Deer Island - Neil Ansell

'Deer Island' came to me as a review copy from Little Toller Books, they asked if I'd like a copy and as everything I've read from them has been excellent I naturally said yes please before they had a chance to change their minds. When I read the brief description of Ansell as a man who had lived and worked with the homeless in London staying in squats interspersed with brief escapes to Jura I was reminded of people I had known but not much taken to in my own teens and twenties so was ready to disapprove. It is however a short book - only 96 pages, and there's no better invitation to step outside of your reading comfort zone than a short book.

What happened in the end is that I read it twice, the first time pages at random whilst the book sat on my kitchen table for a couple of weeks - a few page with every solitary cup of tea or at breakfast, the second time I read it properly from start to finish over a couple of hours. Both readings marked this book out as something special. The beginning is, I think, a happy ending - it describes a settled sort of life in Brighton, the actual ending is altogether bleaker, or would be without that beginning. 

There is something about Ansell that reminds me of Gavin Maxwell, I don't think there's a  particularly obvious parallel here unless it's a sort of lost boy quality (I've put Ansell's earlier book on my wish list, it'll be interesting to see if the impression continues) but it's meant as high praise. Life amongst London's down and out's sounds intense but occasionally familiar; working in a city centre you soon get to recognise and be recognised by the down and outs, when I first worked in town I had quite a lot of friendly contact with local beggars, changing their coins into notes helped them out (and saved us in banking fees). Every 18 months or so though you would realise a familiar face had gone. I hope some got off the streets and generally found more stable lives, with most you simply watched a process of physical disintegration which could never end well. I found this depressing observing it from the relative distance of the shop door, I can only imagine what it does to you when you live right in amongst it all.

Ansell's way of dealing with it seems to have been to travel, sometimes to far flung corners of the globe, but periodically to Jura on the west coast of Scotland. Unless you fly at least part of the way getting to Jura is basically a two day process from London - which when you think about how small Britain is, makes you realise how remote it is, the process of getting there gives the traveller ample time to feel removed from whatever it is they're leaving behind and to adjust to what they'll find when they arrive - which in city terms is a whole lot of nothing but geography.

As this post rambles on I really wish I had Ansell's skill for succinctness. It's a book about losing and finding things within yourself, but far less pretentious than that sounds. It's also a very good book, one that should be sought out, enjoyed, and meditated over. 

Apple Acre - Adrian Bell

When I first became interested in wine rather than just in drinking it I was lucky to find myself in one of the best places in the world to learn about it. If you live in a wine producing country you get the wine from that country and generally very little else. Here in the UK we get the lot, and even better for me my first wine job was with a company that prided itself on discovering new things and was also small enough to buy in little parcels of wine. Each shop might only get a couple of cases but we could try wines made by producers who were both innovative and artisan in their approach, sometimes they pushed the bounds of eccentricity, bit they always made great wine. Now I work for a supermarket where you can buy excellent wines at prices that are basically fair to producer, retailer, and customer, but which essentially favours the larger producer. If you want wines from the little guys it comes at a price, of course not choosing to pay that price creates a different sort of cost - we lose choice, diversity, and sometimes the chance to imagine a different sort of lifestyle.

'Apple Acre' first came out in 1942, it roughly follows the seasons and events in a farming year on Bell's Smallholding in Suffolk and is full of details of family life as well as the authors own philosophy about how to live. It's a big slice of nostalgia for a way of life which wasn't destined to survive the war, as well as a little bit of myth making about what we were fighting for. 

When I was the same age as Anthea Bell is in the book our lives were really quite similar, the difference that 35 years had made was that my father had a dilapidated tractor, but we grew vegetables, cut hay, and peat to keep us warm in the winter, kept hens, sheep, and at various times cows and a pig. My mother baked bread and scrubbed the old oak table in the kitchen afterwards, she was also the one that dealt with the rabbits and hares that dad sometimes shot. The other difference was that my parents couldn't make it pay and eventually went their separate ways. Farming in Shetland is marginal, I'm grateful for the memories of those childhood years, in many ways they were idyllic, and just as Anthea Bell describes in her introduction they felt like a privilege though I wouldn't choose it for myself now.  

