The Song That Sings Us, my novel set in a fantasy world, where gifted humans have always been able to talk to animals, was published in the Uk in October 2021. I sent it out to selected readers in advance of publication in the hope that we’d have some quotes for the cover. And people said some very nice things 

‘Beautiful. Heart wrenching, gripping, strange and glorious.Liz Hyder 

‘Beautiful, lyrical and fast paced. A powerful and daring story,  Gill Lewis 

‘…an extraordinary weaving of fierce action and tender poetry,’ Sophie Anderson 

‘A brave, bold, epic story, with huge imaginative reach, thrilling adventure, marvellous characters and a deep true heart.Julia Green 

‘A captivating eco-fable Linda Newberry 

‘A heartsong. And a song of active hope in a dark world. Jackie Morris 

‘A very special book. Inspiring, important and innovative –. Simon Fisher 

‘How to classify this great book? Ecofiction, thriller, fantasy, parable? Page turner from the outset‘ Eva John 

Now there’s a 2nd hardback edition and reviewers have said some nice things for that cover too

Praise like this is literally life preserving. But real readers, people who aren’t reviewers, friends or blood relatives, are what every book needs, and as more people get round to reading this novel, I’m getting asked about the characters. Jackie Morris created motifs to symbolise some of them, but I’m finding readers want a bit more. 

I’m not going to tell you much about what most of the human characters look like because they exist in my head as consciousnesses, rather than appear as figures; plus I want you to be able to imagine yourself inside any of them, the way I put my self in side Eowyn in Lord of the Rings, but here is a little background information to help you imagine my cast!

Toren Sisal

Is the mother of the three main human characters, Harlon, Ash and Zeno. At the time of the story she is still a relatively young woman, in her lat thirties. She’s a little above average height I think, strong and athletic. She is the daughter of retired a military man and a beautiful heiress and trained in the military herself, as part of an elite force a bit like our SAS. But shortly after her training she ran away to join the eco-rebel forces fighting oil exploitation in the White Sea, my world’s equivalent of the Arctic. Toren is a warrior and gives the care of her first born daughter, Harlon, to her partner Tui, while she goes on to be a leader of a very successful, and rather violent, group of eco activists, Green Thorn. 

At the time of Tui’s death she is travelling back to rejoin and revitalise Green Thorn. But she discovers she is pregnant with twins and, to protect her children, she runs to the mountains to raise them in isolation, giving herself a false name Breen Avvon.

Toren isn’t naturally motherly. But she tries. She loves her children with a deep, fierce passion; she cares for them, educates them and prepares Harlon in particular to be a warrior like her. When the time comes, something in Toren is relieved to return to the life of an activist and soldier, but this time without bloodshed…well, not much bloodshed. She does still shoot somebody in the head..

Harlon

Harlon is much more her mother’s daughter than she realises. At the start of the story she’s in her mid teens and has been raised by her mother to be the protector of her younger siblings, twins Ash and Zeno. This has created a little separation between her and the twins. Harlon’s sense of responsibility for them has made her a bit stiff and fierce at times. The fact that she isn’t a Listener, as they are, makes her feel very different from her siblings. Sometime she feels she the sensible one, while they are both a bit dreamy, and sometimes she feels like the stupid one because she can’t do what they do. 

Harlon is strong and fit and well trained but doubts her abilities at first , blaming herself for things that are beyond her control. But she is mentally tough and resilient and keeps going ins spite of her doubts. She is also Tui’s child, and although she lacks his talent for Listening – the name for the ability to eavesdrop on animal thoughts and communicate with animal minds – she has his ability to connect in another way. The song he and his friends the humpbacked whales have planted inside Harlon’s brain is there, waiting for the right moment which she must recognise when it comes. Harlon’s intelligence and bravery, her ability to to analyse and then act, are ultimately what save the world. 

Xeno

Xeno’s words pepper the story of the Song That Sings Us. She speaks in riddles, but riddles that prove to have a deep meaning. Living alone on the mountain has allowed her family to get used to her strange, disconnected way of communicating and her eccentric behaviour. They come to accept the fact that Xeno is really more comfortable communing with birds than with humans.

But Xeno hasn’t really chosen to be this way. Her listener power is the strongest of anyone in the story, stronger even that her father Tui, so strong in fact that she cannot tune out the consciousness of birds. She connects with them automatically, like a radio tuned to multiple stations and perpetually on. Some of what flows into her mind she loves, but often it leaves her overwhelmed and confused. Not really able to exert her own will or personality. 

