Wild Child: Coming Home to Nature

By Patrick Barkham

“Quiet but compelling arguments about the importance of kids getting out more and connecting to nature . . . A book that deserves to flourish.” —The Guardian
 
From climbing trees and making dens, to building sandcastles and pond-dipping, many of the activities we associate with a happy childhood take place outdoors. And yet, the reality for many contemporary children is very different. The studies tell us that we are raising a generation who are so alienated from nature that they can’t identify the commonest birds or plants, they don’t know where their food comes from, they are shuttled between home, school and the shops and spend very little time in green spaces—let alone roaming free.
 
In this timely and personal book, celebrated nature writer Patrick Barkham draws on his own experience as a parent and a forest school volunteer to explore the relationship between children and nature. Unfolding over the course of a year of snowsuits, muddy wellies, and sunhats, Wild Child is both an intimate story of children finding their place in the natural world and a celebration of the delight we can all find in even modest patches of green.
 
“Entrancing . . . If ever there was a book to fuel the ecological interest of future generations, this is it.”—Isabella Tree, author of Wilding
 
“Barkham takes us through a year giving his children an education in wildness. He encourages them that a physical relationship with wildlife is of the utmost importance . . . His memoir reveals the abundance of wildlife that can be explored in our own back gardens.” —The Herald

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781783781928

Patrick Barkham

Patrick Barkham is a natural history writer for the Guardian, and is one of a generation of British authors who have revitalized British nature writing. His books include The Butterfly Isles, Badgerlands, Islander, Coastlines and Wild Child, and he has been shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and the Wainwright Prize. He is currently writing the biography of acclaimed naturalist Roger Deakin. He lives in Norfolk with his family.

Book preview

1

Wild Children

‘All of you with little children and who have no need to count expense, or even if you had such need, take them somehow into the country among green grass and yellow wheat – among trees – by hills and streams, if you wish their highest education, that of the heart and the soul, to be completed. Therein shall they find a Secret, a knowledge not to be written, not to be found in books. They shall know the sun and the wind, the running water, and the breast of the broad earth. Under the green spray, among the hazel boughs where the nightingale sings, they shall find a Secret, a feeling, a sense that fills the heart with an emotion never to be forgotten. They will forget their books – they will never forget the grass fields.’

Richard Jefferies

A wild child entered my life on the night I first heard a tawny owl call ‘kerr-wick, kerr-wick’ in the dark trees behind my home. She has dark eyes, a mane of brown hair and she roams our garden like a little lion. Nothing seems to escape her gaze. She possesses the eyes of a hawk, the ears of a bat and the talons of an eagle. She schemes like a hyena, runs like a cheetah and pounces like a tiger. Her name is Esme and she has had an urgent appointment with the wild since she was very young.

She was stuffing soil into her mouth at six months old and could distinguish between a jay and a magpie as a toddler. She was catching butterflies with her bare hands at three. She is seven now, and loves to run free, poke hands into birds’ nests, squeeze frogs, catch crickets, hold chicks. She is also an intuitive freedom fighter who sides with the underdog – usually other animals – and chafes against the strictures of parental surveillance and the school system.

Esme is one of an endangered species. A few of my generation, and more from preceding generations, were once wild children. Today the wild child is functionally extinct in the Western world. The idea that a child of, say, nine would roam without adult company through copses and spinneys close to their home is anathema. The self-directed child, playing freely among an abundance of other animals, plants and peers, belongs to a lost civilisation. And we have lost it in the blink of an eye.

We live in a time of unprecedented gloom about enveloping environmental crises. We must adapt to unimaginably rapid climatic changes. We are increasing in number. Our energy and our thirst for a good life are throttling other life on the planet. But these crises may prove unsolvable unless we fix another problem: our children are growing up without green space and wild things. Our contact with species other than our own is lessening. Our time in nature is curtailed. We have little clue where our food comes from. Most of us live increasingly confined to the structures made by our own species, on a planet ever more ravaged by that species.

It hasn’t always been like this. We forget how life has been for 14,990 of 15,000 or so generations of Homo sapiens. For by far the greater part of our existence as the ‘wise man’, we have lived outdoors. It was only in the nineteenth century that most of us moved inside to work, learn and play. By 1861, more of Britain’s population were recorded living in towns and cities than in the countryside, and we became the first urban nation. Today, more than eighty-three per cent of British people are ‘urban’. Our alienation from the natural world may be older and deeper than many other nations’, but there are now thirty-two countries even more urban than us.

