Guest review by Gill Lewis: DIARY OF A YOUNG NATURALIST by Dara McAnulty

 

"McAnulty has a fierce love of the natural world which shines brightly, and I, for one, am glad of its light."

Gill Lewis is a children's author, vet, wildlife enthusiast and tree house dweller, whose many books about animals and the natural world include Sky Dancer, Moon Bear and Run Wild. Three new books will be published in 2021: Willow Wildthing and the Shooting Star, illustrated by Rebecca Bagley (OUP), is the third book in the Willow Wildthing series about children finding wild space in the city; Swan Song (Barrington Stoke) is a story about teenage depression and the healing power of nature; and A Street Dog Named Pup (David Fickling Books, with a cover by Levi Pinfold) is about the incredible bond between human and dog, and one dog’s journey to find his boy.

See more on Gill's website.

I’ve been mulling for a while about writing this review. It’s hard to say what hasn’t already been said about this astonishing book and its equally astonishing author.

Quite deservedly, Diary of a Young Naturalist is the winner of the Wainwright Prize 2020, winner of Books are my Bag Readers Award for Non-Fiction, shortlisted for the Irish Post Award 2020 and finalist of Baillie Gifford Award 2020.

The book chronicles a year of McAnulty’s life between his 14th and 15th birthdays, a time between childhood and adulthood. We journey with him from the west of Northern Ireland to the east, from one spring to the next. He allows many of us a deeper understanding of autism, smashing stereotypes, as he shares the love and support from his family – mother, father, younger brother and sister. All but his father is autistic. Diary of a Young Naturalist is a profound account of a deep connection and love of the natural world and a desire to communicate with others to ensure protection of this planet we all call home.

I’ve wanted to read this book for a long time but needed to find time and space to immerse myself. I’m glad I waited, because McAnulty’s words are ones to savour. He is truly a gifted writer. Poetic and lyrical, he is able to convey the deepest thoughts and emotions through words, yet without resorting to prolific superfluous prose.

McAnulty’s descriptions are powerful. They reawaken our senses to the world around us, a world we all too often shut out, wrapped up in our busy lives. He offers us sensory landscapes from seabird cries in the far distance and the way cloud shadows move across golden fields to then focus in self-absorption in the small details of watching a woodlouse crawl on our fingertip. Literature and folklore are woven throughout minutely observed science. We tread carefully amongst the bluebells for fear of the wrath of faeries and yet also learn about the slow growth of bluebells and their existence since the ice age. Science and art. Head and heart. Our human connection to the natural world.

Many people travel the world to see wildlife, but McAnulty shows us the world in a bucket. He describes a newly made bucket-pond as a cauldron of magic, and yet with growing distance from childhood has the self-awareness to realise that such childish joy is perceived as wrong, bad almost; “My mind skips, because, well, I’m too old for my body to be seen skipping into the house.” And yet, McAnulty’s words fizz and pop and sparkle with raw wonder, and one can’t help feeling that utter joy, a reawakening of senses long buried in childhood, a joy that should be a part of all our lives, however old we are.

Whilst the natural world offers great solace, delight and curiosity, the human world is one that is a hard path for McAnulty to navigate. The joy and wonder at the natural world are matched by the depths of anger and sorrow at its destruction at the hand of man. And through the course of the book we see that anger and passion become a powerful engine to communicate with others. McAnulty talks of the frustration of not being listened to, and being bullied at schools. Then we see the growing empowerment of having his voice heard. There is maturity beyond his years to recognise that some people pay lip service to him or want to use him for their own agendas. He acknowledges that he must be his own agent, and yet feels powerful and powerless at the same time. His sheer determination has traction. Where teachers once shrugged their shoulders at him and pupils laughed, a new school sees engaged teachers and pupils who seek change too.

I came away changed by reading McAnulty’s book – reawakened to childhood wonder, a renewed conscious desire to use all my senses to perceive the world around me, and to hold fast to the truth that we can all make a difference and change hearts and minds.

This is an important book for all to read. Deeply empathetic to all living things including his fellow humans, McAnulty has a fierce love of the natural world which shines brightly, and I, for one, am glad of its light. 

Diary of a Young Naturalist is published by Little Toller. Cover illustration and internal maps by Barry Falls   

See also: Fingers in the Sparkle Jar by Chris Packham, reviewed by Linda Newbery

Guest review by Ann Pilling: DRIVING SOUTH TO INVERNESS: POSTSCRIPT TO AN ACTIVE LIFE, by Phoebe Caldwell

"A brave, funny and inspired book."

Ann Pilling has written or edited over 40 books for children and has published three collections of poetry. A fourth, Jigsaw, is coming from Shoestring this October. She is married with two sons, six grandchildren, two cats and half a dog. She lives in the Yorkshire Dales which she calls 'the country of my heart', a phrase first used by D H Lawrence whose prose and poetry she greatly admires.

Not long ago Phoebe Caldwell, for 45 years a highly distinguished practitioner who worked, nationwide and abroad, with people on the Autistic Spectrum, decided reluctantly that she could no longer live independently. Now into her eighties she put her Yorkshire home up for sale and downsized to a small flat in a ‘retirement complex’ in nearby Settle. She can still be alone but help is at hand, should she fall, should the plumbing fail, or should the underfloor heating begin to roast the undersides of her feet. Such catastrophes, and the snail’s paced attempts of the ‘management’ to sort them out , are told with a wry mixture of frustration, humour, and sheer disbelief.

Phoebe dislikes the word ‘downsizing’, a euphemism for shrinkage and prefers ‘editing’ where the emphasis is on selection, rather than contraction. Her problem was to condense a library, a museum and an art gallery into two small rooms. When I first visited Phoebe she showed me round. I was moved by their beauty and enchanted by their diversity and their occasional eccentricity. Everything chosen was of significance to her. I recalled William Morris's  ‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.’

This book is the product of a richly furnished mind. It ranges widely, from the author’s knowledge of botany, zoology, chemistry to the workings of the brain. She writes with insight and passion about paintings and ceramics, about music, about poetry. Her descriptions of nature are those of a poet, her observations of the majestic limestone landscape which she inhabits are both precise and powerful. She writes of ‘drumlins, like green bubble wrap’, of how ‘Pen-y-Ghent, Ingleborough and Whernside rise from their limestone plateau like yolks sitting on the white of poached eggs.’

Phoebe married early and had five children with her biophysicist husband Peter. She describes his ‘most astonishing eyes, sea green with a pale circle round the edge, like that slither of light trapped under the crest of a breaking wave’. He died young. Half mad with grief she took scissors, sat on their Emperor size mattress and tried to cut it in half. Unsurprisingly her small curved nail scissors were inadequate. Phoebe sold the rambling ruin they had lived in, and moved to a small cottage and went back to work. She has been working ever since.

What do the old do all day, she asks, apart from continually looking for their glasses? Line-dancing, quizzes, craft-work, all feel to her ‘like colouring books for children, to keep them quiet on a car journey’. But she is realistic. ‘The struggle to keep the mind going is balanced precariously against inertia and the temptation to retire to bed and read thrillers.’ What she longs for is ‘humour, conversation, empathy, and psychological awareness’.

Phoebe has a religious faith. Life keeps posing unanswered questions. To someone whose working life has been given addressing the physical disorientation and emotional isolation experienced by people on the autistic spectrum, there must be so many. She writes of meditation, of the experience of being in ‘Presence’. There may be other kinds of mindfulness, she says, ‘but I don’t care, since it works for me and empowers my life and helps me to help others.’

This is a brave, funny and inspired book. Read it.

Driving South to Inverness is published by Pavilion Books.