A Natural Boyhood
Born in London in 1938 - not long after the Second World War broke out we – my father, mother and I – moved to a small country town about 25 miles away. Close enough for me to see the city burning at night, bombed by the German bombers I heard roaring through the dark sky above me.
When I was seven years old the war ended. Life breathed a huge sigh of relief. Beneath the wave of victory there was a deep healing going on. Most weekends my dad took me into the woods and fields around our town. He gave me a little jewel of a book called "The Observer's book of birds." We watched birds, saw changes wrought by seasons and learnt to recognize and identify cloud forms. Friends and I built tree camps, watched birds nesting, and fished for trout in a radiant stream called the River Chess. We dug a huge hole halfway down our back garden, made a roof with thick timbers and old tarps, built an entrance tunnel, a fireplace and a chimney. We told stories and dirty jokes down there and held farting competitions. Later my dad took me out in a rowboat to fish in the English Channel. Sometimes we rowed so far out we could no longer see land. Nothing but sky and waves, the rocking of the boat, the quietness between us, the occasional lively tug of a fish taking the bait beneath the waves.
Fishing stayed with me, all through my teens. I remember going to school one day in my final year, and learning that I'd missed part of a French exam the previous day - I'd gone carp fishing in a distant lake. I had to stay at school for another semester to retake the exam.
Now I'm a retired teacher; an octogenarian living in the California Sierra mountains, not far from Kings Canyon National Park. My entire adult life I've spent teaching children and young people - from nine years old through college. I love the natural world, and I love children, and am saddened, and worried, by the growing gap between the two.
As [one of] the last children in the woods, to misquote the title of Richard Louv's book, I became familiar with the different ways birds flew - some leap like a thrown stone skipping across water; some slide, some glide, some hurtle, and one – the kestrel – even hovers. I recognized the song of a blackbird, a woodpecker, a robin. I remember speeding down a steep road called Holloway Lane, parking my bike at the bottom, and exploring the rippling River Chess, finding caddis grubs and sticklebacks, glimpsing the blue electric blur of a kingfisher. Once I found a coot’s nest full of eggs… I held one in my palm, and it cracked open and the baby coot crawled out. A shiver of wonder jumped through me.
My dad, God bless him, followed an ancient human dynamic. He taught me bird-watching and fishing skills, how to row and how to drop an anchor. He taught me to love poetry, took me to concerts in London, and art galleries; I think of this now as a vertical transaction. He passed things down to me. Sharing his love of the natural world is the gift I am still most grateful for.
What difference has it made to my life that my father, in the scarred, rubble – piled, healing country of post-war England spent so much time with me and my brother Ian fishing, rambling, and birdwatching in some of the most beautiful countryside in the world? I remember our standing together on a rain-soaked platform waiting for the train bring us home after a day’s fishing on the muddy banks of river… He scanned us, uttered his is characteristic stuttering laugh, and said "You look like a coupla shit piles!"
Ian became a shepherd, a painter and a sculptor. Some nomadic gene in me impelled me to be a classroom teacher all over the world – in England, France, Java, and California. Much of it in the cities. But birds and wildflowers, the silent progress of clouds and the rustle of trees in the wind – all this has stayed with me. Up here, on my steep mountain walks, I'm drawn to admire the skills of woodpeckers as they sprint up the vertical columns of pine trees. Somehow the experience of watching birds or clouds or of touching the texture of an old oak trees bark or the smell of rain in dry soil… all this is enriched by similar experiences over the past seven decades or more. How many of my Springs have been gladdened by daffodils, or the sight of a crow flying overhead with a thin stick in its beak, material destined for a new nest…?
There are many reasons for the gap that I described between children and nature. You are no doubt aware of some of them. The disappearance of open areas to play in. The increasing influence of TV, video games, social media… The fact that many parents now simply don't have the time or the freedom to hang out with their kids as my dad did with me. Also, back then in the late 40s and 50s, parents on the whole trusted their kids. We were free, my friends and I, to go off and spend all day in the woods building tree camps or playing tracking games or digging caves in the sides of dells… Since then, for various reasons, many parents have lost that element of trust.
In my last decade as a teacher I became a member of California Poets In The Schools, and specialized in inspiring children to think and write poetically. Often, weather permitting, I took students outside and asked them to write about trees or clouds or flowers… whatever was out there. Almost invariably they would write poetry that was full of wonder and richness of imagery. This leads me to believe that children have a strong innate bond with the natural world, even if for various reasons they have relatively little contact with it.
What's lost as a result of this generational break from nature? There is a lot of research indicating that exposure to and interaction with the natural world is essential for physical and emotional health. In the book that I mentioned: "Last Child in the Woods" Richard Louv uses the phrase nature-deficit disorder to describe the negative consequences of separation from the natural world. These include diminished use of the senses, a higher incidence of physical and emotional illnesses, and diminished attention spans. Louv’s book was published in 2006. Since then, the use and influence of electronic media in the lives of children has increased dramatically, further reducing their multi-sensory experience of nature.
But I would like to end this blog on a positive note.
One of the poetry ideas I use with kids is this: in some cultures it is believed that everything in life is part of one great circle… that animals and plants and material things like rocks and water, and human beings are all on the same level. So we can ask other lifeforms in this circle to teach us what they know. "Teach me" poems almost always work with kids. Here's one by a third-grade girl:
A Teach me
by Nicole Messina
