Its the first day that The Promise, the picture book I’ve done with illustrator Laura Carlin is out in the world. I want to write a post about it…about how it came to be written and all the strands that were drawn together for me by creating that text, but there isn’t time today. I’m at a tipping point with the novel I’m writing, Lost and Found and today it needs to be pushed past and into the last, hopefully easier-to-write, third of the story.

So here are some poems instead…mostly animal ones…a dragon fly, a puffin and a dragon, but one more that doesn’t quite fit the category. I wrote it ages ago when I did a writing workshop at Keats’ House in London. I was raised on John Keats’ poems. My father – born in 1916 – was of a generation of Welsh schoolchildren who had to learn huge poems by heart, and he took to it with a deep delight in the sound and pattern of language. As a very small child I would sit on the edge of the bath watching him shave and he’d recite ‘Ode to Autumn’ or to a nightingale, stopping to repeat lines and savour their feel and sound. I still love those poems and carry them with my in my heart. I think it was Helen Dunmore that wrote about the portability of poems; and its true. You can’t carry a whole book in your head but you can carry a poem, and once it’s in there it starts to change your psychic ecology. The poems and the songs that I know and can call up whenever I want are my most valuable possessions. One of my recent acquisitions, June Tabor’s version of ‘The Dream Factory’ describes the value of this internal dreaming life. I can’t yet sing it all the way through without crying, and remembering my dad, shaving brush under his chin saying ‘thou  wast not born for death immortal bird, no hungry generations tread thee down..’

My father taught me how to sing,

To sing that dreams are everything,

Can’t be bought and can’t be sold

More than silver, more than gold.

On Visting Keats’ House With A Class of Fine Children

Dear John

We visited your house today

Not the Swan and Hoop where you were born,

With hoofbeats clattering the cobbles and the creak of wheels.

Not your Granny’s house in the woods and meadows

Of old, wild Middlesex.

Not the apprentice room above the surgery,

Or the students’ lodging near the hospital,

Where you lay awake with blood and crying in your head.

No. We visited you last house, on the Heath,

Where you found a wider sky to walk under,

Crickets chiruping by the Winter fireside

Nightingales in Summer dusks,

And love, of course.

We weren’t invited,

But we thought you wouldn’t mind

If we sat in your study

In the chair, placed just as you left it,

Looked through your window at the sky.

We walked around your bed;

Was it so high and fluffy, John,

When you were here?

We wondered if you had to run and jump to go to sleep,

And if, when you were ill,

Your bed was just too high.

It was dry today, and being Summer

We went into your garden

And tried to look as you once looked

With hearts as open as our eyes,

Noticing the details:

The shiney stripes of bark,

The minute patterning of grass blades

The sunlight and the shadows

And the wind in the trees,

Like change.

And things have changed John.

Middlesex is banker country now,

No woods,  just roads and concrete

And shops that sell a world of nonsense.

There hasn’t been a nightingale in Hampstead

Since the war we call ’the last’,

Though why I can’t imagine,

Since it seems the fighting never stops.

You might not even know your house,

A grand room stands where your back door was

And there’s a sort of shop,

Where Mrs Brawne sat darning stockings.

Your stairs have gone,

There’s no real kitchen

And the view beyond the garden’s blocked with houses.

But there are some good things:

The wall that divided you from Fanny’s been demolished,

It’s all one big space, that you could share;

Just a street away the hospital could cure your illness,

We understand tuberculosis now

We have its number, we’re on its trail

It doesn’t win the way it used to do.

The medicine you left behind moved on.

In my class no one died from whooping cough or scarlatina

Polio and measles don’t maim and blind,

The poor don’t die of cholera, but boredom

And everyone can learn to read and write.

And John, one other thing, it’s the reason

We didn’t need an invite to your home.

Anyone can come here now,

Other lives and ghosts have left their mark but

It’s your good spirit that they come for,

And your face that looks down from every wall.

You’re famous John,

Your words weren’t written on the water,

They’ve travelled round the word, engraved on hearts

My own included.

Your deathless nightingale, your loitering knight,

Your season of mists, go with me

And millions like me, everywhere.

Just like you said

A thing of beauty is a joy forever

Its loveliness increases

It will never pass into nothingness.

So as we left your house

We crushed lavender between our palms

And remembered you.

Dragon Fly

It’s an odd apprenticeship

Terrorising tadpoles

In the pond’s murk.

Forget princes, crowns and swordfights,

Your trade here is water fleas,

Hog-lice, sticklebacks.

There’s no treasure to be won, no gold.

Just silver bells of spider silk,

Necklaces of toad spawn.