She seems vulnerable, fragile and the character least able to take care of herself. Yet she is the one who engages most directly in conflict with the evil leader of the Automators, Doada Sisal. It is the making of her. She finds her will to resist him, and she finds a power that she thinks does not belong to her but to the birds with whom she connects so powerfully. But she discovers at the end of the book that she is indeed powerful, and that she can be herself.  

Ash

I’m after asked (or even sometimes told) which of the characters is most like me. Harlon and Toren are who I would like to be…warriors with the ability to think fast and make good decision under pressure. Aspects of Xeno, her alienation from the world, and her struggle to make herself feel autonomous, are like me. But the human character who was easiest to write was Ash. He has a strong sense of fairness and looks at the world with clear eyes which sometimes find human behaviour strange or even ridiculous. He is the one who I used to make a commentary about some of the aspects of the Automators plans which I find unacceptable in our world. 

Ash loves his sister Xeno as if she were a part of himself. He looks up to Harlon and his mother and is afraid when his support system is taken away. But Ash is pretty flexible, and very resilient – he can adapt to hardship very easily and find something to make him happy in the simplest of things. He has a wry sideways sense of humour, which he finds he shares with the Gula. 

If you ask Ash at the start of the story, when he is about 12 where he would like to spend his life, he would say, here on the mountain of course. He would never expect to end up the mast of a ship sailing the oceans, and absolutely loving it. He is an unexpected adventurer, who lives in the moment. 

Doada Sisal

Doada is Toren’s older brother, a fact that he is desperate to conceal in case it undermines his rise to complete power in Rumyc. He was his mother’s darling son, spoiled by her. But he had inherited the listener talent from his father’s side of the family, something his mother would disapprove of. Throughout his childhood he conceals this talent and through that grows a desire for secrecy and control and a taste for cruelty. He sees that his greatest chance of complete control, of complete power lies through the Automators and their rise to power. So he must rid himself of the listener power, which he does through a hideous self experiment. 

Like his mother Doada likes beautiful things, clothes objects any kind of luxury. He see them as his right. He’s good at manipulating people but has no real relationships in his life because no one would be good enough for him and anyone who got close might find out things he would be too ashamed to reveal. Doada is vain and deluded to the point of insanity. He is the only character who I would describe: he looks exactly like the Uk politician Jacob Rees Mogg.  

The Gula

The Gula is a wolverine, an animal with a bad reputation with humans for wanton destruction. But wolverines are just supreme survivors, incredibly tough and with a steely determination to get what they want. I did a lot of research about wolverines for another, non fiction book, and unearthed lots of recent discoveries made through radio tagging. These studies in some ways reinforced the image of the wolverine as an indomitable survivor – one radio tagged wolverine went straight up a 2000 foot vertical rock face in winter, in a blizzard in the dark, because it was the shortest route to the next place it wanted to be. But they also showed that wolverines are not so solitary, that their bonds with their children are lifelong, reinforced by children visiting both mum and dad’s territtories to hang out with them as adults.

The Gula’s vision of the trail come out of research too. Many indigenous hunters, when tracking animals, using sight, sound, and smell cues, plus knowledge and memory, report the trail manifesting as a golden thread that they can actually see. It isn’t hard to imagine that an animal with such acute senses and high intelligence as a wolverine might experience something similar. 

The Gula is wise, and intuitive. She trusts her senses, and what they tell her, and she trusts her brain’s intuitive ability to interpret that sensory information and give her an unshakeable direction in which to go. Having lost her own cubs, Ash becomes her cub substitute and she will never, ever give up on him. But in following Ash, she has experiences that no wolverine would normally have, and it makes her into something even more extraordinary. 

Enkalamba

I find it incredibly moving that many people’s favourite character is Enkalamba and that her story arc moves many readers to tears. She is another character who grew out of research for other books and from my own interest in elephants and in animal intelligence and consciousness.

Elephant’s like humans are social beings.They communicate with sound, smell and touch and form strong life-long bonds with family members and friends. They rely on each other and in particular on the matriarch of their group, who is the repository of knowledge. Her long life and long memory are the group’s insurance policy against drought and famine as the matriarch remembers where food and water can be found in a range of different seasons and conditions. 