Most of us in Britain are fortunate to live in an era of unsurpassed comfort, liberated from the back-breaking outdoor labour that sent our forebears to their premature graves. But we are myopic when it comes to our good health, and seduced by ease and easy stimulation. We forget what we and our children need, and neglect what makes us well. Across the affluent world, outdoor teachers tell the same stories – of children wondering what mud is, or where milk comes from; of children who have never before set foot on grass, never visited the seaside, or think a blue tit can kill them. I visited a permaculture garden in Athens where teachers fielded questions from Greek city kids such as ‘Who hung the lemons on the tree?’

I could devote many chapters to assessing the growing body of scientific evidence showing the harmful impact of our dislocation from other species. I could quote the accumulated wisdom of traditional thought and contemporary artists, and seek to prove the damaging impact of a life lived on concrete, in polluted air, and beholden to electronic screens – on us, and on our planet. Although the medical establishment currently suggests that guilt-stricken parents needn’t feel too terrible about children’s screen time, most of us instinctively understand that excessive electronic time indoors alters our mood, disrupts our sleep and affects our mental and physical health. We need to know more precisely why green space is good for us, why other species make us happy and well. But I don’t want to harangue or blame people. No one has ever been terrified or rebuked into embracing nature. I want to tell a more empowering and hopeful story about the pleasure, fascination and joy we may find in the ordinary wildlife we can still encounter in our everyday lives. I want to celebrate the power and importance of neighbourhood nature. (I should mention that in doing so I do not want to imply that we have a solely transactional relationship with nature. We depend upon other species for our existence and they do us many great favours, but every wild thing has as much of a right to live on this planet as we do, regardless of whether we derive pleasure or usefulness from their company.)

Three wild things currently dominate my life. Alongside my daughter Esme is her elder twin, Milly, and their younger brother Ted. What follows includes some small, true tales from their childhoods, and mine, about our relationships with the species around us. Naturalists from another century would scorn the paucity of my family’s encounters – the wood pigeons, the common butterflies, the roadkill – but these everyday meetings with fellow animals, plants and fungi still nourish us. I believe we can even today find a niche in nature. Wherever we live, in countryside, city or town, we can form intimate bonds with fellow species in our local area, if we make space and take time to look up, or down, or more closely. We are part of nature. We do not live here, with ‘wildlife’ over there. There is only us, one animal among many.

As my children learn about the world, they are teaching me what I’ve forgotten since I was a child, and what it is to be a parent. Thanks to them, I’ve spent a year volunteering at an outdoor nursery, and I will recall some of those experiences here too.

I’m writing about our personal lives, but I don’t want to suggest that I’m a paragon of parental virtue or a model citizen of planet Earth; I’ve had three children, so I can’t give lectures about sustainable population growth. Wild Child describes the portion of our lives where I seek to maintain our proximity to nature. There are plenty of times when my family and I are not enjoying rapturous natural experiences. Under the trickle of everyday pressures, I’m as mediocre as most contemporary fathers. Some mornings, our children are glued to the television for an hour while I catch up on sleep. We drive a car that emits diesel particulates. Snowdrifts of plastic toys form inside our home. Our children eat sausages and crave sugary sweets. We’re sucked into ways of eating and consuming that cannot continue.

‘It’s easy to worry about nature when you don’t have to fret about putting food on the table,’ some people argue. But I reject the idea that access to nature is an indulgence for the privileged. Access to nature is a human right that must be championed more than ever for less privileged members of society. High-quality green public space is more crucial for low-income families than for anyone else. It’s a source of free entertainment, free exercise, free good health and even free food. Living fractionally closer to nature saves money and makes parenting easier, wherever we live and whatever our income. I believe that nature can and must become central to all our childhoods once again.

I hope the stories that I tell contribute to the case for institutional change in our schools, cities, hospitals and even our farms, as we belatedly acknowledge our need for nature in everyday life. Wild life is not a luxury, nor a middle-class lifestyle choice; it is part of everyone’s existence. We are all enriched by being on nodding terms with the other species with whom we share our miraculously life-giving planet.

