Melissa Harrison - The Stubborn Light of Things: A Nature Diary

There was an overgrown pond in the next village when I was a child, choked with shaggy bulrushes and silver with frost in January. I wrote about it one afternoon at primary school, in my English lesson, and my teacher, a kind, generous woman called Judith Jessett, kept me back after class to tell me it was good.

I was a bright child, but I didnt have enough confidence to be truly creative: what made me feel safe was getting things right not taking risks. Yet her words that day meant more to me than any qualifications I later achieved, either at secondary school or university; I carried them with me through my twenties like a tiny flame, precious but insubstantial. Mrs Jessett once said I was good at describing nature. But what use could come of that?

I was in my early thirties before I realised that there were people whose job it was to write descriptively about ponds and meadows, birds and trees. Kathleen Jamies Findingswas the first modern nature writing I discovered, and then Roger Deakins Wildwood; Robert Macfarlane and Esther Woolfson came next. And then the whole canon opened up to me like a magic box: Richard Mabey, Mark Cocker, Nan Shepherd, Kenneth Allsop, J. A. Baker, Clare Leighton, Ronald Blythe, John Stewart Collis, Edward Thomas, Richard Jefferies, all the way back to the parson-naturalist Gilbert White. On and on it went, wonderfully, transfor-matively; and as I read I began to make connections with the books Id adored as a child, like The Country Diary ofan Edwardian Lady, Animal Tracks and Signsand The AA Book of the British Countrysideeven the four seasonal Ladybird books, What to Look For in

Yet I didnt think I would ever qualify as a nature writer; for one thing I lived in South London, and more importantly I wasnt enough of an expert to hold forth on plants or birds or ecology. Instead I wrote a novel set in a city, Clay, into which I crammed all the noticing and description and love of the natural world I could. I contributed short pieces to the wonderful Caught by the River website, and began to pick up work reviewing books such as Helen Macdonalds H is for Hawkand Esther Woolfsons Field Notes From aHidden Cityin the broadsheets. Still, what I most wanted to do was write descriptive non-fiction about the natural world. But while my expertise was growing exponentially as more and more of my life shifted to focus on nature and the countryside, I still didnt think I was allowed.