Edinburgh International Book Festival interview: Helen Macdonald

Helen Macdonald has spent lockdown at her home in an “absurdly chocolate-boxy” village in Suffolk.

Ahead of her live online event at the EIBF, Susan Mansfield meets up with award-winning author Helen Macdonald

“I must introduce you to my parrot,” Helen Macdonald says. “He’ll interrupt, he always does.” And sure enough, mid-interview, Birdoole, a green-cheeked parakeet, hops down on to her finger and pins me with a steady black eye before flying up to perch on the arm of her angle-poise lamp.

It feels appropriate to find Macdonald in company of a bird, albeit a very different one from the goshawk Mabel, the subject of her best-selling 2014 memoir H is for Hawk. The book, which charts her journey training a goshawk in the aftermath of her father’s sudden death, went on to win the Samuel Johnson Award and Costa Book Award.

Success came as a shock to Macdonald, who thought she’d written a book so uncategorisable no one would read it at all: “I don’t think I really understood what was happening, I was just walking around grinning and being bewildered by it all.” There were benefits - “I’m now driving a car that doesn’t break down every ten miles” - but what has had the biggest impact on her has been the contact with readers, the chance to hear others’ stories.

She has also realised there are things she wants to say and, in her new book, a collection of essays called Vesper Flights, she is starting to say them. While sharing many of the qualities of H is for Hawk - frankness, reflective thinking, formidable powers of observation and wordcraft - it has something else too: a political edge.

“We’re taught to assume that nature is entirely free of class and politics and society,” she says. “We use it as this refuge from these other human things, but actually it’s packed with them, in our minds. We use it to prove the rightness of our own assumptions about ourselves and about the world.”

Macdonald has spent lockdown at her home in an “absurdly chocolate-boxy” village in Suffolk (“People assume that I’ve been spending all my time walking around under the clouds and staring at hedgerows, but I have been eating a lot of ice cream and watching a lot of action movies as well!”). She is intrigued by talk of the resurgence of nature during the pandemic, “as if we started to look for animals when we hadn’t really had any interest in looking for them before, and suddenly there they were.”

No observation of nature is neutral, she says. In times of resurgent national feeling (the word “Brexit” hovers over our conversation), we look askance at “invasive species”. In the 1930s, Norfolk farmers shot skylarks when they found they had flown over from Germany. Class hypocrrisy is there too: men in marginalised communities are vilified for keeping caged songbirds, while landowners clipping the wings of waterfowl are happily ignored. “There is always that question of who has the right to define the natural world? Who has the right to interact with it and how? Those are the big questions for me because so much of it is about power and class and race and gender.”

In one essay, Macdonald recounts a journey on the Thames with a group of men engaged in the ancient ceremonial pursuit of ‘swan upping’ (catching and marking the birds for their owner, in most cases the Queen). She went feeling cynical, but came back with a sense of respect for the fieldcraft of the swan uppers, and a renewed love for the bucolic riverside landscape. However, she retains a healthy suspicion about the power of national myths. “When a country is hurting it very often reaches for an idea of itself anchored in some golden imagined past, and those stories are always dangerous, I think, because they always exclude people.”

In another essay, she describes vividly the place in which she grew up, when her parents - both journalists - bought a cottage on a crumbling estate in Surrey owned by the Theosophical Society. Wandering at liberty in this semi-wild environment, she says, turned her into a naturalist. “It had formal gardens and parkland and meadows and forest and I just ran riot across it. I’d be in trouble constantly, wandering around with snakes, or standing in the middle of the estate pond trying to catch newts.

“It was full of wonderful eccentrics, mostly older ladies, refugees from Nazi Germany and very posh women who had been kicked out of their families. They were an astonishing group, and I really feel that being exposed to ways of being, ways of living that were not ‘normal’, was freeing for me. I never felt that I had to fit in, or to conform.”

She describes encountering nature, sometimes in unexpected places: watching migratory songbirds from the top of the Empire State Building, or falcons living on the towers of a disused power station in Dublin. While she writes with shock and sadness about the decline in biodiversity in her lifetime (she’s 49), she doesn’t get on a soapbox about climate change.

“It’s the difference between someone shouting at you saying everything’s wrong and you need to fix it and someone sitting by you and saying, ‘I’m so sad, listen to my story’. I’m not good at hectoring. There is a place for it, and I think we need to do more of it, but I want to bear witness to what is being lost. We don’t want to protect things unless we love them, and we can’t love them unless we know them.”

Macdonald studied English at Cambridge, and worked training falcons for sheikhs in the Gulf States before going back to university to study History and Philosophy of Science. Her knowledge of her subject permeates her writing, and she says that the more she learns, the more “complicated and marvellous and beautiful” the natural world becomes.

That’s certainly the case in the title essay, which explores the “vesper flights” taken by swifts, thousands of feet up into the atmosphere at dusk. Once thought to be a way for the birds to sleep on the wing, vesper flights are now understood to be a means to predict large-scale weather systems and calibrate magnetic compasses, something the flock does together in order to make decisions about their migration.

Macdonald says: “To me, right now, in this historical moment, it’s become a really important metaphor. It’s important, for those of us who can, to leave the everyday life of the lower air and try to see where we are and what’s coming next, and work together. That essay was written before the pandemic, but it seems to me now to be talking just about it.”

Helen Macdonald: The Natural World Beyond H is for Hawk is free to watch on www.edbookfest.co.uk on Tuesday 25 August, 8.30pm-9.30pm

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