Throwing away precious parts of our lives
Ireceived a small parcel from a friend living in Tasmania yesterday. It contained a book written by my father in 1935: Salar the Salmon. This particular book was a wartime edition and had been inscribed by my father in 1943 as a present to our neighbouring farmer in Stiffkey, Norfolk, one Hubert Groom. My friend had bought it around the end of the 1970s and was now sending it ‘home’.
Mr Groom was a yeoman farmer of the old school, reminding me of Gabriel Oak from Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. He owned a large stretch of open fields and woods along that beautiful coastline between Wells-on-sea and Blakeney.
Just at the time father took over Old Hall Farm in Stiffkey (known as The Norfolk Farm) in the mid-1930s, there had been a proposal to turn this wild landscape into a vast housing development, similar to that of Peacehaven in East Sussex.
Hubert Groom and other worthy local men opposed this desecration of this stretch of salt-marsh with its bracing open view of the sea.
Among those who formed a small company to buy and protect the land was my father. The company was called Stiffkey Amenities. It still exists today and when father died the family kept the small family interest in it to honour his commitment.
Today the whole area is a World
Heritage Site.
And incidentally – if those houses had ever been built they would have been swept away in the drastic floods of 1953.
To return to the point of my tale, the book with its historic inscription (father did not sign books lightly), on the break-up of the estate of Mr Groom at the time of his death was put out in a car-boot sale, where my friend bought it for sixpence.
Salar the Salmon was in its day very successful, selling 12,000 copies in its first week when published by Faber & Faber.
It has never been out of print and has been particularly popular in America and the Scandinavian countries.
It influenced the poetry of the Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, who gave father’s earlier volume Tarka the Otter an almost biblical status within his own view of nature.
Yet the copy in Norfolk came as near
to landfill when my friend happened to be passing. It was but a microcosm of the macrocosm that we see all around us. Go to any landfill site and you will see historic items being dumped.
The ‘fashion’ now is for brighter furniture, especially oak. So thousands of oak trees across England have been felled. Dark brown wood is ‘out’ we are told, so solid Victoian cupboards, tales, chairs, are burned. Their mahogany was once part of the rainforests now gone, with modern culture causing catastrophe.
I saw once on an antiques programme the total disbelief on a person’s face as she wondered if a ‘glass bowl’ was any use. She had paid £1 for it as at house clearance.
She had never heard of Rene Lalique and almost fainted to hear it was worth £100.
The same friend in Tasmania, before he emigrated, found the complete, and quite valuable, collection of the eminent Edwardian writer and photographer Arthur Paterson’s books on the Broadlands of Norfolk thrown onto a roadside verge. They were wet through but he managed to save them.
In our own ways we are all throwing away more precious parts of our lives: especially the ecosystems of our planet. When will we ever learn?