Studies of elephants show that they grieve over dead relatives and friends and even return to the place where a loved one died at the same time that the death occurred. 

So they are complex beings but their huge brains are arranged very differently from our own. Experiments have shown that they are very intelligent but the nature of that intelligence and the workings of their minds we can only guess at. Enkalamba find human minds very different, very difficult to navigate, but she is bright and very motivated to understand. Without any of her own kind left to talk to, she seeks communication with other beings and through that feels, ever more strongly, that all life is one kin. And I agree with her.

Skrimsli

Everyone’s favourite tiger sea captain! Skrimsli is a hero in a striped coat. His long associations – both very bad and very good – with humans have made him into a being not quite tiger, not quite human, but entirely himself. 

I’m not going to say much about him here, as I’m right in the middle of writing his back story for the next book in the series. But he is based on a Siberian tiger, not a Bengal. So he’s a tiger whose ancestors hunted in the boreal forests of the north, who is used to frosts and snow. 

In writing about Skrimsli I’ve thought and read quite a bit about how language influences our thinking, on the sorts of thoughts and the sorts of communication that are only possible with language, because language is what changes Skrimsli. I’m not sure what all his story is yet, but you’ll be able to read about it in 2023. 

Not long after the Day War Came was published I was contacted by a wonderful charity Refugee Trauma Initiative. They work with the most traumatised refugees directly after arrival at camps in the Mediterranean. so they are doing a very difficult but essential job. I said the only real help I could offer would be to write something for them.It seems a pretty lame offer but they were very kind. So, they sent me a selection of real stories from refugees who had agreed to share things that had happened to them, and care workers who had stories from their perspective to tell.

As you can imagine they were hard to read, but the absolute bare minimum we can do as human is not to look away from the harsh realities of others’ experience. I read, I cried. I thought and I wrote the poems here. I have another WIP, which is a sort of allegorical myth as a play…but its unfinished an I don’t know when I’ll get back to it.

If you are one of the few people who make it to this blog, then do please share these poems and look at RTI’s wonderful work. One of the poems has been set to music by Simon Fisher, composer, teacher and the Dad from Family Bookworms Wales.(fabulous guide to childrens books with reviews by all family members) Maybe one day we’ll share that somewhere too.

Apologies for the spaced out format here: bloody wordpress did that when I took it from the original document. SIGH

DISPLACED 

poems by Nicola Davies 

Part one DEPARTURE

THIS  MOMENT 

Of course you saw this moment coming:

It was in the space between the flags and placards on the street,

behind the camouflage of newsprint.

A distant megaphone announced it months ago,

The boarded windows and the bombs, confirmed its imminent arrival.

It was too big to understand,

yet somehow, small enough to hide,

to fold between the wind-dried sheets,

stir back into the stew,

and slide underneath the bed

It didn’t stay where it was put.

And now its on the doorstep,

shouting like a drunk

This moment,

This moment,

This moment from which nothing will ever be the same. 

BEFORE WE LEFT 

For months we listened, huddled in the dark:

to Mother’s words, like hail battering the roof

“It is too dangerous

It is too far

It is too expensive

It is too cold

It is too lonely”;

to Father’s silence. 

When at last his words came,

they lodged beneath our eyelids 

the way sand does,

rubbing, chaffing, 

“There is no future here

We have to leave.”

We listened, huddled in the dark

Afraid. 

FIVE MINUTES

You’ve got five minutes, what will you choose

From all that you’re about to lose?

You’ve got five minutes, to fill your arms.

When the city shrieks with fire alarms.

You’ve got five minutes, what will you bring?

A hat? A coat? A wedding ring?

You’ve got five minutes, no time for pain,

Because bricks and mortar fall like rain.

You’ve got five minutes to save a life,

Your sleeping children, your brother’s wife?

You’ve got five minutes to run, run, run

While the sky burns up like a dying sun.

You’ve got five minutes to count the cost

Of the past and future you just lost.

MATHEMATICS

Two hundred on a tiny boat,

Forty drowned when it won’t float.

Eight thousand in a camp for two,

Seventy sharing a portaloo.

Sixteen crammed in an isobox,

Thirty down with chicken pox.

No roof, no food, no clothes, no soap

No home, no dignity, no hope.

Humans crammed on overload,

No surprise that they explode.

Rules are made with gun and knife,

And ten year olds take their own life.