Fire won’t light underwater

So your killing’s done stone cold,

Just grab and smash.

Each body contributes to your bulk,

And you shed your tight skin

Only to outgrow another.

The seasons pass, years too,

In twilight, slaughter, ruthless growth,

Without fairy tales.

Is it true you’ll split

Your dull costume and fly off,

Igniting in the sunshine?

Last Friday afternoon I spent two hours in the company of one of my childhood heroes. I
didn’t know much about him when I was seven or eight, but I did know his pictures of birds,
reproduced in books and magazines about ornithology, and all the more wonderful to me
because they depicted birds from another world, America. Leaning on the kitchen table,
with my tongue sticking out of the corner of my mouth for extra concentration, I made
attempts to copy his pictures, in crayons on pages of exercise books. And I dreamed of
seeing some of those birds, as delightful and exotic to me as unicorns. When I finally went
to North America when I was 18, seeing ordinary ‘back yard’ birds like American robins,
red winged blackbirds, flickers and blue jays was doubly thrilling to me because I’d seen
them in Audubon’s pictures.

So when the lovely Louisiana State University curator e mailed me to say that no, the
collection of Audubon elephant folios wasn’t open to the public, but that I could make an
appointment to see them, my heart did what my seven year old self knew as ‘roly-polys’.
I made my appointment for April 26th, and on Friday I walked from the scented afternoon
sunshine of the LSU campus, into the high ceilinged library where the three folios lay like a
giant’s picture books, on trolleys, cradled in shallow v shaped holders to protect the spines
as the pages were turned. I had two hours.

It was magical and strange. Two hours to look at hundreds of pictures. Not two hours to sit
and stare at one. I turned pages, lingered too long, passed over too fast, gasped, smiled,
almost cried.

Lots of things went through my mind as I drank in the images. First of course was the
sheer technical rigour: feathers that make your fingers want to stroke them. A single
detached feather on the peregrine page elicited an automatic brushing motion from me as
I tried to remove the ‘real’ feather that looked as if it had landed on the page. The feet of
the smaller birds particularly struck me…small birds toes are extraordinary, tiny but long
and articulate, able to wrap and hold with astonishing strength. Anyone who has ever put a
ring on a bird’s foot knows their strange, delicate, knobbliness. As I looked at the feet of
Audubon’s birds I felt blue tit feet gripping my fingers, felt merlin chicks toes as I pushed
them through a pullus ring, remembered the way a tawny owl fledging had opened my
finger almost to the bone with the touch of a single claw. Of course I realised then why this
tactile feeling is so strong in Audubon’s work: he knew his subjects by touch as intimately
as by sight, no binoculars in those days, he drew from shot specimens, which he
preserved and posed, so every tiny detail of their anatomy was familiar to his fingers and
his eyes. The attention Audubon paid to the detail available to him was fanatical, not only
in the birds but the vegetation and insects and reptiles he puts in the pictures with them: a
tiny money spider floating from the top of a frame; the curling caterpillar eaten leaves of a
tree. And all the detail was put in the context of his observations of the living creatures, so
that tells some small story about the bird’s life, habitat, behaviour. His pictures don’t just
give identification, they give life history; each image is a piece of narrative non fiction.
Some of the poses capture tiny moments of behaviour, prefiguring images not seen again
until the advent of high speed cinematography. He captures the essence of bird-ness: the
way the insubstantial fluff of feathers creates weaponry, display, armour; their quickness,

the speed with which they move and communicate; the way beaks and feet are shaped to
sometimes gruesome tasks. Audubon’s birds are often beautiful but never
anthropomorphised into something pretty, they are always living creatures in all their
vividness and utility.

Not only are the pictures zoologically astonishing but aesthetically ravishing. Who would
have thought there were so many ways of showing ‘bird’? The variety and invention of his
compositions, their range of scale and of palette is soberingly impressive. He never let’s
up. The energy of the man is almost frightening. That’s before you even start to consider
the story of how he published his work, by tireless promotion, especially in the UK, and
the acquisition of subscription to fund the making of the plates and their hand colouring.
Audubon knew the value of casting a brand.

Not every species is perfectly represented. He clearly had favourites that he knew best.
The woodland species I think are loveliest – woodpeckers I think he loved especially. But
he has blind spots: his owls are, well, a bit rubbish. Perhaps because he worked from
dead specimens where the disk of the owl face is lost a little, his owls are a bit hawkish or
have eyes not set quite in the right place.

