The Sea Inside

fatigue it would bend to its master’s will – had died with its jesses caught in some distant tree, where, ‘hanging upside down by the mildewed leathers, his bundle of green bones and ruined feathers may still be swinging in the winter wind’.
    Terence Hanbury White was born in Bombay in 1906, a product of the Raj as much as Julia Margaret Cameron, and as adrift from birth as Thomas Merton. Sent back to England by his uncaring parents for his education, he too gravitated to Cambridge, where, among other talents, he determined to learn medieval Latin shorthand so that he could translate the bestiaries which would come to influence his own work. Having published his poetry, he considered writing a biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins, but left his post as a schoolmaster at Stowe – where he let loose grass snakes in his sitting room and sunbathed naked on the lawns – to retreat to a five-shilling-a-week gamekeeper’s cottage on the Stowe estate.
    Here he lived in rural solitude, drawing his water from a well and using an earth closet – although he also spent a hundred pounds on carpets and curtains, mirrors and an ornate antique bed, and stocked his larder with tinned food and bottles of fine Madeira. In 1936 he published an account of his time there, archly entitled
England Have My Bones
, in which he sought to define himself, and the morally empty country Thomas Merton had left two years before. ‘Nowadays we don’t know where we live, or who we are,’ he wrote. ‘This is why, in a shifting world, I want to know where I am.’
    His book was assembled from his various hunting, fishing and flying diaries, with one eye on his ancestor, Gilbert White of Selborne, and the other on Richard Jefferies, the Victorian naturalist who recorded the vanishing world of southern England and who wrote ‘To me everything is supernatural’ as he lay on his back on the downs ‘so as to feel the embrace of earth’, imagining the sky was the sea. White rhapsodised, in similar tones, about the country that he knew, caught in a few years of peace, a kind of insular refuge in time. ‘
20.iii.xxiv.
So is the whole British Island an anchorage, if you avoid the towns. So are birds and beasts and the sporting seasons … All the
things
which will outlast London are important to philosophic man.’
    White may have been thinking of Jefferies’ futuristic novel
After London, Or Wild England
, published in 1885, in which the writer imagines how the country would look if its capital ceased to exist and the land returned to its natural state. White could not know, though he may have suspected, that the coming years would see that city threatened with just that sense of oblivion – or that the countryside too would change as radically. And as William Cobbett, on his rural rides around Hampshire, had delivered a similar polemic against the iniquitous effects of the Industrial Revolution in the early nineteenth century, so White’s was a last glimpse of Britain before the mechanisation to come, when its fields would be turned into chemically treated food factories. He wrote of its people and its animals, and of the carrion crow which he believed to live ‘as long as a man, is extremely destructive of game, and is hunted for that reason with much enthusiasm by gamekeepers, as well as by emotional people who object to the creature for pecking out the eyes of dying animals’.
    In fact, crows live for ten years, often less. But to White, animals were barometers of an even greater threat, unable as they are to defend themselves. He wrote in a weird interregnum, an era which flirted with any creed or philosophy or politics, no matter how extreme – indeed, made more so by the bookends of global conflict just past and soon to come. White made up his own myths, his own heroic narrative. He hunted and fished and learned to fly. ‘Because I am afraid of things, of being hurt and death, I have to attempt them,’ he wrote. ‘This journal is about fear.’
    It is not surprising that his book ends violently, as White leaves friends late at night after drinking, careers off the road and crashes into a ditch. His head strikes the dashboard of his car, and his nose and throat fill with blood. As he gets out, into the still-shining beams of the headlights, he realises he has lost the vision in one eye. Happily, he regained it, and resumed his helter-skelter life.
    White could not stay still. He despised people who ‘don’t do enough things