Richard Lindsay – Page 9 – Richard Lindsay: Environment Arts and Letters

Background to the poem: ‘Home Leave’

Home Leave was that most peculiar of things – always longed for yet, once obtained, often something to be endured and ended as quickly as possible. The shock of seeing London to varying degrees still lit up and enjoying itself (at least until the Zeppelin and Gotha raids began in earnest in 1916) often triggered a sense of dislocation, incredulity and even anger as troops on leave passed through the capital en route to their homes. Adding to this, the sheer normalness of being home contrasted so bizarrely with what those on leave had just come from that many appeared to find it difficult to adjust in the few days available. There are stories of officers insisting on sleeping out in the garden under groundsheets, men inventing spurious reasons to return early, and, in memoirs, a frequently-expressed reluctance to talk with anyone about anything they had just seen or experienced. Jingoistic comments about ‘our brave boys beating the Boche’ appear to have particularly grated, and there is often an underlying sense of ‘wondering how your pals were doing’, and a desire to return to them as quickly as possible because they were the only ones who truly understood how you felt.

For those left at home, ‘Leave’ was a blessed relief from worry and was usually (though not always) a brief moment of joy, but for the individual on leave it was often a painful experience because there was rarely a chance to unburden themselves. Sometimes quite the reverse, because there was inevitably pressure to play up to the image of the ‘brave conquering hero’ – probably the last thing that anyone fresh from the muddy murderous hell of Passchendaele felt like doing.

Background to the poem: ‘The Skull’

Although life in WW1 trenches is now invariably linked with the word ‘mud’, in fact the River Somme runs through a chalk landscape for much of the setting for the eponymous battle. True, the riparian margins of the River Somme were peatland, making the going challenging in these parts, but during early parts of the Battle of the Somme the weather was dry and the chalk was hard. A better picture of the conditions associated with early stages of the battle is given by William Orpen’s paintings of the same area in 1917, where white bones of the dead blend with the white bones of the chalk landscape. Indeed Orpen’s “Thiepval 1917” may have been the subconscious trigger for this poem.

Only when the rains came in late July and August and barely seemed to stop did the battlefield begin to descend into a muddy hell. Anyone who has walked across a chalk field in the rain will know how cloying and sheer glue-like the chalk and clay-with-flints (usually found together) of such a landscape can become. During the warm days of July, however, the Somme Battlefield was often bone dry and splattered with the startling while lesions of shell holes and trench lines, as though the very bones of the Earth were being exposed.

Should we use the term ‘moorland’?

It may seem odd to question the use of the term ‘moorland’ when the word is so well established in English literature, being used in both Lorna Doone (1869) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) though not, interestingly enough, in Wuthering Heights (1847) despite the fact most people today would, in their mind’s eye, set Emily Bronte’s tale against a ‘wild moorland’ backdrop. In the inter-war years of the last century, however, Prof. A.G. Tansley used the term just three times in his magnum opus “The British Islands and Their Vegetation” (1939), considering it only within the linguistic complexities of describing peatland habitats using common parlance. In contrast, Prof. W.H. Pearsall’s ‘Mountains and Moorlands‘, published in 1950 as one of the earliest classic volumes of the New Naturalist Series, waved a large eponymous flag for the term ‘moorland’. Nonetheless, he was obliged to admit that: “There is no good definition of moors and moorlands“, identifying it pragmatically as open, wild uninhabited country. This absence of a ‘good definition’ continues to the present day. Despite the title, ‘The Moorlands of England and Wales‘ (2003) by Prof. I.G. Simmons in effect provides no more specific definition of ‘moorland’ than did Pearsall half a century earlier. The word also continues to appear in accounts of ‘moorland’ habitat from such disparate parts of the former British Empire as Uganda and New Zealand, whereas the term is almost unknown outside former Imperial territories.

