Vesper Flights. Helen MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ and the signs were very close. Each weekday morning I’d stare out of the window as the army land approached and wait for the words to appear so I’d have another chance at them. And the feeling I had then, of wanting to apprehend something important that was passing by me very fast: that’s the feeling I have now when I look for the place behind the motorway fence where I grew up.

      I was five in my first summer in the Park. It was 1976. Cape daisies bloomed and died in the flowerbeds, and pine cones in the trees behind the house crackled and split through endless indigo afternoons. Standpipes, orange squash, dry lawns, and a conversation in which the matter of drought was explained to me. That’s when I realised for the first time that not every year was the same, or perhaps that there were such things as years at all. My parents had bought this little white house in Camberley, Surrey, on a 50-acre walled estate owned by the Theosophical Society. They knew nothing about Theosophy but they liked the house, and they liked the estate too. There’d been a castle here once, or Squire Tekel’s early nineteenth-century approximation of one, all faux-gothic battlements and arrow slits, peacocks and carriages. After it burned down the Theosophists bought the grounds in 1929 for £2,600 and set about turning it into a place for them to live and work. Residing here was a privilege, the residents were told. A privilege for service. Members built their own houses, bought tents for a campsite and a second-hand Nissen hut from the Army to put there too. They grew food in the walled kitchen garden; opened a vegetarian guesthouse. In the 1960s, after leaseholders were granted the right to purchase the freeholds of their properties, outsiders like us slowly began to populate the place.

      Theosophy had been banned in Nazi Germany, so many of our neighbours were refugees from the war, and others were the black sheep of good families: elderly women, mostly, who had refused the roles society had reserved for them: the quiet Lolly Willowes of Surrey Heath. One wore ancient Egyptian jewellery she’d been given by Howard Carter; another kept a great auk egg in a drawer. Spies, scientists, concert pianists, members of the Esoteric Society, the Round Table, the Liberal Catholic Church, the Co-Masonic Order. One former resident sent his beard clippings back from Nepal to be burned on the estate bonfire. On discovering that I had gone to Cambridge, another, years later, 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. СКАЧАТЬ