Spring Days in Devon, and other Broadcasts: Henry Williamson Collections, #14

By Henry Williamson

Henry Williamson (1895-1977), nature writer and novelist, is perhaps best remembered today as a 'nature' writer, the author of the much-loved classics 'Tarka the Otter' and 'Salar the Salmon', although he wrote over fifty books during a long life, including the 'Flax of Dream' tetralogy and his major work, the 15-volume novel sequence 'A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight'. What is not so well known is that during the late 1930s he became a broadcaster of some repute on the BBC. 'Spring Days in Devon' collects twenty-two of his talks, broadcast on the wireless between December 1935 (his very first appearance in front of the microphone) and 1954. Subjects include reminiscences from his own inimitable viewpoint of the West Country and its flora and fauna; the significance in his life of the barn owl; four talks on the lives of English animals (otter, badger, stoat and red deer - the last, memorably, given from the studio as if it were a live outside broadcast); and the difficulties encountered on becoming a farmer in Norfolk, following his move there in 1937 to reclaim a derelict farm. As an Afterword, the history of the working relationship between the BBC and Henry Williamson is told in 'Henry Williamson and the BBC', by John Gregory.

It is clear from his scripts that Williamson put as much care into the writing of these as he did into his books; they are of a high and immediate quality, and remain immensely readable today. All surviving scripts have been gathered into two volumes and published as 'Spring Days in Devon' and its companion 'Pen and Plough', both now available as e-books.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Henry Williamson
• Release date: Dec 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781873507612

Henry Williamson

The writer Henry Williamson was born in London in 1895. Naturalist, soldier, journalist, farmer, motor enthusiast and author of over fifty books, his descriptions of nature and the First World War have been highly praised for their accuracy. He is best known as the author of Tarka the Otter, which won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature in 1928 and was filmed in 1977. By one of those extraordinary coincidences, Henry Williamson died while the crew were actually filming the death scene of Tarka. His writing falls into clear groups: 1) Nature writings, of which Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon are the most well known, but which also include, amongst many others, The Peregrine's Saga, The Old Stag and The Phasian Bird. 2) Henry Williamson served throughout the First World War.The Wet Flanders Plain, A Patriot's Progress, and no less than five books of the 15-volume Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (How Dear is Life, A Fox Under My Cloak, The Golden Virgin, Love and the Loveless and A Test to Destruction) cover the reality of the years 1914–1918, both in England and on the Western Front. 3) A further grouping concerns the social history aspect of his work in the 'Village' books (The Village Book and The Labouring Life), the four-volume Flax of Dream and the volumes of the Chronicle. But all of these groups can be found in any of his books. Some readers are only interested in a particular aspect of his writing, but to truly understand Henry Williamson's achievement it is necessary to take account of all of his books, for their extent reflects his complex character. The whole of life, the human, animal and plant worlds, can be found within his writings. He was a man of difficult temperament but he had a depth of talent that he used to the full. The Henry Williamson Society was founded in 1980, and has published a number of collections of Williamson's journalism, which are now being published as e-books.

Book preview

Recipe for Country Life

I have just come from Piccadilly – up Regent Street to Broadcasting House. I suppose it is about half a mile in length, and it took me twenty minutes in my car. All I saw was the back of a car in front of me – the electric signs – and I smelt the carbon monoxide in the streets.

I could not help thinking as I came along rather impatiently, and a little scared lest I should be late, that in Devon I could have gone in twenty minutes from my cottage – in a valley running down from Exmoor – the nine miles to the Atlantic. That is one of the reasons why I like living in the country. I suppose some of you have visions or dreams of one day going to live in the country in a cottage as I do now.

I retired from my business, such as it was, at the age of 22 – after the War. I had a job in Fleet Street, and I didn’t keep it very long. To be quite frank I was sacked. My editor told me that I was not likely to become an efficient writer, so just about sixteen years ago I took my old army pack – filled it with my favourite books of Richard Jefferies, and a spare pair of marching boots, and two pairs of socks and a shirt, and I took my holly stick, and walked west from London, and I walked for two hundred miles, all down the Great West Road, which in those days had not quite so many houses by it as it has now; it was a very narrow road, and there were trees where now one sees factories.

