Above is one of John Tenniel’s illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.
“For some minutes Alice stood without speaking, looking out in all directions over the country—and a most curious country it was. There were a number of tiny little brooks running straight across it from side to side, and the ground between was divided up into squares by a number of little green hedges, that reached from brook to brook. ‘I declare it’s marked out just like a large chess-board!’ Alice said at last.”
I owe the story of Alice’s Meadow below to my ertswhile collegue Nancy Campbell’s Thunderstone, A true story of losing one home and discovering another, Elliott & Thompson, 2022.
A quotation on the dust-wrapper explains that, wonderfully, “It was believed lightning would not strike a house that held a thunderstone. And so these fossils were placed on top of clocks, under floorboards, over static doors … But there are some storms that thunderstones cannot prevent.” Delightfully, thunderstones appear as head- and tailpieces throughout the book.
Thunderstone is an extraordinary memoir which is still haunting me (in a good way) since I finished it a few days ago. Borrowing to some extent from the back panel of the dust-wrapper, it is unflinchingly honest, courageous, compassionate, intimate and entirely authentic. And absolutely beautifully written.
I hope Nancy will not mind my shameless lifting of the story of Alice’s Meadow, but it struck such a chord with me and is so much in my wheelhouse that I cannot resist. The word wheelhouse sprang to mind before I realised I might not be quite sure what a wheelhouse actually is. As I suspected it is the part of a boat which shelters the person at the wheel. The sense of something in your wheelhouse being within your area of interest or expertise is originally American. Good to know that it also describes circular houses built of stone with inner walls radiating like the spokes of a wheel, mostly dating from 100 BC to AD 100 and found in western and northern Scotland.
The story of Alice’s Meadow is one of ingenious resistance. “In the early 1980s the proposed route of the M40 ran directly across Otmoor, a beautiful wetland [in Oxfordshire].” This was opposed by local campaigners and Friends of the Earth (of whom we seem to hear very little these day – I have been a supporter for years). There was a public inquiry which ruled in favour of the objectors but the Department of Transport decided to go ahead anyway. Inspired by Tenniel’s illustration and the words of Lewis Carroll, a plot of land along the route was purchased and divided into 3,000 plots which were offered for sale. “Faced with issuing 3,000 compulsory purchase orders and going through 3,000 appeals, the government backed down. The M40 took a wide curve around Otmoor, which is now an RSPB reserve.” These quotations are from Thunderstone.
This was possible because small plots of land were exempt from having to be recorded on the HM Land Registry – the rules have now been changed so that governments, road builders and developers cannot be thwarted in the same way again.
Known in America as “checkerboarding land” a similar tactic was used by Greenpeace in 2009 to try to prevent the demolition of the village of Sipson to make way for a third runway at Heathrow. A meadow was purchased under the concept of beneficial ownership and sold back to the original owner in 2012.
In 1989 the World Land Trust acquired plots of land in the Amazon rainforest to protect them from illegal logging although in that case the land was held by the Trust rather than being offered to individual supporters.
All of this put me in mind of Edward Abbey, whom I described as one of my heroes in Animal Trust: “Edward Abbey was a free-spirited, radical American writer, ferocious in his anger, focusing primarily on the environment, who advocated sabotage (not violence) as a means of protecting the wilderness.” A defender of the canyon country in the American southwest he loved so dearly.
I seem to have the four books below but can only find the first two at the moment. I was surprised that I don’t have his Desert Solitaire but I have ordered a copy now.
The Monkey Wrench Gang. Canongate, 1978
Hayduke Lives!, a novel. Little, Brown and Company, 1989
Also A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto): notes from a secret journal. St Martin’s Press, 1990 and The Serpents of Paradise: a reader. Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1995.
