Helen Macdonald

 

                                

One of the things that most endeared me to the wonderful Helen Macdonald was finding out how much we share a love of the countryside, especially the English countryside. She knows my birthplace village of Kintbury in Berkshire and even understands my love of Rupert Bear.

I also love these thoughts from Helen's childhood at Tekels Park in her new book,                                   Vesper Flights, published by Grove/Atlantic "So many of our stories about nature are about testing ourselves against it, setting ourselves against it, defining our humanity against it. But this was nothing like that at all. It was a child's way of looking at nature: one seeking intimacy and companionship. When I learned the names of these creatures from field guides it was because I needed to know them the same way I had to know the names of my classmates at school. Their diverse lives expanded what I considered as home way beyond the walls of my house. They made the natural world seem a place of complex and beautiful safety. They felt like family."

This is the overriding theme of this beautifully moving and thoughtful book: All of our planet's creatures and their habitat are our "family." And we are are hurting and killing our family in a way that is disastrous not just for them, but also for us. To quote Helen again, "The rarer animals become, the fewer the opportunities we have to see or interact with them, and as a consequence thier ability to generate meanings for us slowly shrinks away; eventually all they come to stand for is the notion of our moral failings in our relationship to the natural world. The world has lost half its wildlife in my own lifetime."

These essays are not just about how badly we have done with our home world though. There are uplifting ones, funny ones and all are so compelling. I loved them all, and not only because I totally agree with her thoughts and sentiments. Her descriptions capture the wonder of our fellow creatures with reverence, celebration, and awe. 

In a starred review, Booklist praises Vesper Flights as “Gorgeously composed, complexly affecting, and stunningly revelatory. Macdonald is both exacting and enthralled… There is abundant wonder and beauty here. Best-selling Macdonald’s fans will rush to embrace this, as should all readers passionate about nature.”

Now read more about her fascinating life and learn about Birdoole, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen and the Goat in my interview with Helen.

Helen, tell me about where you live now and why you love it so much. 

My house sits on a hill in a small village in the east of England. It’s a very rural place. Barn owls float around the foggy field margins in the evening, there’s a Norman church with medieval stained glass, and this morning I waved to Tim the farmer, who lives with his wife in a dusty pink-painted house at the bottom of the hill, as he rattled past on his tractor. Moving to a village is always a bit of a lottery. I’ve been incredibly lucky with this one. It’s a hugely warm, friendly community and even in this time of Covid and lockdown, I’ve not once felt isolated or alone. 

Where were you living when you were 7 years old? Are they fond memories?  

Very fond memories! Two years earlier my parents had bought a house set on a fifty-acre wooded estate in Surrey owned by the Theosophical Society. It was full of the most gloriously eccentric souls, mostly elderly ladies, who taught me an early, valuable lesson in how women need not conform to the roles society has laid out for them. I ran wild in this place across fading formal gardens, woods and fields, catching snakes, frogs, newts, and grasshoppers and watching birds through a pair of small, elderly East German binoculars. It was such a safe place my parents were happy to let me wander unattended in it for hours. Without this species-rich environment, and the freedom I was lucky enough to have had exploring it, I doubt I’d have become so deeply in love with the natural world.

Helen visiting Dinosaur Isle theme park on the Isle of Wight. I'm glad Triceritops are vegetarians!

Did you have a favorite teacher when you were young and are you still in touch with her or him?

 Oh, Absolutely. I was very young. Mrs. Baylis. Pat Baylis. She was a marvel. The most astonishing human. Dark hair, warm eyes, a mouth that seemed always set in an expression of pride at her class, or delighted amusement at our antics. I still remember the stories she improvised for us—one, about a small boy with a pet stoat, I adored so much I wrote what I could remember down after school and stapled it into a book, illustrated it with wonky line drawings.

Helen's Ravenscote School, Surrey

She was an exceptionally gifted teacher able to communicate a proper love for learning, and she was also that very rare thing in a child’s mind, someone who felt like a real person rather than just a teacher. I’m not in touch with her now, but she was such a nurturing and inspiring person in my life that I thanked her in the acknowledgements to H is for Hawk. Thank you again, Mrs. Baylis. 

Is there a book that changed the way you look at life? 

Oof. That’s a hard question to answer. Not one, certainly. There have definitely been books which have changed me, intellectually, emotionally, or both. For example, William Cronon’s fabulous collection of essays Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature first revealed to me how the natural world is not, as we are led to believe, a place free of human meaning; that in fact we load it with our political and social assumptions.

Emotionally, the poetry of Frank O’Hara blew me away when I was an undergraduate: it made me want to write poetry, seriously, for the first time.

 

His voice was so many things at once: wry, delighted, queer, playful, full of love and at the same time deeply literary and serious. Lines from his poems still fall into my head all the time; they went very deep. 

Do you have a favorite children’s book and what about it makes it so? 

It’s a little vertiginous to look back on the books I loved as a child. Some of them I’m not sure I want to re-read; I’m sure they contain all sorts of dubiousnesses. I had quite an obsession with two books: Brendon Chase by the English author Denys Watkyns-Pitchford was the story of public schoolboys who ran away from home to live off the land in an English forest.

