Back in 1924 when radio was still a young upstart technology, full of daring invention and brazen self-confidence, a nature-loving cellist, Beatrice Harrison, sat in her Surrey garden and played duets with a nightingale, which were broadcast ‘live’ on the BBC’s Home Service.
Back in 1924 when radio was still a young upstart technology, full of daring invention and brazen self-confidence, a nature-loving cellist, Beatrice Harrison, sat in her Surrey garden and played duets with a nightingale, which were broadcast ‘live’ on the BBC’s Home Service. We heard a clip from one of them on Richard Mabey’s inspiring quintet of meditations for this week’s The Essay (Radio Three). Harrison’s cello could just about be heard meandering below the speckles of sound that were distorting the archive. But the nightingale sang out loud and clear, as if no time had elapsed since that moment in a country garden.
The attempt to capture the evanescent trills and swoops of the bird’s song was a piece of technological egoism, an attempt to prove that nature can be contained, boxed, encapsulated at the whim of a manmade microphone. Was the bird tuned into the cello’s harmonies? Did it sing in time with Harrison’s playing of ‘Danny Boy’?
Mabey’s use of the recording in his talk was not intended to pose such questions but simply to show how hearing a bird in full-throttled song can be the touchstone of memory. The song of the nightingale may not be a language in the sense of words and lexicons but it is fully expressive of something that we intuitively understand, of a state of mind, an emotional response. It captures the aura of a moment, that moment, on a late April evening when it is at last warm enough to leave open the back door as the last light of the day swells from the west and the dusk can be heard settling on the land. If you can garner one such moment in your life every year, said Mabey, it will remind you of all the other moments in your life when you connected with nature in this particular fashion.
In his talks, subtitled The Scientist and the Romantic (produced by Sarah Taylor), Mabey, whose book Flora Britannica has become the definitive guide to the natural life of our islands, took us through his own life as he attempts to reconcile the meticulous observation of the natural scientist (studying biochemistry at Oxford) and the imaginative response of the naturalist. His first experiments with jamjars filled with potassium permanganate and sulphur in a makeshift laboratory at one end of his father’s greenhouse were purely chemical and yet also ‘Romantic’ in the way that Mabey imagined himself as a magician at work in his chamber of potions. Meanwhile in the ‘wild luxuriance’ of the unkempt field beyond their garden he conducted his first painstaking observations, watching a barn owl in flight and discovering the myriad properties of wood.
Mabey’s five short programmes had few props other than his own rich store of memories and thoughts but in the course of the week we experienced with him not just the song of the nightingale but also ‘the terrifying golden glare of a sparrowhawk’s eye’ espied eye-to-eye through a binocular’s lens, and the gift of ‘dropping down’ evinced by John Clare in his startling poem ‘The Snipe’. Clare imagines himself not as the snipe but as living in the reedbeds of the snipe’s world so as to experience the ‘swampy strangeness’ of the bird’s waterlogged environment. It’s almost as if Clare is himself the microscope, magnifying for us the small and insignificant details of the natural world.
This was pure radio in the technological sense of the aural transmission of a man speaking to us through a microphone, but it also had the power of imaginative translation. Mabey took us along with him as he was ‘nostalgically smothered’ by the ‘spicy, liliaceous overtones’ of bluebells in a wood and thought of what the scientist Colin Tudge meant when he wrote, ‘We can’t hear the trees talking to each other but the air is abuzz with their conversations.’
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