My Favourite Nature Stories Read online

  The smell of the sea. I lived with it for over a year in the Channel Islands, I liked the sea mist and liked the fierce gales that swept across the islands in the winter.

  Later, there were the fogs of London; I did not like them but they made me think of Dickens, and I walked to Wapping and the East India Dock Road and watched the barges on the Thames, I had my favourite pub and my favourite fish-and-chips shop. There were always children flying kites from Primrose Hill or sailing boats in the ponds on Hampstead Heath.

  Once we visited the gardens at Kew and in a hot-house, moist and smelling of the tropics, I remembered the East and some of the simple things I had known—a field of wheat, a stack of sugar-cane, a cow at rest and a boy sleeping in the shade of a long, red-fingered poinsettia. And I knew I would go home to India.

  Heaven on Earth

  ‘If there be a heaven on earth, it is this, it is this.’ The words are inscribed on the wall of the Hall of Special Audience, in the royal garden of the Red Fort of Delhi, built by the Emperor Shah Jahan in the 17th century. It is a beautiful pavilion, the walls inlaid with jade and other semiprecious stones; and from the latticed windows one sees the waters of the river Jumna winding placidly across the plain. In Shah Jahan’s time, the river ran much closer to the fort, and I like to think that the emperor, when he found time to be alone, strolled along the ramparts of his palace while it was being built; and that one evening, while he gazed at the river, something happened to make him feel at peace with the world, and he was so moved by the moment and all that was associated with it, that he decided to build his private pavilion at that spot, inscribing on it the line: ‘If there be a heaven on earth, it is this, it is this.’

  Such moments come to each of us—moments when we feel deeply moved or inspired, moments when time seems to stand still… They come but rarely, as small miracles, like the fragrance of the first summer ram on parched earth, or the song of the whistling-thrush emerging like a sweet secret from a dark forest; moments when heaven is here, compensating for the irritations and petty disasters that we create around ourselves each day.

  When I was only 17, I wanted desperately to be a writer. My early efforts did not meet with much success, and my relatives discouraged me. At that time I was living and working in the Channel Islands in the UK. Late one evening, when I was feeling particularly discouraged, I went for a walk along the seafront. The tide was in, the sea was rough; and the wind, which was almost a gale, came pouring in from the darkness like a mad genie just released from his bottle. Great waves crashed against the sea-wall, and the wind whipped the salt spray across my face. I was alone in a wild wasteland of wind and water. And then something touched me, something from the elements took hold of my heart, and all the depression left me, and I felt free and as virile as the wind—quite capable of building my own fort, my own pavilion of words. And I spoke to the genie in the swirling darkness and said, ‘I will be a writer, and no one can stop me!’

  Well, 30 years later, the writing is still going on, and it is still a struggle; but whenever I feel like giving up, I try to recapture that moment when heaven and earth and I were all one; and then the writing begins again.

  Almost always, it’s the unexpected that thrills us. It may only be a shaft of sunlight, slanting through the pillars of banyan tree; or dewdrops caught in a spider’s web; or, in the stillness of the mountains, the sudden chattter of a mountain stream as you round the bend of a hill; or an emperor’s first glimpse of a winding river and the world beyond.

  Time, place and emotion must coalesce, hence the rarity of these occasions. Delight cannot be planned for—she makes no appointments!

  Street of the Red Well

  The sun beats down on the sweltering city of Old Delhi. Not a breath of air stirs in the narrow, winding streets. This old Walled City, now over 300 years old, has no open spaces, no sidewalks, no shady avenues. During the reign of Emperor Shah Jahan, a canal ran down the centre of the main throughfare, Chandni chowk (street of the silversmiths), but the canal has long since been covered over, and the Yamuna river, from which water has been channelled, lies beyond the emperor’s fort, the Red Fort of Delhi, where the Prime Minister speaks to the multitude every year on independence Day.

  It is not water that I seek most, but shelter and heat from the heat and glare of the overhead sun. I have chosen what is quite possibly the hottest day in May, the temperature over 105 degrees Fahrenheit, to go walking in search of—what? A story, perhaps, and adventure. Or that is what I set out to do. The heat of the day has willed otherwise. I may be ready for an adventure, but no one else is interested. I am the only one walking the streets from choice.

