The Curling Pond Wood

Nowadays the majority of children's fiction is about phantasy, the most famous creation being Harry Potter. But boy wizards, however attractive, cannot control the world. We have already entered a period of climate change which will have profound effects on millions of us. No magic wand will wave away scorching heat, hold back rising seas, provide basic food for starving millions. We need a new direction in children's fiction in which the young are knowledgeable and concerned about the threat to the world and its species. The young need to be able to identify plants, trees and wildlife so that they know they are worth saving.
Below is the first chapter in a children's novel THE CURLING POND WOOD that goes entirely against the trend of phantasy in fiction and tries to entertain as well as educated. Show me that it interests you and I will post Chapter Two in due course.


Chapter One
David doesn’t need an alarm clock, especially in early summer, when he’s wakened by the dawn chorus singing in the garden and wood beyond his window. David has loved birds ever since the age of five, when he saw a blue tit swinging on a half coconut his mother put out in the bitter winter that froze the pipes and killed so many birds. David sits for hours, listening to tapes of bird calls, which is why he can distinguish the wren from the dunnock as he lies in bed in the dawn. That’s a songthrush, followed by a blackbird. The sound is so loud, as if they’ve gathered to sing him a serenade in his bedroom at the top of the house.
David’s room is far more orderly than that of other thirteen year old boys. He doesn’t leave his clothes strewn on the floor, but hangs them carefully in the white wardrobe on which he has painted images of birds. David’s computer is in the corner, at the desk with the pull-out shelf for the keyboard. He isn’t into games like Nintendo, or slaying dragons in their sinister dens, using a joystick. Nor does he spend hours on-line in chat-rooms, like his school contemporaries. He uses the computer to help with his homework, to answer his questions on wildlife and to listen to recordings of bird songs. On the shelf there’s a hand-lens for studying insects, and also a microscope for examining the water he removes from the rusty container that collects rain-water in the garden.
His father built the shelving to hold David’s collection of bird reference books, and Wingbeat, the magazine for teenagers of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which he looks forward so eagerly to every quarter. On the shelf there’s a clay model of a curlew which David made himself in his art class at school. Beside his bed is the notebook in which he always records his observations, putting down the date so that he can refer back.
David, who is tall for thirteen, has dark hair and an alert, sensitive face. Girls find his blue eyes attractive. He gets up, pulls on his denims and a sweater and goes down the stairs quietly, so as not to waken the rest of the family.
Their house, which is in the country, but only ten minutes outside the town, and a mile from the sea, is spacious, with five bedrooms upstairs, and three public rooms downstairs. It’s an old farmhouse, and the floorboards, which are dark-stained and uneven, creak as you walk across them. His outdoor shoes are in the porch, beside the telescope he always leaves set up on its tripod in case he has to go out quickly to look at a bird. He shoulders the telescope out into the morning and goes up through the small wood at the back of the house, to the hide he’s built of branches and pieces of timber beside the fence, with a view over the big field.
David sets up his tripod and begins to scan the field through his binoculars, then, when he sees something interesting, he focuses his telescope. The grey animal he’s watching is carrying something in its mouth through the grass. The hares have had young, the first David has seen this year, and he’s thrilled. He loves these mysterious creatures and has read a book about them. He knows that hares are born fully furred and active because they’re born above ground, with eyes wide open, unlike baby rabbits, which are small, hairless, blind and helpless and are hidden down burrows. A hare has a very large heart and this, with the volume of blood in its body, and its powerful loins, mean that it is a creature of exceptional speed and endurance as it bounds across the field, as if there are strong steel springs within its long hind legs. A hare also has a split upper lip, but it’s not clear why. David has read that a hare eats mostly at night and that it lies still for long periods, taking refuge in orchards. The nest is called a form, and the doe, the female hare, settles down in her territory to rear her young.
On misty mornings David watches the bucks, the male hares, up on their back legs, sparring as if their front paws are fists. Is it because it’s the mating season, or do they have scores to settle? Whatever the reason, David could watch the hares for hours, crouched in his hide, his eye to his telescope, keeping his movements to a minimum because he knows how sharp-eyed these endearing creatures are.