Hope, writes the naturalist Mark Cocker, is written into all our encounters with the natural world. To watch a small murmuration of starlings, which I’ve just spied outside the window of my study overlooking an industrial estate, is a profoundly uplifting experience. To meet the eye of a blackbird is a moment of genuine connection.

Here is fun, here is surprise, here is rapture; here is where we want and need to be; here is home.

2

Beginnings in Nature

‘Every child is born a naturalist. [Their] eyes are, by nature, open to the glories of the stars, the beauty of the flowers, and the mystery of life.’

Ritu Ghatourey

There’s long grass, daffodils and the rough bark of an old Bramley apple tree. Poopy, our tortoiseshell cat, is in the high grass with me. Maybe I am not yet walking; I can’t remember. Other things that summer: peonies, plump maroon blooms like folded skin and scent of old lady; orange nasturtiums with saucer-shaped leaves that bleed white and smell cabbagey when you snap them; nettles, dangling, stinging and smelling of green dust.

First memories are capricious, wobbly and of dubious chronology. Some are photographs masquerading as memories. Others become favourite family tales that illustrate an indubitable truth about our character, as smooth as pebbles on a beach and glib in their meaning. Memories that disrupt our chosen narrative are pushed aside. But we seek founding myths because we know from science and psychology, from instinct and popular conversation, that our early months and years make us who we are.

I’m reluctant to declare it significant that my first memories are outdoor ones. I was outdoors a lot, but I don’t believe I was born to love the natural world and others are not. Show me a child who cannot make a home in nature, given the opportunity. I didn’t possess an unusually potent affinity with nature but the circumstances of my childhood gave it to me.

Gradually, the horizon of early memory lifts. Remembered objects – sweet, heavy lilac blooms, a grey rabbit, yellow tendrils of weeping willow – are in a garden. The Arcadia of early childhood was given physical form in our blessed plot. In the early 1970s, Mum and Dad moved to an unlovable 1960s bungalow, won over by its land: one L-shaped acre of old orchard and valley meadow which they sculpted into a wild garden. They followed the Good Life. Mum kept goats, Lady and Isadora; we drank their milk and, with curiosity and no sense of contradiction, cuddled and then ate their kids, Daffodil, and George, who was born on St George’s Day. The garden and little meadow beyond were a house of rooms and passageways: behind shrubs, within conifers, beyond hedges, inside ditches; unseen sites for hiding, denning, nesting, dreaming. Children require privacy, places of retreat. I crouched between the prickly gooseberry bushes with their sour fruit; skulked in the raspberry cage when a July thunderstorm came; clambered up the young Scots pine so no grownup could reach my feet.

My earliest memory of actually being indoors? Those pictures are hazier and from later on: Daddy gets on his hands and knees in the living room while my older sister Henny and I rumpus all over him, rolling and tumbling like gleeful fox cubs; I play behind the frosted glass door in the hallway with Maui, my invisible friend; I stand in our dimly lit dining room, looking through to the kitchen where Mummy is cooking, the Archers’ theme tune on Radio 4; I have Mum to myself; Henny has gone to primary school but I am yet to go.

That the biggest trauma of my early childhood was, aged nine, moving house shows how lucky I was. I didn’t mind changing houses but I did mind changing gardens: I grieved for the outdoor terrain I lost. Being banished from this Eden of orchard, ordered vegetables and unruly meadow marked the end of my innocence; the world opened wider, and I stumbled into some difficult experiences that unravel inside me still. At least leaving behind this childhood paradise preserved it for ever, parcelling up my early years in a warm, safe outdoor place. I’ve been trying to get back there ever since.

Aged four, or seven, or eleven, I was not a Wild Child. I was a serious small person who was content to play alone. I did not consciously ‘love nature’. It was not forced upon me; it was not part of my identity. Like all true luxuries, nature was simply the fabric of my life, and I took it for granted.

I was fortunate to grow up in a rural place in a time when country-dwellers were no longer condemned to arduous work on the land. My dad was a university lecturer who took the slow coach into Norwich thirteen miles away. My mum was a teacher turned full-time mother. We were middle-class, obviously, but it was the era of the Oil Price Shock, the Thatcherite crunch on the public sector and spiralling interest rates, and we didn’t have conspicuous cash. My parents shared a rusty ten-year-old MK3 Cortina estate; we were late to videos and never had a computer; Scalextric and Soda Streams were found only at friends’ houses – although their absence from mine was probably a cultural choice as much as an economic one.

