A Writer's Process: Pam Keevil

Pam’s creative process, and below that, her runner’s up piece from the Wild Words Summer Solstice Competition 2020.

It was just a thought. Would Hawkwood College, near Stroud have any online courses during the pandemic? Yes. One which immediately appealed was called Nature Writing led by Steve Moss, course leader of the MA in Nature and Travel Writing at Bath Spa University. Why not give it a go? Most of what I write always has some references to the natural world either implicitly or explicitly and in lockdown, I was spending a lot of time in the garden which backs onto a wood. I was saturated by the natural world. It was a good time to learn how to put this in print.

The rest is more or less as the passage unfolds. I merged the early experience of the one hour lockdown walks with observations as I paused in my garden. The main theme of the writing was in response to my husband’s call up the stairs one Wednesday morning in early June; ‘There’s a bloke with a hazmat suit, spraying the brambles.’ It was also inspired by the words of Inger Anderson, the UN’s environment chief, saying nature is sending us a message with the coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing climate crisis reported in Damian Carrington’s article in The Guardian 25th March, 2020*. And it represents my own passionate held beliefs that humans should work with nature and not seek dominion over it (Genesis, 1 vv26-28).

I won’t become a specialist in creative nonfiction but I will be far more sensitive in my portrayal of the natural world from now on.

Unnatural Nature

It was an unnatural spring; the sunniest and driest since records began. The elderflower blossomed early and like country people of old, I measure the summer from the appearance of the flowers to the ripening of the first sprays of berries. Could summer really start in mid-May? There were other portents too. The absence of traffic made it easier to hear the melodies of the dawn chorus starting with the robin whose large eyes absorb light more easily and so he sings before the first glimmer of light turns dark to grey. He is followed by the wren, blackbird and chiff chaff, overlaid with the rumbling of the wood pigeon. I ignore the squawks of crows and magpies, the cackle of the occasional green woodpecker and the screech of the jay. They have their part to play in nature’s orchestra but I prefer melody to percussion.

In the aeroplane free skies, the lark soared above the meadow where buttercup, red clover and sorrel jostled for space with the grasses; meadow foxtail whose heads resemble the fox’s brush, Yorkshire fog with a purple tinge, cock’s foot with tufted triangular flower heads and the feathery fronds of quaking grass. Brushing past them released clouds of pollen and when the wind was stronger, they shimmered like the surface of the sea. At least on my one-hour Boris walk as I called it, there was the chance to track the progress of the season through the unfurling of every new plant or acid-green, young leaf. As the oak arrived before the ash, is it true we’ll have a dry summer for according to the old rhyme:

Oak before the ash, going to get a splash

Ash before the oak, going to get a soak.

Was the perfume of the wild roses and that biscuit aroma of a warm spring day, when nature is at its most fecund, voluptuous, ensnaring and desirable, stronger too? Or was it always there but smothered by the metallic stench of petrol?

The great gardens of stately homes, so often built from the profits of persecution and exploitation were abandoned. The Chelsea Flower Show, with photo opportunities of celebrities in colours designed to complement the backdrop of another award-winning design of glass and steel or old tyres and rusty wire in an attempt to create something noteworthy, was cancelled. It didn’t matter. The bluebell beech woods, the bladder wrack and shell strewn shores and the lake with its perfect reflection of willow and clouds where moorhens shepherded their chicks to safety as the pike, like a submarine, rose from the bottle green depth to snap at the fly-coated surface easily took the prizes and jostled for best in show.

Was everyone transfixed by the paradox of our enclosed lives and the expansion of the natural world? Nature had taken centre stage and humans had been relegated. Moon daisies colonised the verges by the side of empty roads and strange mosses and lichens crept through the cracks in pavements where usually a thousand feet a day took precedence.

And then summer arrives. After weeks of drought the pink and white blackberry blossoms have smothered the new growth of the brambles. Come too close and the thrumming of bumble bees, honey bees and solitary bees drowns out the chirrup of sparrows, nesting nearby. A flash of gold and red like the uniforms of soldiers in past centuries and the chittering from the overhead wires announces a pair of goldfinches. They flutter down, balance on a springy branch before settling on the grasses below. It will be a good year for bird, mouse and human when the berries form.

That is when I see him. The man in the hazmat suit clambers over the rickety wooden fence separating the lane from the slopes of the valley sides. Hunched over, he sprays an evil smelling liquid from the plastic container strapped to his back and I know the duvet of pink, white and green will soon be a brown wasteland.

‘I can do what I like’ he says when I challenge him. ‘It’s my bloody land.’

There is no reasoning, no chance of discussion. For him there is no alternative. I walk home, remembering those images from April of others in hazmat suits, trying to save lives and wonder if this cavalier attitude to the natural world and the havoc a small virus is making are in any way linked.

When this pandemic is over, or at least on the wane, will we return to our desire to have dominion over all living things and bend nature to fit our will? Or might this unnatural time be remembered as the year when nature held sway and we finally knew our place?