REMEMBERING RONALD BLYTHE

It was the farthest from the home patch we’d ever travelled together. On a whim back in the 1980s, Ronnie and I had decided to take a trip down to Cornwall for the May Day Obby Oss ceremonials in Padstow. I drove, and Ronnie did his ever-luminous trick of improvising a commentary – on the locations of Hardy novels, the mysteries of Bodmin Moor, and the diminutive hedged church of St Edenoc in Rock where John Betjeman is buried .
On May Day morning we walked into Padstow, amazed at a village cleansed of cars, decked up with oak branches and cowslips, and with most of the citizens dressed in white. For the rest of the day we jigged and sang in the procession, ensnared by the hypnotic rhythms of the “Morning Song” and words that seemed like a remnant of some lost May fertility chant. Ale was drunk and Ronnie proved to be an adept communicant, whirling in slow motion like a very English dervish. He was deep in a pagan rite hundreds of miles from home, but never for a moment seeming to be “out of his knowledge”.
A few years previously he’d written his seminal essay, An Inherited Perspective, about the complex ways place and landscape mould personality. He’d been on train journey to Lincoln, had passed unexpectedly through Helpston and seen in the distance the churchyard where John Clare is buried. “It was all over in seconds, the glimpse of the confined prospect of a great poet, but not before I had been reminded that he had thrived for only as long as he had been contained within those village boundaries.” He talks of how Clare’s “extraordinary ability to see furthest when the view was strictly limited” meant he was able to present the “indigenous eye at its purest and most naturally disciplined…(his) feeling for nature and the landscape of man deepens when it remains hedged about by familiar considerations.” Ronnie considered the development of his own landscape consciousness. He saw it as a constant interplay between an instinctive, unlettered, sensuous response, and the scientific, aesthetic and religious sensibilities developed later as a kind of overlay.
It’s tempting, if a tad facile, to see similarities between Ronnie and Clare, the poet he did so much to champion. Both men were born into the poor rural families. Both achieved monumental feats of self-education. Clare read Thompson’s poetry curled up in the fields; Ronnie was decoding to Gainsborough’s and Constable’s paintings when he was barely a teenager. Both produced their most majestic work from the lineaments of landscape and culture contained within a few square miles of their homes. And I sense an affinity between their restless, inquisitive engagements with the world. I always think of Ronnie when I read the opening stanzas of Clare’s elegiac ‘Remembrances’
When jumping time away on old crossberry way
& eating awes sugar plumbs ere they had lost the may
& skipping like a leveret before the peep of day
Walking with Ronnie was just like this, though we progressed more like tortoises than young hares. Everything had to be pondered – the views (“the Suffolk Highlands, dear boy!”), the inscriptions on gravestones, the intimate interiors of local artists’ houses. I could match him on botany (he diligently filled in his Wild Flower Society checklist every year) but just listened, starstruck, to his masterly storytelling about local history. Deeply engrossed, we missed closing times in pubs, and sat on field-banks nibbling peanuts instead. He would spin extravagant tales like the Worm of Wormingford, about the village where he lived in John Nash’s old house. I remember especially one autumn day in Polstead, just a few miles from his home. The narrative moved in parallel with our walk, from the village’s celebrated cherry trees to the crumbling stump of a Gospel Oak, under which St Cedd had reputedly preached. On the way he told, in gory detail, the full story of the village’s great historical scandal, the Red Barn Murder. In 1827 a village girl, Maria Marten, was shot dead by her lover in a Polstead barn. The hunt and trial of her killer became a national sensation. He was hanged in Bury St Edmunds before a crowd estimated at 20,000, and his flayed skin used to bind a book about the murder. How apt, Ronnie added as a footnote, that his friend the distinguished crime writer, Ruth Rendell, now lived in the village….
This is how Ronnie’s storytelling and writing flows. It’s discursive, conversational, sometimes almost gossipy. It has the look of free association, but is more like following the pathways on a detailed map, guided by an intense understanding of history and contexts. Feeding into this is a remarkable bank of memory, both personal and learned. He had the gift of what I’ve called “historical empathy”, able to momentarily exist in two different time zones – or two different consciousnesses. On a night-walk he sees the distant charcoal stump of a church “just as it was in the summer nights that followed the Conquest.” Thoughts about the apostle Mark meld unselfconsciously into concerns over a fish-pie.
This for me, is where Ronnie diverges from Clare. Somewhere on the journey between Suffolk farm-boy and doyen of Aldeburgh’s cultural salons, he acquired a social ease, an ability to move comfortably among all classes and situations. He was never regarded as an out-of-place oddity by his neighbours, as the “peasant poet” was. He could talk as easily to (and about) Wormingford combine drivers as Scottish poets. No manor house owners shunned him because he wrote “the rural idyll slips in blood”. The extent to which he was loved and respected in turn is shown by the immense network of willing villagers and friends who looked after hm in his last years. Since his death I’ve wondered whether his beautiful speaking voice helped his social integration. What must have been in his boyhood a distinct Suffolk accent eventually dissolved, I guess by osmosis, as his circle of friendship widened. I was at the ceremony in Westminster Abbey in 1987 when a plaque to John Clare was installed in Poets’ Corner. Ted Hughes read Clare’s ‘The Nightingales Nest” in his peaty Yorkshire growl, and Ronnie gave the Address in a voice half Cambridge don, half angel.
This was perhaps one occasion when the lettered man took precedence over the indigenous eye. But mostly it was the tension between these two modes of perception that generated the genius in his writing, as it often did with Clare. And no more so that in the writings for which they are both best loved, on nature and the countryside. Both regarded the citizens of the natural world as fellow commoners, a sentiment which was both visceral and philosophical. Both saw a moral virtue in the cultivation of the soil, but decried the enclosures and abuses of modernising agriculture. In what has echoes of Clare’s “Remembrances” a moment of pastoral nostalgia from Ronnie is a perfect example of the interplay between his two forms of landscape consciousness: “Sometimes I hear them, the skinny labourers, clumping down from the bothy to feed the stock, the girls singing in the dairy, the barefoot children falling over the dogs, the mother shouting, the pot bubbling. All gone into the dark, says the poet. Or into the light, says someone else.”