I met old friends amidst the lovely storm of new images. I turned a page and came across
an old favourite, his Eskimo curlews. I love them for so many reasons: because the way
one bird is rolling around with such comfort and pleasure; because curlews are lovely to
me and the picture reminds me of walking over a stubble field into a full yellow moon with
live curlews in my arms ; and because Eskimo curlews are extinct. Audubon’s pictures
of things alive a hundred years before me and now gone fired my youthful ambition to
become a biologist and an evangelist for the wild. Turning a page on Friday and seeing
passengers pigeons courtship feeding was a chilling reminder that extinction is a threat to
even the most abundant species.

I left the library exalted and exhausted but with a thirst to see real birds. So today I drove
out of town away from the endless spaghetti junction of roads that wraps Baton Rouge
in traffic, to the green, green, green of Louisiana forest and swamps. It wasn’t a totally
successful expedition, it’s early in the year and many walking trails are still flooded from
the March swelling of the Mississippi, but I did see cardinals, and indigo buntings, robins,
and mocking birds (my new favourite bird) blue jays and red headed woodpeckers, and
an owl, fat and brown and downy flapping lazily in broad daylight. Sitting in the garden of
Oakley Plantation where Audubon once sat I saw a humming bird, a female ruby throat
I think, vibrating amongst the flowers as if she was thinking herself to flight. She was
so small, not bigger than my little finger but there was so much life concentrated in her,
she glowed and thrummed with it. That, I think, is what John James Audubon must have
been like, glowing and thrumming with intense life. He would be too much for our watered
down modern world, un editable, irrepressibly himself. He was truly a force of nature and
I will think of him, forever walking in the deep green of the forests that he loved with such
passion.

I’m off to America tomorrow. Funny how travel never seems real when you write the words and only when you get on the plane. I’ll be traveling round schools in upstate New York talking to hundreds of children about animals and conservation and writing, focussing on my non fiction books. Narrative non fiction is huge in America and has just been shifted to the centre of the curriculum. Some bright spark in the Obama administration suddenly sussed what I’ve been telling teachers, editors, children …anyone who would listen…for years, that reading and writing non fiction teachers the most transferrable of skills: how to assimilate information and communicate it in an audience appropriate way. What the new curriculum (the Core Curriculum Standards) in the US acknowledges is that reading narrative non fiction, that has an opinion and a definite voice, encourages children to question how the writer knows what they know, what they think about it and why, as well as absorbing the facts packaged in the narrative. These skills of analysis and enquiry are hugely important and useful in every area of adult life from getting a degree to speaking to your boss about your performance, or explaining to your children why they need to wash their hands. We are bombarded by information, by data, by voices telling us things, so children need to practice assessing what they are told so they can sift the sense from nonsense, and conjecture from evidence. (I would venture to suggest that had Michael Gove had such a training he might be better at his job now).

Anyway…I’m delighted that in the US the penny has dropped, not just because it means my books will get more readers and I’ll get to play with more kids, but because I think it will make a huge difference to children’s education and to their reading. I wish there was some hope that this attitude would transfer to the UK, where there is huge resistance to non fiction amongst adult readers. I myself was one of those people who said ‘Oh I don’t read non fiction’ before I discovered the delight of ‘In Cold Blood’,  ‘ Sea Biscuit’, ‘A Perfect Storm’, ‘In the Heart of the Sea”…. (all American titles incidentally) and realised than non fiction is story-based too. This trickles down to younger age groups via teachers who don’t read non fiction and who therefore don’t value it as a reading resource for their pupils.

But, I must stop; I’ve ranted about this here before and for now I need to focus on rejoicing in the fact that the US loves non fiction even if the UK is lagging behind.

In any case, the first part of my trip isn’t about non fiction at all. I’m going to Louisian, to new Orleans and Baton Rouge. It’s all about my next novel for Walker Books, ‘Lost and Found’. I got the idea for it by re reading ‘Life On the Mississippi’ and decided I wanted to construct a setting that drew elements from that time and place. This is a tricky thing to explain: I’m not setting out to write an historical novel ‘set in the mid 19th Century in the American South’, not least because I would need to devote 5 years research to it and have come from an historical background rather than a zoological one. It’s more that the mixture of things happening in Louisiana in the mid 19th century provides a rich loamy substrate for imagination. There was a fabulous cocktail of races and cultures, of ideas and dreams and a back drop that was the cusp of what became the modern world right up against the wilderness documented in John James Audubon’s wonderful pictures and writings. So I’m going to get the feel of the place, to visit museums and archives, to gather voices and places and objects to help me construct a story world. I have some characters already, but it’s too early to tell you about them. One or two are already jostling their way to the front…

The concept of ‘The Wild’ is going to run through this story I think as a fat vein. The new world as Eden was hugely influential in Europe  in the early days of American settlement by Europeans and it’s remained so in US culture, giving birth to a strong genre of environmental and nature writing that we don’t really have to such an extent here. One of the drivers of that vision of wilderness here and in the US was John James Audubon, born in Haiti, the son of a french planter, who grew up to be perhaps the greatest wildlife artist of all time. The  most exciting thing I’m going to do in Louisiana is visit Audubon’s elephant folios, held in the Louisiana State University archive. I’ve known some of these pictures since I was tiny. I can remember copying Audubon’s picture of a blue jay when I was about six. Filling an A4 drawing pad with the sweep of its body from tail to beak in the bottom corner. So the thought that I will be in a room with the folios (elephant because of their size) is fizzingly thrilling.