Well, I walked for two hundred miles, and eventually I came to a little village in a valley, about half-a-mile from the Atlantic, and I saw a cottage below the church which was empty. I enquired the rent of that cottage and I was told four pounds a year. That just about suited me, so I got the key from the landlord and opened the door, and while I was going in my neighbour came to me and said: ‘You want to be careful about going in there, because there’s snakes.’ I said: ‘Snakes? What sort of snakes?’ ‘Oh, they’m grass snakes.’ And I said: ‘Well, they don’t hurt you, do they?’ ‘Oh, well, snakes are snakes.’ And I said: ‘Well, it seems a pretty good cottage to me,’ and he said: ‘Also there be oils up over.’ I said: ‘Oils? what is an oil?’ ‘An oil? An oil be an oil,’ and I then discovered that an oil in Devon was an owl, and when I went in this cottage there was a white bird that I recognised as a barn owl, sitting on the rusty kitchen range, and this bird flapped up and flew round the room. It was quite a small room, and the bird – I suppose his wings were about three feet wide, and I remember being struck then by the strange silence of his flight and the cold wind that came on my face – let out a screech, and flew up the narrow stairway, and out of the broken window by which it entered, I suppose, at sunrise, after its night’s hunting was done.

That decided me. I took the cottage, and I lived there for four years, and every day I went for a long walk – perhaps ten or twelve miles, and when the sun went down I went back, and I started to write, and in those days I was so excited by what I was writing that I sometimes wrote all night, and as soon as I had had a few hours’ sleep I went downstairs again in my pyjamas, sat on the table, and read over what I had written the night before.

That was in 1919. I lived alone in that cottage for about four years. I say alone, but I had two spaniel dogs with me, a cat, an otter, one or two jays, a carrion crow, and a sea-gull, and I think it was a little auk – it was a bird that had got oil fuel on its wings. I daresay you have heard about oil fuel from ships passing up the Bristol Channel. In those days the ships used to throw out their waste fuel, and diving birds would get the fuel on the filaments of their wings. When they tried to fly they found they couldn’t, and then when a south-west gale blew they would drift in with the waves. I suppose they fed a little by diving after fish and swimming with their wings under water – the movement under water would not be affected by the oil fuel – and then when they could not fly back to the place where they lived, which was Lundy, and the south-west wind blew them gradually into the shore, they were washed up, and died of starvation. I got one of these birds and cleaned its filaments with petrol, and it lived quite a long time, and then one day it was killed by the sea-gull.

It may interest you to know how I got the otter cub. The bitch otter, the mother, was shot by a farmer in a village not far away, and I heard casually that there was a litter of young otters in a pipe that drained a marsh. I went down with a friend, and we borrowed a pick and shovel, and dug for a bit till we discovered the drain-pipe, and heard the mewing inside, so we cracked the pipe, and lifted out one live otter cub. I am sorry to say that the other two had died, apparently of starvation. We tossed up for the otter cub, and I won. I took it home and fed it on milk and warm water in a bottle, and it was a most charming companion. I used to take it with me into the town of Barnstaple on market day, and amuse myself by interrupting the business of the old women sitting there at their tables, by showing them the otter cub. But what happened to the otter cub, I am afraid, is quite a long story, and I cannot tell it now.

When I look back on those years I see myself as a very carefree, happy-go-lucky young man, with a beard, and an immense ambition. I wrote then with great joy, and loved it. But after a while, I found that I had got in a habit of living in a world of imagination, and I suppose as I grew up a bit and became the father of several children, I rather grudged the time that I had to occupy myself out of the sunshine writing books to earn money for these children, in order to keep them, and there was a period when I was rather disheartened, and felt that I was finished. Then one day I discovered that the reason was that I had not really been a countryman, but a writer living in the country. Then I decided to become a more active man, and when we moved to the present house where I live, about nine miles from my old cottage, I thought I would do a lot of physical work. And the first thing that I did was to split some sticks – or logs, I suppose you would call them – or branches of trees which were blown down in the gales, and prepare stacks of wood to be burned three years ahead.

Now the hearths in our new cottage had the usual old English open hearth – a great wide space that heated the chimney with a roaring fire, and scoured the room out, and nobody could sit in front of it, it was so cold. But I had seen, when I had been in the Pyrénées on a holiday, that there they had hearths just as big, but they had sloping backs, which threw out the heat, so I put in these sloping backs, and found it was a great joy to sit before the fire and not hear the wood hissing as most wood does that has not been matured – hissing and fretting itself away. My brands, which had been maturing three years, burned slowly like a good cigar, and we found that we could, with safety, keep the fire in for six months. At night we covered the embers with the ash, and in the morning I came down and uncovered them, and there they were, glowing dull red, and I just chipped off some charcoal from the big brand at the back which threw out the heat, and very soon we had a lovely fire.

