Autumn Forest

JOURNAL ENTRY

 26^th October, Thursday.

“Darkness.
Mizzle transforms the water
Into star-fields of pinpricks of light.
Evanescent.

Like walking
Through the tangle
Of watery
Spiders’ webs.

A dance of tiny droplets
In the torchlight’s beam.
Cloud-walking
Beside the canal.”

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

Outside, Orion is climbing the lip of the eastern skyline. To the south, the Hunter’s Moon with Jupiter at her side is hiding stealthily among long banks of cloud, that form the shapes of desert islands. Her light, warm with the blush of orange and pink, paints the fields with long shadows. There’s a peaceful stillness in the air. Smoke lazily curls straight upwards. Two owls call.

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into the darkness to you wherever you are.

 It's a calm night, but a dampness hangs in the air. So come inside where it's warm and cosy. There's a tired but happy dog to greet you. Make yourself comfortable while I get the kettle on. I am really glad to see you. I was hoping you'd make it. Welcome aboard.

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS  

This week, skies remained bruised and storm battered. But from time to time you get that particular light and shades of blue that you really only get around the equinoxes – although we are now over a month past the autumn one.   

Clocks go back this weekend. We go into winter-time, when the dusk gathers early. However, we do get, for a short time at least, slightly lighter mornings. Miles Hadfield states that the Anglo Saxons named this month – Winterfylleð. The fylleð is thought to relate to the full moon of this month (which occurs tomorrow), when it is thought that the full tide of winter once more flows into the year.  However, he also notes that they also called it Wynmonað, the month, he supposes, when wine – and possibly cider and perry were made.

Hadfield also observes that it could just as accurately be called the bonfire month.

[READING]

Mind you, they’d be hard pressed this year. I suppose that this current October could be best described as mild and wet. But even here, Hadfield reminds us that October has been recorded as being statistically the wettest month of the year. Despite the mildness, the dampness in the air has introduced a chilly feel to our mornings and evenings. Night-time temperatures have generally only dipped into the high single figures, nevertheless it has been nice to come in after the evening’s walk and sit in firelight of a warm stove while listening to the night fall outside.    

More and more old friends are returning for the winter moorings here. It was good see Jackie and Pete from the narrowboat Lorna Kelly again. Everybody on the system seems to know Jackie and Pete. One of the lovely things about this type life is the catching up of a year’s worth of news, swopping stories, reminiscing about friends and acquaintances (old and new) in common. There’s something of a timeless feeling to it, as if this type of conversation was started long, long, ago. The sharing of news and stories around wells and common stopping grounds before we humans drifted into a more sedentary life.

Maggie has at last had her clean bill of health following her operation and so we at long last can let her off the lead again and let her run and run and run. Running all the pent-up energy off. She’s been over-joyed and reverted to being an exuberant puppy again. I couldn’t wait to take her on proper walks again and not be too worried about her getting muddy or wet, or pulling on a healing wound. I have to say that we are all really relieved with our lives being back to normal again!

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

AUTUMN FOREST

When I was growing up, a favourite author of mine was Denys Watkins-Pitchford. You might be more familiar with his pen-name, BB. He was a prolific writer from the late 1930s well into the eighties. He was a countryman and naturalist of the old school. A no nonsense, romantically unromantic view of the natural world; avowedly masculine. He had little patience for what he saw as sentimentalising nature – though, like Kenneth Grahame he also held some deeply spiritual, panentheistic views. His chapter in (possibly his most famous children’s book, The Little Grey Men) on Giant Grum (the human gamekeeper) and his encounter with Pan is equal, in my view, to Grahame’s ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’. But he belonged to that class of nature lovers who – to more recent eyes and ears – appear to be almost oxymoronic in their attitude. Lovers of all things wild and natural; a die-hard, huntin’ shootin’, fishin’ types of naturalist. For a long time, he was a regular contributor to the Shooting Times. He was part of that old school of nature writers – like others whom I love like Richard Jeffries – who could incongruously and yet without any sense of irony, write pages on the delicate beauty of a bird or animal, sensitively describing their behaviours and habits, even mourning the fact that they are not as abundant as they once were, before discussing the best ways to shoot it – and at times eat it. Even his pen-name, BB, is taken from the size of shotgun cartridge that he used for shooting geese about whom he writes so touchingly and poignantly as the hounds of heaven in his sequel to The Little Grey Men, Down the Bright Stream.     

