A Somerset Lad

The lockdown has provided moments to watch the birds, and also moments to contemplate the harsh reality of natural life. BBC Television’s Springwatch programme seems to have as much violence as beauty. The magpies and the gulls outside seem to caw a chorus of endorsement of Chris Packham’s reflections on nature.

The violent reality of the natural world recalled one morning where I arrived back at the house to discover a young crow hopping along on the tarmac, seeking refuge. It reached the wooden fence that separated the drive from the lawn to the rear of the house, and could go no further. It turned and watched me. Stepping from the car, I walked towards it. Stretching out its wings it hopped away. Another crow, that was presumably mother of the young one, flew overhead, screeching loudly.

It seemed it had nothing broken, but was presumably too weak to return to its nest. If it lingered too long at the foot of the fence, a neighbouring cat would make quick work of it. There was an inclination toward trying to catch it and perhaps trying to do something, but what was to be done, though?

There was a memorable film in my teenage years, Mr Forbush and the Penguins. John Hurt played Richard Forbush, a biologist who went to Antarctica to study a penguin colony. Forbush had gone to impress a woman back in London, but in the isolation of his existence and the penguins’ struggle for survival, he develops an empathy for the penguins that makes him deeply resentful toward skuas that come to steal penguin eggs and chicks. Forbush is determined to protect the penguin colony and makes catapult to repel the skuas.

“Retribution is near my fine feathered friends. Make no mistake about that,” he declares to the predators. As he attacks the skuas with the catapult, he shouts, “You’ve asked for it, now you’ll get it! Now it’s your turn! You hear me? Go on, get out! Get out! All of you! Die, damn you! Die! Do you hear me? Die! Die!”

Forbush briefly repels the skuas, but as soon as he ceases his onslaught against them, they return and he realizes that there is nothing he can do against nature working in its own way. Forbush would probably have advised that there was not much to be done for a weak crow.

Leaving the house about an hour later, the young crow was still there. “Shut up, Forbush”, I thought and walked toward it. Its cries brought a whole flock of crows overhead, shrieking their indignation. “Shut up,” I shouted, clapping my hands repeatedly until they dispersed.

Opening the gate in the wooden fence, I herded the young crow toward the opening. It hopped rapidly through the gateway and onto the lawn. Frantic flapping of its wings allowed it to take to the air, like some primitive aircraft it flew no more inches from the ground until disappearing among the trees where its companions perched in sullen silence.

Of course, it probably had as much chance of survival as one of Forbush’s young penguins had against a circling skua. Accepting nature is a difficult thing.

Bird watching is not a happy activity.

The Heart of the Moor, Beatrice Chase’s 1914 novel is set among the Dartmoor landscape where I attended school. Beatrice Chase moved to Dartmoor on the recommendation of her doctor. Her work among the poor in the East End of London had brought the onset of tuberculosis and the moor was considered to have therapeutic qualities. Chase and her mother bought a farm outside of the village of Widecombe in the early 1900s and Chase testified, “the Moor saved my life and transformed me into a robust woman.”

Forty years after her novel was published, Heathercombe Brake School was opened in a house that was four miles from Chase’s farm, among the pupils for whom the school was established were those considered to be “sick and delicate.” I was among those who were to be considered so, and in 1974 was sent by Somerset County Council to attend the small boarding school that was tucked among the Dartmoor hills. I am not sure I was ever “robust”, but I became considerably healthier than I was when I first set in the school is a pale, sickly, underweight teenage boy.

It is Chase herself speaking in the novel when she says that much of the therapeutic quality of rural life lay in its routine:

It is a huge relief to turn . . . to the peaceful routine of farm work. That is no doubt, its main value for healing the ills of soul and body . . . there are the placid, orderly animals, the silent, fruitful fields, all working out their allotted destiny, untroubled by the passions that ravage humanity . . .

Half its value lies in the necessity for regularity, and this imperative regularity is due to the fact that it is life which is calling. When you are dealing with living things, you cannot defer your duties till the next day. Men must be fed, beds made, fires lighted. Animals also must be fed, and watered, and the cows must be milked. The work of the farm, like the work of the house, cannot be postponed for death, marriage, birth, or any other event, however mighty.

Yet neither she nor I were farmers. Beatrice Chase owned a farm worked by tenants, she was free to follow whatever routine she chose, as she herself acknowledges. I was no more than a schoolboy among dozens of others who might have endured the spartan regime of the school, but never had to step out on a cold morning to engage in farmwork.

What was therapeutic was not the routine, ours was one of boredom, but the Moor itself. Beauty, colour, landscape, mystery, fear, danger, incessant change and timeless changelessness, the Moor defied definition. It brought detachment from the world below, awareness of the infinite intricacy of nature, respect for the land and the elements.

Perhaps, the ultimate therapy of such a place, is a reconciliation with one’s own mortality. Chase found that among the hills I would walk in my teenage years. I would take many years before I understood the Moor’s lessons.

“Do you remember when we had the serious lockdown?” The woman talking loudly on her mobile phone was obviously under the impression that the lockdown was over. Perhaps she had been among the twenty per cent of the population who had remained oblivious to the Covid-19 provisions.

At a distance, there was the sound of an ambulance moving through the uncertainty of this Saturday afternoon. The traffic must be much busier than heretofore because the presence of the ambulance would not need to have been announced on empty roads. Its progress must have been impeded by other vehicles because the high pitched wail of the siren was replaced by a deep-throated klaxon sound.

The siren and klaxon were used on the ambulance that carried Dad from home to the hospice. The flash of the blue lights had been reflected in the shop windows of Langport and, as we approached Taunton, the wail and the roar had opened an avenue through the Tuesday morning rush hour traffic.

On 10th March, the world around us was still normal, although caution and hesitancy were becoming commonplace. A week later, people sent their apologies at feeling unable to attend the funeral. Three days after the funeral, schools closed and life as we had known it came to a standstill.

Dad would not have coped with the lockdown, he would have raged at the inconsistencies and the double standards. How can it be safe to visit a house you want to buy but not one where an old person has spent weeks of loneliness? Why couldn’t you buy a plant from an outdoor garden centre but could go indoors to buy them at out of town chain stores? Dad would have told the people on the television screen what he thought of their responses to the crisis.

The standstill stopped time. The calendar says it is 6th June. Dad would have recounted his childhood memory of hearing the evening news on the radio that announced the Allied landings in Normandy. But it could be any date. The wind is cutting. Sharp squalls of rain punctuate the day. Trees dried by drought conditions have prematurely shed leaves.

The pause has revived nature, or perhaps it has made space for nature to be noticed. A pair of dunnocks with their two fledglings hop around the garden, the young crying for the attention of their parents. A squirrel steals nuts from the bird feeder.

A quarter of the year has passed.