a gallimaufry

Corvus: A Life with Birds, by Esther Woolfson

It began when Esther Woolfson settled down in Aberdeen with her family. Despite never having kept birds before, she was asked if she would take on some doves, looking for a good home. Fortunately, there was a coal-shed which the family swiftly repurposed as a dove-cot or doo’cot. Then one of her daughters asked for a pet bird and Bardie the cockatiel came to live with them.

Then word got round.

People started bringing injured wild birds and abandoned nestlings to the Woolfson house. The pet-shop lady gave them a parrot with French moult whom she could not sell. Another parrot and some canaries were given to them by people who could no longer keep them, as was Max, a sweary starling. Woolfson bought a book called Feeding Cage Birds: A Manual of Diet for Aviculture by Kenton C. and Alice Marie Lint, and so began her life with birds.

The two birds who dominate this book are both corvids, of the crow family. One spring the bird-requesting daughter and her friends found a fledgling rook near their Guide camp. The little bird had fallen from her nest, or been pushed out, or had tried to fly and got lost. Of course, they brought her to Woolfson. Unlike previous wild birds, she thrived and received the fantastically inappropriate name of Chicken (short for Madame Chickeboumskaya). Spike, another fledgeling, fell from a nest near Woolfson’s home. He was a magpie, who learnt to talk a little (‘Spike, Spikey. Hello! Spikey? SPIKE!’ and ‘Bugger off!’ being typical remarks). Spike and Chicken became house birds, hopping about, perching on people’s knees and stuffing their food in holes in walls, under carpets and even in trouser turn-ups. The Woolfson home was soon crammed with cages, sprinkled with poo and liable to odd whiffs from food stashed in unexpected places, yet the humans adapted with grace to their fellow residents’ eccentricities and valued them as they should.

(Photograph of Esther Woolfson and Chicken by Simon Chubb; found here)

Feeding Cage Birds only gets Woolfson so far; soon she is reading about avian evolution and physiology, natural history and culture, bird habits and bird reputations, and she shares the fruits of her reading in Corvus, balancing anecdote with information, enthusiasm with consideration. However, it is the quality of her observation of her corvid companions and her thoughtfulness about human and bird relationships which made this book special in my eyes.

Often, as I sit at my desk, the sounds behind me are of tearing newspaper, of beak and claw as Chicken carries out some elaborate ritual of domestic rearrangement. It may be early morning and Chicken still at breakfast, the consummate corvid process of eating and hiding, the sound of her beak closing on fragments of bread and butter alternating with the rustle and rip of the paper that carpets the floor of her house, as she hides things. I don’t know her criteria for choosing what’s to be hidden, whether, as a child might, she’s keeping the best bit until last, or if she’s storing the dull, butterless portions to be dealt with when the rest is gone, or the food runs out [..] Since I am the only person with her, I assume she is hiding it from me. [...]

When it comes to caching, nowhere, or rather no one, is sacred. Chicken is on the floor. I am eating lunch. I give her a flake of poached salmon from my plate. She takes it with alacrity and immediately begins to cache it. Her choice of site, were I a habitual cacher, would not be my own. Thrusting her beak under the hem of my jeans, she wedges the fish between the laces of my boots. I do nothing, for it will not, I know, be there for long. She hovers for a moment, then retrieves it. She carries it into the hall and, since I haven’t yet noticed the odour of rotting salmon, I have to assume that it was eaten.

Woolfson records her birds’ actions but she wants to understand them too and she instinctively wants to ascribe meaning to them. Is Chicken thinking when she is caching food? What then are her criteria for good hiding places? And how can Woolfson write about this without falling into anthropomorphism?

[...] trying to understand, for humans, is only possible through the sole means we have, the filter of ourselves and our ideas, our prejudices and often irrational beliefs. The lines we draw between sentiment and rigour are fine indeed.

For me, she succeeds in balancing between sentiment and rigour perfectly; her book charms and educates in equal measure. And it reminds us that we should cherish the urban wildlife around us and accommodate ourselves to it, rather than destroying its habitats and decrying its less salubrious behaviours.

Oh, and it has some very nice illustrations by Helen Macdonald, who went on to write H is for Hawk.

The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, by Frances Wilson

We lay upon the sloping Turf. Earth & sky were so lovely that they melted our very hearts. The sky to the north was of a chastened yet rich yellow fading into pale blue & streaked & scattered over with steady islands of purple melting away into shades of pink. It made my heart almost feel like a vision to me.

Dorothy Wordsworth, wrote the literary critic Ernest de Sélincourt, was ‘probably the most remarkable and the most distinguished of English prose writers who never wrote a line for the general public’. I appreciate that is a fairly defined category, but the excerpts of her Grasmere Journal quoted in this brilliant biography reveal a truly great nature writer who has not had her due.