Hayduke is one of the characters in The Monkey Wrench Gang, ex-Green Beret and “wilderness avenger, industrial development saboteur, night-time trouble-maker, barroom brawler, free-time lover”. Not to mention a hero of eco-warrriors everywhere. Abbey died in 1989 and Hayduke Lives! was his last book. I was delighted but astonished to remember that an obituary in The Independent at the time was written by another former colleague, Martin Battey. There is a photocopy loosely inserted in my copy of the book. “He believed the salvation of modern man lay in the protection and preservation of the wild lands of the earth, and that anything that threatened their existence threatened his own and that of all of us.” He had no fear of taking on his own employers, the National Park Service, nor of irreverence and dark humour. He once said, for example, that he took every opportunity to discard empty beer cans along the roadside “since highways were abominations and not worthy of respect.” Martin quotes Abbey at the end of his piece, “the despair that haunts the background of our lives, sometimes obtruding itself into consciousness, can still be modulated, as I know from experience, into a comfortable melancholia and from there to defiance, a roaring affirmation of self-existence. Even at times into a quiet and blessedly self-fretful peace, a modest joy.”
The epigraph on the half-title reads: “Author’s warning. Anyone who takes this book seriously will be shot. Anyone who does not take it seriously will be buried alive by a Mitsubishi bulldozer.”
After my Beat Generation phase, I had a period of enjoying later American counter-culture authors, writing of drifters and hobos, outlaws and the road. Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a favourite although I struggled with his rather peculiar Lila: an enquiry into morals. And then there was Ken Kesey.
One such book was the source of my daughter’s name: Isis. I could neither find it (we are still looking for it, it is here somewhere) nor remember the author nor title. This quickly turned into an infuriating itch. AI was helpful but could not really narrow it down. The word “stone” came to mind. Was the author Robert Stone, who would fit the bill, or was that pat of the title? It is funny how the mind works, how information is retrieved from old memories filed away. As I was driving to collect my daughter from work an hour or so later, it was suddenly there, even a mental picture of the book: Stone Junction by Jim Dodge. It’s terrific.
Isis Parker only gets a brief mention:
But the name jumped out at me and I knew immediately that this is what we would call our second daughter, thinking too of the Egyptian goddess and the Thames as it runs through Oxford.
It has not been easy to concentrate on writing about this satisfactorily circular chain of reading and memory. Yet again the noise of heavy plant and works next door has been impossible to ignore. The neighbours, the same ones who commissioned the destruction of my Lime Tree, are installing a plunge pool and now cutting hedges at the wrong time of year. We have already had a week of great disturbance (those reversal beeps!) and this morning has again been intolerable. I asked why they had not done their neighbours the courtesy of a warning on either occasion and was told that the decision to have a plunge pool was “last minute” which seems hard to believe. Also why this was being done at a time of year when people, including pub customers, were still hoping to enjoy spending time outside? It turns out that they had forewarned their neighbours on one side but clearly the pub and I were considered beneath their contempt. At least it’s not as bad as the three years of it we had when new neighbours demolished the existing bungalow and large garden behind us to build a wholly out of keeping house which looks like a cross between an industrial unit and a crematorium. Heavy plant went up and down the narrow track behind our house constantly and both of our cars were badly damaged by skip lorries or similar. These were the subject of insurance claims but the many hours these take were pretty soul-destroying. The foreman was highly aggressive and unpleasant and made sure that we were given as little consideration as possible, in spite of promises to the contrary. The dead-end track, especially for those further down it, is the only means of entry and egress for those of us who park our cars to the side of it. It was often blocked meaning people missed school runs, doctor’s appointments and more. When I protested to the local planning office that this breached the terms of their permission, I was told that there was no possibility of enforcement – the terms were merely “recommendations”. And therefore entirely pointless.
Here is another piece of work commissioned by the plunge pool neighbours. It is not on my land but forms a border between the track and footpath just outside it. I shudder every time I walk past it. This was carried out several years ago and there has unsurprisingly not been one sprig of regrowth.
I have been walking, once a week, a lovely Norfolk Terrier called Chilli on behalf of an elderly lady for the Cinammon Trust. I duly turned up as arranged this week and since it can take her a while to get to the door entered the kitchen as usual. Chilli was pleased to see me and came bounding over, but her companion was nowhere to be seen although the house was unlocked. I feared the worst and wondered what to do. I could hardly go upstairs or take Chilli for a walk without her knowing. All seems well with Chilli though and dogs always know when something is wrong. I left a message with her daughter but did not hear back. Nevertheless I called the Trust who advised me not to enter the house alone and contacted the next of kin. It turned out that she had just been chatting to a neighbour and was perhaps a tad confused. Much relieved, we walked along the Kennet & Avon Canal as usual, albeit half an hour late, and were enthralled to see a pair of Grey Wagtails.
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