‘WE’VE lost so much abundance. This is what I find so sad: that there used to be so much - so much that we took it for granted,’
Saltaire-based writer Richard Smythe has always been drawn to the natural world, and, as a child, took delight in discovering and learning about it.
When he became a father he found a new joy and urgency in showing his own children the everyday wild things around them.
From watching tadpoles in the pond at Heaton Woods, lifting stones to whatever lies beneath - “WOODLOUSE!” cry his children - pointing at blackbirds in the trees and searching rock pools off Whitley Bay, each family outing is a nature walk.
In his new book The Jay, The Beech and The Limpetshell, Finding Wild Things with My Kids, he details the simple pleasures brought by those outings, but also questions how nature can evolve and flourish under the pressures of a changing world.
Because, says Richard, the planet is changing, bringing challenges for the natural world, with many local species struggling to survive and some already gone.
As he and his children explore rock pools in Whitley Bay, or the woods and moors near his West Yorkshire home, he imagines the world they might inhabit as they grow up.
Through different objects discovered on their wanderings - a beech leaf, a jay feather, a limpet shell - Smyth examines his own past as well as that of the early natural historians, weaving together history, memoir, and environmentalism to form a new kind of nature writing: one that explores both what we have lost and what we still have.
He asks: ‘Weren’t they richer, rock pools, wasn’t the seashore busier, when I was a kid?’
It’s not an easy question to answer. ‘It’s hard to say with any certainty whether the rock pools of our coasts have changed - become emptier, less wild, less fun - since I was little,’ he writes, but goes on to say that it is likely that, over the last 30 years, sewage overflows, rising human footfall, a warming climate and the construction of new sea defences, have had some impact on these places.’
With his wife Catherine, Richard takes immense pleasure in introducing their daughter Genevieve and son Daniel to the natural world, and listening to them as they learn.
‘You know all the trees!’ Genevieve sometimes says to me on our walks, if I’ve just said: ‘This is an oak’ or ‘This one with the bunches of keys is an ash,’ writes Richard. ‘Actually I know about six trees. At some point she’ll learn that there are more than six trees and the scales will fall from her eyes.’
Richard, the author of six non-fiction books including A Sweet Wild Note and An Indifference of Birds, and a novel The Woodcock, looks back at his own childhood, a happy time growing up in Wakefield, with mum dad and his big brother.
He takes a trip back to his home neighbourhood, retracing his walk to school. It’s the first time in 33 years, yet not much has changed. There’s a small wood, used by the school for outdoor education. One of the mature trees was planted by Richard as a child: ‘oaks, ashes, cherries planted by Year Three in 1987.’
He hears how the trees are great for the kids to sit under, play under and read under in summer. ‘This is the deal with trees. We go on, they stay behind,’ he writes.
Richard and Catherine’s own struggle to have a family is documented in the book, sharing space with the difficulties faced by bird populations - among more threatened species it is not uncommon for more than 60 per cent of eggs failing to hatch.
Having kids didn’t make Richard worry about climate change. ‘I was already worried about climate change, because of everyone else’s kids,’ he writes.
‘There’s an increasing number of people who are so worried about climate change that they won’t have children - either because having children will only make things worse, or because they don’t want to bring children into a world that’s going through catastrophic warming.’
Father of ten Charles Darwin, who would have been a hero to Richard, had he adopted any heroes, didn’t have any such concerns as he observed and experimented with nature.
His children were ‘willing and happy assistants to their attentive father, fascinated by his explanations of the natural world.’
Writes Richard: ‘There’s a story about how Darwin’s son George, as a little buy, visited a friend’s house and learned that the property didn’t have a study. ‘But where does your father do his barnacles?’ he asked.
While contemplating a natural world that many of us feel is beyond repair, this easy-to-read, informative, thoughtful book is light of touch, full of interesting facts and peppered with humour.
Looking to the future, Richard mourns the loss of so much, but has hope in leaving the planet in the hands of his children’s generation.
‘My children’s world will be warmer, wetter, more populous, more depleted (less greenery, fewer animals, fewer sorts of animals). Will it be worse? I don’t know - I think I know - that however bad it is, they’ll make it better.’
They want to make sure their children grow up to ‘know it, and love it, and look after it, and, who knows, maybe even save it.’
*The Jay the Beech and the Limpetshell by Richard Smyth is published by Icon Books and costs £16.99.
His short stories have also been widely published and broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
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