Guest review by Linda Sargent: THE OLD WAYS - a Journey on Foot, by Robert Macfarlane

 

"What a complete joy it’s been, timely and so sustaining in these darkening times in our world."

Linda Sargent is a writer who worked for twenty years as a publisher’s reader (David Fickling Books since 2002). She has published short stories and articles and her first novel, Paper Wings, appeared in 2010; she is also the author of Words and Wings, a training guide to creative reminiscence work, available as a free download from her website. 

Tosh's Island, a graphic novel for children and based on Linda's childhood experiences, written in collaboration with Joe Brady and illustrated by Leo Marcell, was published last October by David Fickling Books, having first appeared in serial form in The Phoenix Comic.

A book about walking might not seem like the obvious choice for me, now a full-time wheelchair user, but this is about so much more than the mere physical act itself. As well as the obvious meaning, the “old ways” explore and traverse humanity’s various journeyings and their resulting connections over the millennia; covering not just the more well-known tracks, but lesser-known ones too, over mountains and even the those more fleeting passages across the seas. These are journeys rooted both in the physical reality of walking and, perhaps more importantly, that of the imagination. Over the years I have been giving it to more agile friends, but now since moving to rural Wiltshire with our monthly trips down to the Mobile Library in the village hall car-park I decided to add it to my order reserve list. And what a complete joy it’s been, timely and so sustaining in these darkening times in our world. I messaged the author as much on Instagram, not expecting a reply, but one came in the form of a warm and thoroughly empathetic response. Since feet connecting with earth is clearly so vital for the author, he seemingly totally grasped what I was trying to say about how I nurture and ponder the memories of past walking times, as well as continue such journeying vicariously via writing such as his, in many ways even more enriching as they mostly are in settings I would never have visited and never shall. Although that isn’t true of all, since there are places featured that are familiar, including Cambridgeshire, the Downland country of the south of England, Sussex, Wiltshire and my old home in the Kentish Weald, landscapes referenced through the author’s deep admiration and connections with the work and lives of Edward Thomas and Eric Ravilious which thread through this book enriching the reader’s experience not only of the land, but also these two artists.

So many paths trodden here, from Scotland, the Camino, Tibet and more. And not all are land-bound. His descriptions of the Sea Paths show a more ethereal, yet equally powerful way marking. He tells the reader (p.88) of the many names of these paths, for example “In Old English the hwaell-weg/the whale’s way” – invisible currents bringing humanity together over thousands of years, leaving no trace on the water, but resulting in a sharing of trade, culture, stories, songs, invasion of course and the aftermath of man-made upheavals. The latter with such a profound modern resonance.

It is impossible to do this book justice. For me it worked and will continue to work in so many levels through my own imaginative, internal world. As the writer says these are (p.198) “the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in the memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality”.

Yes. Exactly this.

(NB: I have recently come across a newly formed organisation called Slow Ways, a community initiative mapping accessible walking and wheeling routes and encouraging more to be developed. More here.) – see slowways.org)

The Old Ways is published by Penguin.

See also Linda's review of 12 Birds to Save your Life - Nature's Lessons in Happiness by Charlie Corbett

Alison Layland reviews Sarn Helen by Tom Bullough

Guest review by Judith Allnatt: ENGLISH PASTORAL - AN INHERITANCE, by James Rebanks

"In a world trembling at the brink of climate disaster, this is both a timely and a hopeful book..."

Judith Allnatt writes short stories and novels for adults. Her novels have been variously shortlisted for the Portico Prize for Literature, the East Midlands Book Award and featured as a Radio 5 Live Book of the Month. Short stories have appeared in the Bridport Prize Anthology and the Commonwealth Short Story Awards, and have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service.

