by Simon Barnes
This one can only be for Eddie – wild companion
Where would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
CONTENTS
Epigraph
Map of the Marsh
1. In a Vulnerable Place
2. A Place of Small Importance
3. The Marvellous Nature of Ordinary Things
4. Running Away, Joining Up
5. The Bitterness Test
6. Transformations
7. Being Magnificent . . . Nudge-nudge, Wink-wink
8. Everyone Suddenly Burst out Singing
9. Not Dying
10. Bouncebackability
11. The Ring of Power
12. The Power-ballad of the Earth
13. I am not a Number
14. Runnin’ Wild
15. Life is not Tidy
16. The Year Holds its Breath
17. The Mad Conductor
18. Here Hare Here
Epilogue
The Bird List 2012–18
Plant List
1
IN A VULNERABLE PLACE
We were high as a couple of kites – or maybe marsh harriers – so Eddie and I went out to listen to the marsh. There were only us two at home that evening, so it was a bit of a lads’ night out. We were high because we’d had a visit from our soon-to-be-ex-neighbour Barry. ‘ ’Allo mate!’
He made a great fuss of Eddie, as he always does. Good egg, Barry. Sorry we’re losing him but . . .
‘Just wanted to let you know that it’s gone through, mate. All yours now.’
We’d completed, then. The sale had gone through. But not his house. His marsh. Two or three acres of it. A bit less than two years of negotiation. Relief and joy fought for the mastery. Handshake: Barry is an ex-copper, and with a Barry handshake you always get the idea that something has been settled. Sorted, as he would say himself.
‘Thanks, Barry.’
‘Cheers, mate.’
The day was already dark, the year was already past the autumn equinox, though only just. I should have been organising Eddie’s bedtime, but hell, it’s not every day you buy a marsh. So we took a small walk in the dark.
I brought my new toy with us. It’s a bat detector: it translates the ultrasonic squeaks of bats into sounds that we humans can hear. When you get good at it you can tell one species from another by the clicks and bonks and splats that come through the hissing speaker. I was no good at all: just smart enough to tell a bat from a cricket. Naming is always good, but it’s never everything.
Eddie, my younger son, was 15 then. He loved and loves nature with a sense of driving, inspiring joy. He also loves nature as a thing we share. What does a buzzard eat? Where do ducks sleep? What do bats do in the day? I wonder how many times I read him Bat Loves the Night by our friend Nicola Davies. A brilliant book: ‘Bat shouts her torch of sound . . .’
‘Do you remember how a bat finds his way in the dark?’
‘Echolocation.’
A huge word. Articulated with some clarity, too. And to celebrate we picked up a bat: his torch of sound spattering and puttering through the speaker like a bongo drum. Here was a kind of magic: you can’t see it, you can’t hear it, you don’t know it’s there, so it doesn’t really exist, but turn this little machine on and you don’t just find a bat, you seem almost to create a bat. I experienced the wonder of it and I watched the wonder of it in Eddie’s face: together we listened to the soundscape of the inaudible world.
We stayed out a little longer, for the night was cool and still. A tawny owl called out rather suddenly, as if he had been working himself up to it for some time. It was a terrible hoot, a truly pathetic attempt at being an owl. This was a young bird setting out to seek his fortune: trying a hoot or two and hoping to discover a hoot-free zone where he would be free to hunt without opposition. You’ll have to work on that hoot, mate, if you want to convince the tough old owls that live round here.
Still we lingered. And then a sudden roaring bark, a sound full of anguish and pain, like the hound of the Baskervilles calling for its prey. ‘A long, low moan, indescribably sad, swept over the moor. It filled the whole air, and yet it was impossible to say whence it came. From a dull murmur it swelled into a deep roar, and then sank back into a melancholy, throbbing murmur once again . . . My blood ran cold.’
It was a truly fearsome sound: one that you’d have thought has been echoing round the marshes of East Anglia for countless centuries, a sound that contained every element of wildness that you’d associate with a wild marsh and the darkness: the fanged spirit that haunts the wet nights of this watery and sinister place.