Countless corpses in the sea

This is the maths of misery

A rising tide of pain and sorrow

And forty thousand more tomorrow 

This is the maths of misery

It could be you, it could be me.

part 2 HEALING

HOPE

A bomb took his brother.

A sniper’s bullet took his dad,

and when you asked about his mum and sister, 

he just looked away.

So, when his was the only sunflower that didn’t come up,

I thought, jeez, the Universe really doesn’t like this kid.

I didn’t blame him when he threw the pot against the wall.

But in the middle of the muddy impact zone,

there was a speck of green;

a minute, fragile finger poking from that skinny, stripy little seed.

He picked it up, refilled the pot,

replanted it with such tenderness,

 then, for the first time, smiled.

I had to turn away to hide the tears,

As a tiny shoot of hope stirred inside me, too. 

NOT LOST

We had to walk and walk and walk.

Mum held my little sister and couldn’t hold my hand.

She wrapped my fingers round the button on her coat

“So you’ll be safe”, she said “and won’t be lost!”

I held on tight,

Even on the boat.

Even when I fell asleep.

I held on to the button when they pulled me from the sea.

I hold it still, on a string, next to my heart,

So I remember how Mum loved me

and that I’m not lost. 

SPIDERMAN 

Everyday, Spiderman winds string around the table legs,

Through the backs of chairs,

Over the blackboard. 

Across, between, beneath, and back again.

He whispers to his web, like a nun with her rosary,

Repeating the stations of his journey:

The place names and the terrors;

The blood splashed days;

The nights of sleepless cold;

The people he has lost,

Where and when and how.

We are all tangled in his time line,

It threads around our ankles and our arms, and through our hair.

Only he can rescue us, this is the game:

Meticulously, he unwinds his string,

Spools back his story onto the bobbin of his soul.

Each time he gains a little power.

Each time he’s closer to a superhero.

UNBROKEN 

The china cup was my mother’s,

The one small thing of beauty in her harsh life.

It held her smile, her hands as rough and gnarled as branches

With their tender touch.

I carried it across continents and oceans,

The one small thing of beauty in my lost life.

It held my endurance and my patience.

Today it broke.

I can no longer endure.

My rage consumes me,

For what is broken cannot be unbroken.

Our shattered past,

Our fractured future

are beyond mending.  

My daughter takes the shards.

With her granny’s tender touch,

She pieces them together.

Patient, when it seems they do not fit.

Enduring when their edges cut her fingers.

She hands me back the cup, whole.

“Unbroken.” she says.

Unbroken!

Dated 67/378/5897221 

Indigenous date 6/11/2019

Planet 2978611/…/,,,/*/22311///2

Indigenous name : Gaia or Earth 

Intergalactic Name name: Most Precious

Most of us in the Intergalactic community have been familiar with Planet 2978611/22311/2 since its discovery, many galactic cycles in the past. It has names in every language in the Cosmos, but all have the same meaning in the Common Speech ‘Most Precious’.

This small blue, ever changing world is precious because of the unprecedented diversity of the life forms which have evolved there. We are familiar with life and its evolution elsewhere in the ten galaxies, and even further into the mapped Universe, but nowhere else have these phenomena reached such a peak of exquisite complexity. 

So, it has been with increasing anxiety and concern that we have observed the rising populations of one of ‘Earth’s’ sentient life forms, the bipedal primate form known to themselves as ‘Homo sapiens, (here, HS for brevity. It is a tragic indication of the deluded and limited sentience of this life form that the meaning of their self appended name is ‘wise’ and ‘knowing’. ).

The data from long term study of the progress of evolution on ‘Earth’ predicted the rise of a different sentient form, derived from a line of extremely large and ‘feathered’ creatures, dominant on the planet during the tenth scientific expedition funded by the Intergalactic Scientific Council. However, following an unexpected meteor strike which caused great damage and destruction, (and no little media speculation about the competence of the IG SC) a little studied group of other life forms gave rise to the currently dominant HS species, which had overrun the planet by the time of the 11th expedition. 

At that time, there was a call by some scientists for an intervention (as sanctioned by IG statute 222@@@/>5901) to eradicate all HS, which some considered to be a scourge. But others, myself among them, argued that the species was showing signs of improvement – the emergence of cultural traits that we felt would surely give rise to a greater awareness of the qualities of this extraordinary planet and, therefore, a planet-wide desire to cherish those qualities over the simple interest of HS dominance.

