4th December 2021

 In the darkness of these winter days my mind plays around with odd thoughts.  Listening to Macfarlane in Landmarks and I find he has read all the books I have.  Trying to find  out what it is that makes writers tick. 

What do we experience on our walking out into nature, do we slip off ourselves and allow the spiritual uplift of the scenery to take hold of our bodies.  We relax into the world, some go on physical journeys of 'wellness' but does that inner being we call spirit meet up with wider nature I wonder.  We become One.

Well yesterday as I listened to Macfarlane's musings on two authors I had read, the thought trickled through that not only do female/male interpretations colour our views but also the writing.  The first Richard Jefferies, (1848-1887) an incurable romantic of the countryside, I had read 'Bevis' and 'After London'.  This latter book is a futuristic mythic tale, he has centred it on a great lake on a dystopic landscape, where you walk on the bone dust of people.  

The lake which actually covers a greater part of England in the story, is the much smaller Coate Lake near Swindon, where he roamed freely from his farmhouse home in childhood.  Paul and I walked round it, in those heady days when we first met and he showed me where he had lived.  We visited the little museum with the reconstruction of Jefferies bedroom and the old grandfather clock that had ticked his way through his childhood.  

Bevis on the other hand was a tale of childhood lived by this lake but both captured the absolute joy that Jeffries expressed on the wonders of the natural world.  An ecstatic mood of sheer oneness. There are passages in my blogs that I still come across that thrill with their intensity.

 Macfarlane notes that Jefferies would count the number of wild flowers he would find down his street in the suburbs of London, counting as many as 60 at one go but already realising that they were condemned by the encroachment of our civilisation.  Jefferies minutely observed everything but his life was cut short by tuberculosis and exhaustion.

The other author was female, Jacquetta Hawkes, (1910-1996) another romantic but a mind devoted also to archaeology.  The first woman to study the subject.  I loved her book on the Prehistory of  Britain, her writing was also subtly and emotionally wrought but Macfarlane remembers her for the book 'The Land'.  A strange book, he says of it that she was in an emotional state between the divorce of her first husband Christopher Hawkes and her marriage to the author J.B.Priestley.

She starts the book with the cameo of her lying down in her garden in London, and not in this instance looking to the stars but feeling the billions of years beneath her opening up to that fiery ball we sit upon. It is perhaps that archaeology gave her that love of the solidity of rock, changing from liquid to solid.  Something you will see as you walk any coast, the layers vertical or horizontal strata. Telling of the moment that Earth formed amongst the flames and fire of volcanic rock.

Macfarlane tackled two emotionally gifted authors in the chapter, stressing though that the writing of 'The Land' came from that moment of upset in divorce and remarriage whereas the treatment of Jefferies emotional state is not a given moment of his temperament which must have at times figured on a dramatic religious nature......