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closeness to Green and Savory helps head off any sense that
his
might be the
intrusive voice of an outsider. Day also aligned himself with local fowlers and
keepers, who might not write their own story but could be represented through his
pen. The cover of
Marshland Adventure
shows a Breydon fowler at night, bending to
pick up a downed bird, a 'Moonlight trophy on the mud'. Day's eulogy of free-
shooting over marshes, mudflats and tidal shore is also a eulogy of local humans,
independent and resourceful, out with nature in all weathers. The tidal flats of
Breydon, unlicensed and beyond human ownership, with matching human and
animal freedom, sit alongside the shooting estate as signifying different yet, for Day,
complementary ways of being in Broadland. Day also gave local wild-fowlers genetic
distinction as part of the local fauna: a photograph of Stanley Nudd of Hickling is
captioned: 'One of a Famous Family of Broadsmen, said to be of Norse Descent' (Day
1950:15). He found another variant of human fauna on the Horsey estate,
captioning a photograph in
Marshland Adventure:
'Half Bird, Half Man! Crees, the
Horsey Hall Gamekeeper, an Authority on Harriers, Bitterns and Other Rarities'
(Day 1950:64). Day was having a serious joke here, tapping a consistent enfolding
of local human and animal fauna, the authority of one on the life of the other
deriving from a long and close sharing of space.
This version of human-as-visceral-animal-observer rests then on an alliance of
elite humans, local serving humans, and animals, united in experience of land and
water, and united through the shooting/hunting and eating of animal flesh. And set
against this, but always in relation to it, are ways of not-being in Broadland,
personified by the figure of the tripper (Matless 1994). In Day's work the tripper
emerges as a kind of polluting pond skater, slipping across the surface of local
ecology and having no meaningful connection to it, but managing to destroy it in
the process. The image of trippers as literal scum is stated most clearly in
Portrait
of
the Broads
in 1967, where Day remembers a Broadland not 'exploited, capitalised,
vulgarised, transistorised': 'A pleasanter picture I suggest than that of a boatyard
yacht-basin littered with ice-cream cartons, candy floss sticks, empty potato crisp
bags, cigarette ends and the thin grey scum of contraceptives on the water' (Day
1967:36). These people only consume, can never produce. We now turn to a second
version of animal—human which, if also set against the tripper, offered a more
benign moral geography of Broadland.
Weather eyes and ears
Alongside this visceral sense of the animal—human we find a reserved mode of
watching and listening, committed to conservation and education; the term
'reserved' refers here to both the practice of establishing nature reserves and the
reserved engagement with nature which they are held to demand, and to cultivate.
This sense of the animal—human forms part of a 'new naturalism' that emerged
before, during and after the Second World War (Marren 1995; Matless 1998),
embodied at a national scale in the New Naturalist topic series produced by Collins,
the establishment of the Nature Conservancy and National Parks, and the general
