knew nothing about Theosophy but they liked the house, and they liked the estate too. There’d been a castle here once, or Squire Tekel’s early nineteenth-century approximation of one, all faux-gothic battlements and arrow slits, peacocks and carriages. After it burned down the Theosophists bought the grounds in 1929 for £2,600 and set about turning it into a place for them to live and work. Residing here was a privilege, the residents were told. A privilege for service. Members built their own houses, bought tents for a campsite and a second-hand Nissen hut from the Army to put there too. They grew food in the walled kitchen garden; opened a vegetarian guesthouse. In the 1960s, after leaseholders were granted the right to purchase the freeholds of their properties, outsiders like us slowly began to populate the place.
Theosophy had been banned in Nazi Germany, so many of our neighbours were refugees from the war, and others were the black sheep of good families: elderly women, mostly, who had refused the roles society had reserved for them: the quiet Lolly Willowes of Surrey Heath. One wore ancient Egyptian jewellery she’d been given by Howard Carter; another kept a great auk egg in a drawer. Spies, scientists, concert pianists, members of the Esoteric Society, the Round Table, the Liberal Catholic Church, the Co-Masonic Order. One former resident sent his beard clippings back from Nepal to be burned on the estate bonfire. On discovering that I had gone to Cambridge, another, years later, inquired of me where I had stabled my horse – for he’d had dreadful trouble finding livery for his hunter while a student there in the 1930s. Everyone had lives and pasts of such luminous eccentricity that my notion of what was, and wasn’t, normal took a battering from which it’s never recovered. I am thankful for that, and for the women in particular, for giving me models for living a life.
But most of all I’m thankful for the other freedoms I had there. After school I’d make a sandwich, grab my Zeiss Jena 8x30 Jenoptem binoculars and strike out for my favourite places. There were ivy-covered walls and specimen trees, redwoods planted to commemorate the death of Lord Wellington – they called them Wellingtonias back then, of course they did – and creosoted summerhouses with fly-specked windows. ‘Arthur Conan Doyle liked to sit here,’ I was told, of the smallest summerhouse beneath the sparse shade of a balsam poplar, the one with original prints of the Cottingley Fairies hanging on its cream-washed walls. There was a round, shallow pond on the Italianate terraces that held an intermittently-broken fountain, smooth newts and great diving beetles, and from which vespertilionid bats dipped to drink at night; a 9-acre meadow with decaying stables on one side, acres and acres of Scots pine, and damp paths obscured by bracken, rhododendrons, swamp laurels with piped-icing flowerbuds, and there were roads that went nowhere, for when the motorway was built on land compulsorily purchased from the Theosophists in the 1950s, it cut the estate in two. I loved those roads. Bare feet on the rotting tarmac down by the straight avenue of sessile oaks that ended in drifts of leaves and a new desire path that curved right to trace the perimeter of the motorway fence. One dead-end lane at the back of the Park had 10-foot sandy banks I’d scramble up towards the vast grey beech carved with hearts and dates and initials, and I was awed by the notion that anyone had found this tree, because I’d never seen anyone near it, ever, and one afternoon I dug up a rotted leather drawstring bag from the humus beneath it that spilled threepenny bits into my hands. There had been glow-worms here, and snipe, and ponds, before the motorway came, I was told. Everything on the other side was already houses.
I was allowed to roam unchallenged because everyone here knew me – though they’d have quiet words with my parents after they’d yet again spotted me knee-deep in the middle of the pond looking for newts, or walking past the guesthouse with a big grass snake, two feet of supple khaki and gold twined about my arms. Reg the gardener took me for rides on his tractor-trailer, and we’d putter down the road singing music-hall songs he’d taught me:
It’s the same the whole world over
It’s the poor what gets the blame
It’s the rich what gets the pleasure
Ain’t it all a bloomin’ shame?
And while Reg rolled a cigarette I’d race off to explore the bracken and scrub in the back woods, where rhododendrons had grown to near-trees with branches shaped by ancient prunings. They were superb to climb when I was small: frames of right-angled kinks and acute wooden curves I could hoist myself into and up, and sit inside a canopy of dark leaves that clicked and pattered with tiny rhododendron leaf hoppers that on closer inspection resembled the brightest of bestiary dragons. In the back woods too was the wood ants’ nest, that glittering, shifting particulate mound which moved from year to year and reeked of formic acid. You could turn blue flowers pink if you tossed them on the top before the ants carried them away, and for a while I’d prepare skeletons of the dead birds I found by folding them carefully in little cages of wire mesh and lodging them on top of the nest. When I pulled them free weeks later they’d been reduced to clean white bone that never quite stopped smelling of ants.
Almost by accident I’d been granted this childhood of freedom and privilege, partly through a quirk of location, partly through my parents’ trust in the safety of this place, and I lived in the familiar setting of so many of my children’s books, from The Secret Garden to Mistress Masham’s Repose, though I wasn’t half as posh as their protagonists. I was a state-school kid running free in crumbling formal parkland that might have been written on paper as metaphor for the contracting Empire, or a wilder life, or social transgression, or any number of dreams of escape forged in the imagination of writers years before I was born.
I didn’t know how unusual my freedom was, but I knew what it had given me. It had turned me into a naturalist. And for a new naturalist like me, the nine-acre meadow was the best place of all. So much of what was there must have arrived in hay brought for long-dead horses, as seeds from lowland meadows: scabious, knapweed, trefoil, harebell, lady’s bedstraw, quaking grass, vetches, diverse other grasses and herbage. And butterflies, too, marooned in this small patch of the nineteenth century: common blues, small skippers, grizzled skippers, marbled whites, small coppers, and grasshoppers that sang all summer and pinged away from my feet. The other side of the meadow
was different, and more what you’d expect on acidic soil: a low sea of sheep’s sorrel, stars of heath bedstraw, white moths, small heaths, anthills and wavy hair grass brushed with fog by the sun. I knew that meadow intimately. It was richer, more interesting, had more stories to tell than any other environment in my life. I’d press my face in the grass to watch insects the size of the dot over an ‘i’ moving in the earthy tangle where the difference between stems and roots grew obscure. Or turn over and prospect for birds in the thick cumulus rubble of the sky.
So many of our stories about nature are about testing ourselves against it, setting ourselves against it, defining our humanity against it. But this was nothing like that at all. It was a child’s way of looking at nature: one seeking intimacy and companionship. When I learned the names of these creatures from field guides it was because I needed to know them the same way I had to know the names of my classmates at school. Their diverse lives expanded what I considered as home way beyond the walls of my house. They made the natural world seem a place of complex and beautiful safety. They felt like family.
When you are small, the things you see around you promise you they’ll continue as they are forever, and you measure life in days and weeks, not years. So when the mowers came one day in early August to cut the meadow as they had done every year since the meadow was made, and I saw what was happening, I burned with terrified outrage. There was no time to think about what I was doing. I ran. I stumbled. I sat in front of the mower to make it stop, then mutely, passively, held my ground in front of the bewildered driver, who came down to quite reasonably ask me what the hell I was doing, and I ran home crying. I didn’t understand how hay meadows work. All I saw was destruction. How could I know that the mower’s job was to hold history in suspension, keeping the meadow exactly where it was against the encroachment of heather and birch and time?
Vesper Flights Page 3
