We are all ecologists now. The odd Little Englander mutters about European Environment Commissioners but for the rest of us, ever since the Guardian published its first Country Diary in 1906, it and a few other influences have weaned us on environmental consciousness. “We have our conservationist pieties, our sacred texts . . .”
Or do we? Whom would we, as a British audience in thrall to the conditions, problems, flora and fauna of these islands, take as our mentors? To narrow the question down, who are the best living writers in English on natural history? Peter Matthiessen? Barry Lopez? Both are fine and prolific. They’re also both American, imbued with the grand, macrocosmic style of utterance which typifies that nation. You can’t somehow imagine either one of them sitting down to write The Natural History Of Selborne. Its scale is too intimate, its preoccupations too firmly rooted in the familiar, the actual and the everyday. No room here for Arctic Dreams or The Tree Where Man Was Born. Anyway, Gilbert White’s long gone - next year is the 200th anniversary of his death. But does he have a successor?
The repeated reassurance that he does came to me as I walked down from Cadair Idris in company with Guardian Country Diarist William “Bill” Condry. We had been arguing about Thoreau, for whom we share a special affection, it hadn’t so much been argument as putting forward the virtues of favourite texts. Bill had been for Walden and I’d been happily quoting from the great Essay on the Duty of Civil Disobedience. This seemed to please him, to establish credentials, so he asked me, confidingly and a touch timorously, if I’d read his book on Gilbert White. I had to confess that I hadn’t even heard of it.
At this Bill, in an easy fashion and the tones of his native Birmingham which he’s retained through 50 years’ residence in Wales, made a joke of it, told me that he supposed I wouldn’t have done as it had only appeared in an edition of 200 from the Gregynog Press. But he added - and this is the point - “I love that quiet attentiveness of his.”
Quiet attentiveness was what I’d been witness to all day. I’d met Bill amongst the mossy dwarf oaks and hand-tame chaffinches in the National Park picnic site below the northern slopes of Cadair Idris. It was a schizophrenic January day, bright salients of blue sky pushing up the Mawddach estuary into the grey-canopied hills. We were to go botanising. Eyes down and the summits as Bill made quite clear, were out.
If you were to ask me how long I’ve known of Bill I couldn’t give you a satisfactory answer. When you live in Wales and are concerned with the fabric, beauty and variety of the land, his presence and influence are ubiquitous. He’s the finest British natural history writer - a fact of which you get a sense even from the lucid evocation, clear detail and moral weight of those minimalist Saturday Country Diary contributions.
His company out-of-doors is an education. I remember a spring day’s walk around Cwm Brwynog when he showed me purple, starry and mossy saxifrages, roseroot, alpine chickweed, the Snowdon lily and all manner of other botanical rarities - brief jewels making their own light in the shadowy mountain places. Things that might otherwise pass unnoticed. Had this been done in a spirit of mere didacticism, the memory would not be half so clear. But it wasn’t.
For Bill is fun to be with. From behind a diffident manner and beneath tousled eyebrows, he teases you mercilessly, berates you for your emptier concerns and professes his own subject so modestly that a literalist might see him as the most bumbling amateur, until, in his blindness he stumbles over the precision of Bill’s observation: “These white specks on the leaf-tips . . .” - we were studying minute flecks on purple saxifrage leaves which themselves are less than an eighth of an inch long - “. . . they’re exuded lime, which shows you how lime-rich is the habitat.”
This January day on Cadair we were again in search of purple saxifrage. A local botanist had found it flowering on Snowdon on January 26 and Bill, with sportsmanlike competitiveness, was determined to better that date in this more southerly location. As we walked up the Foxes’ Path, he let slip that he hadn’t been to the summit by this route since 1923. I pressed him to elaborate. He told me of a summer holiday camping at Talybont.
“We had a sort of garden tent, it was the first time my mother had been camping and, of course, it rained. My father joined us after a couple of weeks, we got the train from Talybont to Arthog and we walked this way up Cadair. I remember him complaining bitterly about having to pay sixpence for a cup of tea from the refreshment hut on top because everywhere else it would have been a penny. I twisted my ankle on the way down and was carried in on other’s shoulders. We caught the train back from Dolgellau.”
As we talked, more of Bill’s background came out. His father was a craftsman jeweller, a diamond-setter, by trade, and in Bill’s words “almost a communist”, anti-war and a follower of Keir Hardie. He was an ILP member until that fell apart and thereafter the Labour Party was far too right-wing for him. Both he and Bill’s mother were committed pacifists and Clarionites - a vital clue to the intellectual mantle Bill himself inherited. In the early years of the century every major centre in Britain had its Clarion groups - for cycling, rambling, theatre, political discussion. They took the name from the paper run by the socialist crusader Robert Blatchford, whose two-million-selling Merrie England of 1893 was the great popularising tract for socialism in Britain.
Merrie England opens with the injunction to its audience to read Walden, or Life In The Woods. So Thoreau’s exemplary individualism and intense, loving observation led a generation of English people - Bill’s father among them - to the outdoor life. Bill describes his father reading Thoreau’s sweet-minded, graceful English aloud to him in the rounded tones of Brummagem when he was a child. When Bill came to write his first book, it was a biography of Thoreau.
