The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (29 page)

To me, peace
can
be found in this world, and in nature especially, as much as anywhere; and since Roger Ulrich, thirty years ago, published his arresting discovery that the patients recovering from surgery who could see trees through the hospital window, recovered far faster and more fully than those who could only see a brick wall, as I instanced earlier, we have begun to study formally the beneficial effects of the natural world on the human body and the human mind, and there is now a substantial literature. To illustrate nature’s restorative powers, I could quote from it any number of examples, but following Joseph Conrad’s belief that the influence of the artist is more enduring and goes deeper than the work of the scientist, I prefer to quote a poem. It’s called ‘The Recovery’:

From the dark mood’s control

I free this man; there’s light still in the West.

The most virtuous, chaste, melodious soul

Never was better blest.

Here medicine for the mind

Lies in a gilded shade; this feather stirs

And my faith lives; the touch of this tree’s rind,—

And temperate sense recurs.

No longer the loud pursuit

Of self-made clamours dulls the ear; here dwell

Twilight societies, twig, fungus, root,

Soundless, and speaking well.

Beneath the accustomed dome

Of this chance-planted, many-centuried tree

The snake-marked earthy multitudes are come

To breathe their hour like me.

The leaf comes curling down,

Another and another, gleam on gleam;

Above, celestial leafage glistens on,

Borne by time’s blue stream.

The meadow-stream will serve

For my refreshment; that high glory yields

Imaginings that slay; the safe paths curve

Through unexalted fields

Like these, where now no more

My early angels walk and call and fly,

But the mouse stays his nibbling, to explore

My eye with his bright eye.

I have quoted it in full because I like it very much, and it is not well known, and I think it deserves as wide an audience as possible. It is by Edmund Blunden, one of the poets of the First World War, and what he was recovering from, was what he had seen in the trenches. Blunden went to France as a nineteen-year-old subaltern in 1916 and remained at the front for most of the rest of the war, far longer, in terms of continuous service, than all the better-known poets such as Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, and Siegfried Sassoon; his survival was a miracle. But if
his body escaped unscathed, the wounds to his psyche were monstrous. You can get a vivid sense of them from his account,
Undertones of War
; it is the most restrained of all the famous Great War memoirs, but even so the true ghastliness of what is happening in front of him, of bodies blown to pieces on a daily basis, cannot, willy-nilly, be disguised, and for the rest of his life in academia and the literary world he lived with the horrors, suffering regular nightmares. (His daughter Margi told an interviewer in 2014 that while Blunden’s day was filled with being a literary journalist or a professor, ‘the night was filled with the war.’) What adds to the power of the poem is that the horrific memories are referred to only fleetingly and indirectly – ‘imaginings that slay’ – they rumble in the background, they are distant thunder, and the concentration is instead on everything that eases them, everything that is commonplace and reassuringly familiar about nature; above all, there is a sense of coming home.

Home indeed. For the natural world is where we evolved; where we became what we are, where we learned to feel and to react. It is where the human imagination formed and took flight, where it found its metaphors and its similes, among trees and pure rivers and wild creatures and grasslands rippled by the wind, and also among poisonous snakes and lethal predators and enemies and the unending quest for sustenance – but not among concrete buildings and automobiles and sewers and central heating and supermarkets, for these last are just accretions, add-ons which have been with us merely for the blink of an eye in evolutionary time, no matter how much they now may dominate our lives. Deep down, they mean nothing. It is nature which is the true haven for our psyches, and I was given a more detailed insight into why this is so by Nial Moores of Birds Korea, during the time I spent with him looking at the lost estuary of Saemangeum and the surrounding coastline.

It was fascinating to pass several days in the company of a
man who had spent long continuous periods observing nature, and especially shorebirds, with a very sharp eye. For this had given Nial a particular interest, which was in how wild creatures moved through a landscape and how they interacted with it; and his interest had broadened, from watching birds in a landscape, to watching people. He had no doubt that we still possess the reactions to landscape of our Pleistocene forebears, such as the primal need of all wild things to see and not be seen; to see prey and avoid being seen by predators. He was fascinated by the way people react to open space, for example: they instinctively tend to walk around the edge, he said, where they are less conspicuous, rather than walk across the centre, where they are very visible.

