Bog Myrtle & Peat

I leaped to condemn Henry Williamson last winter, and I’ve been regretting it ever since. He’s a far more complicated author than I thought he was, and I was too keen to damn him for his politics. In working my way through his Flax of Dreams novels, I find more to catch my eye than I had ever imagined. 

I don’t love these novels, but they are certainly worth reading. My main issues is that while I managed to get twenty of Williamson’s books, including the complete Flax of Dreams (four volumes) and Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (fifteen) for fifteen pounds on eBay, they seem to have come from the smelliest home in the UK. It’s not a smell of filth or cigarettes – these would be tolerable – it’s the reek of an old lady’s perfume, but ratcheted up to a pitch of intensity which exceeds any safe level day-to-day application.

I’m naturally pretty sensitive to artificial perfumes and scents, but I guarantee that these books would embarrass a badger. So if not for pleasure, then why am I exposing myself to this fearsome nasal harassment? The answer is sheer curiosity… I need to know how it all fits together; how can the man of sentiment and whimsy drive for the hunt and the kill? What’s the mechanism and the worldview behind these works? Who is the audience and how did these books work for a generation of readers almost precisely one hundred years ago?

The Beautiful Years (1921) follows the life of Willie Maddison from his birth to the age of nine. It’s cramped into a Richmal Crompton aesthetic of cheeky boys who are disgusted by girls and spend their whole lives playing cowboys and Indians, but while there are moments of gentle comic relief (particularly when a gin trap is set to catch Santa), this is far more introspective and serious stuff. Willie’s mother died in childbirth; his father’s withdrawn to a cast-iron box of depression. Life is narrow and confusing for the boy as he grows up in the richness of a slightly unspecified rural landscape that is “near the coast” and “beneath the Downs”; it’s an echo of Williamson’s own childhood in southeast London at a time when the countryside really did run right up to the city’s door. 

Willie is intensely interested in the world around him, to a point at which he’s almost a little soft and distrait; a delicate flower, weak and “mazed” with an unstable temperament. He likes to be centre of attention, but only on his own terms – and he certainly has a well-established reputation for exaggerating stories with drama and hyperbole. By all accounts, there are strong autobiographical veins of Williamson himself here – particularly since young Willie is also fascinated by nature – several early chapters are determinedly focussed on establishing this fact to the reader, but his interest runs with both the fox and the hounds. Deeply sensitive, the boy wallows in the performance of maudline funerals for dead birds and mice he finds in the woods… then without skipping a beat, he rushes off to kill other creatures with every expression of joy.

Outside the strange rigidity of an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of little birds, Willie’s experience of wildlife feels entirely emotional, and maybe that’s how it can be so contradictory. In his moment, Willie will keenly kill moles so that he can use their skins to make a hat for himself; the greatest moment of his young life is a rabbiting trip with a group of local labourers. He’ll gleefully form part of the killing crowd, and yet he’ll also weep aloud at the idea of a local bully killing a young rabbit. Sometimes Willie’s killing is intrinsically linked to aspirations of manly pragmatism – he doesn’t want to be seen as a soft little mummy’s boy. At other times, thoughtful explanations are overwhelmed by a simple, excitable urge to spill blood.

The Beautiful Years builds towards a specific incident in which Willie finds a gibbet line upon which the bodies of dead owls have been hung by the local gamekeeper. Owls are something like an avatar for Willie, although the connection works more clearly in the mind of the writer than it does for the boy. Reeling from this spectacle, he’s already heartbroken when he turns around to discover a jay lying wounded in a gin trap. In a fit of furious pity, Willie declares his intention to smash up every trap in the surrounding area, even though these belong to a much-feared and famously unsympathetic county squire. The first step of this new crusade is to put the jay out of its misery by pulling its head off… and then he’s just a blurr of self-righteous animal protectionism. Willie’s caught in the act by a gamekeeper and is then dragged before his father in a slump of defeat and ignominy. It’s a neat and simple way to frame a rapprochement between them, and all is well (or better) in the end.

There are some obvious contradictions in Willie’s relationship with nature, but we shouldn’t get too hung up on them. For what it’s worth, I believe that being interested in animals and making headspace to kill them are two sides of the same coin. Little Willie can love nature and also want to kill things; this “dilemma” doesn’t trouble me at all. A more interesting question lies in how the focus shifts in Williamson’s presentation; what triggers the move from admirer to assailant and how the experience of killing shifts its meaning depending upon its context. 

Here’s a theme which runs throughout Henry Williamson’s work; an ability to observe and refract the first-hand experience of killing into profound emotional understandings – and yet also to excoriate the unfeeling cruelty of other people who do exactly the same thing. It’s tempting to wonder if this distinction matters to the creature being killed, but even when animals kill other animals in later works, Williamson often expresses a gently knowing subtext that “nature’s cruel, isn’t it?”

In this sense, Williamson often presents himself as the only person who can successfully navigate the complicated ethical, intellectual and emotional roadway required to kill with sensitivity and honour. Everyone else is just being grubby or nasty. At times, he presents himself as “the exceptional observer”, speaking from a privileged perspective as the lone voice of beauty and reason – and it’s not a very endearing way to present himself.

In his short story The Badger Dig (1930), Williamson appears in the first person, repeatedly putting himself above the cruelty and thoughtlessness of ignorant common folk. You or I could argue that everybody involved in that badger’s death is complicit, and yet when the moment of truth comes, Williamson believes that he is more to blame than the others because only he should have known better. That snobbishness is thickly present in The Beautiful Years too; the labourers and gamekeepers who provide some of the backdrop to this novel are shown to have simpler, lower ethical standards. They’re to be envied for aspects of strength, endurance and masculinity, but they’re pretty blunt instruments, particularly when they’re measured against a subtle, acute and emotional little boy.

In his guise as annotator of death, Williamson often pardons his own complicity in bloodshed. The slightly arrogant implication is that his experiences are uniquely valuable and creatively extraordinary. In The Beautiful Years, Willie dances to a similar tune – his killing reveals deeper and profound truths about his own burgeoning humanity… and yet when other people kill, it’s only a product of chaos, cruelty and a lack of feeling.

But is that it? Not entirely, and perhaps I’m being unduly harsh here. There are many more questions to answer here as I reach for the next stinking volume in the series.