  Shopkeepers nod drowsily beneath whirring ceiling-fans. The pavement barber has taken his customer into the shelter of an awning. A fortune-teller has decided that there is nothing to predict and has fallen asleep under the same awning. A vegetable seller sprinkles water on his vegetables in a dispirited fashion. Those cauliflowers were fresh an hour ago: they look old already. Even the flies are drowsy. Instead of buzzing feverishly from place to place, they stagger about on tired legs.

  It is the pigeons who have found all the coolest places. These birds have made the old city their own. New Delhi is for the crows who like to have a tree to sleep in, ever, if they take their meals from out of kitchens and verandahs But the pigeons prefer buildings and the older the buildings the better. They are familiar with every cool alcove or shady recess in the crumbling walls of neglected mosques and mansions.

  A fat, supercilious pigeon watches me from the window ledge above a jeweller’s shop. The pigeon’s forebears settled here long before the British thought of taking Delhi. Conquerors have come and gone, Nadir Shah the Persian, Madhav Rao the Maratha, Gulam Kadir the Rohilla, and generations of goldsmiths and silversmiths. Hindus and Muslims have made and lost fortunes in the city, but nothing has disturbed the tranquil life of these pigeons. Their gentle cooing can always be heard when there is a lull in the jagged symphony of traffic noise. How do they manage to sound so cool?

  But here’s welcome relief for humans; a shady corner in Lal Kuan bazaar, (street of the Red Well), where an old man provides drinking water to thirsty wayfarers such as myself. His water is stored in a surahi, an earthenware jug which keeps the water sweet and cool. I bend down, cup my hands, and receive the sparkling liquid as my benefactor tilts the surahi towards me.

  Lal Kuan. The Red Well. Of course it is no longer here, but the street still bears its name. And I like to think that here, in the middle of the street, where a bullock has gone to sleep forcing the cyclists to make a detour, there was once a well made of dark red brick, where the water bubbled forth all day. Imprisoned beneath the soil, held down by the crowded commercial houses of this old quarter, the water must still be there; it gives nourishment to an old peepul tree that grows beside a temple. It is the only tree in the street. It juts out from the temple wall growing straight and tall, dwarfing the two-storeyed houses. One of its roots, breaking throughout the ground, has curled up to provide a smooth, well-worn seat. And it is cool here, beneath the peepul. Even when there is no breeze, the slender heart-shaped leaves revolve prettily. Creating their own currents of air. No wonder the sages of old found it a good tree to sit beneath, and no wonder they called it sacred.

  On the other side of the road, a tall iron doorway is set in a high wall. Doors like this were only built in the previous century, when a wealthy merchant’s house had to be a miniature fortress as well as a residence. I cannot see over the wall and I would like to know what lies behind the door. Perhaps a side street, perhaps a market, perhaps a garden, perhaps.

  The door opens, not easily, because it had been left closed for a long time, but slowly and with much complaint. And beyond the door there is only an empty courtyard, cohered with rubble, the ruins of the old house. I am about to turn away when I hear a deep tremendous murmur.

  It is the cooing of many pigeons. But where are they?

  I advance further in
to the ruin, and there, opening out in front of me, ready to receive me as the rabbit-hole was ready to receive Alice, is an old, disused well. I peer down into its murky depths. It is dark, very dark down there; but that is where the pigeons live, in the walls of this lost, long forgotten well shut away from the rest of the city. I cannot see any water. So I drop a pebble over the side. It strikes the wall, and then, with a soft plop, touches water. At that instant there is a rush of air and a tremendous beating of wings, and a flock of pigeons. Thirty or forty of them fly out of the well, streak upwards, circle the building, and then falling into formation, wheel overhead, the sun gleaming white on their underwings.

  I have discovered their secret. Now I know why they look so cool, so refreshed, while we who walk the streets of old delhi do so with parched mouths and drooping limbs. The pigeons are the only ones who still know about the Red Well.

