Painter in words
John McEwen
FISHERMAN'S FOLLY by `BB'
Boydell Press, £4.95
In recent years 'BB' has not been well served by his various publishers, and the Boydell Press here proves no exception. Fisherman's Folly is limited to paperback — a particularly crass commercial decision in the case of a venerable author, which `BB' is, because the books of venerable authors are collected and collectors like a proper binding. There is also no biography supplied, which may be intended as a compliment but in these unliterary times seems foolhardy. I shall try to make some amends.
`BB' illustrates all his books in his real name of D. J. Watkins-Pitchford. His father was a clergyman and he was brought up at Lamport, Northamptonshire, in one of the loveliest rectories in England — today, apparently, the weekend retreat of a pop-video millionaire. At the age of four `BB' incontrovertibly saw a gnome. At the age of '36 he wrote the most famous story about gnomes in the language, The Little Grey Men. This book won him the Carne- gie Medal. In 1944 he had a book pub- lished about three public schoolboys (until he concentrated in middle-age on writing, `BB' was for 20 years assistant art master at Rugby) who jump school and live by their wits in a forest. Punch described Brendon Chase as the best boys' book since Richard Jefferies's Bevis, and that remains its repu- tation. Furious headmasters still contact him as succeeding generations of school- boys discover this beguiling masterpiece and try to emulate its outlaw heroes. In all, `BB' has now written and illustrated over 50 books, several of them classics in their different genres, each benefitting from the luck he had as a boy to be educated entirely at home. He learned his country lore as a young hunter in pre-motorcar days, and it is because he is a hunter that he adopted a classification of gun-shot as his pen-name.
Today 'BB' is 82. He still writes, paints, shoots, fishes and rears purple emperor butterflies; and, to the delight of his worldwide readership (only the anglopho- bic French disdain him), he still regularly produces a new book. Fisherman's Folly is not strictly new, being an old book with additions; but the circumstance of its ori- ginal publication was so odd that it amounts to a new book. This is because it was first published in 1949 under another title and, so as not to flood the market with `BB' imprints, another pen-name. But, long before Doris Lessing, 'BB' discovered that a change of name did not help a book's reception. Now, at last, the mistake is corrected and another 'BB' can officially join the canon.
Like all 'BB' books Fisherman's Folly owes its charm as much to the author's illustrations as his text, particularly the vignettes which head each chapter. Two of these, respectively heading chapters V and VII, are of stately houses bordered by lakes; and interestingly demonstrate the different scraper-board techniques of his middle- and old age. Both vignettes have his characteristic feeling for atmosphere, but where one is neat and precise the other is free and bold. This freedom lends a new excitement to his drawing, a broader range to his technique. Incidentally, he could be argued to have invented scraper-board as a fine art medium.
Fine art was his training and in daily life D.J. Watkins-Pitchford probably still spends more time painting than writing. This has an important bearing on his writing, because it makes him not a writer who paints, as his literary fame might suggest, but a painter who writes. Visual accuracy is always a distinction of his prose: In Fisherman's Folly water-lilies are `globes'; carp emerge from the 'fog' of the pond; a pulled float 'swoons'. Indeed all his sensory perception is equally acute. The call of a moorhen is described by the RSPB Book of Birds as `crorrk', by Collins Field Guide as `kr r rk'; by Collins British Birds as `kr r rok'. But 'BB' here describes it as `cruick', and he is right.
As can perhaps now be guessed, you do not have to be a fisherman to be enter- tained by Fisherman's Folly. In the tradi- tion of The Compleat Angler it is not just about fishing as a skill, but also about fishing as a pleasure. Today, of course, that in itself is a rare virtue, because fishing books have been as thoroughly polluted by materialism as the rivers and seas, and now consist of nothing but diagrams, statistics and prices. What a relief, therefore, to get away for an hour or two to `BB"s own version of Thoreau's Walden Pond, Thor- ney Pond somewhere in the Midlands, there to share his thoughts at all seasons and in all weathers.
The result is both restorative and in- structive and puts paid, above all else, to the misconception that fishing requires patience: Yes, 'patience' is entirely the wrong word, as it implies putting up with a thing without complaining for an indefinite time. I do not complain at being able to sit in a quiet green place with so much beauty around me ...
In country matters — and, for his many disciples, in every matter — 'BB' has the divine quality of always being right. This makes his views on the misunderstood nature of field sports particularly perti- nent: I always maintain that to get full enjoyment out of fishing you must possess, in a certain measure, the hunting instinct. This applies to shooting men as well. The eating of your fish should be the sublime termination of the whole business.
He once ate roast heron and found it surprisingly good and unfishy. In this context too it should not be forgotten, as James Teacher mentioned last week, that fox-hunting is a modern corruption of beagling, though today fox-hunting has a vital conservationist role as the chief custo- dian of our hedgerows and spinneys. 'BB' also stresses, like Richard Jefferies and other natural-philosophers, that Nature is pitiless: he has seen a fox chasing a pack of hounds, and cites the classic story of the perch which was caught on a hook baited with its own eye. Jefferies reminds us in one essay that the first artists were hunters, so immemorially the hunting instinct pre- cedes the artistic. This has certainly proved the case with 'BB' or, if you prefer, Mr Watkins-Pitchford.
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