Eddie knew that one too: ‘Chinese water deer!’
It really does have fangs: the males wear long canines rather than horns. And in fact it’s a pretty recent arrival. They’ve only been around here since the 19th century, released and escaped from private collections and doing very nicely, thanks, on the Broads and in the Fens. Just as well, I suppose: they’re declining in their ancestral habitats of East Asia. They’re officially classified as Vulnerable.
Vulnerability, eh? There’s a lot of it about. That’s why we wanted to buy this bit of marsh. Not really to own it, that’s a relatively minor pleasure. To stop it being vulnerable.
So many vulnerable things. So many things I wish I could make less vulnerable. Starting with Eddie, who has Down’s syndrome.
We were looking at a house on the edge of the Broads when I heard a Cetti’s warbler sing out – loud, assertive, unmistakably himself.
‘We’ll take it.’
An exaggeration, but not by much.
The song of a Cetti’s means that the place is wild and wet. The garden’s boundary was a dyke, and beyond it there was a marshy no-place that had been left to its own devices. It was runnin’ wild, lost control, runnin’ wild, mighty bold . . . as Marilyn sang in Some Like It Hot. The thought of living next to a wild, wet place where a Cetti’s warbler sang out, telling the whole world that the place was indeed wild and wet – well, it was at once intoxicating.
The worry, of course, was that the wetland, being vulnerable, would be damaged, destroyed, ploughed, chemicalised, dug up, built on and silenced. So we tried to buy it . . . and my wife, Cindy, negotiating with skill and tenacity, succeeded in buying four or five acres of the stuff. We wanted more, of course, you always do, but Barry was able to buy the rest when he moved in. We put up a fence to divide our two chunks of marsh, for that was the deal: one half managed for wildlife, especially for warblers, and the other kept open for Barry’s dogs. He also put in a nice little pond. He and his wife loved the place.
But then they decided to move.
Pigeons on the roof, whispering together. Plotting a coup?
I didn’t decide to move away from The Times, where I had worked for more than 30 years, writing about sport and wildlife. My departure was involuntary and not altogether easy. Interested readers can learn more with a little internet research, but it’s all ancient history now, and there’s no profit in raking over it again. What matters in this story is that the Wildlife Trusts turned up trumps. They took trouble over me in troubled times and I’m forever grateful to them – and it’s thanks to them that the marsh became a possibility. So in the end, it was wildlife that got the benefit of the trouble taken by the Wildlife Trusts.
The Trusts invited me on a trip to Cornwall, where we went out on a boat looking for dolphins and instead caught a magnificent passage of Manx shearwaters. Then I was asked to go to Alderney, one of the Channel Islands. I was there on the first day of Wimbledon, as it happene
d. This turned out to be a trip of immense personal significance. Had I still been working for The Times I’d have been checking in for a fortnight’s work at the Wimbledon tennis tournament. I had scarcely missed a day’s play at Wimbledon since the 1980s: great sport and (I know I’ll never convince you) rather seriously hard work in sometimes depressing conditions. But instead of taking on a fortnight’s hard labour in a long, low, dark room, I found myself scrambling up a rock in the middle of the English Channel, wearing protective glasses and a hard hat, helping to attach satellite tags to half a dozen gannets. I was the wing-clasper. My job was to keep these mighty birds still while the specialist attached the trackers. Another person had the job of keeping that beak – which is like an unusually ferocious spear – wrapped up safe. She used an old sock, pulling it over the eyes so that the bird, finding itself in darkness, ceased to struggle, while she held the bill closed in her other hand. Then all three of us, in a coordinated movement designed to keep the bill away from us, let the gannet go: and each time the bird extended its vast wings, wide as a tall man is tall, and flew.
‘Would you like to give this one a name?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Eddie.’
