A long life observing and recording nature in all its glories
PAUL JOHNSON
Iwas fortunate in my childhood, being tended not only by a delightfully gifted and soft-hearted mother but by two devoted sisters many years my senior. So I had in a sense three mothers, all angelic to me, teaching me music and poetry, Greek and Latin, history and drawing, and how to write stories. Last week I attended the funeral of my elder sister Clare, who died in her sleep, without pain or fuss, in her mid-eighties. It was to her, in particular, that I owe my love of nature, of clouds and wild weather, mountains and streams, trees and moorland, and all the creatures which inhabit the untamed parts of our island.
A notable athlete in her youth, she — and I, too, as I grew older — thought nothing of walking 30 miles in a day or going twice that distance on our Raleigh bikes. She had wonderful eyesight and noticed everything, recalling what Coleridge said when he first met Dorothy Wordsworth: Her information various — her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature — and her taste a perfect electrometer — it bends, protrudes, and draws in all subtle beauties and most recondite faults.' She loved looking for four-leaf clovers, several times finding ones with five leaves — even, on a red-letter day, one with six — and in the process often discovered silver threepenny bits and sixpences. On beaches she collected pebbles of rare rock, which she identified and treasured: indeed, she was never without stones in her pockets, to my mother's dismay. She would watch birds for hours and tell me exactly what they were doing and why. When she was 18 she went to Manchester, my mother's old university, to study geography under the great Professor Herbert Fleure. She revered him, sharing his passion for wandering over desolate beaches, collecting evidence of the Earth's long history, and his deep humility in the face of the grandeur and mystery of nature. But her approach was never in the least academic: she learned, all her life, through the senses — touch, sight, smell, taste — and the deductive power of an agile and heterodox intelligence which allowed her to make unusual connections and take daring leaps into knowledge.
More than 60 years ago she went to live in Anglesey, that magic isle of druids and fairies. Progress in many ways has stopped at the Menai Straits, or hurtles through on the high road to Holyhead. She lived outside the beautiful town of Beaumaris, where Edward I built his last castle, and her house was an ancient cottage directly overlooking the beach, at the end of a lane through the woods. There, like Dorothy at Grasmere, she created a garden entirely stocked with local wildflowers, beautifully untidy and elegantly natural. She planted many trees and lived to see them mature. Her knowledge of trees was deep but had very little to do with books. She saw trees, and loved them, not as species but as individuals, to be noticed for their singularities, to be drawn, too, and their leaves preserved. There were few volumes in her home which, when opened, did not reveal pressed flowers or leaves, tiny plants, seeds and pollens, evidence of the collector's instinct and outdoor reading. Like Charles James Fox, her delight was 'to lie on the grass on a sunny day with a good book'.
From Clare's garden there is what I have always regarded as the most spectacular view in Britain. Across the waters is the entire panorama of Snowdonia, for the great hills plunge directly into the sea, in infinite variation of deepest tropical green to azure and Prussian blue, silvered and burnished in strong sunlight, black and threatening on dark days. Then, clouds build up over the peaks into celestial precipices of purple and cyan grey stretching thousands of feet into the stratosphere. The weather is sometimes dazzlingly clear, and these massive hills seem both tantalisingly near and infinitely distant. I have painted them often, and I possess a superb small oil-panel of this view by John Brett, whose wonderful 'Val d'Osta' (Tate) is the most evocative shot at high mountains I know. But the true grandeur of this spectacle cannot be rendered by human hand in two dimensions, and Clare, who in her last years produced exquisite pastels on paper, concentrated on the flowers in her garden and the trees of her own woods.
After the requiem mass and the burial, we all gathered at this delectable spot and ate our lunch in the garden, spilling on to the beach — people of all ages and countless children of a large and still proliferating family, bright, eager faces da771ed by the future before them, talking of schools and universi ties and careers, and older, lined ones, remembering the past, its sorrows and glories. The day was crystalline, the sky lapis lazuli, the blue remembered hills more beckoning than ever. The waters glittered in the sunlight, yachts flickered over the waves, and immense seagulls, spotting our picnic, clamoured in powerful voices for their share. Clare loved these birds, admiring the way in which their bodies were adapted to their rough amphibian life. I once remarked that these gulls were greedy. 'No,' she said, 'no wild creature eats more than it needs. Only humans are greedy.' But Clare was not one of those false friends of the earth who despise humanity. People inspired her curiosity and powers of observation, and not least her wit. She might have said, with Jane Austen, 'Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.'
She was serious, too, about life and nature and art. Always recording what she saw, with pencil, brush, crayon, sometimes painting on the smooth grey stones she found on her beach or producing strange sculptures from driftwood, she also wrote all her long life. In my childhood I often saw her composing her epic poem, 'Finn', based on lore from Iceland and Scandinavia, and from her reading of Beowulf and Gawain, writing each word lovingly in a clear hand, in red-covered school notebooks. This epic was never, I think, quite finished. But many poems were. Her daughters found in her papers a hand-written sonnet, evidently composed just before the onset of her last illness. It was printed in the order for her requiem mass, and I reproduce it here: Beaumaris Road Nearing Beaumaris, where the way swings down,
Often I pause to scan the roadside verge. In quiet neglect, sea-sheltered, random sown, It borders, peacefully green, the traffic's urge. Slowly, from field and wood, from rock and
shore, Silently, small seeds settled, rooted and grew Heedless of passing speed. On that slight floor They leafed, spread, blossomed, fruited — lived anew.
Increasing, binding a firm habitat.
Here, burnished beetles creep, ants nest, bees hum, Worms bite and pull dead leaves; spiders grow fat
Waiting on silvered web, Men go and come All haste: butt with gentle joy may see This little wayside world, busy and free.
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