Half-a-Century in Surrey
Surrey Naturalist. By Eric Parker. (Robert Hale. 18s.) MR. PARKER'S new book—it would, perhaps, not be inaccurate to describe it as a further chapter in autobiography—is leisurely and reflective. From the vantage point of 81 years, in the evening of his life in which he won great distinction as a scholar, a journalist and a countryman, E.P. looks back on half-a-century lived in the Surrey countryside. No man knows the county better than he ; no man knows the woods and heaths of south-west Surrey, with which this book is chiefly concerned, half as well. There have been tremendous changes in these 50 years. And, though the south-west corner escaped the most savage onslaughts of the jerry-builders between the wars and has escaped the most fanatical devastations of the timber-fellers since, there have been very great changes in the wild life of the area. Mr. Parker, himself an accomplished field naturalist, is naturally concerned to record these changes. He came to the close observation of wild life, I think, through shooting and fishing (there are few better ways), and it is the end of the pheasant era, the dis- appearance of the partridge, the lack of hares, the elimination of the small farm, which bring home the change most forcibly to him. Though he was educated to regard it as one of the immutable laws that a country gentleman should rear pheasants (and kill them) by the thousand, he does not regret the passing of the pheasant era. It is characteristic of him. He has a breadth of outlook that might well be the envy of a man half his age.
Yet what an uneven book this is ! Though he records the occur- ence of a small white, not long emerged from the chrysalis, in February (an amazing thing), there is no mention of the release of buzzards near his home, though they must have soared over his house daily, though they nested in his immediate neighbourhood. Though he discusses the intriguing possibility that the polecat has returned to the Surrey woodlands, he makes no mention of the red deer which live in them. Though he writes a good deal about Frensham Pond, and records the black terns, there is nothing to indicate that both the natterjack toad and the smooth snake are resident there.
Again, when he discusses other Surrey naturalists, he includes (rightly) Gertrude Jekyll, but he does not mention Marion Cran, and he ignores Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, in her day as great a gardener as Miss Jekyll and, moreover, a collaborator with E.P. in one of the most delightful of all garden books. Nor can one pass over his chapter on Surrey prose and poetry without comment. He includes Patrick Chalmers, a Scot who did not live in Surrey, on the strength of his lovely poem " Richmond Park," and Kipling, also on the strength of a single poem, but there is no mention of Hudson or Jefferies or Edward Thomas, and that is surely rather astonishing. On the other hand he pays deserved and long over-due tribute to George Sturt.
To set against the omissions, however, is much treasure—the under- ground machinations of the River Mole, the fascinating suggestion that the present unwieldy trinomial system for naming birds, so beloved of our ornithological bureaucrats, sprang from a printer's error, the intriguing guess that the introduction of the grey squirrel was made at the suggestion of Matthew Arnold. The poet's name can be cleared of this crime at once, for the grey squirrel was on irrefutable evidence released in Cheshire in 1876 and maybe some in Denbighshire before that, but how pleasant it is-to discover Matthew Arnold as a naturalist. -There are any number of similar discoveries to be made, all kinds of odd and fascinating bits of information. But it is when he is writing of his garden that he is at his happiest and best. There is about his prose then a balance, a sense of the fitness of words, a scholarship that is altogether foreign to modern English writing about the countryside. And how much he knows ; how much one may learn from him and the garden he made at Feather-
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