This did not occur. 

The culture of planet stewardship that we hoped would become ubiquitous amongst all HS remained the province of only the most beautiful of the HS cultures, the peoples living in forests, on the open sea and in deserts, polar regions and mountains. Planet Stewardship (PS) amongst HS living in their large middens, or ‘cities’ in HS local language, became a rare trait. 

Intervention is now our highest priority. IG statute 222@@@/>5901 would sanction the immediate and total eradication of all HS. This would be expensive and unpleasant. The psychic waves we have all endured from the suffering of other species on ‘Most Precious’ would be as nothing to those that several billion HS would emit, even under the kindest of euthanasias. Also, having spent time on ‘Most Precious’ during the 12th IGSC expedition, I and my colleagues have observed some slight increase in PS traits; there is evidence that these are genetically based and enduring, and increasingly fostered by small but significant cultural changes. Dr Mau from the Centuari Cluster using her species’ heightened 5th dimensional awareness, felt this to be especially notable. Moreover, if this strengthening trait were to be encouraged, Contact could be initiated with HS, and their species educated and developed to be effective PS providers, making use of IG technology and support. 

I do not need to explain to you all the economic benefits of On Planet Stewardship provision. 

Other opportunities could then present themselves. Travel to Most Precious has always been strictly controlled and limited to members of the IGSC. However, with newly trained HS and stewards recruited from Earth’s other sentient species (we have already been piloting contact with the marine species known locally as ‘Humpback whale’, known widely across the Cosmos due to the popular documentaries on the epic stories retold in their song cycles) it might be possible to recreate some of Most Precious’  regions on other planets for the purposes of Enlightened Tourism. A Rainforest Planet or a Coral Reef planet we feel would be particularly successful and indeed raise revenue for further research by IGSC.

In short, we propose the following intervention.

1. Removal of all HS from ‘Most Precious’ to the large planetary holding system in the Nadawanada Complex. This could be done in short order with the help of Centuaria and their mind quieting techniques.
2. IGSC teams would then work on Most Precious restoring lost diversity where possible, and installing low impact replacements for HS accommodation and food production. HS middens  – cities – and plant and animal concentration camps, known locally as ‘farms’  would be almost entirely eradicated.
3. Re-education of all HS as PS operatives ( there will be inevitably a certain amount of natural wastage here as some sections of HS are resistant to ideas of valuing any life forms, even other HS) 
4. Contact with other sentient life forms to prepare them for the return of HS and cooperation with their newly educated sibling species.
5. Return of surviving, re-educated HS to Most Precious

6) On-going monitoring of the HS in their new roles, and careful study and documentation of new cultural trends and traits. 

Our studies suggest that this would be a successful intervention with multiple positive outcomes for the IG community as a whole. Of course we retain the option of complete HS eradication should our projections prove incorrect.

Any delay will in anywise result in the eradication of HS from Most Precious, through their own destruction of planetary support systems, but the associated loss of complex life forms is unacceptable and would make restorative action prohibitively expensive. We therefore commend this interventive action for immediate approval.

Often the first to be in full leaf, the horse chestnut trees are already looking rusty and worn, as if they simply haven’t got the energy to go on. No wonder really, considering what they’re making: thousands of spiked, green cannonballs with mahogany works of art inside.

Conkers! I still get excited about conkers. The silky sheen, the subtle rippling of deep purplish brown, like muscles moving under the skin of a racehorse. And that smell. Is any scent cleaner, greener, more distinctive than the inside of a conker shell? Breaking in to witness the way the nuts fit inside that pale interior, is like being told a great secret, a spell of happiness.

When I was little, six, seven, eight, I was obsessed with conkers. I dreamt of finding giant, perfect specimens, and I would open one spikey shell after another, always hoping that this would be the one. The truth was of course that they were all the one, each miraculously perfect. I tried every way I could to preserve the plump sheen, pickling, varnishing, drying in the oven, painting with oil. Nothing worked. The beauty and delight of conkers was transitory. They withered and shrivelled and for a while I mourned over the bowls of faded loveliness. And then I threw them out on to the compost heap, and turned my attention to the next round of seasonal delights: kicking fallen leaves; frost on spider webs; ice.