Today, he sits rather awkwardly among contemporary nature writers. But then, I would suspect that he would find them just as difficult and out of touch as they would do of him. Apparently, he was one of life’s true gentlemen, polite, kind. Even so, I can almost imagine him, leaning against a gate, puffing with irritation on his pipe and muttering, “Humans are humans and animals are animals. That is how it has always been and that is how it will remain. Animals kill other animals. Humans kill animals. That is the simple way of things.” Even so, I have to admit, as much as I love BB and the others, I find this constant attention to death as the natural pursuit and sport of a true country man maddening and unacceptable. And the word ‘man’ being the operative here. In this world, country women lead very different lives, tied far closer to the home and kitchen. This is not something new. Even as a lad, there were sections in his books that, to me made no sense, jarred in the pictures that I could otherwise recognise and inhabit in my imagination so clearly. What was the point of the death of that bird you seemed to admire so greatly and whose skill at crossing continents and oceans you seemed so much in awe at? Or that fish whose perilous journey from sea to river you have described in such beautiful detail. What have you gain from their deaths? If I can identify BB as one of my earliest guides and teachers who led me into the natural world, he also provided my first lessons in questioning those who taught me. Perhaps that is the greatest thing a teacher can do.     

He combined his encyclopaedic knowledge, wrought from a lifetime of living and working outdoors, of the British (particularly English) countryside with a writing style that was both filled with rich colour and was as sparklingly clear as a mountain stream. In a sentence or even a turn of phrase he could capture a scene or encounter with a bird or animal with such vividness and clarity it could remain in the reader’s mind as if they too had been there – in a way, they had. Certainly, they live long in my imagination. His writings covered many regions of Britain, but he seemed the most at home in the home counties and the counties of central England. His most famous children’s book, The Little Grey Men, Down the Bright Stream, the series on Boland, are set not many miles from here. His writings are scented with beech mast, chalky streams, a fold of fields with a distant edge of ancient woodland and a church spire in the distance.

Perhaps that is what drew me to his writing in the first place. BB wrote about landscapes in which I lived. That were outside when I looked out of the window, where I went to school. As much as, even then, they had a slightly backward-looking old-fashioned feel nevertheless they were about a countryside that I recognised.  BB was suspicious of the modern world and deplored the unchecked encroachment of urbanisation – The Little Grey Men was a heart-felt and passionate protest against habit loss and despoilation of the countryside through development - it is sobering to realise that such calls for environmental and ecological awareness are far from new. Although published in 1942, the message it brings and the warnings it heralds could have been written today.

There’s a further rather tangential but perhaps serendipitous point of contact here. Denys Watkins-Pitchford was the illustrator of Tom Rolt’s classic Narrow Boat that has been so instrumental in raising public awareness of and love for Britain’s canal systems and prompted the reopening and use of many miles of abandoned canals that had fallen into disuse. His black and white etchings arguably show the more romantic – sentimental – side of him. They often depict idealised – but never cloying scenes. Interestingly he always kept his name Denys Watkins-Pitchford for them – no hiding behind a gun cartridge for his paintings and etchings.  

In older life, I reacquainted myself with BB. This time as an adult – discovering a wealth of his writings for an adult audience. The magic and the folkloric elements no longer there, but instead a wealth of learning of a lifetime living within the natural world. As difficult or as jarring as I sometimes found some elements of his writing, it re-awakened my appreciation of his talent and artistry in his word pictures of scenes, events, and encounters.

But, as wonderful as they all are, my heart always returns to BB the children’s author – and to one particular book that will always remain very dear to me; Brendon Chase. I was 10 going on 11, and in my final year at junior school. A large world awaited me in the form of senior school, the tournaments and the many unofficial rites of passage of being a teenager, the gateless gate to adulthood. But there was another world too – a world of which I was already aware – it lay just outside my classroom window. I passed through it every day. A world which, for the rest of my life alternated in its orbit around all other worlds – sometimes being eclipsed by them, and at other times eclipsing them.  

As was the custom at school, most afternoons included reading time, during which the teacher would read to us from a book that they felt we would enjoy. One of these, was BB’s Brendon Chase. Published in 1944, but set in 1922, on the face of it, the story is a simple one. Three brothers, being cared for by a strict and dour maiden aunt in a small village, run away and live wild for eight months in a large, ancient forest. Theirs is a life unfettered and unconstrained – a life completely immersed in the elements and the living forest community. There is only one other human character, the eccentric and rather cantankerous Smokoe Joe, a charcoal burner, who initially is their sworn enemy but who then later becomes their ally.