(Silhouette of Dorothy Wordsworth, taken in 1806 when she was thirty-four. From the Wordsworth Trust)

Wilson focuses on the two and a half years of the Grasmere Journal, the pinnacle of Dorothy’s literary achievement, written while she and her brother William were living in Dove Cottage in the Lake District. She is a sensitive reader of what Dorothy writes – and what she doesn’t write – and always works from Dorothy’s own words to discuss Dorothy’s childhood, her life before moving to Grasmere and her life after William married Mary Hutchinson, as well as Dorothy’s own character. The woman who emerges from these pages is complex, passionate and creative: Wilson describes her as a Cathy to William’s Heathcliff.

When Dorothy was six and William seven, their mother died, and Dorothy was separated from her four brothers and sent away to live with an aunt in Halifax. Aunt Elizabeth was kind but Dorothy was never to see her childhood home in Cockermouth again, she wasn’t even allowed back for Christmas. It’s hard to imagine the traumatic effect this must have had on her; it certainly laid the ground for her lack of self-esteem and her need to construct a happier existence through writing. At the age of fifteen, three years after her father’s death, she was sent to live with her grandparents as ‘a professional poor relation’. The grandparents were a ‘joyless’ pair who found Dorothy ‘wild and intractable’; however, Dorothy was now able to become reacquainted with her brothers, whom she had not seen for nine years. She immediately formed a close bond with William, a bond that was to have many of the elements of romantic love in it, for they found themselves in each other.

When William went away to Cambridge to study, Dorothy missed him enormously. Fortunately, after eighteen months she was invited to live with her uncle and his new bride in Norfolk, where she quickly became indispensible as ‘head nurse, housekeeper, tutoress of the little ones or rather superintendent of the nursery’ as her aunt gave birth to a new baby every year. However, she and William corresponded constantly and became even closer. In 1794, aged twenty-two, Dorothy left her uncle’s Norfolk rectory to go for a ‘pilgrimage’, a long walk, through the Lake District, and after this they set up house together in a string of different places, ending in Dove Cottage.

Dorothy began writing the Grasmere Journal for William to read. Far from being artless, her diary entries were the products of intense and accurate observation and careful selection of words. Wilson contrast them with her letters to her childhood friend Jane Pollard. In the letters, Dorothy’s ‘emotions are fashionably exaggerated’; they are ‘so different from the sharpness, shyness, and indirection of her journal entries that it is sometimes hard to believe they are by the same woman’. Wilson notes that occasionally Dorothy wrote two versions of the same day’s events in her journal, evoking quite different emotions. She portrays Dorothy and William’s intense love for each other as symbiotic and feeding off each other. There are echoes of the journals in William’s poetry of the time. Had Mr Mybug been a feminist, he would have undoubtedly claimed that Dorothy wrote William’s poems. The more likely explanation is that William and Dorothy discussed their impressions together before writing them down, or that William read her journal entries and used phrases from them in his own work. Dorothy was valued not only by William, but also by Coleridge and De Quincey, by all who knew her, for her great responsiveness, her sensitivity to what she saw and heard.

(A page from the Grasmere Journal, showing a description of daffodils at Ullswater; the Wordsworth Trust; found here)

After William’s marriage the fire went out of Dorothy’s writing and she seems to have subsided into a more conventional rôle as maiden aunt, helping with the upbringing of the children. Wilson argues that she should not be seen as a ‘victim of nineteenth-century femininity’, yet it is simply impossible not to wonder what her literary career might have been had she had the opportunities of her brother. It does seem at least she has finally received the biography she deserved; Wilson really is an exemplary researcher and writer and as well as looking out for a copy of Dorothy’s Grasmere Journal, I’m keen to read more of Wilson’s work.

Sometimes a Wild God, by Tom Hirons and Rima Staines

The wild god stands in your kitchen.
Ivy is taking over your sideboard;
Mistletoe has moved into the lampshades
And wrens have begun to sing
An old song in the mouth of your kettle.

This lovely little book is an illustrated poem: the words are by Tom Hirons and the pictures by Rima Staines. For me, it’s a work which requires both elements, word and image, to make it as special as it is. The ‘you’ of the poem, who stands for us all, has banished the wild god from his or her safe, modern life; what happens when the wild god returns? (A wild and rather fun party, although a wren in my kettle would be a little inconvenient and I’m not sure I’d like to cough up snakes.)