ends

Review of : Roy Vickery, VICKERY’S FOLK FLORA

An A-Z of the Folklore and Uses of British and Irish Plants, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £30

Until quite recently, the duckweed-carpeted canals and flooded pits of Lancashire were said to be inhabited by a bogey called Jinny Greenteeth, whose “long green hair and long green fingers” would drag hapless children down into their depths. It was an untypically practical superstition, a device to discourage youngsters from venturing onto what can look like seductively smooth patches of grass. You have to search hard for such sensible explanations across the bulk of Britain’s plant folklore, a florid almanac of calendar customs, arcane domestic rituals, artful games and outlandish remedies that suggest 21st century Britain has an ethnobotany more complex than Amazonia. Plants’ local names alone reflect the entire range of human response to the vegetable world. But it’s hard to imagine what torrid night-time encounter led to the Dorset tag of ‘welcome-home-husband-though-never-so-drunk’ for stonecrop, grown on roofs as a magical defence against lightning. Continue reading

The Library as an Ecosystem

I like to think we run an open door policy in our library in Norfolk. That is to say, on warm days in summer the door to the garden is actually open. Anyone’s welcome to come in for a browse. Last summer a stoat wandered in, peered dismissively at the modest shelf of my own titles, sniffed about under my desk and then ambled out. Most Julys the house ants – here long before us and so given due respect – pour out from alarming new holes in the floor, march along the tops of my editions of Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne, and shuffle in a lost and desultory way about the carpet, seeming uninterested in getting outdoors for their nuptial flights. But while I fret about the continuance of their ancient lineage, the culling is already under way. Next through the door come the bolder blackbirds and robins, hoovering them up in front of the shelves. Continue reading

September 2014

This article first published in

  • BBC Wildlife Magazine
  • In one of the out-of-nowhere gales of mid-June, the best-known tree on the planet was blown down. I hasten to add I don’t mean the oldest, or biggest, or most mythologically rich, simply the tree whose image has been seen by probably more people than any other in history, thanks to its appearance as the Whomping Willow in the Harry Potter films. The famously twitchy willow, whose snaky branches hit back when attacked, was a slightly computer-tweaked version of a real beech, which, for more than half my life time, was the tree I knew best.

    It is (‘was’ is the wrong tense for a horizontal tree) a pollard, growing in the National Trust’s Ashridge Estate in the Chilterns, and surrounded by a gothic assembly of only slightly less regal lopped beeches. I’ve known it since the 1950s, and it is the hero (or perhaps heroine : beeches are traditionally female) of my book Beechcombings. So perhaps I may be excused a small and probably over-lyrical quote (it was easy to lose one’s head under its arching cranium) by way of a tribute: “It seems elephantine, an impossible mass for a living thing. It is, I guess, about 350 to 400 years old… its long low branches trail out like the arms of a giant squid. The trunk is like vegetable hide, a mass of burrs, bosses, wounds, flutings, folds of scar tissue congealed around the points where the branches were lopped…”

    What’s surprised me about its fall is how remarkably sensible and positive the response has been. No wailings or funeral rites. No declarations of disaster. Not even a backlash (yet) from Health and Safety, as there was after the 1987 hurricane, with demands that the whole company of unstable freaks should be summarily destroyed. Instead, the local National Trust forester has said “it is a shame, but now it can start a new part of its life in its decay as a different habitat for Ashridges wildlife.”

