Holmes Love Letters on the River

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-917140-27-0
Verlag: Parthian Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 134 Seiten

From a young age Carly Holmes has been in thrall to the creatures that live around us. Her childhood companion was a blind gander called Beep Beep who thought she was his wife. She nearly postponed her wedding when a pair of wrens nested in a hole by her back door and cut it very fine to fledge their chicks into an assorted audience of cats and magpies. This collection of essays, beautifully illustrated throughout, are each of them love letters to the Teifi valley and to the river that winds through Carly's days. The wild animals - the badgers who visit nightly for peanuts; the juvenile osprey who learned to fish on the estuary across the lane; the young jackdaw she nurtured until it was healthy enough to ignore her whenever she went into the garden; the cuckoos she discovered in flagrante one afternoon on a lockdown walk - are the very heart of it. Describing encounters and missed encounters with the wildlife that surrounds the Teifi, Love Letters on the River is a lyrical, honest and tender tribute to the many creatures - both in the garden and beyond the garden wall - that bring joy to Carly's life simply by existing. Includes a dozen black and white illustrations commissioned exclusively for this publication by acclaimed local artist Guy Manning.

Carly Holmes lives and writes in a small village on the banks of the river Teifi in west Wales. She is the author of the novels The Scrapbook, which was shortlisted for the International Rubery Book Award, and Crow Face, Doll Face. Her short story collection, Figurehead, was published by Tartarus Press in limited-edition hardback and reprinted in paperback by Parthian Books. She has had numerous stories published in journals and anthologies.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Holmes, Carly

Weitere Mitwirkende

Manning, Guy

Leseproben

Foreword

This book isn’t intended as an expert’s observations on the natural world, for I’m no expert when it comes to wildlife. Neither do I have a detached and scientific approach to nature. I unabashedly love the wild creatures I encounter and I gave up feeling embarrassed or ashamed for that love, that lack of detachment, a long time ago.

I try not to anthropomorphise animals except in a light-hearted, humorous way, one that doesn’t harm them or deny their essential wildness. But I also accept that I will slip at times, because I’m human and so my point of reference, the filters I apply to the world around me, are necessarily human, too. Besides, I don’t think anthropomorphising animals needs to be an inherently negative thing, for surely it’s through seeking connections and similarities that we form bonds of affection and a desire to cherish, and god knows the natural world needs to be cherished.

I read nature books to educate myself, and nature books that focus on animals I particularly love – Mark Cocker’s Crow Country, for example – and I also read the newer breed of nature memoir, the kind of book that turns the natural world into a jumping-off point for humans to explore themselves: their musings on grief or divorce, becoming a parent or losing a parent. Nature as guide, as healer, as provider. A natural world that only seems to exist in relation to us, its value lying in the service it provides.

I don’t view nature as a frame for humans and their preoccupations. It isn’t there as a backdrop for the next Instagram post or the perfect saleable photograph. It’s not a theme park, to be sampled on a day out. I don’t chase rare birds around the county or country simply to tick them off a list – the pleasure seemingly lying in the achievement of the sighting and not the sighting itself – and I don’t have expensive equipment to record this or that creature’s existence before moving briskly on to the next thing. Seeing a bittern for the first time at my local wildlife reserve is of course going to be more of a thrill than seeing the long-tailed tits on the feeders in the garden for the twentieth time that day, but the pleasure I take from sitting quietly and watching those pretty little birds with their showgirl outfits and perfect pink eye shadow is just as profound.

It makes me happy to stand in the street outside my home and watch the house sparrows hanging rudely out of the entrance to the swift box I didn’t actually put up just for them. Lording it over their rivals, yelling to anyone who’ll listen that their spacious new pad – thank you very much, by the way – is so much better than some dank and cobwebby crevice tucked behind a drainpipe. They’ve raised three broods this year and fledged them all successfully. I’d love to know that box is being used to protect and shelter a new generation of swifts, but to see it protect and shelter any bird raising a family is a joy.

For me, the natural world exists alongside us, sometimes entwined with us, and often despite us. It fills me with a sense of wonder and awe to see such busyness and life all around me, all the time. The unruly patch of nettles at the end of the garden providing food for the caterpillars; the caterpillars providing an essential meal for the blackbirds; the sparrowhawk plunging out of the sun to take one of the blackbirds and then flying fast and low over the garden fences, trailing alarm calls and glossy jet feathers. I am nowhere in these scenes of survival and death. My existence, except as provider of sunflower hearts and peanuts, is without importance.