My major obsession was not the environment but the invention that changed the character of the British countryside, and, eventually, childhood, more than any other. ‘I want to be a garage-man,’ I told the boiler-suited mechanic peering dubiously at the undersides of our Cortina. ‘Ah, they do a very important job protecting the Queen,’ he replied. He thought I’d said ‘Guardsman’. He didn’t realise he was my idol, that I loved cars. My most prized Matchbox car was a lime-green Cortina saloon which I drove along the borders of the living-room rug. I could identify makes of car from the sound of their engines alone: at least, I could recognise the thrum of a Beetle, the whine of a 2CV and the chug of a Peugeot diesel. I hoovered up free sales brochures for the new Sierra (‘Man and Machine in Perfect Harmony’) and pored over the respective trims of the GL and the Ghia. The first book I wrote was an illustrated reference work entitled ‘Barkham Family Cars’.

An electronic screen played a part in my childhood, but not really until I was five, when we sold our small black-and-white telly and rented a colour Triton TV. Mum rationed our screen time, disapproving of my Saturday evening schedule of American shows, beginning at 5.25 p.m. with The Dukes of Hazzard, which was the gateway drug to The Fall Guy, The A-Team and Knight Rider.

Aged seven, eight and nine, my world expanded beyond our garden and I wandered further, in an apparently safe world. Next to the football lawn at the bottom of our garden was a gate straight onto Booton Common, twenty acres of boggy grassland and alder and oak woodland beside a small beck. My best friend Jeremy was a farmer’s son, who lived opposite, so we wandered around his farmyard, popped over to his granny’s bungalow next door and bustled between gardens like a pair of curious robins. We invented a call sign – ‘Oooh-oooh-uh-ah!’ It was our walkie-talkie. Each of us used it to check whether the other was available to play, without actually leaving our gardens or knocking on a door. Our homes were separated by a small dead-end lane imaginatively known as The Street. A group of us, seven children aged between seven and fourteen, biked up and down and hung about on the lane. My parents worried about vehicles whizzing around its sharp right-angled bend; an old neighbour, Sonny Long, hand-painted a wooden sign –

please slow children playing

– which was erected at the corner.

The village children walked to school accompanied only by big kids – ten-year-olds. I didn’t walk because my primary was three miles away but in summer we sometimes cycled there. Later, I cycled there alone now and again. My route included a stretch of country road where reckless motorists could reach sixty miles an hour, but there were many fewer vehicles than today, of course. On my cycle to school, I’d meet a couple at most. It was the era of the BMX but I had a secondhand purple Tomahawk, a poor boy’s Chopper – small front wheel, large back wheel, long banana-style seat. I invented an advertising jingle and sang it to myself as I freewheeled downhill:

Take away the strain

On a country lane

With Tomahawk!

These were years of great sprawling imaginative projects, which were not games but deeply real. One day Jeremy and I decided to be stuntmen, and dress in ‘boilersuits’ (the overalls worn by every farmer’s son) and build a ramp for our bikes. Another day we launched a chocolate-bar-making company. We formed a pop group, gelled up our hair like punks and corralled the grownups for an outdoor performance. I penned a staccato-sounding number that was informed by Adam Ant:

Sitting in the larder

Eating an apple pie

I dive in

And get pulled under

Like a fly

The grownups laughed. I was disappointed they didn’t take it more seriously. We rebelled by smoking hollow stems of hogweed.

As we grew up, more fantastical imaginings were replaced by football fantasies. I turned my vast reserves of car love towards a sport I would never really master. We built a goal from branches and painstakingly knotted a net together with orange binder-twine gleaned from straw bales. I spent hours kicking a ball around outside, alone and with friends and neighbours. One older boy, Mark, who was fourteen, attained superstar status during the endless summer of 1984 when he organised the Booton Olympics. Each day there were new races, from slow cycle to sprint. Jeremy and I and our sisters competed, with Mark totting up the golds, silvers and bronzes.

Every generation is prone to nostalgia but it is only by looking back that we see how childhood has moved indoors. In the affluent West, at least, childhood’s terrain has been radically annexed.

