The Horizontal Oak: A Life in Nature

Polly Pullar

Birlinn, £16.99

 

REVIEW BY ROSEMARY GORING

The old oak in Ardnamurchan that gives nature writer Polly Pullar’s memoir its title has withstood “the wrath of the Atlantic” for decades. She has known it since she was a child, and it holds a special place in her heart.

Pullar, a licensed wildlife Rehabilitation Keeper living in Perthshire, has written extensively about the creatures around whom her life has revolved. Now, she has chosen to write as much about herself and her family as the menagerie of deer, owls, hawks, squirrels and sheep around which her life has revolved. Central to that story is the horizontal oak, which has offered much-needed solace at difficult times: “Raven, hooded crow, buzzard and tawny owl frequently visit this tree. Sometimes it will be the little stonechat with his dapper black bonnet. And, from time to time, it is me, for its trunk, having withstood so much abuse, offers me support too”.

The oak’s presence is crucial to this story, representing strength and comfort, and hinting also at Pullar’s resilience. All these qualities have been essential to prevail over circumstances that would have broken many.

Pullar’s upbringing as an only child was unconventional but, initially, fun. She was drawn to birds and animals as if by a magnetic force, and her parents gave her free rein to roam the wilds around their Cheshire and Welsh homes. Even in retrospect, as she surveys the damage done to her and others by her mum and dad, she acknowledges with gratitude their help in fostering what was to prove a lifelong passion.

That Anne and David Munro-Clark (her father changed his name to double-barrel by deed poll), were locally referred to as “the two PBs” – ‘pompous bugger’ and ‘promiscuous bitch’ – gives a glimpse of what they were like. Both were by turns talented, lovable and impossible. In her mother’s case, she was to grow deeply unkind to her daughter.

Moving from England to Ardnamurchan to take over a hotel, the family hoped for a fresh start. Instead, her father could not cope with the isolation, and his drinking escalated. Soon the marriage, which had never been easy, came to an end and her mother remarried a man called Geordie. Very quickly his step-daughter grew to love him, but he could not replace her father.

The trajectory of her life thereafter was pulled between the opposing forces of her parents. By the time she left school with little in the way of academic qualifications, her dad was careering downhill in top gear. Among the most painful episodes in a narrative filled with toxic relationships is when the author - exhausted by the struggle to save her father from himself - attempts to take her own life.

This, however, was only the first calamity. Some years later, by which time Pullar was in a far from happy first marriage, her dad committed suicide. That horrifying day, she writes, “was a devastating smudge of indelible ink spreading fast onto crisp, pristine white linen, an oil spill wrecking all in its wake, a vast blot with no pattern sprawling on and on into densely blurred edges. And oblivion.”

More tragedy and misery was to follow, and Pullar unflinchingly relates her tortuous relationship, not just with her mother, but with her husband Joe, to whom she was wholly unsuited. “Whilst I was on Greenwich Mean Time, he appeared to be working in an Australasian time zone.” This caused ructions when they were running a fish farm, since he often failed to turn up in time to gut the fish or help with the deliveries on which their business relied.

The hardship and bleakness of these years were immeasurably relieved by the presence of countless animals and birds, which absorbed Pullar’s attention and time. They also allowed her to offer help to others, when she badly needed help herself. There was the kestrel she found, all but dead, shortly after her dad’s suicide; and the fawn she thought would die of starvation until her dog began to mother it. There was a snowy owl, found on an oil tanker in the mid Atlantic, which was successfully returned to the wild. And Pea Owl, brought to her in a comatose state by a factory worker. Covered in mushy peas, which it had also ingested, the owl had been “partially canned”. Miraculously, she managed to save it.

While a question mark remains over who was Pullar’s real father – a source of angst and confusion – this book is dedicated to her and Joe’s son Freddy: “If ever anyone ever asks me what is my greatest achievement, then the answer will always be Freddy.”

The Horizontal Oak is simultaneously an enjoyable and difficult read. Enjoyable, because Pullar’s style soars when she is describing wildlife and landscape; difficult, because of the depths of trouble and distress she reveals. When dealing with people rather than the natural world her writing is less buoyant and supple, reflecting perhaps the pain of bringing to light subjects which are still raw. This isn’t helped by jolting shifts from past to present tense. Possibly this device is intended to underline how traumatic events remain with us.

With its colourful and often comic vignettes of rural life, this memoir is reminiscent on occasions of Katharine Stewart’s A Croft in the Hills. It also shares with Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals the sense of a child’s world in which wild creatures offer companionship and fascination no relative could ever match. Yet while Durrell’s reminiscences transfigured a gloriously eccentric upbringing into a nostalgic idyll, Pullar’s purpose is quite other. With courage and dignity she faces up to her past, where the odds of happiness were stacked against all around her: “We were flies struggling in the stranglehold of a complex spider’s web.”

Despite the emotional storms that battered and bent her, she has survived and thrived, like the horizontal oak. Since wildlife and wilderness suffuse and shape everything she has ever done, it is no surprise when she writes, “Nature holds the key to everything.”