We thus find ourselves in Britain in particular with a concept of a ‘typical moorland landscape’ well understood at least in Pearsall’s and Simmons’s terms by the public at large, but one which lacks any sound, rigorous definition for scientific use – as Tansley so clearly illustrated by his decision not to use the term when describing the range of British and Irish habitats. Indeed hereby lies the nub of the issue, because Tansley was describing natural and semi-natural habitats, while the prime focus of Simmons is moorland and its history as land-management units. We thus find that D. McVean and D.A.Ratcliffe’s NCC Monograph “Plant Communities of the Scottish Highlands‘ (1962) refers to moorlands only in the context of muirburn, an approach also largely adopted by Averis et al. (2004) who use the term ‘uplands’ as the focus of their ‘An Illustrated Guide to British Upland Vegetation‘.

This distinction between habitat types and management units matters because ‘moorlands’ typically consist of several quite different habitat types, yet management parcels often make no distinction between these types or even deliberately seek to embrace a variety of types. In particular, given the increasingly high profile being afforded to peatlands within national and international community most notably because of their enormous carbon stores (more than all the world’s vegetation combined) and their role in water management, the distinction between peatlands and non-peatland habitats within the upland landscape is crucial because peatlands are wetlands. The only reason they are able to store so much carbon is that they are waterlogged to an extraordinary degree – typically peat soils in their natural state have a moisture content of more than 90% and often have a ratio of water to solid matter similar to that of a jellyfish. This contrasts markedly with the soils of other habitats typically rolled up within the all-embracing term ‘moorland’, yet for management purposes these very differing habitat types are often conflated under the term ‘moorland management’. Such conflation means that while a given management technique for upland grass heath, for example, may be appropriate, it may be completely inappropriate for an adjacent area of peat bog.

An area of particular concern is the use of the term ‘moorland’ in scientific publications which describe research in upland habitats and which then either explicitly or implicitly highlight policy implications for such ‘moorland’ areas without also highlighting the distinction to be made between peatland habitats and non-peatland habitats within the upland expanse. Indeed use of the term ‘moorland’ when describing habitat management in the uplands merely continues to muddy the waters of land-use policy and serves to add an unhelpful level of ambiguity to any scientific results obtained from habitat research in these landscapes. For the moment, it is necessary to be aware that any literature which uses the term ‘moorland’ requires the most careful examination to tease out what is relevant to peatland management and what is relevant to other upland habitats.

It is worth closing with the observation that ‘moorland’ still has a role to play, for example in the study of mobile species such as birds because they may make use of differing parts of the landscape during differing times of the day and differing times of the year. The concept of ‘moorland’ is thus arguably valid and helpful here, and the technique of ‘Moorland Breeding Bird Survey’ pioneered by Andy Brown and Kevin Shepherd remains in essence the standard approach for the survey of moorland birds – it is just worth highlighting the title of their 1993 defining paper: ‘A method for censusing upland breeding waders.’

References

Averis, A., Averis, B., Birks, J., Horsfield, D. Thompson, D. and Yeo, M. (2004) An Illustrated Guide to British Upland Vegetation. Peterborough : Joint Nature Conservation Committee.

Brown, A.F. and Shepherd, K.B. (1993) A method for censusing upland breeding waders. Bird Study, 40 : 189-195.

McVean, D. and Ratcliffe, D.A. (1962) Plant Communities of the Scottish Highlands. Monographs of the Nature Conservancy No.1. London : HMSO.

Pearsall, W.H. (1950) Mountains and Moorlands. London : Collins.

Simmons, I.G. (2003) The Moorlands of England and Wales. Edinburgh : University press.

Tansley, A.G. (1939) The British Islands and Their Vegetation. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.

‘Poems of love, blood and death’ – background to the World War 1 poems

For anyone interested in first-hand experiences of World War 1 and the material which has inspired my poetry about this period, there has been a recent flush of such accounts, many published decades ago but now made more easily accessible through the medium of e-books and the likes of Kindle and Amazon. The classics are volumes such as ‘Goodbye To All That‘ by Robert Graves, ‘Memoirs of an Infantry Officer‘ by Siegfried Sassoon and ‘Undertones of War‘ by Edmund Blunden, while Lyn Macdonald has compiled a huge number of first-hand descriptions for her much acclaimed accounts of the Somme and Passchendaele.