I'm sharing this because there are a few ways to read 'Apple Acre', what I took from it is coloured by my own experience and ideals. On one level this is very much a book of it's time and reading it now it's close to the sort of fiction that Persephone publish. Here in the middle of war is an oasis where nothing matters compared with the weather. If the Germans had invaded the harvest would still have needed to be gathered in the autumn, seeds sown in the spring. It's a world where a family can live with pride and dignity on a few acres despite the struggle, rooted to the earth, timeless. Bell doesn't pretend it's easy but he makes you believe it's worthwhile, worth fighting for, and above all real with family and future generations at the heart of all the effort. 

Seventy years later it doesn't always feel like we've learned very much. In Shetland this summer the fate of the local dairy is in question, it could supply the islands with all their milk needs but is struggling because people are buying imported milk from the supermarkets. I don't blame Tesco for this - they sell Shetland Dairy products alongside the stuff they bring in but I question the choices people make when they decide not to buy local produce especially when it means a choice between independence and dependency. Bell warns about the dangers of becoming separated from our food source and advocates the value of recycling and reusing. He talks too of the value of knowing your limits - a well run allotment might do better for you than a more ambitious small holding. 

Those niche wine producers convinced me years ago that there really is a place for the small farmer. Small probably means you'll never make a fortune, but it doesn't mean you can't make a living, if you're lucky you can do it on your own terms and make it interesting for everyone. For me that's worth supporting. This is a lovely book and a timely reissue, Bell's philosophy is firmly on the agenda at the moment - the more people who think about it the better.  

Fresh Woods Pastures New - Ian Niall

Little Toller Books continue to be the find of the year, nature writing can be a tricky thing - I have a stack of books I've failed to get very far with, books without humour but heavy on philosophy and written in an overly lyrical style (books that shall remain nameless here because they deserve no sort of encouragement), but when it's good you can find a book that changes the way you look at the world.

'Fresh Woods Pastures New' is just such a book (or books, originally it was two very short books). Ian Niall was the pen name of John McNeillie who wrote over forty books and contributed 'a countryman's notes' to Country life for many years, so predictably I'd never heard of him but 'Fresh Woods Pastures New' is mostly a look back at growing up in Galloway in south-west Scotland. I don't know Galloway particularly but I love the Scottish borders and that's what attracted me to this one. (I should say - in case it sounds like I have far to much of a fetish for Scottish books going on that whilst I happily pictured the landscape that I know and love whilst reading this, part of it's appeal is that it could have been written about any farm.)

What Niall writes about is his personal Eden - North Clutag farm, as it was when tenanted by his grandfather. Sent there as a boy in the 1920's to escape an outbreak of meningitis in Glasgow it becomes the place where he spends every holiday as he grows up learning the landscape intimately as he does so. The young Niall was a keen poacher so his days are filled with illicit trips into the woods and over the moors in search of every sort of game from eels in the burn to pheasants for the pot. Nobody can know a patch of land like a man whose spent hours hours observing a gorse bush to see where exactly under it a bird has her nest. He knows the rat runs in the farm, where the stoats live in the dry stone wall, and where to find a plovers nest. This is a boy who kept pet hedgehogs and disgraces himself by shooting an owl, one who'll find himself half way across a field before he's really woken up - and only then by the crack of his shotgun after an early rabbit. He's also a man who understands the importance of a whole ecosystem (though that's not the word he uses) and the need to maintain  balance within it.

'Fresh Woods Pastures New' is in part an elegy for a way of life already over by the time it was written - by the 1950's tractors would surely have been the norm, rather than horses, to do the heavy work; a way of farming that had to an extent accommodated wildlife fast being replaced by mechanised efficiency and pesticides. Niall doesn't often explicitly condemn modern methods - for the most part he ignores them choosing instead to recall the past, but he does mourn the loss of woodlands, though even when he does this he manages to avoid being sentimental. This is a book bathed in nostalgia but always grounded by the presence of a shotgun and an awareness of the food chain.