  Once You have Lived with Mountains

  It was while I was living in England in the jostle and drizzle of London, that I remembered the Himalayas at their most vivid. I had grown up amongst those great blue and brown mountains, they had nourished my blood, and though I was separated from them by thousands of miles of ocean, plain and desert, I could not forget them. It is always the same with mountains. Once you have lived with them for any length of time, you belong to them. There is no escape.

  And so, in London in March, the fog became a mountain mist and the boom of traffic became the boom of the Ganges emerging from the foothills. I remembered a little mountain path which led my restless feet into a cool sweet forest of oak and rhododendron and then on to the windswept crest of a naked hilltop. The hill was called Cloud’s End. It commanded a view of the plains on one side, and of the snow peaks on the other. Little silver rivers twisted across the valley below, where the rice fields formed a patchwork of emerald green. And on the hill itself the wind made a ‘hoo-hoo-hoo’ in the branches of the tall deodars where it found itself trapped. During the rains, clouds enveloped the valley but left the hills alone, an island in the sky. Wild sorrel grew among the rocks, and there were many flowers—convolvulus, clover, wild begonia, dandelion—sprinkling the hillside.

  On a spur of the hill stood the ruins of an old building, the roof of which had long since disappeared and the rain had beaten the stone floors smooth and yellow. Moss, ferns and Maidenhair grew from the walls. In a hollow beneath a flight of worn stone steps a wild cat had made its home. It was a beautiful grey creature, black-striped with pale great eyes. Sometimes it watched me from the steps or the wall, but it never came near.

  No one lived on the hill, except occasionally a coal-burner in a temporary grass thatched hut. But villagers used the path for grazing their sheep and cattle on the grassy slopes. Each cow or sheep had a bell suspended from its neck to let the shepherd boy know its whereabouts.

  The boy could then lie in the sun and eat wild strawberries without fear of losing his animals. I remembered some of the shepherd boys and girls. There was a boy who played the flute. Its rough, sweet, straightforward notes travelled clearly through the mountain air. He would greet me with a nod of his head, without taking the flute from his lips.

  There was a girl who was nearly always cutting grass for fodder. She wore heavy bangles on her feet and long silver earrings. She did not speak much either, but she always had a wide smile on her face when she met me on the path. She used to sing to herself, or to the sheep, or to the grass, or to the sickle in her hand. And there was a boy who carried milk into town (a distance of about five miles) who would often fall into step with me to hold a long conversation. He had never been away from the hills or in a large city. He had never been on a train.

  I told him about the cities and he told me about his village, how they made bread from maize, how fish were to be caught in the mountain streams, how the bears came to steal his father’s pumpkins. Whenever the pumpkins were ripe, he told me, the bears would come and carry them off. These things I remembered—these, and the smell of pine needles, the silver of oak leaves and the red of maple, the call of the Himalayan cuckoo, and the mist, like a wet face-cloth, pressing against the hills.

  Odd, how some little incident, some snatch of conversation comes back to one again and again in the most unlikely places. Standing in the aisle of a crowded tube train on a Monday morning, my nose tucked into the back page of someone else’s newspaper, I suddenly had a vision of a bear making off with a ripe pumpkin! A bear and a pumpkin—and there, between Belsize Park and the Tottenham Court Road station, all the smells and sounds of the Himalayas came rushing back to me.

  In the Garden of My Dreams

  The cosmos has all the genius of simplicity. The plant stands tall and erect; its foliage is uncomplicated, its inflorescence are bold, fresh, cheerful. Any flower, from a rose to a rhododendron, can be complicated. The cosmos is splendidly simple.

  No wonder it takes its name from the Greek ‘cosmos’, meaning the universe as an ordered whole—the sum total of experience! For this unpretentious flower does seem to sum it all up: perfection without apparent striving for it, the artistry of the South American footballer! Needless to say, it came from tropical America.