Perhaps less well known is ‘The War the Infantry Knew – 1914-1918‘ which gives a day-by-day account of the activities and experiences of the Royal Welch Fusiliers spanning the entire war, painstakingly assembled by Captain J.C. Dunn, the RWF Medical Officer for much of this period, from accounts given to him by colleagues and from his own diaries. Both Sassoon and Graves feature briefly in the accounts but although Dunn and his contributors rarely stray from the principle of restrained understatement, the conditions and experiences they endured, month after relentless month, come through all too clearly. John Lewis-Stempel has meanwhile pulled together a particularly moving account of the youngest, most junior officers, who shared the experiences of the men most directly, felt responsible for their men and led them into battle from the front. As a consequence they had the shortest life-expectancy of any in the trenches, as Lewis-Stempel’s title suggests: ‘Six Weeks – The Short and Gallant Life of the British Officer in the First World War‘.

Another feature of the recent crop of accounts now emerging – or re-emerging – is the number of autobiographies or biographies giving the perspective of the common private soldier or the NCO. The majority of the best-known autobiographies were written by junior officers, subalterns mainly, and have an air of ‘public school duty’ about them, whereas accounts written by the rank-and-file Tommy often have a different, more dogged, feel to them. For some, life in the trenches was only marginally worse than the life they had left back in Britain, with the added benefit of the undoubted camaraderie which developed within a platoon, although the steady loss of one’s ‘pals’ and the grinding nature of the work sometimes led to a shutting down of the emotions and an avoidance of new friendships, typified by “With Innocence and Hope” by Mike Williams.

There are, of course, also famous accounts from the other major combatants in this war, most notably ‘All Quiet on the Western Front‘ by Erich Maria Remarque for the German perspective, and ‘Le Feu‘ [Under Fire] by Henri Barbusse for France, but for an understanding of just what both French and German troops endured during the battle for Verdun, Ian Ousby’s ‘The Road to Verdun‘ is essential reading.

Furthermore, while the humour of the Wipers Times and the Bruce Bairnsfather cartoons are now somewhat legendary, it should not be assumed that the British had the monopoly on humour within the trenches. “The Silence of Colonel Bramble” by André Maurois shines a gentle Gallic light on the British approach to war.

What is perhaps the most remarkable thing of all is the way that so many men, and women, went back to live a normal life at the end of the war as though they’d just been away somewhere for a few weeks, the only thing betraying the scars they carried inside being the fact that many refused ever to talk about their war experiences with anyone. Pat Francis never learned anything about the war from her father Jack Watson apart from a nursery rhyme which he wrote in her autograph book and which he then enigmatically dated ‘Abbeville 1916’. She never learned why, but her subsequent meticulous research into her father’s war record resulted in ‘A Quiet Life – a marine in the Great War‘. He had been in Gallipoli, through the worst of times in that ill-fated venture, and then Salonika, the Somme and finally Passchendaele – worse even than the worst of times – and yet he never, ever, spoke a word about it…

FirstSite Open Exhibition

Fowey hinterland — View north across Cornish countryside from Fowey, Cornwall.

Having just discovered that FirstSite, Colchester’s major arts centre, is hosting an Open Exhibition for East Region artists and that today was the final day for submissions, a flurry of activity led to submission of a limited edition full-sized print of my “Fowey Hinterland” oil painting. It shows the view from the upper car park in Fowey, Cornwall, looking out across the Cornish countryside to the north. It was the only picture I had ready-framed and strung. Even the original oil painting isn’t yet framed. It’s a bit of a cheat to claim it as my first work chosen for public exhibition because the Open Exhibition guarantees to display every work submitted (an estimated 750 works), starting from 2nd October until 22nd November, but nevertheless good to be exposed to public gaze and scrutiny.