Niall writes beautifully, and according to his son with very little editing or revision - this I can well believe the book reads like a man reminiscing in conversation. It's attractive but calls for sustained concentration - this wasn't a book that I could read for hours, without a narrative my attention wanders and when I'm reading about nature it generally wanders straight out the window to look at a tree or similar - which is part of the pleasure. After reading 'Island Years Island Farm' I ended up buying three copies as presents, by the end of the year it will probably be more, 'Fresh Woods Pastures New' has the same quality - it makes me long to share it with other people.          

Ring of Bright Water - Gavin Maxwell

Little Toller Books have turned out to be a joyous discovery - and one more reason to be thankful for Gavin Maxwell. My original copy of 'Ring of Bright Water' started to fall apart last time I read it and is now kept for sentimental rather than practical reasons. For a while the only version in print was an abridged amalgamation of 'Ring of Bright Water' and its two sequels; 'The Rocks Remain', and 'Raven Seek Thy Brother', it's not a format that appeals to me so I was delighted to find Ring not only back in print, but in such a handsome form. The cover illustration is particularly apt - it's a detail from Winifred Nicholson's 'Bonnie Scotland' and I'm assuming it's a view from Maxwell's Camusfearna (she was a regular visitor and if I had an outrageous amount of money I would have loved to buy this) and I can't imagine anything capturing the spirit of the book better.

I've read 'Ring of Bright Water' any number of times and each time it's a slightly different book, undoubtedly because each time I'm a different person so there were surprises. Memory associates it exclusively with otters and the small patch of the highlands Maxwell came to call home but the otters don't appear until half way through, the whole first half of the book is an evocation of Camusfearna (really Sandaig, but Maxwell wanted to protect his privacy and the place he writes about has become so much a place of fable that his name for it seems more appropriate than a specific geographical location).

The way he tells it he was casually handed the keys to his spirtual home by a friend from university days whilst he (Maxwell) was attempting to earn a living as a portrait painter after the failure of the Soay project. It's love from the beginning and so begins a new phase of life, the chance find of a barrel top from the shark fishery leads to the writing of 'Harpoon at a Venture' and the death of his dog Jonnie leads to the search for a new animal companion. On a trip amongst the marsh Arabs of Iraq with Wilfred Thesiger he buys an otter cub, she doesn't live long but just before he leaves the country he acquires another - it's the beginning of an obsession which will last for the rest of his life. The otter section of the book is both funny and heartbreaking. Mijbil the otter who barely makes it back to the UK alive is with him for a year and a day before his untimely end.  

The grief that colours the whole book is at it's rawest re-living that year and its aftermath. Mijbil was an otter sub species previously unknown to science and so is named after his owner - as Maxwell says "he belonged to the only race of living creature that was ever likely to bear my name", he's aware that the love he lavished on that beast makes him slightly ridiculous but he's prepared to expose himself to it anyway. 

There are a hundred things I could say about this book, but as I've been told the quotes I chose from 'Harpoon at a Venture' were stomach churning I'll leave the last words to Maxwell to redress the balance and because they sum up how I feel about the book as a whole.

"It is October, and I have been for six unbroken months at Camusfearna. the stags are roaring on the slopes of Skye across the Sound, and yesterday the wild swans passed flying southwards low over a lead-grey sea. The ring of tide-wrack round the bay is piled high with fallen leaves borne down the burn, and before a chill sea wind they are blown racing and scurrying up the sands. the summer, with its wild roses and smooth blue seas lapping white island beaches, is over; the flower of the heather is dead and the scarlet rowan berries fallen. Beyond are the brief twilight days of winter, when the waterfall will thunder white over flat rocks whose surface was hot to bare feet under summer suns, and the cold, salt-wet wind will rattle the windows and moan in the chimney. This year I shall not be there to see and hear these things; home is for me as yet a fortress from which to essay raid and foray, an embattled position behind whose walls one may retire to lick new wounds and plan fresh journeys to further horizons. yet while there is time there is the certainty of return."