And Eddie Gannet moved away from the rock and circled around it, making the classic cruciform shape. When we had fitted all six transmitters, I sat there for a while as the two conservationists took down all the necessary data. I was within a few feet of nesting gannets, totally surrounded by these bloody great birds, while looking out to sea at many more of the same. I felt as if I was sitting in the vaults of heaven surrounded by angels, not a thought I had often had in the press-room at Wimbledon. It was like being slapped in the face by beauty and wonder and glory, and I was unable to avoid the message that Eddie Gannet and the rest were bringing to me with such glorious and unsubtle insistence.
Enough! Time to move on.
So gannets have become a personal totem of the good challenges: a bracing call to order, to get on with it, facing forwards towards the future, rather than gazing wistfully in the rear-view mirror. Get on with it. Deal with it. And when in doubt, turn to the wild.
I now have a nice woodcut of gannets on the wall above my desk and a photo of the Alderney gannets as the wallpaper on my phone: twin bracing calls to the present and future joys of wildlife and a prohibition against the temptation to look back at past glories. Self-pity, resentment, anger, hate and nostalgia are all forbidden by the gannets, and they accept no backsliding.
The Trusts then commissioned me to write an ebook about Charles Rothschild. A great man. He was a banker, as Rothschilds tend to be, and a public figure. And he was absolutely nuts about wildlife. He was also a visionary, though what he saw wasn’t good. He was one of the first people to see that the wildlife and wild places of Britain were vulnerable. Not only vulnerable but finite. And what’s more – what’s a good deal more – he was just about the first person in England to do something about it.
In 1912 he founded the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves, and four years later, the Society produced a list of 284 sites ‘worthy of preservation’. This is now called the Rothschild List. The sites were chosen for two reasons: for their wildlife value and for their vulnerability. It was the beginning of wildlife conservation in Britain.
It was a slow start. In 1916, people had other things on their minds than butterflies, other things than the future of the planet. It was only during the Second World War – and long after Rothschild’s suicide in 1923 – that the SPNR and the Rothschild List were accepted as something of genuine importance. In the post-war rebuilding, the SPNR morphed into the Wildlife Trusts, and the Rothschild List showed the way forward. And Rothschild was revealed as the hero, prophet, pioneer and even martyr that he was all along.
It was an honour, then, to celebrate such a man, and to mark the centenary of the Rothschild List with this writing project. I called it Prophet and Loss. I began my research with a visit to his favourite place: a little hut in the middle of a marsh. Now it happens that I went on to write the words for the Rothschild project, just as I wrote the words for this book, in a little hut in the middle of a marsh. Different hut, different marsh, same love. Rothschild loved his hut surrounded by wildness and wet, and he went there whenever he could, away from banks and money and public life, and towards the wilder life that we all crave at some level.
Rothschild loved Woodwalton Fen. He bought it because it was vulnerable. He tried to give it to the National Trust to look after, but they turned him down. They said it was ‘of interest only to the naturalist’. It’s now a National Nature Reserve: owned, that is to say, by you and me, and generously under-funded by the public purse. But it’s still a fabulous spot. I had a picnic in Rothschild’s hut at Rothschild’s table, though I didn’t use Rothschild’s thunderbox that stood uncompromisingly in the back of the hut. While I was there I saw a marsh harrier from the window – and I bet Rothschild never did. Marsh harriers were shot to extinction by Victorian gamekeepers.
And all of a sudden I had a fantasy. I was right here in the hut with Rothschild 100 years ago, looking out of the window and waiting for him while he got his bug-hunting gear together – and that very moment I had a first for Woodwalton Fen. ‘Look!’ (Problem: how should I address him? We could never have been friends, the social and financial distance was far too great, and nor was my expertise enough to bring us closer than social convention would permit. But in dreams and fantasies such matters are infinitely flexible:) ‘Charlie! Marsh harrier! Male, flying left to right! Got it?’
‘Yes! Far out! Cheers, mate!’