  And growing it is no trouble. A handful of seeds thrown in a waste patch or on a grassy hill slope, and a few months later there they are, en masse, doing their samba in the sunshine. They are almost wild, but not quite. They need very little attention, but if you take them too much for granted they will go away the following year. Simple they may be, but not insensitive. They need plenty of space. And as my own small apartment cannot accommodate them, they definitely belong to my dream garden.

  My respect for the cosmos goes back to my childhood when I wandered into what seemed like a forest of these flowers, all twice my height (I must have been five at the time) but looking down on me in the friendliest way, their fine feathery foliage giving off a faint aroma. Now when I find them flowering on the Himalayan hillsides in mellow October sunshine, they are like old friends and I greet them accordingly, pressing my face to their petals.

  Not everyone likes the cosmos. I have met some upper-class ladies (golf club members) who complain that it gives them hay fever, and they use this as an excuse to root out all cosmos from their gardens. I expect they are just being snobbish. There are other flowers which give off just as much pollen dust.

  I have noticed the same snobbishness in regard to marigolds, especially the smaller Indian variety. ‘Cultivated’ people won’t cultivate these humble but attractive flowers. Is it because they are used for making garlands? Or because they are not delicately scented? Or because they are so easily grown in the backyards of homes?

  My grandparents once went to war with each other over the marigold. Grandfather had grown a few in one corner of the garden. Just as they began flowering, they vanished—Granny had removed them overnight! There was a row, and my grandparents did not speak to each other for several days. Then, by calling them ‘French’ marigolds, Grandfather managed to reintroduce them to the garden. Granny liked the idea of having something ‘French’ in her garden. Such is human nature!

  Sometimes a wildflower can put its more spectacular garden cousins to shame. I am thinking now of the Commelina, which I discover in secret places after the rains have passed. Its bright sky-blue flowers take my breath away. It has a sort of unguarded innocence that is beyond corruption.

  Wild roses give me more pleasure than the sophisticated domestic variety. On a walk in the Himalayan foothills I have encountered a number of these shrubs and climbers—the ineptly named Dog Rose, sparkling white in summer; the Sweet Briar with its deep pink petals and bright red rosehips; the Trailing Rose, found in shady places; and the wild Raspberry (the fruit more attractive than the flower) which belongs to the same family.

  A sun-lover, I like plenty of yellow on the hillsides and in gardens—sunflowers, Californian poppies, winter jasmine, St John’s Wort, buttercups, wild strawberries, mustard in bloom… But if you live in a hot place, you might prefer cooling
blues and soft purples—forget-me-not, bluebells, cornflowers, lavender. I’d go far for a sprig of sweetly-scented lavender. To many older people the word lavender is charm; it seems to recall the plaintive strain of once familiar music—

  Lavender blue, dilly dilly,

  Lavender green,

  When I am king, dilly dilly,

  You’ll be my queen.

  This tame-looking, blue-green, stiff, sticky, and immovable shrub holds as much poetry and romance in its wiry arms as would fill a large book.

  Most cultivated flowers were originally wild, and many take their names from the botanists who first ‘tamed’ them. Thus, the dahlia is named after Mr Dahl, a Swede; the rudbeckia after Rudbeck, a Dutchman; the zinnia after Dr Zinn, a German; and the lobelia after Monsieur Lobel, a Flemish physician. They and others brought to Europe many of the flowers found growing wild in tropical America, Asia and Africa.

  But I am no botanist. I prefer to be the butterfly, perfectly happy in going from flower to flower in search of nectar.

  Ferns in Foliage

  At the bottom of the hill there is a small rippling stream, its water almost hidden by the bright green, tangled growth along its course. It is only by its sound as it batters over the pebbles, that we become aware of it. Here we came across many plants that delight to grow in such places—wild strawberries, wood sorrel, orchids, violets and dandelions, and a nest of ferns.

  The first thing one notices is a beautiful group of ferns growing almost to the water. This is the Lady Fern, whose broad fronds must be four to five feet high, a delicate plant, frail and almost transparent in the fineness of its foliage, and looking so tender that you would think the sun and wind would almost scorch or shrivel it up. But the abundant supply of flowing water keeps these ferns cool and fresh.