It is easy to see why such a story should be attractive to children. The reject the stifling conventions of their world, run free under sun, rain, and later frost and snow. Cleverly evading all attempts by the adults (the Olympians in the narrative - perhaps another nod towards Kenneth Grahame) and  who, with the exception of the vicar and Smokoe Joe, are all cast in the role of (rather ponderous and stupid) villains. The local police constable – interestingly named Bunting – epitomises the slow-witted, dull, adult race who seem incapable of appreciating the beauty of what is in front of them. There’s a subtext here. Robin, the eldest, is named after Denys Watkins-Pitchford’s son who had died at the age of seven. It is thought that Brendon Chase is Denys’ way of inviting his lost son into a world he loved so much, teaching him the skills of trapping, butchering, cooking – and all the other skills associated now with survival, but then, simply the natural craft of being alive in the wild. Perhaps, it was also away to help teach his lost son how to navigate his way through that gate into an adult depicted in Brendon Chase as being imbued with far more danger and threat – from dull civility and disconnection - than the forest life ever could.

The outlaws, as they call themselves, quickly find a large hollowed tree in which the live. Their clothes are soon in tatters so they make themselves new clothes from the skins of the animals that they trap. This is a practical life-skills manual as well as a story and a natural history text book. The forest world in which they find themselves, is beautiful, enchanting even. Painted so perfectly in BB’s prose. But it is not a sentimental one. Reading it as an adult, I was struck by the graphic nature of some of the descriptions. I suspect that they were excised for our sensitivities – even in the 60s running around with a gun was not something to be encouraged. But in BB’s world - to live meant the death of others. The elements can be kind, but they can also be cruelly harsh. The boys live rough through the bite of winter. There is that twentieth century aversion of anything the smacks of anthropomorphism or sentimentalisation. This is classic BB writing.

Our school had recently been expanded to accommodate growing numbers. The top year were housed in a demountable – a rectangular – tissue box – or a building that looked like a large static caravan a little way off from the rest of the school building. This was the 60s. Everything was new, sharp-edged, flat-roofed. The classrooms – there were two were joined in the middle by cloakroom, where we hung up our coats on pegs with our names written alongside, where we placed our outdoor shoes and changed into black, rubber-soled plimsols. It was located to the side of the school playing fields. Best of all, the outward facing wall – with windows running down its entire length, faced the chain linked fence that separated the school ground from the neighbouring wood. Few people ever came to that part of the wood and so it was relatively undisturbed. In essence, it acted as a hide. We inside, could look out at the turning seasons, as woodland life carried on unaware of our presence. To a couple of pupils, it was something dark and scary, but to me it was freedom and the real world. I would watch the leaves colour and fall and then burst open like green fireworks. Look at the mosaic carpet of fallen leaves and even smell the fungus scent of leaf mould.

It was the perfect backdrop to listen to Brendon Chase. We were sitting right beside it. Those few weeks are some of the most cherished memories of my school years.

From the moment I started to develop this podcast I have wanted to read from it. I wanted to read the entire thing – but copyright would have prohibited it. But I want to share at least some of it with you.

At the start of the week, I was thinking how we are now well into autumn – and it is clearly autumn – but it feels somehow different to what I normally expect of autumn. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but although clearly autumn, I don’t feel particularly autumnal. My mind immediately – as it usually does at this time of year – drifted back to BB and Brendon Chase. BB’s passages of summer and its languid embrace are captured beautifully, but it is autumn where he excels. Perhaps, then, this is the perfect opportunity to share with you and enjoy autumn coming to Brendon Chase.

This is a particularly wonderful section. The boys feature only in an indirect way. The focus is the ponderous and lumbering, Police Constable Bunting with his trusty bicycle, once again out to try to track the outlaws down.         

[READING]

 True to form, Bunting as someone blind to the ways of the wild ends up comically encountering the wrong side of a fallow buck fuelled with the adrenaline of the rut. But I will say no more than that lest I spoil it for you if ever you get a chance to read it. I highly recommend it.

SIGNING OFF

This is the narrowboat Erica signing off for the night and wishing you a very restful and peaceful night filled with beauty. Good night.

WEATHER LOG