Whatever our differences, the joy – undisguisable, unmistakable, unfakable – of a great wildlife moment would unquestionably have been a shared thing. I have shared a thousand such moments across the world with near-strangers and with close friends; I know such times with immense precision. They’re also startlingly intimate, for there is an intimacy with the creature observed as well as an intimacy in the shared joy of sighting it: yes, there, drifting onward, moving beautifully on the very edge of a stall, see how it catches the light and shows off all three colours, silver, russet, black. Marsh harriers came back from extinction during the First World War, but were hammered again by pesticides and reduced to a single pair in Great Britain. Now it’s just a part of our landscape, accepted and if still remarkable, no longer headline news. Bloody wonderful, yes? Cheers, mate.
Sometimes I think marsh harriers, recovering from this not-quite-double extinction, by means of their own vigour and by the tenacity of humans who love wildness and wet, are the most significant birds on the British list. They are certainly the most significant birds on our own patch: configuring the seasons and sending us constant messages about the health of the marsh they harry. Without good marshes there are no marsh harriers. Every visit from a marsh harrier tells you that stuff about the marsh that only a real expert on marshes could know. And marsh harriers are experts all right.
I visited five other Rothschild sites as I did the research for Prophet and Loss. Two were still perfect, one was a little damaged and overshadowed by industry, one was much diminished but still great and one was almost completely trashed. I wrote about the past and present of conservation: and, of course, the future. The future of the most vulnerable thing of all. You know – the bloody planet.
Whenever Charlie had a little spare cash – which was most of the time – he liked to buy up wonderful chunks of beautiful, valuable and vulnerable wildness. As a result of writing the ebook, I found myself in possession of a little spare cash myself. Well, not exactly spare. A smart person would have used the money to pay off a chunk of mortgage, an increasingly pressing need in these hard times. Or perhaps to upgrade the faithful vehicle that has been carrying us about for a dozen years and more. We needed this money to stabilise ourselves: we really ought to be grown-up and sensible for once. To be totally and brutally frank, we couldn’t afford to do this. So many worrying things could be solved with this money. But – well, as y
ou see, we made the other decision. It was an act of knowing folly. Do you think that’s wise, sir? The eternal question of Sergeant Wilson to Captain Mainwaring. It all depends on what you mean by wisdom, doesn’t it?
Besides, what would Charlie have done?
So we did the same. Cindy did the deal, of course, not me. And Barry accepted.
Handshake.
Thanks, Barry.
Thanks, Charlie.
Cheers, mate.
Morning chores. At the barn I learn that barn owls have the right of way.
At 14.21 on 21 September the earth’s Equator passed across the centre of the sun, with the result that all over the planet, day and night – light and dark – were approximately equal in length. The equinox, no less: an appropriate place in which to start, and an appropriate time to acquire two or three acres of Norfolk marsh. Some prefer the term ‘equilux’: equal light, rather than equal night. Some call it the autumnal equinox, to distinguish it from the vernal variety, but that’s pure hemisphere chauvinism. The equinox is a planet-wide event, occurring when the border between night and day is perpendicular. So let’s call it the September equinox.
An equinox doesn’t feel exactly like a beginning, I admit, unless you’re working to the routine of the academic year. It’s a milestone: neither a starting nor a finishing point. It’s a point where you can stop and eat your sandwiches and admire the distance you have travelled while contemplating the distance you still have to go. And that’s appropriate because this business of the marsh was and is all about continuity. We hadn’t taken it on in order to change it: we were there to make it carry on. Steady as she goes. We were a safe pair of hands, not a new broom. Our basic job was to keep it safe. To make it Not Vulnerable, which is not the same thing, alas, as invulnerable.
All the same, it’s nice to have a sign. A portent. You don’t have to believe in such things to rejoice in their significance. It’s always pleasing when you find something auspicious: and that’s a word derived from ‘birdwatching’ in Latin. I have always liked the idea of ornithomancy, of understanding crucial things in life from the movements and sounds of birds. It was a serious business: in The Odyssey an eagle appears three times carrying a dove in its claws, foretelling the return of Odysseus to Ithaca and his slaying of his wife’s suitors. An augur is someone who reads the signs made by birds.