I also feel that I had a great enjoyment through the possession of a trailer which I draw behind my car sometimes. Let me tell you the sort of things we do with the trailer. In the deer-park which adjoins my cottage – I rent some fishing in it, and am privileged to wander about there – I discovered a great number of yellow mole hills in the spring, and I thought that, as the soil in my cottage garden was not very good, it would be rather a good thing to use these mole hills for getting larger flowers. It is very good stuff, the earth that the moles throw up. You crumble it between finger and thumb, and feel yourself really in touch with life.

Well, having got permission to remove these mole hills, we got out the trailer, and my old French cor de chasse, a sort of coiled bored hunting horn, and blew a few blasts on that to bring the children up. You can hear cries down the lane: ‘Dad’s getting out the trailer.’ That’s Windles, the eldest boy, aged nine. ‘Come on, John,’ he says. John’s high voice is heard: ‘Come on, Margie.’ ‘Wait for me and Robert,’ cries Margaret. ‘Can Jack Slee come?’ asks Windles. Jack Slee is his friend, a son of farmer Slee. Two other children, small girls, appear who live in the hamlet. At a word they scramble into the trailer. Windles springs to open the iron gates of the deer park. The engine has already been warmed up, as all engines should be before being used, so that we can make a flying start.

We race under the lime trees, up and down Humpy Bridge over the river. Beyond is a level piece of ground where the steering wheel is locked over, and we go round and round in a narrow circle, the trailer swinging out more and more with centrifugal force, the children simply shouting with enjoyment. Then we change over and spin round in an opposite circle. Having, as it were, uncoiled ourselves, we set out for the area of mole hills, where each child with his or her small shovel and pail proceeds to work. When we get a load of earth we return; the children insist on riding on the trailer, the springs bump, nearly turn over, and it is all very exciting.

The children each have their own flower bed in their charge; they say what flowers they would like, and I help them plant them out. I think it all helps to make them aware that when they grow up they will have to do these things for themselves, and also gives them a good idea of responsibility.

We have all sorts of fun down in the country. I wish I could tell you about the tame trout we have had for five years; we feed them on a special kind of food, and they wait there year after year, never going away, and for some reason, never caught by the otters. Some of them, I am not ashamed to say, I have caught five or six times over and put back. Once a year each one can be caught and no more. I see them getting bigger and bigger; they all have names, and I think they know me, because when I appear they all range up in a squadron formation, the biggest one in the best position, the second biggest one in second best position, and so on.

Well, sixteen years ago, as I said, I went down to Devon, and it took me about ten years to learn that the way to be happy in the country is to organise one’s time and to do a lot of physical work.

Now, Lawrence of Arabia, just before he died, said to me: ‘I don’t believe the brain is any good unless it is used in conjunction with the hands, Williamson. It’s no good at all. It’s simply a squirrel cage, racing round and round. The hands are the only things that matter,’ and I agree with him.

I have never regretted leaving London. At the same time, I must say it is a grand place to come back to for a short while – a very stimulating place – and also a very good place to leave.

Broadcast on 16 December 1935, in the series Men Talking.

Reprinted in The Listener, 24 December 1935.

Spring Days in Devon

The panes of glass in the windows of my writing-room are old and discoloured. Some are curved, flawed with bubbles and twists in the glass which distort the trees outside. The view from the window is enclosed, for the cottage stands in a combe, or valley, descending from fields on the southern slope of Exmoor. It has, like most of the North Devon combes, sides that are steep, and what I usually see through the grey panes of my upstairs writing room is a fringe of thatch and a blur of trees, most of them leafless, some grown with ivy, others tall and like bedraggled green feathers – these are the spruces, that I have seen so many times swaying slowly to and fro in the south-west gales which sweep up the valley and puff the smoke of the open hearth into the room. Day after day the same view of the same trees, with sometimes the hoarse craking of a disturbed pheasant, smoke drifting from the chimneys of cottages at the end of the lane, the sight of the farmer’s wife walking along the narrow strip of grass between the lower edge of the wood and the little stream or runner which divides the farm and the swamp at the bottom of my garden. A dull and melancholy existence, you may say. Doesn’t anything ever happen out your way? Sometimes I see two pink sows trotting down the field, uttering cries of complaint and grumbling; and shortly they return the same way, following the farmer’s wife and sniffing the buckets she carries. Occasionally something really exciting happens, as it did this morning. Such a barking and shouting and bellowing at the corner of the field near the lane, and there was Varmer waving his stick at three cows which had somehow got into the enclosure round the haystack. Then a couple of hundred yards up the lane, which goes through the wood, there is a quarry, where they dislodge the rock with gelignite. I don’t know which is the louder – Varmer and his dog driving cows away from his stack or five tons of stone tumbling down the face of the quarry.

