Nature Book Reader June 2020 - Flipbook - Page 128
A Nature Book Reader
LUKE TURNER
Luke Turner is co-founder and editor of online arts magazine The Quietus, and
author of sexuality-and-nature memoir Out of the Woods.
The Romany series
by George Bramwell Evens
It’s easy to forget that in
the 1980s we didn’t have
intensely informative
high-budget, glossy nature
programmes with vast crews
spread around the globe.
Instead, my education came
from far closer to home, and
always from reading. The
Romany series of books were
based on a 1930s radio series
by George Bramwell Evens, a
Methodist minister of Romani
ancestry whose books
imagined him travelling the
lanes and moors of the North
of England in his caravan,
Vardo, to teach a young lad
called Tim about the natural
world. Deeply evocative of
a landscape and way of life
that were vanishing into
modernity and the Great
Depression, the wonder in
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the richness of the flora and
fauna was never expressed
in sentimental tones. A
favourite passage that is stuck
in my head to this day told
of an epic struggle between
a hedgehog and an adder:
the hedgehog reacted to
the adder’s attack by biting
its tail, holding on, and
rolling into a ball. Incensed,
the adder tried biting the
mammal but only ended up
stabbing itself to death on the
sharp spines, after which the
hedgehog uncurled itself, ate
half the snake, and shuffled
away. I always thought
this was such a wonderful
metaphor for so many
situations that it eventually
made it into my book, Out of
the Woods.