A kestrel has been hovering over the field and as it descends David has to move his telescope quickly to follow it. The kestrel has caught a leveret, a baby hare, in its talons, and as it rises with its prey the mother hare stands on its hind legs, trying to save its offspring. David can hear the leveret crying piteously as it is carried away to become the kestrel’s breakfast. It’s sad, but David knows that it’s nature’s way, the survival of the fittest, otherwise there would be too many hares. Like birds, the weakest must die, or be taken as prey in order to maintain the balance of numbers. David also knows that the kestrel population is declining, and that soon it could become a rare bird.
David puts his tripod and telescope on his shoulder and goes back down through the wood. This early summer morning seems to be vibrating with birdsong and the activities of birds, searching for food, as if every tree and bush contains nests. David feels sorry for the two robins, working in shuttle, carrying worms and grubs to their brood in the wall which David and his father built, with spaces so that birds would nest in it. The wood is a sanctuary for birds and David’s father won’t clear the fallen timber with his chain-saw until the birds have raised their young. He’ll leave some to rot down to increase the insect numbers as food for the birds.
David is part of the wildlife of this wood himself, a boy identifying the birds flitting to and fro. As he approaches the house the jackdaws which live in one of the chimneys are hopping from branch to branch. People give birds names, but not David. This is a bird, and it doesn’t deserve to be shackled by a human name, so David calls them ‘jackdaws.’ He always tries to remember the bird’s Latin name, in this case Corvus monedula.
David props his tripod back in the porch. Then he goes into the garden, to check that there are nuts in the two feeders hanging from the bird table which his father helped him to make in the workshop behind the house. David was very particular about the design, telling his father that they needed to put strong mesh round the table, to keep out the grey squirrels.
But there’s a squirrel on the bird table this morning – a smaller red one. David is excited, because this is the first time he’s seen one that colour in his garden. There are plenty of grey squirrels, but he knows from his books that the red squirrel is declining because it can’t compete with its grey cousin, which can eat a greater variety of food and which has more young than the red.
David watches the red squirrel swinging expertly on the bird feeder, like a trapeze artist. For a moment it looks as if the feeder will fall from its hook, but this squirrel knows what it’s doing. Upside down, it’s shaking the nuts from the small hole the birds put their beaks into, and when a nut falls, the squirrel’s paw is there to flick it towards its mouth. David is so excited by this early morning visitor that he doesn’t care if the red squirrel empties all the nuts from the feeder.
But the red squirrel has had its fill, and, as if putting on a show for David for having provided it with the nuts, it flows along a branch, then leaps to another, scrambles up a tree trunk and is gone. David goes into the porch and brings out the basket containing the packets of bird food which his mother buys for him. He fills the two feeders, one with peanuts, the other with Niger seed, and hangs them back on the table, and when he looks up, the branches of the trees are lined with patient birds waiting to feed.
It’s time to get ready for school. He goes upstairs again and makes a few notes in his wildlife diary notebook on everything he had seen that morning. Then he has a shower before putting on his school clothes and going downstairs for breakfast.
‘Did you see anything this morning?’ his mother asks. She’s interested in wildlife and encourages David.
‘There’s a red squirrel in the garden.’
‘That’s wonderful,’ his mother says. She also loves watching wildlife.
‘And the hares have young,’ he tells her.
David’s brother James, who is ten and in his last year of primary school, comes down the stairs, rubbing the sleep from his eyes with his fists. He gets annoyed as soon as David starts talking about birds.
‘Why do you bother with them?’ James challenges his brother. ‘They’re noisy and they’re messy.’
‘Noisy?’
‘The birds in the tree outside my bedroom window make such a racket.’
‘That’s natural. They’re starlings, sociable birds.’
‘What does that mean?’ James asks suspiciously.
But David can’t be bothered explaining the word to his younger brother.
‘And they shit.’
‘James, where did you hear such language?’ his mother pulls him up.
‘So do you shit,’ David tells him.
‘Stop this conversation at breakfast!’ their mother demands.
James has gone sullen as he eats his cereal, and David knows that his brother will have a bad day at school. He’s been in a lot of trouble recently for being restless in class, and got into a fight in the playground with another boy, giving him a black eye. At home James is also troublesome, annoying his brother by touching his telescope in the porch.