The other was My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George, another story about a boy who ran away from home to live in the woods, this time in the Catskills.

 

Both of them were crammed with wonderful natural-historical facts—but mostly I loved them because in both of them the natural world was a benevolent, kindly place, just as it always felt to me when I was outside climbing trees or turning over rocks to look for bugs. 

What are the funniest or most embarrassing stories your family tells about you? 

I’m never been a fan of telling embarrassing stories about loved ones. Seems mean to me, even if it’s done fondly. I guess most of the stories my family could tell about me would be about how incredibly absent-minded and messy I was as a child, though I’m pretty sure those aspects of my personality were symptoms of undiagnosed childhood ADHD.

In that case I must insist on printing this story "Goats" from your book:

"As a child I discovered a simple game that's good to play with goats. You lay your hand flat on a billygoat's forehead and push, just a little. You push, it pushes back, and you push harder, and it does too, and it's a little like arm wrestling, but much more fun, and the goat always wins.

I told Dad about my love of pushing goats, once, just an aside while we were talking about something else. He must have filed this information away, because about a year later, he came home very crossly, and he was cross with me, and that was a very rare thing. In his capacity as a press photographer, he'd spent the day at a London Zoo taking photographs for their Annual Animal Census, and at one point he happened to be standing with the rest of the press pack in the petting zoo.

And there he sees a goat.

And he says to everyone, watch this.

I hadn't explained the activity very well. Because he puts his hand against the goat's forehead, with everyone watching. Then he pushes.

He pushes really hard.

And the goat falls over.

There's a long silence broken only by the sound of photographers and journalists saying, "Jesus,Mac!" and "What the fuck?"

The goat gets up, stares at him, and runs away. And the press pack never let him forget the time he pushed a goat over in front of all of them and it was all my fault."

Is there a song or person that you listen to when you are feeling a bit down? 

People? Yes, two in particular. They know who they are. Songs? Depends on why I’m feeling low, but a bit of gravely beautiful baroque music or something that is sad enough to chime with my mood often helps. Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Prelude de la Nuit is a favourite. Elliot Smith’s TrueLove or Independence Day definitely hit the spot. 

Can you remind me of your parrot friend's name? 

Birdoole! Properly speaking, he’s a green-cheeked conure. He started off being called, simply, “bird” which mutated into “Birdle” in the way pet names do, and at some point in the first couple of years of his life (he’s 17 now!) that became “Birdoole.”

             
 

How would you say you are different now than you were in your 20’s? 

I’m far less self-absorbed and far less worried about what other people think of me—some of the happier consequences of getting older. I think I’m a lot softer these days, too. Happier, certainly. I love humanity a hell of a lot more than I did when I was in my twenties, when I am sad to say I had a bit of a misanthropic streak. Touring with H is for Hawk helped change that. I met so many astonishing people, readers who shared their own experiences of loss and sadness with me. Talking with them quietly shifted the way I felt about us and our place in the world. It’s an obvious conclusion in retrospect, but we all go through dark times, we all struggle, we all lose people we love, we all get hurt. We’re such fragile, precious creatures.

Is there a question no one has ever asked you that you wish they would? Something, perhaps, that people would be surprised to know about you? 

Actually, yes! But I like to think it’s not too surprising a revelation. Perhaps it’s because I’ve only mentioned boyfriends in my books (because they were a part of my life in the times I’ve written about) but no-one has ever asked me about my orientation—I’ve been bisexual for as long as I can remember. 

 

IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME 

to any period from before recorded history to yesterday, 

be safe from harm, be rich, poor or in-between, if appropriate to your choice, 

actually experience what it was like to live in that time, anywhere at all, 

meet anyone, if you desire, speak with them, listen to them, be with them. 

When would you go? 

Where would you go? 

Who would you want to meet? 

And most importantly, why do you think you chose this time?

 

So many possible answers to this one. I think it has to be the answer I’d have given you back when I was about twelve or thirteen, and was working my way through the English translation of a huge work on falconry called De arte venandi cum avibus by Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, Holy Roman Emperor.

It is an amazing volume, beautifully illustrated, from which one can still garner useful hints on how to tame and train birds of prey. Frederick is an astonishing historical figure.

Look him up on the internet and you’ll see why he was known as Stupor mundi, the wonder of the world. I always wished I could meet him when I was small because he was a falconer, but now I don’t really want to meet him: I would like to visit, just for a while, his court. I spent years working as a historian of science at the University of Cambridge, and while I didn’t specialize in early-modern natural philosophy (my specialism was the history of natural history in the twentieth century), what I came to know about it made me understand the importance of places like his court, and how more generally cross-cultural meetings have been so crucial in the development of what we call, today, science. It was full of learned people he’d brought from all over, experts from the Arab world and the West: astronomers, poets, natural philosophers, translators, mathematicians.

It’s their voices I’d like to hear.

Thank you Helen, not just for writing such a remarkable book and answering my questions, but also for describing our shared world with such compassion and empathy for ALL its inhabitants. We need so many more of you.