Where did I learn my conker obsession? I’m not sure. I didn’t grow up with siblings or friends but I did have a grandfather and a father who were passionate gardeners and who were always outside. I tagged along. I think my Dad was as mad about conkers as I was. He was the one who helped try to preserve them. As a kid I think he’d played ‘conkers’ and, now I think of it, I remember him stringing one for me, making a hole with a meat skewer on the kitchen table. It seemed like mutilation to me, and I had no interest at all in bashing things.

My awareness of nature was partly learned and partly acquired simply because I was outside all the time and curious, like all children; I looked, I touched, I sniffed I poked things with sticks (not the same as bashing).

Conker obsession was the norm back then. Come late September and October any conker tree was a magnet for children. Trees in parks were surrounded, the way lamps were crowded with moths. Kids gleaning amongst the leaves, kids throwing sticks to bring down the big, tantalising, out of reach fruits, high up. Even trees in the middle of nowhere would magically acquire a little tribe of worshiping children.

But not now. My last house was in a town and set in parkland. Seven or eight huge conkers trees stood on the edge of the paths or in the middle of the lawns, freely available to the many children who lived on the estate. In five years I saw two boys, once, collecting conkers. They kicked around in the leaves for ten minutes or so then gave up and drifted off.

What’s happened? Why can’t kids feel the conker magic any more?

There are a lot of answers to that question. Screens and perceived danger are some of the story: adults like their kids to be inside where they can easily keep an eye on them and still pursue their own screen obsession. A lack of un-structured wild space is another – there are sports grounds, there are play areas but there are fewer bits of long grass and bramble, trees that don’t belong to anyone – the liminal, un-used spaces, that have in the past been the territory of children.( see Julia Green’s wonderful The Wilderness War for a novel about this)

It’s not that children have lost a taste for nature. It’s what I write about and I’ve never been into a school where my subject matter wasn’t received with huge enthusiasm. Kids know and love elephants and lions, orang utans and giraffes. They can tell you how big a blue whale is. But they haven’t a clue what a conker is, or what a wren sounds like. And mostly these days, neither have their teachers.

The problem, I think, is a kind of collective forgetting. It only takes one generation of parents forgetting their own childhoods, forgetting dens and tree climbing, acorn gathering, puddle splashing and leaf kicking, bramble picking, for the cultural transmission of nature-delight to be lost. And with that forgetting comes a loss of the language we use to describe those experiences. How do you point out an oak tree to a child, if you don’t know the word ‘oak’ or ‘acorn’ or even tree? How do you even notice an ask or an ash, a pine or a willow if the only word you know is tree?

Imagine that no one in your family had ever made a birthday cake. Your grandmother made one with her dad once, but your parents never did. They don’t know how to do it. They don’t even know the words to describe what goes into a cake. So cakes drop out of the world because no one knows the words, ‘butter’, ‘sugar’, ‘eggs’, ‘chocolate’ ,‘candle’, ‘icing’ ,‘mix’, ‘bake’.

That’s what we are on the brink of. Losing touch with our ordinary, everyday, infinitely precious back yard wild, because we are losing the language to name it. Many adults and children no longer know words that specify anything more particular than ‘plant’ or ‘bird’.

This matters. The evidence is mounting that this loss of connection, this loss of ability to articulate to ourselves and others the detailed, particular experience of the natural world is damaging us. Is damaging our children. Development and long term mental health are at risk without contact with nature. Disorders like ADHD, depression and anxiety are all healed by nature, by willow and ivy, by acorn, bluebell and bramble, by wren and starling, heron and kingfisher.

Which is why, back in 2015 I was signatory to a letter, ( see below) written by Lawrence Rose to OUP protesting that the new edition of the junior oxford dictionary had removed many words for features of the natural world, words like acorn, and willow and wren. OUP’s response was merely to repeat a description of what they do and to say that they were just reflecting the word usage of modern children. But the tone of their response (which you can also read below) was very much that of responsible moral and cultural educators. If that’s what they are, then they are duty bound not to rob children of words which can describe common features of the world around them. Removing these words removes children’s ability to recognise and take ownership of common plants and animals that are their natural and also their cultural heritage. Every child in Britain deserves to know, and to see bluebells, as much as they deserve to know about the science, the art, the technology and the history that has made us all who we are. And they can’t do that without the language to do it.