David goes back up to his room to fetch his school bag. He takes a small pair of binoculars from a shelf and puts them into the bag in case he sees any interesting birds in the playground. Then he goes downstairs to add his plastic lunch box to his bag.
David is fussy about food. Having seen a television programme about how chickens are reared in big huts, he won’t eat chicken. Nor will he drink milk, because the cow has to be pregnant all the time to calve to produce milk, and then the calf is taken away from her. So David takes a soya milk drink instead, and he won’t allow his mother to put a piece of fruit into his school bag, unless it’s organic, meaning that it hasn’t been sprayed with pesticides. But James will eat anything, particularly sweets.
He and his brother walk the quarter mile to the end of the lane where they catch the school bus. It’s a long straight stretch of road on which drivers speed, not slowing down for wildlife. There’s another road-kill this morning, a hedgehog, squashed under a tyre while attempting to cross the road in the darkness. David pushes the hedgehog off the road with a stick and into the ditch so that a fox can eat it in safety.
The school bus is always noisy, and the two brothers sit near the front, away from pupils playing with their mobile phones, some of them even phoning each other on the same bus. Some mornings there are fights on the back seat, with the driving having to stop the bus, warning the troublemakers that he’ll put them off unless they behave. David knows that his brother would like to be up at the back of the bus, but he has strict instructions from their mother to keep James beside him, out of trouble.
James gets off at his primary school and the bus proceeds through the town to the secondary school. David is popular with his peers and teachers. He plays football in the playground at break and lunchtime. It’s the last week before the summer holidays and David has been asked to give a talk to the biology class, because Mrs MacLaren the teacher knows of his interest in wildlife. He stood at the white board, explaining to the class that some types of birds were in danger of extinction.
‘What’s extinction?’ a lazy boy in a hooded top lolling at his desk at the front of the class asked.
‘It means that they’ll die out.’
‘Everything dies,’ the lazy boy pointed out. ‘My cat died last week. He was nineteen.’
‘But he probably died from natural causes, from old age,’ David informed his classmate. ‘I’m talking about birds that don’t die from natural causes. They die because they’ve been poisoned by chemicals or because their habitat’s been destroyed.’
‘What’s a habitat?’ a girl with a stud at her nostril piped up from the back.
‘It’s the place where animals and plants live,’ David explained. ‘Your habitat’s your house and garden. Birds have habitats as well. A robin’s habitat is woodland or a garden, and a swan’s is a loch. If you spray a garden with dangerous chemicals to kill the insects, then the robins will die of poisoning or starvation, and if you allow dangerous chemicals to run off farmland into lochs, then swans will die. But of course there are other robins and other swans to take their places. I’m talking about birds whose habitats are destroyed so that these birds don’t hatch out eggs and so they disappear for good from the face of the earth. That’s called becoming extinct.’
‘Like the dinosaurs?’ a bright boy asked.
‘That’s right, just like the dinosaurs that used to roam the earth.’
‘My dad got a video of Jurassic Park and I had nightmares about the monsters,’ a girl said. ‘I dreamed that they were chasing me and one actually had me in its mouth when I woke up.’
‘It’s a pity it hadn’t chewed you up!’ a boy shouted out, and was checked by the teacher.
‘Go on, David,’ the teacher encouraged him. ‘This is fascinating. What are you going to do with all this knowledge?’
‘I want to work with birds, to find out what’s making them die out, and to stop it happening.’
‘How do you do that?’ the boy in the hooded top enquired, interested now.
‘You have to start with people, not with birds,’ David informed the class. ‘You have to educate people that using chemicals is putting wildlife at risk, and that they have to find different ways to treat their crops against pests. You also have to stop people from cutting down forests where birds nest and feed in.’
‘We suffer from greenfly,’ one girl revealed, making the rest of the class laugh.
‘Greenfly is a pest that attacks crops,’ David explained. ‘But you don’t have to use a toxic chemical to kill it. You can use something that’s environmentally safer. On organic farms they don’t use chemicals.’
Then David moved on to the subject of climate change, explaining to the class that because of the emissions from car exhausts and factory chimneys pouring into the atmosphere, the world was heating up.
‘We need to stop making car journeys unless they’re absolutely necessary,’ David warned his classmates. ‘If we do this we’ll reduce the effects of global warming.’
