3 July 2006 Claxton
The first sound I heard as I walked down the lane was the burbling song of a swallow while it flew overhead. And that’s how dawn came to me, as a sequence of sounds and smells rather than in visual form. On the marsh the scent of new mown grass carried an unmistakable hint of very distant cigar smoke…Then the dawn came in such varied form – the clyping notes of oystercatchers, a crow overhead…But at 3.38 a.m. I caught the first hint of the bird I went to hear. I urge you to enjoy it one more time, because blackbirds will fall silent in about a week and you won’t hear them again until next March. At Claxton they all seem to start together so that the deep, rich, effortless song rose up from the woods all along the marsh edge.
Mark Cocker Claxton: Field Notes from a Small Planet. London: Jonathan Cape, 2014. p99
Indeed, the male blackbirds have fallen silent around here, some of them hiding because of the molt, some of them still visible despite it. For the females, it’s the same. Both sexes trying to get along, feed young, and stay out of the clutches of the resident sparrowhawks.
Speaking of trying to stay quiet and out of the way, those of us who have filed these few reports on books discussed in the coffee shop have been exercising the same caution of late. We have been accused of bringing the coffee shop into disrepute, driving away customers even. Millie and Nic are not too happy about our posts, especially the last one. “No one will want to come here, with cats and birds flying about the place!” She wasn’t exactly shrieking at me, but Millie’s voice was raised a decibel or two. “It’s nice you want to talk about your books and things,” said Nic who wasn’t much of a reader herself, more a gardener, “but you and the others have not been too complementary about the other customers. People will think you can only come here if you want to talk about books.” No use my trying to tell them that not many people read this page. And this didn’t help matters: “And I don’t like being called an old fart!” roared Bill from his corner. Who’d have thought he even knew what the Internet was, never mind a computer. “Lots you don’t know about me…” he muttered.
That’s not all. Some of the few other Marsh people who have been reading these posts are wondering why the books have all been about women writers. There really is no response to this. We haven’t purposefully excluded male writers, in fact we discussed a few including the one who began this post. And, it’s sad, but we know no one would have said a word if we had only discussed works by male authors. That’s all we are going to say about it.
Back to the coffee shop, we may have to let things settle a bit before reporting from there. We don’t ever meet as a formal group, just a loose collection of conversations in the shop. We didn’t think it very interesting, if we gave it any thought at all, to just report on book conversations without any kind of a backdrop or other non-book discussing people. We are hoping Nic and Millie will forgive us…..?
Until that time, a walk around the Marsh recalls other passages from Coker’s book to mind, especially descriptions like these:
The marshes are shimmering tonight. (p107)
or
My acquisition of a tiny wood on the banks of the river Yare has allowed me to renew a transaction with nature that I haven’t enjoyed for forty years. Every time I visit I permit myself the guilt-free pleasure of a thick fistful of plants in flower as a bouquet for the house. Alas, we live in such an age of hands-off environmental anxiety and in a landscape of such intense environmental impoverishment that the practice of gathering wild flowers is now a lost paradise for most of us. PlantLife, the environmental charity devoted to our national flora, suggests that we now have more flower-rich roadside verges than we do wild flower meadows. Sadly the organisation counts its membership in thousands, while the Royal Horticultural society numbers its own in hundreds of thousands. It says so much about our national culture: that plants sown, tended and owned by us are somehow much more engaging than native blooms that spring up spontaneously without our leave. (p106)
This seems an accurate description of the British gardening mania, something that borders on an obsession. So much so that even someone like Rebecca West, not necessarily known for her gardens, made an observation when visiting the States not uncommon to her countrymen and women: Each of these houses had a garage…But at the same time the most incredible unkemptness-no gardens at all-just grass plots…. (p66) (The Selected Letters of Rebecca West. Edited, annotated, and introduced by Bonnie Kime Scott. Yale University Press, 2000).,
Americans, I think, quite like their “grass plots,” the expanse of them. There might be blooms at certain strategic spots, but Americans like space more than anything. And nothing cuts down on space more than big beds everywhere around a yard, carving up the vista.
Elena wanted me to squeeze another book in before ending (I wrote this post because I wrote the last one that set everyone off, so it was my responsibility to apologize…). Another woman, another war book, I’m afraid:
After this incident [a bombing] there was a call for volunteers to help piece bodies together…I was accustomed to the task by now but never lost my violent revulsion, just as it never lost its grim horror. The wardens hated it too, for it was part of their everyday duties to pick up the pieces of their fellow-men and women after the raids. (p163) A Chelsea Concerto by Frances Faviell. Dean Street Press: A Furrowed Middlebrow Book, [first published in 1959].
If anyone is looking to know, really know what it is like to live through a bombing, to come to with your dead friend’s arm around you, and just her arm, to know what is like to be made homeless and alone in the blink of an eye, this is the uncompromising book to read. Not everyone is a hero, or a stalwart, but they came through it together.