In my work, it’s hard for me to write about the nature that surrounds me here in Wales, the plants and birds, mammals and reptiles that I’ve loved all my life living in the UK. I write picture books mostly and they need foreign co -edtions. Much as I’d love to write about rooks and slow worms, the perception of editors is that those books wouldn’t sell in the USA or China. So, the nearest I’ve come to helping with reconnecting kids and their parents with the nature on their doorstep is A First Book Of Nature a collection of poems illustrated by the quintessentially British images of Mark Hearld. I’ve done a little to help with the issue of the importance of naming species to maintain biodiversity, with a new book for Hodder, illustrated by Lorna Scobie the Variety of Life (which I’ll blog about soon).

But prompted by OUP’s editorial decision to remove some essential words for nature, my great friend and mentor Jackie Morris, together with writer Robert MacFarlane, have done a much better job. They have struck a resounding blow in the battle to maintain the richness of our nature language and our right to access and describe our experience, with their book ‘The Lost Words’. Robert’s poems create spells and charms to conjure and celebrate each of the animals and plants whose names have been lost from the junior dictionary. Jackie’s ravishing pictures show each species in beautiful detail and in context of their habitat, eloquently representing what each loss would mean.

It’s an extraordinary book. I’ve adored watching it grow over the last two years, but its more than a publishing phenomenon, it’s going to make a difference. I think could prove to be a landmark in the rewilding of parents, children, childhood and lives. We need the wild, and, we need the words to hold it like a heartbeat inside us all the time. As Yeats said, in my father’s favourite poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree we need to hear it ‘in the deep heart’s core.’

Jackie and I will be talking about The Lost Words at the Crickhowell Literary Festival on Saturday October 7th, do join us!

THE LETTER TO OUP

Oxford University Press as e-mail attachment 12 January 2015
Reconnecting kids with nature is vital, and needs cultural leadership
We the undersigned are profoundly alarmed to learn that the Oxford Junior Dictionary has systematically been stripped of many words associated with nature and the countryside. We write to plead that the next edition sees the reinstatement of words cut since 2007.
We base this plea on two considerations. Firstly, the belief that nature and culture have been linked from the beginnings of our history. For the first time ever, that link is in danger of becoming unravelled, to the detriment of society, culture, and the natural environment.
Secondly, childhood is undergoing profound change; some of this is negative; and the rapid decline in children’s connections to nature is a major problem.
This is not just a romantic desire to reflect the rosy memories of our own childhoods onto today’s youngsters. There is a shocking, proven connection between the decline in natural play and the decline in children’s wellbeing. Compared with a generation ago, when 40% of children regularly played in natural areas, now only 10% do so, while another 40% never play anywhere outdoors. Ever. Obesity, anti-social behaviour, friendlessness and fear are the known consequences. The physical fitness of children is declining by 9% per decade, according to Public Health England.
For the first time ever, children’s life expectancy is lower than that of their parents – us.
When, in 2007, the OJD made the changes, this connection was understood, but less well publicised than now. The research evidence showing the links between natural play and wellbeing; and between disconnection from nature and social ills, is mounting.
We recognise the need to introduce new words and to make room for them and do not intend to comment in detail on the choice of words added. However it is worrying that in contrast to those taken out, many are associated with the interior, solitary childhoods of today. In light of what is known about the benefits of natural play and connection to nature; and the dangers of their lack, we think the choice of words to be omitted shocking and poorly considered. We find the explanations issued recently too narrowly focussed on a lexicographical viewpoint without consideration for the social context.
In all, the names for thirty species of common or important British plants and animals have been removed – such as acorn and bluebell – along with many words connected with farming and food. Many are highly symbolic of our cultural ties with the land, its wildlife and produce.
This is what the National Trust says in their Natural Childhood campaign: Every child should have the right to connect with nature. To go exploring, sploshing, climbing, and rolling in the outdoors, creating memories that’ll last a lifetime. Their list of 50 things to do before you’re 11 3?4 includes many for which the OJD once had words, but no longer: like playing conkers, picking blackberries, various trees to climb, minnows to catch in a net and so on.
The RSPB has commissioned a great deal of research on this. Among many findings is the fact that outdoor activity in nature appears to improve symptoms of ADHD in children by