Judith’s latest novel, The Silk Factory, is an eerie story of love and memory drawing on both the Luddite weavers’ rebellions in the nineteenth century and a modern day haunting. She has lectured widely on Creative Writing for over two decades and is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. She lives with her family in Northamptonshire and is working on her fifth novel. For more information and blog posts see Judith’s website.  Twitter: @judithallnatt

English Pastoral is both urgent in its call to arms for the planet and poetic in its lyrical description of life on the author’s farm in the Cumbrian fells.

The book is structured in three acts. The first concerns the traditional farming that he learnt from his grandfather: rotating crop and pasture, using manure to nourish the soil and harvesting once a year. These were the farming methods evolved over centuries that worked both with and for nature. Spilt grain helped birds survive through the winter and cutting hay once for fodder rather than frequent grass cutting for silage allowed a habitat to survive for ground nesting birds such as curlews.

The second act explains the pressures of a growing world population and the industrialisation of farming: the growing of monoculture crops and the widespread use of pesticides, literally weeding out biodiversity; the spiralling use of fertilizers on soil ever more compacted and degraded; the use of massive machines on huge fields stripped of ancient hedgerows. These are practices that work efficiently to maximise production, but this drive for ever-lower food prices leaves little room for wild things and the cost to the natural world and the climate goes largely unheeded.

The third act explores hope for the future - the equivalent of the ‘redemption’ frequently used at this point in the structure of fiction. It describes James Rebanks’ return to some traditional farming methods. He chooses Herdwick sheep for their hardiness to Cumbrian weather. Belted Galloway cattle are introduced that can stand wintering outside and don’t need to eat silage indoors. Thus at one stroke he removes both the need for multiple crops of monoculture grass and the practice of spreading the resulting slurry: an acidic form of muck that destroys soil quality rather than well-rotted manure, which builds it. 12,000 trees are planted on his land. With the help of the Eden Valley River Authority, river and beck are rerouted and transformed from straightened, dredged, draining channels to meandering curved watercourses, slowing their pace to help protect towns downstream that were previously devastated by floodwater from unprecedented levels of rain. As the river wanders, gravel is deposited and salmon and trout that need gravel shoals on which to spawn return. He documents the otters, hares and owls returning to his land, alongside the rare wildflowers in the meadows. He speaks with equal enthusiasm of micro-organisms and numbers of earthworms - indicators of healthy soil. And what of the curlews? Driven out during the years of losing their chicks to the harvester, they are starting to return along with the swallows and swifts that dive to snatch the flies above muck-nourished fields.

Hung along the narrative thread that follows the farm’s fortunes, are vignettes of farming life: sheep stranded on an island of grass in floodwater, his father’s manic delight in the five yearly gorse burning, a son’s pride in winning a silver shield for being ‘best tup handler’.

The book is beautifully written. Old phrases such as ‘leading in the hay’ are used naturally as a matter of course. (Surely an echo of the thousands of years preceding this mechanical age, when men led horse and cart from field to yard). The face of the fells, changing with weather, the hour and the season is brought alive by the close observation and choice images of the writer.

In a world trembling at the brink of climate disaster, this is both a timely and a hopeful book. James Rebanks demonstrates that his farm is now not just carbon neutral but carbon positive – it is storing more carbon than it creates. Whilst pragmatically recognising that chemical intervention has its place, he makes the case for using traditional methods wherever possible and for encouraging and cherishing farming that improves the land and stewards the wildlife upon it. He points out that big corporations hunt in rural corners for genes in stock or crops in order to breed animals and plants capable of surviving new challenges such as climate changes. Yet, with every small farmer swallowed up by large scale monoculture farming these opportunities narrow and treasure is lost.

Most of us live in towns and cities and have little close contact with the land that feeds us. We buy packaged food from supermarkets and don’t think much about where it comes from or how it is produced. This book turns our eyes in this unwonted direction. What we see is that we can’t afford to ignore issues of regeneration and stewardship any longer, and that what happens to our land has far-ranging consequences for what will happen to our planet.

English Pastoral is published by Penguin.