You can buy copies of Sometimes a Wild God and read more about it and its creators at Hedgespoken Press, which is run by Tom and Rima.

shiny new victorian fairy tales

(‘Sipping their Cups of Dew’, ‘Acheta Domestica’, Episodes of Insect Life, Vol. II (London: Reeve and Benham, 1850); taken from Melanie Keene, Science in Wonderland: The Scientific Fairy Tales of Victorian Britain (Oxford: OUP, 2015))

I love holidays. I love not working and lounging about in the sunshine and reading lots and not getting dressed until lunchtime and playing with my daughter. I have never understood people who say they’d still work if they won the Lottery. I wouldn’t!  I remember on the teacher-training course I followed, all the trainers said sternly that if you wanted to be a teacher because of the lovely long holidays, you Wouldn’t Last Long in teaching. ‘Bother’, thought I, but three years down the line I’m still hanging in there and yes, enjoying the holidays; perhaps there are exceptions to that rule.

So, just in case you aren’t a teacher or don’t have a child at a Belgian school, I should tell you that the last two weeks have been Easter holidays and thus I have not really strayed near the computer. I am sure that you all know by now that the latest wallet-worrying edition of Shiny New Books is out and as usual stuffed to the gills with good things.

I have two reviews in there this time. The first is a new collection of Victorian fairy tales edited by Michael Newton. This was terrific fun and highly recommended: there are other similar collections but this one contains stories not in print anywhere else and a really good introduction by Newton. The other is Science in Wonderland, by Melanie Keene, an exploration of what happens when nineteenth-century enthusiasm for science meets fairy tales and produces some truly bizarre educational texts for children. The dreadful photograph at the beginning of this post is from there (taken by me, as are all the pictures in this post).

Melanie Keene mentions an album by two Victorian teenagers, Madalene and Louisa Pashley, pages from which were published in 1980. The album sounded so appealing I had to track down a copy, of course not much effort with the internet. Madalene and Louisa were enthusiastic entomologists, and their album, lavishly illustrated with their watercolours, outlines some of their adventures (bizarrely written in the personae of middle-aged spinsters). The sisters often shrink to insect size. Their adventures include ‘DARING NIGHT EXPEDITIONS’, lassoing glow worms, being outwitted by a grasshopper and capturing a dragonfly, all very dramatic. However, their lives are complicated by a succession of irritating governesses (‘none of them was interested in beetles and all of them persisted in setting us SUMS’), their ‘sour’ older sister Georgie whose mere presence causes it to rain, a staid drawing master and their admiral Papa, whose duties consist of ‘discussing repairs to ships of the line, and making arrangements for DINNER PARTIES and croquet matches’. Were I not a teacher with lots of holidays, I think I’d be an admiral, that’s a job I could manage. It all ends happily: ‘After that Papa decided that we were too old for governesses and too idle for drawing masters so we were able to entomologise as much as we liked with no one to bother us.’

(The book is The Adventures of Madalene and Louisa: Pages from the Album of L. and M.S. Pasley, Victorian Entomologists, introduced by Tim Jeal, London: William Collins, 1980, should you be interested.)

Sonnet, by Edward Herbert, Lord Herbert of Cherbury

You well compacted Groves, whose light and shade
    Mixt equally, produce nor heat, nor cold,
    Either to burn the young, or freeze the old,
But to one even temper being made,
Upon a greene embroidering through each Glade
    An Airy Silver, and a Sunny Gold,
    So cloath the poorest that they do behold
Themselves, in riches that can never fade,
    While the wind whistles, and the birds do sing,
While your twigs clip, and while the leaves do friss,
While the fruit ripens which those trunks do bring,
    Sensless to all but love, do you not spring
    Pleasure of such a kind, as truly is
A self-renewing vegetable bliss.

(1620, ‘Made upon the Groves near Merlow Castle’; from Henry Woudhuysen (ed.), The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse 1509–1659, selected and with an introduction by David Norbrook; London: Penguin, revised edition 2005)

On Shakespeare’s anniversary I am not posting a poem by him... Today is also England’s national day, and what could be more English than a daydream of horticultural perfection from the gardens of a castle? Although maybe the castle was in Wales.

I am fond of these country house poems, Marvell’s ‘The Garden’ and Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ are also lovely, and I particularly like the couplet: ‘While the wind whistles, and the birds do sing, / While your twigs clip, and while the leaves do friss’, they sound very spring-like.

To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface, by Olivia Laing

Memory is a funny business. Sometimes, moving through water, I feel I’m washed of all thoughts, all desires: content to luxuriate like a starfish, rocking on my own pulse, sensate to no more than the wavering light as it sinks through space to reach my eyes. I might as well have never been born; I’m not sure I know even my name. And then, on other days, the opposite occurs. There have been times when, sunk in a river or a chalky sea, I have felt the past rise up upon me like a wave. The water has loosened something; has dissolved what once was dry; weighted as if with lead, it filters now through my own veins. The present is obliterated, but what the eye sees, what the ear hears, it is not possible to share.