Nial felt that as humans we were hard-wired to expect certain things from a landscape, such as a harmony, certain symmetries, an expected relationship between objects: ‘a crown of a hill should be followed by the deep of a valley, which should be followed by another crown of a hill’. (Modern artificial landscapes often violate this principle.) Thus, we were also hard-wired to process signals from it, in sights or sounds or smells, above all those which denote sudden difference or change. ‘Something different is danger, something outside the expected harmony – it’s the bear, it’s the wolf, it’s the stranger from a new valley.’ This constant processing took a lot of mental energy, but we had evolved to do it over the thousands of generations; we were adapted to it. ‘There may be danger, but it’s a danger your body can understand.’ But what we could not do, he said, was cope in the same way with the relentless stream of signals emanating from the city; we became numbed to the plethora of noises, lights, smells all around us. Because we were exposed to them constantly, it simply took too much mental energy to process everything that might be a threat, so we shut them all out, and that was the cause of stress. In the natural world, however, we could function once again as we have evolved to do.

I agree fully, and I would also add something of my own: that much as we may love it, the natural world is not paradise. Anyone who equates nature and paradise is missing the point. Nature can harm you and nature can kill you; nature indeed has dangers. But they are
our
dangers, as it were, and whatever they may be, they are part of the ecosystems to which, at the profoundest level of our personalities, we are all adapted; the earth’s biosphere is simply what, as emerging humans, we grew unshakeably used to, over fifty thousand repetitions of ‘the camping trip that lasts a lifetime’, which is why it is still our home, and why it can bring peace to all of us – to her, to him, to you, and indeed to me. For I too have had my own coming to peace through the natural world.

•

It was an uncommon one I suppose, for it took all my life to arrive; but when at last it came, it set the seal on something I had longed to commemorate, as it was a meaning-making, for a very specific set of circumstances, which only nature could have provided. It concerned my mother Norah and her trouble, her three breakdowns, which took place when I was seven, nine, and eleven, and which devastated our family, but of which the single most remarkable feature – I now realise – was that Norah recovered completely.

I think this is unusual. I have nothing but sympathy for those who have suffered psychic shocks and are left with lasting wounds, in fact I suspect this may well be the norm: there is a disturbed state which persists for the rest of life. It was not so with Norah. Once she had finally regained her equilibrium, in the autumn of 1958, although naturally she bore the surface scars on a daily basis, being hesitant and insecure, it was almost as if – for a key part of her – the breakdowns had never occurred. The part I
am referring to is what I would call her essence, her informed intelligence; there, there were no aftershocks, no resentment at what had befallen her, no seeking of sympathy, no jealousy of others, not a smidgeon of self-pity – rather, her essence remained unaltered, an essence which was, as I said at the outset, entirely unselfish, wholly honest, and gentle and kind to a fault.

Over the years of my adolescence which followed, I left behind the strange indifference with which, in stark contrast to John my brother, I had greeted her disappearances, and gradually began to build bridges with her. It was her intelligence which drew me in; I perceived it at first only dimly, but I found that as my mind expanded, and in particular when I fell in love with poetry at the age of fourteen, she was a matchless sounding board, explaining and reinforcing and opening my eyes to people I might otherwise not have encountered (it was she who introduced me to Gerard Manley Hopkins, for example). She was no less concerned, of course, with the development of John, who had come out of the years of family trauma very obviously damaged, and who for his distressed and anxious personality I still considered an embarrassment (which must have caused Norah much pain), and who had been further divided from me by that most inequitable feature of the 1944 Education Act, the Eleven-plus examination: while I ‘passed’ and went to a grammar school and studied languages and the humanities, he ‘failed’ and went to a secondary modern school and studied vocational subjects such as woodwork, metalwork, and domestic science.