See also: Wilding, by Isabella Tree, reviewed by Linda Newbery   

Guest review by Tim Bowler: THE WATERCRESS GIRL by H. E. Bates, short story collection

Tim Bowler has written over twenty books for teenagers and won fifteen awards, including the prestigious Carnegie Medal for River Boy. He has been described by the Sunday Telegraph as 'the master of the psychological thriller' and by the Independent as 'one of the truly individual voices in British teenage fiction'. His works include Midget, Shadows, Storm Catchers, Starseeker, Apocalypse, Frozen Fire, Bloodchild, Buried Thunder, Sea of Whispers and the Blade series. His most recent novels are Night Runner and Game Changer. His books have been translated into over thirty languages and have sold over a million copies worldwide.

I've always loved short stories, can't get enough of them, and I have collections of stories from all the big hitters of the genre plus every imaginable other kind of story ranging from the sublime to the execrable. It's hard to choose a favourite short story writer but H.E. Bates has to be near the top for me. I'm not mad on Bates's longer fiction and I can't stand the Pop Larkins but as a short story writer Bates holds me in a state of wonder. It's not just his evocations of rural England in the first half of the last century, his beautiful prose writing, his empathy with nature, his characterisation or even his humanity, apparent on every page, that set him apart for me. It's something else that he does with his stories, and I come back to the word 'wonder'. Where a Maupassant or a Saki might kill us with a twist, Bates's stories almost always turn on what Anthony Burgess called 'a small epiphany': a moment of revelation or transcendence at the spiritual apex of the story.

The Cowslip Field, the first story in Bates's collection entitled The Watercress Girl, is a good example. A small boy is being taken to the cowslip field by his guardian, a young woman called Pacey. He likes Pacey. She's kind and good humoured and she doesn't mind his leg-pulling about her country dialect. She patiently answers his questions, joshing with him about what ants do all day and why the sky doesn't fall down on us, and she doesn't even mind when he asks if she's got a young man. 'Oh, they're like plums on a tree,' she says. 'They all want to marry me.' We know that's not true. It's been made clear from the start, through the eyes of the boy, that Pacey is no looker. She's small, dumpy, has a mole on her cheek, and she wears outlandish glasses and a big felt hat. They make their way to the field, pick cowslips together, and thread them into chains, his much smaller than hers, then, for the first time, he notices that she has taken off her hat and has a huge wodge of hair rolled up 'like a heavy sausage'. He asks her to let it down so he can place a cowslip crown on her head. She doesn't want to but he persists. Let Bates take it from here…..

'She started to unpin the sausage at the back of her head, putting the black hairpins one by one into her mouth. Then slowly, like an unrolling blind, the massive coil of her hair fell down across her neck and shoulders and back, until it reached her waist. He had never seen hair so long, or so much of it, and he stared at it with wide eyes as it uncoiled itself, black and shining against the golden cowslip field.

'That's it, 'Pacey said, 'have a good stare.'

'Now I've got to put the crown on you,' he said.

He knelt by Pacey's lap and reached up, putting his cowslip chain on the top of her head. All the time he did this Pacey sat very still, staring towards the sun.

'Now yours,' he said.

He reached up, draping Pacey's own longer necklace across her hair and shoulders. The black hair made the cowslips shine more deeply golden than before and the flowers in turn brought out the lights in the hair. Pacey sat so still and staring as he did all this that he could not tell what she was thinking and suddenly, without asking, he reached up and took off her spectacles.

A strange, transformed woman he did not know, with groping blue eyes, a crown on her head and a necklace locking the dark mass of her hair, stared back at him….'

…….and there's the small epiphany, the moment of wonder: for the boy, for Pacey, for us. It only lasts a few seconds before Pacey remembers her modesty, mutters something, and restores her appearance to its former state. They joke a little more, then head for home, laughing, having fun, but somehow, in a subtle way, changed. And the story ends. H.E. Bates showing us how it's done.

The Watercress Girl is published by Bloomsbury.

