Every day I walk for one or two hours in the woods that surround the town where I live in Canada. These walks have informed the writing of my novel as much as the reading that was done for research. Each walk brings new elements of the natural world to observe and discover - whether it is the pattern of twigs on the forest floor, the sluice of light through the trees, the Baltimore oriole I saw this past week, or the sleeping fawn I spied just this morning. These walks are often the best part of my day because they require my full attention, and because they are full of surprises.
Even though The Evening Chorus takes place during the second World War, it is written very much from the material of my everyday life. I wrote the novel because I wanted to talk about the importance of the natural world in relation to human beings. The spark for the story came from a mention in Tim Dee's book, The Running Sky, about an English poet, John Buxton, who was a prisoner of war in Germany during the second world war and spent the time he was interred watching a pair of redstarts around the prison camp. After the war he wrote a book based on his findings called, The Redstart, and published in 1950 by Collins as part of their New Naturalist series.
I based the premise of bird watchers in a prison camp on John Buxton's situation, but my character of James Hunter is not based on Buxton himself. Nevertheless, to steep myself in the time and the pursuit, I read and re-read The Redstart and all of Buxton's poetry, some of which was written while he was a prisoner of war.
In terms of researching the subject, I read widely about both prisoner of war camps and naturalists of the period. There is too much material to list here, but two books that were of particular help were Derek Niemann’s Birds In A Cage, and Madge Gillies’ The Barbed Wire University. The first book is the most recent account of Buxton and other birdwatcher prisoners of war, and the second is a detailed compendium of information about being a prisoner in a German POW camp during the second World War, written by a woman whose father was one of these prisoners and who had access to his, and other prisoner’s, letters, diaries and sketches from the camp.
The prison camps for officers, Oflags, were not death camps and were not run by Nazis. They were operated with respect to the Geneva Conventions, which specified that officers did not have to do any physical labour while in the camps. This is why the camps were filled with birdwatchers and gardeners, why many of the Oflags boasted substantial libraries and staged theatrical and musical shows.
While still subjected to the horrors and deprivations of being prisoners, British officers were allowed to pursue their interests in the camps; and while many men were fixated on escape, many more were reconciled to waiting out the war and focused their attention on a specific hobby to pass the time and keep their sanity. John Buxton’s book on redstarts is still regarded by some as the best single species study ever undertaken because he had vast stretches of time to give to his observation of the birds. For the five years he was in the camp, he did very little else besides watching the redstarts.
In the first half of the 20th century, many naturalists were poets, as it was understood that a study of the natural world depended on keen observation and attention to detail, something that poets have in abundance. One didn't need a scientific degree to watch and record nature, just an interest in it and a curiosity about what they were seeing. There are still some holdouts in our time from that way of thinking - Jane Goodall comes to mind - but poetry and science aren't as closely connected as they once were. And where once nature was a proper noun, now it is just another ordinary word, lost among its countless fellows.
I am in favour of returning nature to being a proper noun, and of poets writing about the natural world and having their contributions valued as scientific study. I believe that as humans we are very much part of the natural world and that our connection to it is a vital one and needs to be protected and nurtured; just as we need to protect and nurture the natural world around us. My attempt at writing a natural history of a particular moment in the second World War, which is what I have tried to do in The Evening Chorus, is my way of expressing this belief.
The Evening Chorus by Helen Humphreys is published by Serpent’s Tail, £11.99
