A Claxton Diary: Further Field Notes From A Small Planet
Mark Cocker
Jonathan Cape £16.99
Britain has a long tradition of nature writing. People like Gilbert White, Francis Kilvert, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dorothy Wordsworth strove to crystallise the wonders of nature in a sentence or a phrase, or sometimes just a word.
‘For some time I have been trying to find the right word for the shimmering glancing twinkling movement of the poplar leaves in the sun and wind,’ wrote Francis Kilvert in his diary in Radnorshire on October 7, 1874. ‘This afternoon I saw the word written on the poplar leaves. It was “dazzle”. The dazzle of the poplars.’
Mark Cocker is part of this tradition, and to my mind up there with the greatest. In the introduction to this lovely nature diary, he confesses that, as a young naturalist nearly 50 years ago, his prime ambition was to encounter ‘as many exotic or charismatic creatures and plants as I possibly could across the world: satyr tragopans, tigers, birds- of-paradise, African rock pythons, marine iguanas, morpho butterflies…’.
Britain has a long tradition of nature writing. People like Gilbert White, Francis Kilvert, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dorothy Wordsworth strove to crystallise the wonders of nature in a sentence or a phrase, or sometimes just a word
Having achieved this ambition, he came home to roost, as it were. For the past 17 years he has lived in the tiny village of Claxton, on the edge of the Norfolk Broads. He now believes he can find all he needs in his own back yard. ‘I have come to realise that the extraordinariness in those species is also to be found here in oaks, common toads, blackbirds, brown hares, garden cross spiders, winter gnats. All are equally significant representatives of the processes of life that have a lineage stretching back for 3.8 billion years…’
Reading this reminded me of a conversation I once had with the late P D James, the crime writer, as we sat outside her family beach hut in Southwold, just 25 miles from Claxton. As we listened to the waves breaking, she said: ‘This is the very same sound that dinosaurs would have heard, a hundred million years ago.’
Every day, Cocker walks from his cottage down to the river, and then records what he has seen and heard. Though his diary is personal and particular, it is also written for publication, and carries an evangelical note. ‘The more we enquire, the more we notice what is about us, living and related to us, the more fully and truly we shall live.’
He sets us all a great example. His records of his daily strolls teem with the richness of life. Take his aptitude for conjuring up the noises of birds: a snipe with its ‘notes so rudimentary they’re just dirt made into noise’, or the wigeon’s ‘companionable high whistle – whee – with something of the child down a slide’. Anyone who lives by the seaside will recognise his description of common gulls releasing ‘a high modulated wailing note that is full of emotional ambiguity and occupies that place where hysterical laughter meets despair’.
Watching a herring gull, he notices how ‘the bird would brace itself, legs planted wide, to withstand the impact of its own internal eruption. The head would point down, then up, and, with bill wide open, it would vomit up this huge sea sound that gains in volume as the gorge and head rise heavenwards’.
As you can tell from these examples, Cocker is no dry ornithologist, doggedly listing the birds he has spotted. No: he aims to conjure them back into life on the page, so that even someone like me, with only the vaguest knowledge of birds, finds himself thinking: ‘Oh yes, I remember! I know what he means!’ Of hearing owls, he writes: ‘Like a flash of lightning in the night storm they manage paradoxically to make the darkness clearer but more unfathomable.’ When a flock of geese in a field suddenly takes flight, he says it is ‘as if the field had uprooted and their calls were the landscape itself in full clamour’.
Though he is best known for his writings on birds, he seems just as fascinated by grasshoppers, moths, shrews, mushrooms and trees. He is particularly keen on bumblebees, and observes them with the keenest eye. ‘Their shoulders are dandelion yellow but much of the abdomen is a soft-apricot plush. They look like furry fruit bonbons.’
His enthusiasm for nature is boundless and all-forgiving. ‘I wonder how many people share my passion for brambles?’ begins one entry. In another, having been bitten 23 times by midges, he is led to wonder how such a tiny dot of a thing could manage to puncture human skin. He then realises that there are even reasons to give thanks for midges, for, without them to feed on, the beautiful swallows and wagtails circling overhead would never have come calling.
In one of his occasional excursions away from Norfolk, he spots an ancient goat willow in the Scottish Highlands that ‘was a sapling when the battle of Culloden was fought and some combatants must have passed it on their way to war’.
Back in Norfolk, he stands on the beach at Winterton and watches a couple of seals mating. ‘Seal sex is a highly public and rather fraught business. Even in congress the heads and upper bodies of both animals writhe and, open-mouthed, they snarl and gnash at each other’s face. His scarred neck is covered in gore, her bared teeth curve into a strange sort of smiling grace. Then they slumber down, his flipper on her flank, and she nuzzles in so that their long whiskers momentarily intertwine.’
Mark Cocker has the ability to get straight to the nub of things and, at the same time, to find, as if by magic, the most pertinent analogies
He is alert to the humour in animals and, more specifically, to the humour in man observing animals, particularly when they are having sex. He compares the ‘bulbous mug’ of the male toad to the actor Charles Laughton. ‘Toad sex,’ he observes, ‘is a weird ferment of life and death. The females, which are huge compared with their multiple mates, act like magnets for all that testosterone. Soon she’s entirely smothered in male flesh so that they writhe as a single mud globe.’
The least enviable version of sex is surely offered by the male redback spider, who stands a good chance of being eaten by his mate. ‘Give a final thought to the male redback spiders that actually perform a suicidal sex jump into their mate’s waiting jaws.’ But he is able to find something reassuring even in this grim prospect. ‘By copulating and simultaneously feeding her cannibalistic urges, he fulfils his ultimate genetic destiny but also gives nourishment to the mother of his offspring.’
This is not to say that Cocker is forever sunny. His last book, Our Place, was subtitled Can We Save Britain’s Wildlife Before It Is Too Late? He is upset, and with good reason, at the state of wildlife in our countryside. Many of his observations on the intricate beauties of this bird or that insect come tempered with hard statistics on their recent decline: 65 per cent of lapwings have disappeared since the Seventies, England has been judged the 28th most denatured country on Earth, and so on.
Nor does he hold back from giving a good drubbing to those who take these matters lightly. At one point he pulverises the breezy former Environment Secretary Owen Paterson for saying that developers could offset the destruction of ancient woodland by planting twice as many trees. ‘It suggests a deep indifference or ignorance on his part,’ he writes. ‘It is the equivalent of suggesting that one could knock down Norwich Cathedral as long as one erected a brand-new shiny structure elsewhere that was twice the size of the old one.’
It is this pithiness that I so admire in Mark Cocker’s writing: this ability to get straight to the nub of things and, at the same time, to find, as if by magic, the most pertinent analogies. He is brilliantly descriptive, but never airy-fairy, because he has so much detailed knowledge of his subject.
He regularly follows up a beady description with a wild, glorious overview, followed by an astonishing fact or two. In his entry for February 16, 2016, he observes a local water shrew, ‘all silky dark fur and squirming energy on the water’s duckweed surface’. He then points out that ‘Shrews are all sex and death and astonishing life.’ And he rounds it all off by offering the extraordinary information that ‘The male’s balls can be a tenth of his body weight. A lactating female can eat twice her own weight in a day.’
Hurrah for Mark Cocker!