This is not so far from non fiction. I never see the line between fiction and non fiction as a solid one anyway. It is in fact in my favourite place, that space one can create between the real solid world and the interior world of dreams and ideas. The story space, where you can put all sorts of real and imaginary things together, like a cook or a chemist, experimenting with ingredients and chemicals to get unexpected explosions, bubbling froths of colour and flavour combinations that linger on the tongue and turn your heart to long forgotten things.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

This time last week I was at the Imagine Festival on the South Bank running writing workshops for children on half term and taking refuge from the absolutely bone chilling cold on the Thames bank outside. We had less than an hour to turn out a bit of writing

so we had to work super fast. I got the young writers going by giving them a choice of what to write about – but not that much of a choice because in my workshops people pretty much have to write about animals. So at the start of each session I either showed some photos of whales that I’d taken in various bits of the world or took four or five suggestions for animals we could use as subjects – the only limits here being that they should be wild, and that the proposer should have thought of something interesting to say about their animal. There were suggestions as diverse as tardigrade (no, not going to tell you, look it up) and lion but the choices of subject and location seemed in the end to be influenced more by the weather than anything. Although the workshops were entirely separate and self contained, you’ll see that the temperature and light levels has got inside young writers’ minds…

Anyway, here they are. I’ve trawled my photos for things that match…no arctic foxes, vampire bats or emperor penguins I’m afraid, but lots of ice and snow and a handful of noctule bats…

Workshop One

Down

Down in the deep, dark depths,

Where there is no light at all,

Not even a pinch the size of the smallest grain of salt,

Down where it is as cold as your baby’s tears,

I hear a faint sound, like distant hooves on metal.

It grows louder and louder, until the sound hurts.

Then, I reach out my hand and touch slippery skin:

The huge body of a sperm whale.

Workshop 2

Inside the Winter

The sky is as black as a penguin’s back.

Stars glimmer and shimmer in the immense darkness.

It is as cold as a bitter heart.

There is a sound, a sound like a thousand silk curtains shushing in the wind

A cacophony of penguin feet!

Each pair carries a precious, snow white egg.

Inside each a tiny promise grows,

The start of Spring in the heart of Winter.

Workshop 3

 The Battlefield

Sky dark as coal.

Land, a dim glow of moonstone-snow.

Like a moving dot on the horizon the Arctic fox sneaks and creeps.

It sniff the air, gracefully, searching for the smallest clue.

There!

The faint thread of blood, lures the fox over the crisp snow and shattered ice.

Rushing paws scurrying to what could be a battlefield:

Scraps of skin, half a flipper, a crushed kidney

And bloodstained snow.

The fox will have a full belly.

On Monday I visited my old haunts in Devon. I spent a day in Uplowman primary school, just a few miles from where I lived on a smallholding for more than 10 years.  But it was another cold, dark day that got into the children’s writing, but in a really good way!

All the pieces were wrote are the start of bigger things that the children will continue to work on over the rest of the term.

Year 5 and 6 Uplowman School

The Sperm Whale

With one long confident blow, the whale head downwards,

through the clear surface water.

Light beams like splinters of rain then fades to welcoming darkness.

Deep, deep, deep, where squid glide and life glows, the whale scans

the shadows with its clicks…

Year 1 and 2 Uplowman School

Dolphin Dinners

In the blue, blue sea and the white foamy waves

A grey dolphin is swimming.

It zooms fast, chasing scaley, silvery fish.

The fish dodge from side to side

but the dolphin opens its mouth and grabs with sharp point teeth.

Gulp, gulp!

The fish is gone!

Year 3 and 4 Uplowman School

Vampire Bats

The air is hot and wet, like breath.

The night is blue and moonlight reflects on the wet leaves.

From a hole in a hollow tree a vampire bat glides out,

Between the twigs and branches, over the dark grass.

It flutters near a snoozing horse.

It lands gently, on the horse’s neck.

It bites fast and sharp, then spits into the cut to keep the blood flowing.

Lap, lap, lap!