Second Nature

As the word itself says, landscape is land-shaped, and all England is landscape – a country whose deforestation began with Stone Age agriculturalists, and whose last old-growth trees were consumed by the energy industry of the time, the sixteenth-century charcoal- burners; where the Norfolk Broads – now in danger of becoming an inlet of the North Sea – are the flooded open-cast mines of medieval peat diggers; where the chief nesting places of its birds are hedges, many of which go back to hawthorn plantings by the Saxons; where domesticated sheep have cleanly shaven every hill; where coverts, coppices and spinneys exist (or existed until the ban) as subsidized amenities for the fox-hunting brigade; where barely a patch of earth can be found that hasn’t been adapted to a specific human use.

The English have a genius for incorporating industrial and technological change into their versions of both nature and the picturesque. It’s hard now to imagine the wholesale wreckage of the countryside by huge gangs of Irish navigators, otherwise known as ‘navvies’, as they dug and tunnelled their way through England during the canal-mania period of the Industrial Revolution. But spool on another century and a bit, and the canals – still busy with commercial barge traffic – had become symbols of all that was green, pleasant and tranquil in the land.

When my father was abroad in North Africa, Italy and Palestine during the Second World War, my mother kept him supplied with a series of slender books, printed on thin, grainy war-issue paper and illustrated with evocative wood engravings, about British churches and cathedrals, pubs, cottages, ancient market towns, gardens and scenic byways, designed to remind the patriotic serviceman of the world he was fighting for. One book in the series, brought home to Norfolk by my father in 1945, and a particular favourite of mine, was devoted to the canals of England and their locks and bridges, now solidly established as key items in the paraphernalia of conventional English pastoral.

Many city children of my generation got their first experience of nature courtesy of the Luftwaffe, when bombed-out houses were transformed into little wildernesses of thistle, teasel, willowherb and loosestrife. Redstarts and other birds nested in crannies in the ruins, among staircases leading to nowhere, peeling wallpaper and upper-storey fireplaces, still with ashes in the grate, now open to the sky. The bomb sites, where I yearned in vain to be allowed to play, appeared to me to be immemorial landscape features, full of character and mystery, and one of the major attractions of family visits to London, Liverpool and Birkenhead in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Or one might look at Turner’s astonishing Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway (exhibited 1844), whose rendering of elemental swirl and tumult makes it close kin to his Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth… (1842). But where the earlier painting shows the paddle wheeler all but overwhelmed by a hurricane-strength wind and terrifyingly steep cross-seas, the train in Rain, Steam and Speed is not the victim of the wild weather but its apparent prime mover. To the peaceful, lately sunlit arcadia of Maidenhead, with its plough, scarified hare and the unruffled Thames below, where two figures are seated in a punt (gudgeon fishing, I suspect), has come this roaring Boanerges, son of thunder, raising a perfect storm. On the final page of his J.M.W. Turner: ‘A Wonderful Range of Mind’, John Gage asks, ‘Has the railway desecrated the beautiful stretch of the Thames it crosses here at Maidenhead?’ But it’s surely clear from the painting that Turner loves the locomotive, with the blazing inferno of its firebox eerily exposed. He paints the newfangled intruder on the landscape as a force of nature in its own right. Gage remarks on the ‘light-heartedness’ of the picture’s imagery; its wittiest touch is that the gudgeon fishers, if that’s what they are, don’t even bother to look up in wonder at the transcendent marvel of their age. But then they’re English, born to a casual phlegmatic acceptance of astounding alterations to the landscape, and perhaps the train and Brunel’s great flat-arched viaduct have already been absorbed into their sense of the natural order of things. If you’re bred to living in second nature, it’s relatively easy to find room in it for a Firefly-class steam engine alongside the gudgeon and the plough.