But in his teens John began playing the piano (ours was a family with music running through it) and it was soon clear he had a notable talent, and when he took his Grade Five examination and won a distinction, the examiner said, if he can get some GCEs, this boy can go to music college – the General Certificate of Education then being the basic school-leaving academic qualification, but one for which pupils in John’s secondary modern, unfortunately, were not entered. My mother
went to see his headmaster and begged him to let John take his GCEs, to no avail: he left school at fifteen with nothing and Gordon, Mary’s husband, got him a job as an office boy in his firm of ship’s chandlers in Liverpool. But Norah would not accept defeat; withdrawing John from his office boy job, she bought a series of correspondence courses, through which, at home, over a period of two and a half years, she single-handedly taught him from scratch the syllabuses of five GCE subjects: English Language, English Literature, Music, French, and Religious Knowledge. In his examinations, he passed them all, and was accepted by the Royal Manchester College of Music; and so through Norah’s sole agency, her elder son went from Eleven-plus failure, as the term was then, to classical pianist.

It is only now I look back in wonderment at what she did, this woman whose psyche had collapsed not all that long before; at the time, it was just what was happening around me as a teenager, and I took it for granted. Little by little, though, I could not but become aware myself of my mother’s unusual qualities; as I started to learn about and appreciate the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, for instance, a period which she knew well, I began to realise that she herself epitomised the values which the Enlightenment had brought into being and which underpinned my own society. But it was her personal nature which won me to her completely, my dawning realisation of her gentleness and her generosity of spirit; she had a kindness which seemed without limit and was specially sensitive to the vulnerable, and eventually I saw what was informing it: at the age of twenty I had a very happy love affair which changed the way I looked at the world and when I hesitantly spoke of it to her I found she understood fully; you might say, as it seemed to me, that she understood about love.

From then on we grew ever closer, as I finished university and became a journalist, and she went beyond being a beloved mother, she was more, she was my best friend, and through the
1970s and into the 1980s I shared most things with her, from the characters I met in newspapers to the best of my generation’s music: I played her much of Joni Mitchell, for example –
listen to this, it’s really good
– and she loved it. She had a very open and adventurous mind. I thought she was incomparable. I was infinitely proud of her. I felt privileged, that she was my mother, she was the best thing I had – to be in a small suburban house with such intellect, such moral seriousness so lightly worn! Eventually, we began to talk of what had happened in 1954, which until then had been but a blur to me, and she told me about it as well as she could (although she could not speak of the core of it – that was something I had to discover for myself from her hospital notes) and I began to understand more about myself and especially, more about John. In 1977 he came home from four years as a pianist at the National Ballet of Canada and joined the Royal Ballet School, and when my father Jack, who was by then retired but no less irritable for that, began to pick on him, I defended him, for the first time; I began to try to be a proper brother. John had many difficulties by then; besides the emotional instability he carried from his childhood, he was an incipient alcoholic, and he was also gay, and still a practising Catholic, and the fact that the church appeared to condemn him for his sexuality as inherently sinful caused him agony. It was all an explosive mix. A particular crisis point came in 1982 after the dramatisation of Evelyn Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited
had earlier been shown on television. John particularly identified with the gay and Catholic Sebastian Flyte, and when he tried to discuss it obliquely with Norah, wholly innocent in matters sexual, she said that she didn’t think there was
anything sinister
about Sebastian, and John went on the bender of all benders, which lasted more than a week, with him intermittently shouting in his drunkenness to her about
your sinister son
, to her great and bewildered distress, until I realised I had to intervene, and I sat her down and said to her, listen, there is
something you have to know: John is homosexual. It was a shock to her. Her mind was formed long before sexual liberation and she barely knew what homosexuality was. It was certainly not something sanctioned by her religion, which she maintained to the end of her life. I gave her a fortnight, and then I went back to her and said: you have to accept it now. And she did. And she and John were able to talk about it, which was wonderful for him, and only just in time, for at the end of that year she was gone.