And yet by providing this food, and shelters for these creatures, I have inserted myself into the periphery of their lives in ways that are both positive and negative. If the thrushes hadn’t been enticed into my garden by the mealworms I put out, then the sparrowhawk wouldn’t have taken one of them. If I hadn’t put the mealworms out during the summer drought when the top layers of the earth hardened to rock and the worms sank to deeper, moister layers, then the thrush and its chicks may well have starved to death. I feel the push and pull of my meddling constantly, my impulse to care and keep them safe versus my equally keen impulse to leave them be as wild as possible. To love them as best I can, in ways that will only do good.

My grandfather on my father’s side was an enigma. Of Roma descent – the surname Holmes, according to family lore, he apparently adopted after seeing it on a gravestone – he was a farm labourer who worked and lived in the rural landscape around Canterbury. He was a formidable and scary figure when I was a small child, for he didn’t like children and was inclined to let that dislike show. Remembering him now, I wish I’d known him better or known him when I became an adult. I think we would have got along well, or as well as he was capable of getting along with his fellow humans.

He rose with the dawn and went for long walks with Jenny, the terrier he adored, checking on the birds’ nests along his meandering route through fields, orchards, and woodland. He knew where the wrens and the kestrels nested and where the weasels had their dens. Sometimes he stayed out for several hours, particularly when there were visitors to the house. He loved wild creatures and didn’t have much patience for humans. I wonder whether that sense of love and fascination we share was passed down to me via the essential, inescapable tangle of genes, or whether it was imprinted on my father as a way of life and then in turn onto me.

I was born on Jersey – the island my mother and the maternal line of the family are from – and spent the majority of my young childhood on a council estate near Southampton before my family moved to west Wales when I was eleven. My memories of those early formative years are fragmented: some things are still sharply in focus while others are wavering and indistinct. I remember, as the only two vegetarians at our school as well as being in receipt of free school meals, that my brother and I had to wait separately from the mainstream lunch queue. Every day we were fed last, cursorily handed a plate heaped high with grated cheddar and then dismissed. Waved away to add boiled vegetables from the parade of metal tureens, if we chose.

Grated cheese every day. I thought I’d gone to heaven.

The council estate was large, or certainly seemed so, and it was at times a frightening place for a shy and fearful child to live. But on the other hand, there was farmland and woodland accessible from the far end, and we would walk there with our dog Sophie, daily, often accompanied by an assortment of our cats. There was a particular meadow a barn owl quartered every evening and we’d go there in the school holidays to watch it. My brother found a monster one day on my mother’s fuchsia bush, which we then discovered was an elephant hawkmoth caterpillar. Every summer tiny frogs emerged from the pond in the back garden to make the journey into the overgrown lane behind the rows of houses, and I’d stay with them for hours, sprinkling them with water so that they didn’t scorch as they crossed the burning tarmac.

When we moved to Wales we had big skies, no near neighbours, and over an acre of land. My parents rescued battery-farm chickens, and added a waddle of ducks and a blind gosling who grew up to be a very stroppy gander who thought I was his wife. We’d been poor when we lived in England but we were even poorer now, deprived both materially and socially as my parents shared hours at their unit in Cardigan market and relied on benefits to make ends meet. Only my father could drive, while the nearest large village with a bus stop was several miles away.

My natural timidity and introversion rose to the surface to become the dominant traits of my personality, and as my teenage years unfolded, depression, arachnophobia and anorexia got mixed into the soup. I spent a lot of my adolescence in my bedroom with my cat Sootica, reading or listening to the gentle, constant scratch and squeak of the bats who roosted under the tin roof of our cottage, inches from my head. Sometimes I’d tap and scratch a response, chirrup to them, and there’d be a short silence before they started up again. The sound comforted me through grim and unhappy evenings, instilling a life-long love of the creatures.

When people think working class they tend to think urban. They tend to think industrial. There’s little mention of the rural poor. With the move to Wales we were suddenly without community, isolated and without the means or money to forge links beyond our patch of land. Outsiders. So I relied on the animals – the cats and dogs, the ducks and geese, and also the wild creatures that visited the garden – for distraction and companionship.

The nature books I came across in those years and in my young adulthood were educational and informative, written to instruct the interested, mainly by men. People who’d had the privilege of a good education, for others with similar educational privileges who could understand the scientific or Latin terms used. They were written for...