On Gallows Down: Place, Protest and Belonging by Nicola Chester is a personal story, recording the writer’s extraordinary journey through life, as her love of nature develops and she chooses her goals.
Nicola Chester spent her childhood
with parents and grandparents ‘who knew the importance of outdoors; of walks,
weather and picnics, time alone, freedom and dirt.’ Her parents moved around as
Nicola grew up but wherever she moved, the nature on her doorstep was always
the first thing she looked for and explored. Her parents settled in Newbury and
it was here, as she became a teenager, that she realised how much she felt a
part of her local landscape. It was also in Newbury that her life-long battle
to protect nature began, with the campaign against the Newbury bypass.
Reading Chester’s account of
the building work, you need to be of a strong constitution – I wasn’t - not to
weep at the account of the nine-mile route ‘smashing through heathland, ancient
oak and ash woods, water meadows and chalk streams…’ The construction destroying ‘10,000 mature
trees…4 sites of special scientific Interest, several local nature reserves….’
The list goes on.
She writes about the
thousands of protestors battling, with regular skirmishes, to stop the
contractors but to no avail. She reflects on the brevity of joy and life itself
as a poplar wood is felled ‘as they lay with the leafy tresses in the water….,
seeming to bleed redly into the water.’ It was this last battle that ignited in
the author the knowledge of what she wanted to do with her ‘one wild and
precious life’, as Mary Oliver put it: she intended to ‘save, champion and
celebrate the wildness in any way an ordinary girl could.’
The rest of the novel follows
the author as she marries, has a family and lives in rural tied accommodation,
usually on big estates with her husband. She teaches her children to love
nature as much as she does by taking them on wild walks, badger watching and
listening for the cuckoo and nightingale. She struggles to bring up her family
in a rural setting on a very low income and writes about her journey of
‘protest, change and hope’ as she strives to save the nature she loves whenever
and wherever she can, trying to influence the people at the ‘big house’ to also
protect nature.
Chester writes ‘We are
writing for our very lives and for those wild lives we share this one, lonely
planet with.’
A very emotional read full of
poignant moments that hopefully will inspire other people to explore and love
nature as much as Nicola Chester does.
Melanie Wakley