“So how,” I asked as we toiled up the path, “did you make good your own escape trom the cities?”
He talked me through a westward Thirties’ progress out of Birmingham: Worcestershire, Shropshire, the hill-ridges of Montgomery fading out into ever-more-distant crests from the rocky spine of the Stiperstones. It comes to rest at the youth hostel of Van (Y Fan), run by Mrs Elizabeth Jones, a miner’s widow.
“She broke all the rules, let us stay for weeks on end if we wanted; mothered us and from there we really came to know Wales - The Elenydd, Plynlimon. We’d walk over it to Ponterwyd, where the warden’s son Reg was the most ardent communist and would put his best efforts into converting the hostellers over their dinners. That’s probably why I’m a conservative these days,” he adds, with a provocative, mock ingenuous grin. And then, to make sure I don’t get confused, adds: “That’s with a small ‘c’ you understand - I wouldn’t have anything to do with political parties of that name.”
He peoples the way to Llyn y Gafr with botanical characters. There’s Price Evans, pupil teacher at the tiny school of Upper Corris who became a North of England headmaster and acknowledged authority on the plants of Cadair. He’s sketched in, raindrops bouncing off his gleaming bald skull, flat on his back, having tripped, and continuing without a break his peroration on ecology: or giving out the hint, in a chance meeting on Cadair with an eminent geologist that the rocks he’s so laboriously mapping, can in fact be traced easily by following the colonies of green spleenwort.
There’s Mary Richards of Caerynwch: “A truly remarkable lady of many achievements. What Mary didn’t know about the flora of Meirionnydd wasn’t worth knowing. Some day I’d love to write her biography.” And there’s Hubert Mappin, to whose kindness Bill Condry owes the tenancy of the house on Ynys-hir reserve near Machynlleth where he and Penny have lived for years now. There’s the poet R S Thomas, under arrest for being in possession of a pair of binoculars near a French military base, unconcernedly raising the said optics to gaze into a tree, then murmuring to himself “woodchat shrike” and ticking the name off on his bird list.
We reach Llyn y Gafr, a plain and open little stretch of water whose quiet charms and loneliness seem to grow in attraction by contrast with the melodrama of the scenery above. Once there, we head for the bluffs whose reflection is stretched and joggled on its windy surface today.
The rocks are fissile, a pale, calcareous grey. A powdery deposit accrues in the whorls of your finger as you touch. Here are tangled tresses of hanging thyme, the fleshy stems of roseroot and among them, purple saxifrage. It is the only place on the mountain where it grows.
Bill’s hands, like a lover’s, very gently, caressingly, are parting the leaves, probing, turning to view. Slightly crestfallen, he shows me volcanic rich minutiae of budding form weeks away from flower.
We walk on to Llyn y Gadair, grandest of mountain lakes and lunch in a boulder-strewn moraine hollow. He eats thin slices of brown bread, offers me lettuce with a lecture on its virtues, refuses coffee from my flask. The ridges of Cyfrwy above are frost silvered along their fretted crests. Ravens tumble and call. He dismisses these cliffs as a thin, sour place for the botanist, but watches the birds with a keen smile. We talk on. Of his background degrees in French and Latin from Birmingham and London universities, teaching, wanting to do a research degree at Aberystwyth on the French novelist Jean Giono but - because books weren’t available - having to settle for Andre Gide.
“I don’t suppose you’ve heard of Giono,” he comments wistfully.
“I read Colline as a set text at A-level,” I reply and in turn receive a smile of concurrence in a view of life, a belief in nature as providential. Bill tells me of a visit to Ynys Enlli - Bardsey Island, whose bird observatory he helped set up in 1952 - of the combative atmosphere between the two farming families then on the island and of the artist Brenda Chamberlain’s enjoyment of the drama. I find myself thinking in parallel to his talk of the lapidary natural detail and calm bodying-forth of landscape mood in his books and their blend of White’s attentiveness and Thoreau’s idealism.
He tells me fond, human tales of other naturalists who are just names to me: James Fisher, Roger Tory Peterson, Edwin Way Teale, Ronald Lockley. Then Bill sails forth into an account of a red kite roost near Tregaron which he has been to see within the last few days and in his description of the fork-tailed birds swooping down in the dusk from their tree to snatch the offal brought daily by a local farmer, there is all the excitement and wonder-at-the-mystery of a child on his 73-year-old face. I know instantly what sustains him and has given him over so many years the power to share that sustenance with us, his readers.
As we walk down from the mountain, over rocks gleaming in a westering sun, moved by the place to chatter out our enthusiasms for Thoreau, it’s obvious that down there, in the bird-woods and along the dipper’s stream, from the thicket of words Gilbert White will come to join our conversation too.
Jim Perrin’s interview with Bill Condry is republished to mark the 100th anniversary of Bill’s birth on 1March 1918. He died in 1998.
