Vesper Flights. Helen MacDonald
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inquired of me where I had stabled my horse – for he’d had dreadful trouble finding livery for his hunter while a student there in the 1930s. Everyone had lives and pasts of such luminous eccentricity that my notion of what was, and wasn’t, normal took a battering from which it’s never recovered. I am thankful for that, and for the women in particular, for giving me models for living a life.
But most of all I’m thankful for the other freedoms I had there. After school I’d make a sandwich, grab my Zeiss Jena 8x30 Jenoptem binoculars and strike out for my favourite places. There were ivy-covered walls and specimen trees, redwoods planted to commemorate the death of Lord Wellington – they called them Wellingtonias back then, of course they did – and creosoted summerhouses with fly-specked windows. ‘Arthur Conan Doyle liked to sit here,’ I was told, of the smallest summerhouse beneath the sparse shade of a balsam poplar, the one with original prints of the Cottingley Fairies hanging on its cream-washed walls. There was a round, shallow pond on the Italianate terraces that held an intermittently-broken fountain, smooth newts and great diving beetles, and from which vespertilionid bats dipped to drink at night; a 9-acre meadow with decaying stables on one side, acres and acres of Scots pine, and damp paths obscured by bracken, rhododendrons, swamp laurels with piped-icing flowerbuds, and there were roads that went nowhere, for when the motorway was built on land compulsorily purchased from the Theosophists in the 1950s, it cut the estate in two. I loved those roads. Bare feet on the rotting tarmac down by the straight avenue of sessile oaks that ended in drifts of leaves and a new desire path that curved right to trace the perimeter of the motorway fence. One dead-end lane at the back of the Park had 10-foot sandy banks I’d scramble up towards the vast grey beech carved with hearts and dates and initials, and I was awed by the notion that anyone had found this tree, because I’d never seen anyone near it, ever, and one afternoon I dug up a rotted leather drawstring bag from the humus beneath it that spilled threepenny bits into my hands. There had been glow-worms here, and snipe, and ponds, before the motorway came, I was told. Everything on the other side was already houses.
I was allowed to roam unchallenged because everyone here knew me – though they’d have quiet words with my parents after they’d yet again spotted me knee-deep in the middle of the pond looking for newts, or walking past the guesthouse with a big grass snake, two feet of supple khaki and gold twined about my arms. Reg the gardener took me for rides on his tractor-trailer, and we’d putter down the road singing music-hall songs he’d taught me:
It’s the same the whole world over
It’s the poor what gets the blame
It’s the rich what gets the pleasure
Ain’t it all a bloomin’ shame?
And while Reg rolled a cigarette I’d race off to explore the bracken and scrub in the back woods, where rhododendrons had grown to near-trees with branches shaped by ancient prunings. They were superb to climb when I was small: frames of right-angled kinks and acute wooden curves I could hoist myself into and up, and sit inside a canopy of dark leaves that clicked and pattered with tiny rhododendron leaf hoppers that on closer inspection resembled the brightest of bestiary dragons. In the back woods too was the wood ants’ nest, that glittering, shifting particulate mound which moved from year to year and reeked of formic acid. You could turn blue flowers pink if you tossed them on the top before the ants carried them away, and for a while I’d prepare skeletons of the dead birds I found by folding them carefully in little cages of wire mesh and lodging them on top of the nest. When I pulled them free weeks later they’d been reduced to clean white bone that never quite stopped smelling of ants.
Almost by accident I’d been granted this childhood of freedom and privilege, partly through a quirk of location, partly through my parents’ trust in the safety of this place, and I lived in the familiar setting of so many of my children’s books, from The Secret Garden to Mistress Masham’s Repose, though I wasn’t half as posh as their protagonists. I was a state-school kid running free in crumbling formal parkland that might have been written on paper as metaphor for the contracting Empire, or a wilder life, or social transgression, or any number of dreams of escape forged in the imagination of writers years before I was born.
I didn’t know how unusual my freedom was, but I knew what it had given me. It had turned me into a naturalist. And for a new naturalist like me, the nine-acre meadow was the best place of all. So much of what was there must have arrived in hay brought for long-dead horses, as seeds from lowland meadows: scabious, knapweed, trefoil, harebell, lady’s bedstraw, quaking grass, vetches, diverse other grasses and herbage. And butterflies, too, marooned in this small patch of the nineteenth century: common blues, small skippers, grizzled skippers, marbled whites, small coppers, and grasshoppers that sang all summer and pinged away from my feet. The other side of the meadow was different, and more what you’d expect on acidic soil: a low sea of sheep’s sorrel, stars of heath bedstraw, white moths, small heaths, anthills and wavy hair grass brushed with fog by the sun. I knew that meadow intimately. It was richer, more interesting, had more stories to tell than any other environment in my life. I’d press my face in the grass to watch insects the size of the dot over an ‘i’ moving in the earthy tangle where the difference between stems and roots grew obscure. Or turn over and prospect for birds in the thick cumulus rubble of the sky.
So many of our stories about nature are about testing ourselves against it, setting ourselves against it, defining our humanity against it. But this was nothing like that at all. It was a child’s way of looking at nature: one seeking intimacy and companionship. When I learned the names of these creatures from field guides it was because I needed to know them the same way I had to know the names of my classmates at school. Their diverse lives expanded what I considered as home way beyond the walls of my house. They made the natural world seem a place of complex and beautiful safety. They felt like family.
When you are small, the things you see around you promise you they’ll continue as they are forever, and you measure life in days and weeks, not years. So when the mowers came one day in early August to cut the meadow as they had done every year since the meadow was made, and I saw what was happening, I burned with terrified outrage. There was no time to think about what I was doing. I ran. I stumbled. I sat in front of the mower to make it stop, then mutely, passively, held my ground in front of the bewildered driver, who came down to quite reasonably ask me what the hell I was doing, and I ran home crying. I didn’t understand how hay meadows work. All I saw was destruction. How could I know that the mower’s job was to hold history in suspension, keeping the meadow exactly where it was against the encroachment of heather and birch and time?
Every year the meadow grew back and thrived and was as rich as ever, right up until we left the Park in the 1990s. A decade later, I returned on a grey summer afternoon, nervous of what I would find. Driving up Tekels Avenue the passing scenery possessed the disconcerting, diffuse, offscale and uncanny closeness of things in dreams. I was frightened by what I might see when the car crested the curve down to the field. But there the meadow was: impossible, miraculous, still crowded with life.
Then I went back in my forties, less scared now, more certain of myself and what I would find when I got there. But I was wrong. Someone who thought meadows should look like football pitches had treated it like a lawn and mowed it repeatedly for several years until the exuberant moving life I’d known and loved was gone. The meadow now looked how that man thought it should look: blank and neat and flat and easy to walk upon. I cried when I saw it: a woman weeping not for her childhood, not really, but for everything that had been erased from this place.
Losing the meadow is not like losing the other things that have gone from my childhood: Mac Fisheries, Vesta paella, spacehoppers, school lunches, Magic Roundabout toys, boiled sugar lollipops when I’d finished my meals in roadside café chains on holiday trunk roads. You can mourn the casualties of fast capitalism for your own generation, but you know they’ve merely been replaced with other programmes, other media, other things to see and buy. I can’t do that with the meadow. I can’t reduce it to nostalgia simpliciter. When habitats are destroyed what is lost are exquisite ecological complexities and all the lives that make them what they are. Their loss is not about us, even though when that meadow disappeared,