It is now grandparents who reminisce about disappearing for the day and only returning home for tea. In the 1980s, aged seven, I’d explore the common with my mates for company and muck about in farmyards amongst the machinery. Later, aged nine or ten, I’d cycle two miles, alone, to a good conker tree. My roaming space was large; my public play, without adults, significant. A few years ago, I interviewed the filmmaker David Bond, whose documentary, Project Wild Thing, revealed the progressive curtailment of a child’s freedom to roam. His mother Helen, who was then eighty-one, roamed across fifty square miles of Yorkshire as an eleven-year-old. When he was a boy, in the 1970s, he moved within one square mile of home. In the 2010s his children wander freely only within the limits of their 140-square-metre garden.

An academic study of three generations of families living on the edge of Sheffield revealed the same picture. When they were children in the 1960s, the grandparents could roam up to three kilometres from home without their parents knowing where they were going. They played with twenty other children in the local woods, chucked stones into the river from a bridge, raced each other along sewage pipes, and messed around on bikes. They needed permission to go into ‘town’ and banned locations included hanging around outside the pub. Their children, today’s parents, who grew up in the 1990s, could visit three or four places within half a kilometre without parental permission – usually friends’ houses and the local playing field. Today’s children, growing up in the 2010s, could go nowhere without permission. One ten-year-old boy was allowed to go alone to two friends’ houses within 115 metres of home. And not only has children’s roaming been curtailed but contemporary children play with far fewer peers, they have swapped public spaces for private homes, and are away from their houses for many fewer hours. A child’s ‘home range’ is no longer negotiated between parents and children but ‘imposed by the parents in a very rigorous way’, the researchers concluded.

The scary thing is that, as a parent, I find nothing unnatural about this. Of course I know where my children are at all times. Of course I am constantly watching my five- and seven-year-olds, apart from when they roam unaccompanied around our fenced garden. ‘Failure to supervise has become, in fact, synonymous with failure to parent,’ declared the American writer Hanna Rosin. She looked at the work of the geographer Roger Hart, who followed eighty-six children around a rural New England town for two years in the early 1970s. Reading his dissertation today ‘feels like coming upon a lost civilisation, a child culture with its own ways of playing and thinking and feeling that seems utterly foreign now’, Rosin wrote. Hart revealed how 1970s children got together without their parents arranging it, took great pride in ‘knowing how to get places’, and spent huge amounts of time creating imaginary worlds that their parents never knew about.

When Hart returned to the town in 2004 as a highly respected New York professor, he found that childhood was extinct: the next generation of parents barely let their children out of their sight, and the children never did anything without their parents’ permission. Hart wasn’t even allowed back into the same school to interview children because the head teacher judged that his research was not related to its curriculum.

In Britain in 1970, eighty per cent of seven-and eight-year-olds walked to school unaccompanied by adults. By 1990, just nine per cent did so. I would be surprised if any did today. My family and I live 700 metres from our village primary school. Some parents living at a similar distance to us drive their children to school. I admit to a little pride that every day, whatever the weather, we walk to school with our children. Then I feel foolish because it’s the most dangerous thing that we subject them to. For half an hour each day, we expose their lungs to diesel particulates you can’t see and pollution you can smell. Our route is on pavements, within a 30-mile-an-hour zone, but I’ve shouted at cars for passing us at 50. And we have to cross three roads without pedestrian crossings. One is a busy A-road where we must wait for drivers to pause and wave us over. There is no way I’d let my children cross that road alone.

When we wonder why children have lost the freedom to roam enjoyed by former generations, we usually blame traffic and stranger danger. Four children in Britain were killed by strangers in the year to March 2018. That’s about a one-in-three-million chance. But our fear of traffic is more rational. Traffic is increasing; the empty Norfolk lanes of my childhood are long gone. In the year to June 2018, 1,310 child pedestrians were killed or seriously injured in Britain, a one-in-nine-thousand chance.

Mayer Hillman, the sociologist who revealed the extinction of the unaccompanied walk to school, argues that rather than removing danger from children by making our roads safer for pedestrians, we have removed children from danger. In so doing, we are infringing the rights of the largest vulnerable group in society. The constraints we place on children’s freedom foster a growing resentment against controlling parents and a distrust of ‘strange’ adults – ‘disturbingly effective ways of inducing alienation, disaffection and anti-social behaviour’, asserts Hillman. ‘It is almost as if there has been a conspiracy to lower the quality of the lives of children and to make more difficult their