Guest review by Andrew Fusek Peters: CORDUROY by Adrian Bell

Andrew Fusek Peters is a poet, author and conservation photographer. His poems have been recordeded for the Poetry Archive. His books include Dip, Wilderland and Upland. See more on his website. 


I am currently re-reading Corduroy after a four-year gap. This time, I am using it as my country meditation before bed – sometimes ploughing through only a few pages before my heart sinks into a peaceful ease. This edition is a Slightly Foxed re-release of a classic nature writing adventure first published in 1930. The author, Adrian Bell (father of Martin) seemed to have two yearnings when young. He wanted to be a writer and, as a Londoner, he also wanted to escape the city ‘flying from the threat of an office life’ to delve deeply into the countryside of his dreams.

As an author and nature writer who left London at eighteen and finally married a Shropshire lass, it could be said I identify slightly! John Clare and to an extent Edward Thomas immersed themselves deeply in hill, field and forest. Theirs is the poetry of the insider looking out, so at one with nature that sometimes it is hard to separate the poet from the landscape. But Adrian Bell brought something different to the table. He was keenly aware from the get-go of his outsider-ness, his difference, his outdoor city boots sniffed at by his host Mr Colville, knowing that London leather will only survive a short while through the farming calendar.

Adrian pleaded with his father that his life ‘should be something in the open air’ - be careful what you pray for. As a paying guest, he began an utterly new life on the Colville farm. Even at that first meal of boiled batter pudding and roast pheasants, when contentment strikes it is tempered by ‘seeing myself in the wide looking-glass of the sideboard’ where he was not ‘large and rosy like the rest’ but ‘pale and thin, sitting like a ghost among them’.

This could have been an inauspicious start. The middle-class Londoner is properly a fish out of water. But Adrian had three great assets on his side – a wonderful thirst to learn alongside the willingness to work to a totally different timetable from the dawdling hours in suburban drawing rooms, and lastly, an attitude of respect for the people that still come to life in these pages. He did not play the outsider as a role, it was simply that the A-Z of farming life needed careful study, to which he applied himself henceforth, and on and off for the rest of his life.

Adrian was changed utterly by his experience. When he returned to town he ‘re-entered a world of nervous significances, where the very furniture was a complex language’. To his former friends, he is an amuse-bouche - or as he put it ‘a character part.’ Yet it is his willingness to embrace difference, to play his part as visitor or urban refugee that warms the text through and through.

‘Children gathered here also, and gazed upon the wonder of the fire, awed into silence as the sparks flew high, and an occasional passer-by paused and warmed his hands, exchanging some item of local news with the blacksmith. For in winter, the forge was a meeting-place second only to the inn, I discovered.

"I suppose these have made a difference to your trade," I said as a motor went by.

"Yes, they don’t need the kind of shoes I make," he replied. "There’s no hackneys kept today, no carriage horses; that’s how we’re hit…"'

This is the role Adrian played best, moving beyond mere nostalgia to a lament of modernisation. The book is full of tales of ancient squires and the last miller who worked the windmill, greasing the gears with tallow candles. By 1920, the world of humans was already in flux. One war over, another to begin, where it was known that many soldiers took Corduroy with them to remind them of the life left behind.

And I too catch glimpses in my second life as a conservation photographer, gradually getting to know some of the farmers and walking their land – being invited in for tea and biccies while we discuss curlews and the rare sightings of the leucistic white kite. Adrian is a good role model in his affection for the land and its people. He is a chronicler of a different age now falling into second hand echoes. My wife’s grandmother, when she was alive, told me how she remembered the coming of electricity to the Forest of Dean at the same time this book was written, when there were still carriages drawn by horse.

I leave Adrian, who went on to write twenty further books on the countryside, with the last word:

‘I had this pleasure of catching in the cloistral gloom of cowshed or stable those gleam-lit attitudes of strength and patience which the old painters turned into religious masterpieces.’

Corduroy is published by Faber.