    Such an ecologically and culturally mature public statement would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. The fading of our everyday intimacy with trees, of our understanding of their workings, encourages us to anthropomorphise them in a directly corporeal way, seeing the trunk, the body of the tree, as analogous to a human body, and therefore killed when severed from its earthly roots. But “a new part of its life” is exactly right. The trunk will take 50 to 100 years to rot down, and during that time successions of fungi – coral spots, brain fungi, dead-man’s fingers, beech tufts – will embroider the trunk. Drapes of wild rose and beechwood flowers will colonise the cliffs of the broken trunk Deadwood insects will hunker down in the extending labyrinth of cracks and hollows. And I will get the chance, at long last, to read the graffiti high up in the tree, some of which are the work of homesick US serviceman stationed nearby in WW2, some of Victorian sweethearts.

    And the Queen, as I liked to call her, may not even be dead in the literal sense. Several of the Ashridge pollards blown down in the gales of the 70s and 80s have sprouted new vertical poles from the underside of their rootplates. At this moment, an heir apparent may be budding in the tangled roots among the flints.

October 2014

This article first published in

  • BBC Wildlife Magazine
  • I’d best make my own feelings clear from the outset. I find the thought of conservationists sitting down and doing business with organisations who illegally kill hen harriers distasteful. I know this is juvenile and self-righteous and idealistic to an unworldly degree. Compromise is the way things get done. The police regularly do deals with criminals for society’s “greater good”. The Troubles in Ireland wouldn’t have been ended if the government hadn’t at last negotiated with the IRA. Realpolitik ain’t pretty or principled but it gets results. So I acknowledge that the Langholm experiment, of providing ‘diversionary feeding’ for harriers on the northern moors, has been partially successful in reducing the harrier’s predation of grouse chicks.

    But my bilious anger won’t go away. These solutions are a pragmatic step too far for my taste, devoid of moral dimension or sense of justice, and of any attempt to make reparation for the barbarity of the harrier vendetta. In his book The Sparrowhawk’s Lament [reviewed July 2014] the distinguished film-maker David Cobham tells of the female harrier he found with its legs cut off and crucified on a barn-door, still alive. This was Norfolk not Northumberland and David’s private version of this horrific story (he has been a close friend for forty years) is even more chilling.

    Nor does the Langholm protocol challenge the central assumption of this whole affair, that the harriers are the villains, and that the protection of the grouse-shooting industry is the overriding goal. For me the ‘diversionary feeders’ uncomfortably echo the divided state of Britain beyond the moors: give the ruffians a soup kitchen and they might not storm High Table. Who do these people think they are that they can commandeer vast tracts of our wild moorland and do pretty much what they like in them? I applaud Mark Avery’s and Chris Packham’s initiative on August 10th at Derwent Dam in Derbyshire, but I fear a group photo of 600 people, 3000 tweets and not a single column inch in the next day’s papers [Ben – as far as I have been able to ascertain] is not going to cause any sleepless nights amongst landowners. And with the classiest northern moors able to charge £40,000 per gun per day, there is not the remotest chance of government intervention. Grouse are “natural capital” in conservation Newspeak, close no doubt to being an element in the FOOTSIE Index.

    I think there are precedents for more robust and effective challenges, which would involve encouraging local authorities to press for ‘Open Country’ agreements over private moorland under the provision of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act, 2000. In the south these are already guaranteeing public access over great tracts of country, an army of part-time wardens, and a curtailment of gamekeepers’ criminal excesses. And they have their roots, with a strange symmetry, just a couple miles west of Derwent Dam. In April 1932, the Derbyshire activist Benny Rothman organised the legendary Mass Trespass of the previously impregnable grouse moors of Kinder Scout. 800 people took part and there were scuffles with keepers. Rothman and four others went to jail, and the chain of effects the action started was slow but momentous. The Ramblers Society immediately began campaigning for access to open country, an aim picked up at the formation of the National Parks in 1947, and consolidated in the Act of 2000 (above). Kinder Scout is now an NNR and was purchased by the National Trust in 1982. No hen harrier will be killed there again. So, si monumentum requirat for this kind of action, circumspice.