Raising Hare

Raising Hare is the kind of book that I simply can't resist. It's the perfect intersection of nature and human experience, written in a gentle, thoughtful style by Chloe Dalton, who has mostly worked in politics and foreign affairs, focused on big international events. All that changed during lockdown when she lived in the country, in an isolated barn conversion, and unwittingly rescued a leveret (baby hare) and took it into her home. Against all odds, the hare grew and thrived, drawing Dalton into a hitherto unseen world of predators and prey, hedges and fields. Keeping her doors open so that the hare could come and go, tiptoeing around the sleeping animal, making sure that guests keep their noise down not to scare it, Dalton shapes her life around the hare, and is rewarded with her trust, to the point where the hare gives birth and raises a pair of leverets inside the home.

Dalton admits that before her relationship with the hare, she paid little attention to the natural world. The hare opens her eyes to the rhythms of the seasons, the activities of the birds and animals, the effect of intensive farming practices on the loss of wild spaces like hedges and woods. Raising Hare is not a long book, but it's a beautiful and profound reading experience based on close observation of small and undramatic events, like James Rebanks' The Place of Tides.

Wish for a Pony and The Summer of the Great Secret

 

Total comfort reading here: Monica Edwards' first two books in the Romney Marsh series, Wish for a Pony and The Summer of the Great Secret, from 1947 and 1948 respectively. I can't tell you why, but I was absolutely in love with these books as an eight or nine or ten year old growing up in the Highlands of PNG. I know now that the Romney Marsh books are widely beloved by ladies of, ahem, a certain age, as attested by the fact that Girls Gone By have reprinted several of the titles, which I have duly sought out and bought -- but it's these two first stories that captured my heart (there were later books in the Mt Hagen library, but I wasn't impressed when boys came into it).

 

Perhaps it was the rock solid friendship between Tamzin and Rissa that appealed to me -- I used to put myself to sleep at night imagining I was their friend, too, and that we all had adventures together. Perhaps it was the pony content; of course I wanted a pony, but not in any realistic way. Perhaps it was the very staid English village setting; perhaps it was the glamour of film-making in the second book, which tied in with the Noel Streatfeild books I was also addicted to. In fact, there is a lot going on in the second book, which was the one I loved most -- smuggling, making a film, pony stuff, and the intertwined story of Lesley, the original owner of Tamzin's pony Cascade, who can no longer walk after a riding accident (don't worry, there's a happy ending).

 

I used to know The Summer of the Great Secret so well that when I borrowed it from the library I wouldn't even need to read it; I'd stash it under my pillow as a talisman and never even open it. By the time I got to it, it had lost its cover, so I never knew it looking as it does above, just with a plain blue hardcover from the Seagull Library, which is the same copy that I have since acquired. I can't put my finger on why these books bewitched me so thoroughly, but they will always have a special place in my heart. 

Wild Hares and Hummingbirds

I have to confess, I bought Stephen Moss's Wild Hares and Hummingbirds purely on the strength of this lovely cover art (by Hannah Firmin). It's subtitled The Natural History of an English Village, and it's a simple but pleasing concept: Moss recounts the comings and goings of seasonal birds, animals, insects (the 'hummingbirds' of the title are actually hummingbird moths) and plants within a small parish in Somerset. The book is divided into twelve chapters, one for each month, beginning and ending in deep winter.

Wild Hares made a perfect companion read to James Rebanks' more serious English Pastoral. Because I'd already read the latter, observations about the extinction of local birds and wildlife hit home harder. I knew what Moss was talking about when he outlined the consequences of silage replacing hay for cattle feed. Moss is careful to avoid an overtly political stance, but the shadow of climate change falls darkly even over this 2011 book. There are floods in the village, birds and insects respond too early to the change of seasons and find themselves without the proper food, certain butterflies arrive at the wrong time. Not every species is a loser in this shakeup of the natural world, but there are more losers than winners.

But mostly Wild Hares is a celebration of close observation and involvement in the natural world, delighting in the small events in Moss's backyard or familiar lanes and fields. This is a lovely book. Let's hope it's not completely irrelevant in another twenty years. 

English Pastoral

After reading James Rebanks' The Place of Tides, I remembered there was another book of his that I hadn't yet read: English Pastoral. I'm so glad that I hunted it down (thanks, Athenaeum) because it's one of the best books I've read this year.

Rebanks is, famously, a farmer. English Pastoral is divided into three sections. In the first, he recalls growing up on his grandfather's and father's farms, with his grandfather introducing him to the hard work of farming but also the small delights of live on the land -- the birds, the insects, the cycle of life and death, the hedgerows, the wildflowers, the mysteries of the animals. In the second section, James is grown up, his grandfather is dead, and James takes his part beside his father in trying to wring a living from the land. Rebanks sets out in savage detail the modern economic pressures that have rendered this almost impossible. As agriculture has become relentlessly more 'efficient,' with the aid of pesticides, economies of scale, monocultures and artificial fertilisers, the price of food has steadily fallen and the crucial connection between farmer and nature has been whittled away. Farms are now just food factories, run on an industrial scale, with no room for emotion or luxuries like harbouring wildlife.

In the final section of the book, Rebanks describes his attempt to return to some of the old ways of farming and caring for the land. He argues that food has become too cheap; we no longer value it truly. The only way he and his family can stay farming in this way is to bring in income from outside -- partly, I guess, by writing books like this. But it's inspiring to read about the way that Rebanks has made room on his land for things like reinstating hedges, returning river flow to its natural state to soak up floodwater, using animal manure as fertiliser, and welcoming back birds and insects. Not surprisingly, he thanks Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell from Knepp, as documented in Wilding, which I read last year. I've read some critiques of English Pastoral as being too 'all over the place,' but while the style is fragmented, I didn't find it choppy. One thought or observation flows into the next to build a rich and moving mosaic, always engaging and persuasive.