One midsummer, after the end of a love affair, Olivia Laing packs up some oatcakes, a large cheese, maps and ‘a pair of sandals of unparalleled hideousness’ and walks the river Ouse in Sussex, from source to sea. On her way she opens herself to experiencing life around her – the insects, the falling sparrowhawk, the wave of pollen drifting towards her across a field – and yet also meditates on the past – memories of visiting this river with her lover Matthew, industries now fallen into disuse, fossils, the draining of the marshes. Most of all, the book is haunted by the spirit of Virginia Woolf and Woolf’s own sensitivity to landscape and water.

Laing writes that she had spent the previous spring obsessively reading Woolf’s work and notes her preoccupation with water and its metaphors. ‘Woolf’s metaphors for the process of writing, for entering the dream world in which she thrived, are fluid: she writes of plunging, flooding, going under, being submerged. This desire to enter the depths is what drew me to her, for though she eventually foundered for a time it seemed she possessed, like some freedivers, a gift for descending beneath the surface of the world.’ During her journey Laing returns to Woolf’s work again and again, and her response to it is always sensitive and acute, bringing the novelist into the landscape and then freeing her from it.

Place was one of the sticking points in Laing’s failed relationship, as she is rooted in Sussex and he in Yorkshire. She grew up there, lives in Brighton and has regularly visited parts of the Ouse for years, although never before has she walked its length. She feels the land in her bones. Her observations of the countryside are beautiful; very precisely and knowledgeably written. She can identify birds by their song, neatly dissect an owl’s pellet and effortlessly list the plants she passes:

The field ended in a double ditch, and from it grew a mass of flowers in a profusion of colours and forms, such as is seen trimming the edges of medieval manuscripts. Black medick, I counted, buttercup, horsetail, ribwort plantain, hedge woundwort, musk mallow and curled dock, the clustered seeds a rusty brown. Wild rose, dandelion, the red and white deadnettle, blackberry, smooth hawksbeard and purple-crowned knapweed. Interspersed with these were smaller, more delicate flowers: cut-leaved cranesbill, birdsfoot trefoil, slender speedwell, St John’s wort, heath bedstraw, tufted vetch and, weaving in and out of the rest, field bindweed, its flowers striped cups of sherbet-pink and white. The stem of the knapweed was covered in blackfly, and a spider trap shaped like a dodecahedron had annexed a few pale purple flowers of vetch inside swathes of tight-woven web.

I particularly like the use of ‘trimming’ in that passage, which seems to me to work in both its senses: creating a bright border to the ‘text’ of the field and also shaping, as all this land is trimmed by the hand of man.

The landscape is physically marked by history but it also acts as a receptacle for memory in a less tangible way. As she walks and loiters and dips into the Ouse’s waters, Laing’s mind wanders. She traces her love of rivers and faint mistrust of woods to a spooky encounter with The Wind in the Willows, and this triggers a diversion into the life of Kenneth Grahame. Seeing bees, she ruminates on the Woolfs’ marriage, on Derek Jarman and his garden at Dungeness. Horsetail, ‘the living link between our own age and that of the dinosaurs’, leads her on to Gideon Mantell, who found traces of the iguanadon nearby in the early nineteenth century. She settles into a wallow and thinks about John Bayley and Iris Murdoch (marriages are something she thinks about quite a lot). The marshes sigh over the drowned knights who fled the Battle of Lewes and the army of Simon de Montfort, and death – Virginia Woolf’s, a farmer’s, a rat’s, our own – is never far away. Nor are other worlds and their visitors. Laing recalls Odysseus’ descent into the underworld, Dante’s tour of the Inferno, and the strange realms encountered by Cherry of Zennor and True Thomas. In a way this walk, this ‘journey beneath the surface’, is Laing’s version of this, a physical and intellectual descent into a world apart which may provide consolation, understanding. Thus the book is structured around a very particular locale but constantly moving outwards, absorbing new material, perhaps like a river too.

Essentially backward-looking as much of Laing’s journey is, reminders of the present are often rude shocks. A landfill site where Asham, the Woolfs’ home, once stood, disfiguring the hillside; a woman ranting and swearing in a pub garden. As the walk progresses and Laing spends more and more time alone with her thoughts and birdsong and bright air, one senses in her a growing distaste with the mass of humanity, mindlessly consuming and destroying. Even so, as she reaches her destination, she feels ‘as purely happy as I’ve ever been’.

But that’s how we go, is it not, between nothing and nothing, along this strip of life, where the ragworts nod in the repeating breeze? Like a little strip of pavement above an abyss, Virginia Woolf once said. And if she’s right, then the only home we’ll ever have is here. This is it, this spoiled earth. We crossed the river then and pulled away, and in the empty fields the lark still spilled its praise.

(The rather tiny photograph of Olivia Laing is from the Marsh Agency's website.)