‘But my dad and me need the car to get to football matches,’ a boy protested.
‘And there’s no bus to the skating rink, so am I supposed to stop skating, when I’m junior champion?’ a girl challenged David.
‘My mother’s certainly contributing to global warming, the number of fags she smokes,’ a boy with his hair cropped to his skull told the class. ‘You can hardly see the telly in the living-room some nights for the fug.’
The pupils had lost interest in David’s talk, and several of them were making bird calls from the back benches of the lab, so Mrs MacLaren sent David back to his seat, thanking him for his ‘most interesting talk.’
Later, in the playground, some of his classmates danced round David, moving their arms like wings and making bird calls. One boy piped up in a high voice: ‘teacher’s pet! Teacher’s pet!’ Another shouted: ‘I know the kind of birds I’m interested in!’ And a girl answered: ‘who would be interested in you, you big lump?’
When he gets home at four o’ clock David changes into old clothes. He gets a piece of cardboard, nailing it to a length of wood before writing on it with a magic marker. He carries his sign to the road end and lashes it with string to the fence.
WILDLIFE CROSSING:
SLOW DOWN!
A lorry driver waves to him, as if it’s a joke, and a youth jerks up two fingers. Realising that most adults don’t care about wildlife, David trudges home. He takes his telescope and tripod up to his hide to watch the hares. But they aren’t in the big field. A tractor and trailer are parked, and several men are working. David crosses the fence and hurries up to them.
‘What are you doing?’ he demands to know.
‘Putting in posts for the hoops,’ one of them informs him.
‘What hoops?’ David asks.
‘For the tunnels for the strawberry plants.’
David knows what this means. He’s seen acres of polythene tunnels for fruit growing covering entire fields on other farms.
‘But this is where the hares live,’ he protests.
‘I don’t think the hares own this field,’ another man says, and the others laugh. ‘Unless they’ve got a lease of it from Mr Murdoch.’
‘You’ll frighten them away,’ David tells them.
‘Talk to Mr Murdoch about that; we’re only doing our job,’ another worker says abruptly, lifting another post from the trailer.
David goes back to his telescope and focuses on the big yellow tractor ploughing the next field along. Though the driver’s wearing dark glasses, David recognises Mr Murdoch and sets off across the field to confront him. He stands in front of the tractor, waving his arms, and it stops only feet from him.
‘What do you want?’ the farmer asks, removing the ear-muffs he’s wearing to prevent the noise of the machine from damaging his hearing.
The tractor towers above David and he has to shout up.
‘They’re putting fruit tunnels in the field where the hares are!’
The driver jumps down from the machine and pushes his designer sunglasses up on to the baseball cap he’s wearing. Mr Murdoch is a young man who’s recently inherited the farm from his father.
‘I can’t help that. I need to make this farm pay,’ he tells David. ‘There’s no money in sheep and cattle now, so I’ve decided to move into fruit production.’
‘So you don’t care about the hares?’ David challenges him.
‘You’re a cheeky bugger.’
‘These hares are rearing young,’ David points out. ‘That’s a difficult enough job, without the disturbance of fruit tunnels going up. And once they’re erected, where are the hares to go?’
‘That’s not my concern,’ the young farmer says, swinging up to the cab again. ‘Now if you get out of my way and off my land I’ll be able to finish this field today.’
David walks dejected back to his wood, shouldering his tripod back to the house.
‘What’s wrong? Aren’t you feeling well?’ his mother asks anxiously, because David hasn’t touched the supper she has put in front of him, though veggie burgers are his favourite food.
‘The farmer’s putting fruit tunnels up in the field beside the wood, where the hares are,’ David informs his mother sadly.
‘My friend Katie lives on a farm where they grow fruit, and they have over a hundred people from foreign countries who come to pick the fruit,’ his mother informs him. ‘It gives the poor souls work.’
But David is still worried for the hares, and after supper he writes up the daily journal he keeps of things he has seen and done.
Today Mr Murdoch’s workers came into the big field to put up hoops for the fruit tunnels. That will be the end of the hares there. His father told me that he had watched them in the same field as a boy, and that was why he always tried to sow crops that wouldn’t disturb the hares.