30% compared with urban outdoor activities and 300% compared with the indoor
environment.
It is no surprise that these and other organisations, including the NHS and Play England,
Play Scotland and Play Wales have come together to create The Wild Network dedicated to
reconnecting children and their families to nature – and to each other.
Will the removal of these words from the OJD ruin lives? Probably not. But as a symptom
of a widely acknowledged problem that is ruining lives, this omission becomes a major issue.
The Oxford Dictionaries have a rightful authority and a leading place in cultural life. We
believe the OJD should address these issues and that it should seek to help shape
children’s understanding of the world, not just to mirror its trends.
.
We believe that a deliberate and publicised decision to restore some of the most important
nature words would be a tremendous cultural signal and message of support for natural
childhood, and we ask you to take that opportunity, and if necessary, bring forward the next
edition of the OJD in order to do so.
Margaret Atwood
Author
Simon Barnes
Author and journalist
Terence Blacker
Writer and songwriter
Mark Cocker
Author and naturalist
Miriam Darlington
Author
Nicola Davies
Children’s author
Paul Farley
Poet, writer and broadcaster
Graeme Gibson
Novelist
Melissa Harrison
Writer
Tony Juniper
Writer and ecologist
Richard Kerridge
Nature writer
Gwyneth Lewis
Former Welsh Poet Laureate
Sir John Lister-Kaye
Naturalist and author
Richard Mabey
Writer and naturalist
Robert Macfarlane
Writer and academic
Helen Macdonald
Writer, illustrator and historian
Sara Maitland
Writer
Mike McCarthy
Nature writer
Hilary McKay
Children’s writer
Andrew McNeillie
Academic, former OUP Literature Editor
Sara Mohr-Pietsch
Broadcaster
Michael Morpurgo
Author, former Children’s Laureate
Jackie Morris
Children’s book illustrator
Stephen Moss
Naturalist, author and TV producer
Sir Andrew Motion
Former Poet Laureate
Ruth Padel
Poet and conservationist
Jim Perrin
Travel writer
Katrina Porteous
Poet, historian and broadcaster
For correspondence:
Laurence Rose laurence@naturemusicpoetry.com

 

…AND OUP’S RESPONSE

Editor, NATURAL LIGHT
Statement from Oxford University Press – 13 January 2015
“Oxford University Press (OUP) is renowned around the world for its high quality educational and scholarly publishing. Our children’s dictionaries, of which there are 17 in the UK alone, are structured by age, with each dictionary specifically written with a certain age group in mind, and with headwords and levels of definition varying according to what that child will need most at any given age.
“All our dictionaries are designed to reflect language as it is used, rather than seeking to prescribe certain words or word usages. We employ extremely rigorous editorial guidelines and word selections are based on several criteria: the current frequency of words in the daily language of children of that age; children’s culture including their reading of fiction and non-fiction; corpus analysis* and commonly misspelled or misused words. We also take current curriculum requirements into account. These criteria then need to be balanced against the appropriate length of any given dictionary, to create accessible resources appropriate for the age of the child the particular dictionary is aimed at.
“The Oxford Junior Dictionary, which was last updated in 2012, is aimed at six to seven-year-olds with 288 pages and approximately 4,700 headwords. As such it is very much an introduction to language. It includes around 400 words related to nature including: badger, bean, bee, berry, branch, caterpillar, daffodil, dragonfly, duck, feather, field, fox, grasshopper, hay, hedge, hedgehog, hibernate, invertebrate, meadow, mouse, nut, oak, owl, pear, plum, robin, seed, shell, sheep, snowflake, squirrel, stag, stone, straw, sunflower, tadpole, vegetation, and wool.
An example entry is:
hibernate verb, hibernates, hibernating, hibernated
When animals hibernate, they spend the winter in a special kind of deep sleep. Bats, tortoises, and hedgehogs all hibernate.
“As children get older they will progress to the Oxford Primary Dictionary aimed at eight to eleven- year-olds. This has 608 pages and 12,000 headwords and it contains all of the words that have been recently highlighted and many, many more.”
“We have no firm plans to publish a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary at this stage. However, we welcome feedback on all our dictionaries and feed this into the editorial process.”
ENDS
*The Oxford Children’s Corpus is a unique database of over 150 million words used in reading and writing for and by children. Our dictionary team uses the Oxford Children’s Corpus to research how children read and use language and to ensure our dictionaries are age-appropriate and up-to-date as language usage changes. It also helps us identify new or re-emerging word trends, words they find tricky to spell, and common issues with grammar and punctuation.