But Varmer is a good farmer, and his cows seldom stray, so it is not often that his voice gives me the excuse to push aside the three-legged writing table and go to the window. Sometimes the foxhounds go past, but the covert on the hill behind my cottage is dense with plantations of larch and spruce, thick with bracken, and many foxes live there and are too cunning to leave the dense undergrowth. So after awhile the clip-clop of stray passing hoofs in the lane is less interesting than the writing on the table – and writing is about the dullest job on earth after the first ten years – except perhaps mining, which takes a man completely out of the sunlight. The writer knows every grain and crack and mark on the surface of the table which bears the little world he creates by ‘chipping every word out of his breastbone’, to use the words of V. M. Yeates who wrote that magnificent story of flying in the Great War called Winged Victory. Day after day and night after night the writer hears the same lesser sounds about the house – the crack crack crack of the floor when the hot water is turned on and the iron pipe underneath expands and pushes up the boards, the rustling gallop of one solitary rat down the thick cob wall just after half-past eight every night; the voices of very small children crying ‘appull’ or ‘bikky’ or other words which polite grown-ups pretend not to notice; the chirping of sparrows at the thatch; the dry flitter at the window of a red-admiral butterfly, awakened from winter sleep behind the bookcase; the varying notes of car-engines of newspaper man, baker, butcher, and fishmonger; the distant cawing of rooks; the merry shouts of children home from school; the tottle-tonk of the African bullock-bell which calls the members of the household to meals at the long oak table in the room immediately below – the table which takes five strong men to lift, and which is only just big enough for all to sit down at. And the writer sees the same walls and rows of books day after day, and the flawed grey window-panes with the dull and distorted trees fifty yards away on the combe-side. He sees these things as insubstantial surfaces. They are not of the real world, which for him is in his mind. He writes, he sees and lives in ancient sunlight, which arises before and around him with an integrity he trusts and uses. The writer must trust that other self, that scarcely-known visionary ghost which lives independently and often with torment, within his being, if his work is to have its authentic life.

But that being needs nourishment: it needs the sun in the sky if its own inner sun is to shine truly. With what relief does the body and its outer mind leave the confined space of house-sounds and grey window-panes, and go forth under the wide sky, and become a natural man again. The sunlight lays the little visionary ghost; birdsong becomes real, part of the spring-time, of the earth; the larches, as one climbs higher up the rough track through the plantations on the hillside, are gemmed with living green; the buzzard soaring between white cloud edge and blue glowing sky shows smoky-brown markings as it turns in its orbit; the nostrils draw deeply of the scent of tree trunk and earth and sun. The dull, complaining creature that sat in the room under the thatch so small away and below is changing with every step; every moment the sunlight is removing the creases of winter, as it warmed and re-glowed the colour spots and bars on the wings of the red-admiral butterfly which escaped with him. On the top of the hill the natural man is fully in accord with the sun and all the life around him. He is I. I am alive and joyous in the English countryside, seeing valley after valley lying away into the mists of the south and the noonday sun. And I had thought, only this morning, the twenty-first of March, that the first day of Spring meant nothing to me – that a primrose at the river’s brim was not even a primrose to me nowadays; it was just something that the children were discouraged to pick, with a vague irritation when a little hand was held out with a bunch of flowers and a shy, hesitating smile, by the timidly-opened door of the writing room. Why, these primroses growing beside the runnel of spring water still have the soft, pure, sulphur colour of youth: and the leaves, not yet fully unfolded – was there ever such a pristine green? And the ringing cry of the great titmouse – that perky bird over there on the ash-tree, with the white cheeks and black cap – its cry is like a little handbell for Spring. How has he got so clean and new-looking? He is so spruce and his colours so new that he might just have flown out of a box. That’s a stupid simile – ‘just flown out of a box’ – bringing the idea of shops and houses to this Devon hill, but that’s how I thought of it. Fifteen years ago my younger self would have sought for a precise and harmonious simile, all in accord with the natural scene. All taint of civilisation would then have been obliterated with scorn.

‘Just flown out of a box’ – now that phrase actually has a significance, but very different from the one which occurred to me when first I saw the titmouse. A short while ago I was staying in a house where one of the boys kept a small aviary of caged birds. I happened to come down to breakfast first one morning, and looking at the letters by my plate, noticed a small