Island Years Island Farm - Frank Fraser Darling

There's an island theme emerging at the moment - I'm on a roll and enjoying it so there's more to come. 'Island Years Island Farm' felt like a book that had been waiting for me most my adult life - it's curious that amazon have never tried to make me buy it, as it was I saw it when I was eyeing up a new copy of 'Ring of Bright Water' (there was a display of Little Toller Books - it's a fantastic looking series of classic nature writing and worth looking up here).

This was one of those books that it surprises me not to have met long ago. Googling Frank Fraser Darling doesn't reveal much either, there is a standard blurb about his work in the Scottish islands with his wife Bobbie but very little more. It seems that he was a prominent environmental campaigner, researcher, philosopher, and visionary. Clearly a much respected man and I wonder if that's why there's not more information about his personal life, normally this wouldn't bother me but this is an intimate sort of book, and from the moment that the introduction by his son Alisdair referred to Bobbie as his fathers first wife I was curious. From what little I've found the Fraser Darling marriage broke down not long after the original publication of 'Island Farm' and Frank went on to have two more wives and three more children. It's pertinent because 'Island Farm' is full of plans for a future that clearly never happened and I was left wondering what happened to the croft on Tanera Mor.

Indeed it's the only (very little) fault (and perhaps only in my eyes) with the book and it's presentation - originally two books 'Island Years' and 'Island Farm' Little Toller have melded them into one (this isn't an omnibus) the joins are pretty seamless, the time line is sometimes a bit confusing, but I think that may have been the case anyway and the Scottish one didn't notice any discrepancies (he's generally far more pedantic than I am). I think there should be a little bit more about what Bobbie went on to do with her life in the introduction, she's a shadowy but crucial part of the narrative, I hope she went on to do something that made her happy.

For anyone who's ever dreamed of living on a remote island or bit of coast line this is a must read book. The Fraser Darlings met at agricultural college in the twenties and quickly married. Frank went on to do a Ph.D in Edinburgh before heading off to research red deer in the highlands. It seems that he and Bobbie had a love of wild places and dreamt of living on an island. Eventually they got funding to study bird life on Eilean A' Chleirich and went off with a small child in tow to live in a couple of tents for more months than would seem feasible. After Eilean A' Chleirich came stints on North Rhona, Treshnish, and finally Tanera Mor where they  rescued a derelict croft, and as war breaks over the rest of Europe Frank and Bobbie labour to bring it back into production. (Frank was considered to old for active service and then manages to break his leg on his way to milking a cow, but a sense of guilt and frustration is palpable as news keeps coming through of friends being blitzed or taken prisoner).

Otherwise my own experience tells me that this is a particularly accurate view of Island life in Scotland. There is the almost constant presence of the wind with the corresponding wonder of a calm day. The rewards of living so close to not just land, but also sea, and sky when you have to learn to accommodate to the environment around - if the wind blows and the tide is against you there's sometimes no way off an island. If you can accept that though the pay off is seeing things denied to others, knowing a place intimately shore to shore and having it's secrets revealed to you, that and a very primitive satisfaction in being the only ones to see it.

Although written in the 1940's it's only very rarely that this book feels like a period piece, mostly because if you choose to live somewhere very isolated not much has changed - links to the outside world are still sometimes tenuous and the weather can still cut you off. The thought of casting off possessions and expectations to live an entirely stripped back kind of life is seductive despite the sacrifices it would call for (although I have no romantic illusions about living in a tent and don't suppose I would thrive as a small holder). 'Island Years Island Farm'  is after everything a timely read though. It's salutary to realise that the message to reduce, reuse, recycle is old, old, news. There's a lot to think about in this book, as well as a lot of entertainment (and for me at least a lot of nostalgia). I can't recommend it highly enough.