‘Deep Roots’ a guest post by author Nicola Davies

Delighted to be kicking of the blog tour for Carnegie-nominated The Song That Sings Us with a fabulous guest post by author Nicola Davies – read on to discover how the book’s deep roots connect to Nicola’s childhood and the richness of her experiences with nature.

 

Deep Roots

The Song That Sings Us has deep roots that stretch back, winding though all my other books and my previous career as a biologist right down into the rich earth of my childhood..I was lucky to be the daughter and granddaughter of green fingered men so I had gardens full of flowers to roam in. My earliest memories are of staring into the faces of flowers and being filled with deep peace and delight, the crimped scarlet silk of poppies, the creamy pink of phlox, the zinging purple-blue of crocus. I greeted their re appearance each Spring and Summer with the kind of excitement that most kids reserve for Christmas and birthdays. There were animals in those suburban gardens too. Hedgehogs, cuckoos, spotted flycatchers all rare in the UK now, were commonplace in every garden, part of everyone’s ordinary experience. You didnt have to try to see wildlife then. You just walked out of your door, and there it was.

Poppy…one of my first loves.

Wildness was there at the edge of the tamed world of human beings and with no close siblings or friends to play with, it became my place, where I had my real life, the life I lived for myself, not the one I lived to please others. I couldn’t speak with the animals and plants that I liked to spend time with, but I certainly felt a deep connection with them.  The most meaningful and significant moments of my childhood and adolescence happened when I was alone in nature, wandering the small kingdom of suburban gardens or roaming the fields, green lanes and hedgerows of the West Suffolk landscape, where I lived from the time I was 11 until I left home.

Me at Five

Those experiences of connection with nearby wild shaped me, and they certainly fed into the human characters in the Song That Sings Us helping to create Xeno’s involuntary intoxication with the minds of birds, the relationship between Ash and the Gula, and Mayo’s strange hosting of thousands of insect friends. They fed into the baddies too, because the Automators are the dark opposite of that feeling of connection and kinship; not only do they not feel it, they deny its existence and find the very thought of such a kinship with other living beings frightening and threatening. I had my arch baddie Doada Lazit, (‘the Vampire of the Fang’ as he is known by his enemies) name his team of evil scientists the ‘Gardeners’, in a parody of the real, plant loving gardeners I grew up with. These Gardeners are working on a weapon called the Greenhouse, which like the greenhouse effect in our world, is a force that can destroy life.

Nagoya Karabach

River crossing Vietnam

In the desert in Sudan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I set up the world of the Song That Sings Us to be the opposite of our world. In my story sustainable power and a respect for nature have long been the norm, but are threatened by the Automators who see nature only as a resource to be exploited. In our world exploitation of nature without thought for anything but profit has become the norm of Western civilisation but is beginning to be challenged by a more nature-respecting culture. In both worlds, real and imagined there is a great conflict between the forces of exploitation and those of respect. They are, simply described, the forces of death and life and in both worlds it is young people who stand up for life, who understand, better than adults, that all living things are ‘one kin’.

Planting trees in NE India

With a new friend in Madagascar

Giant tortoise at Dawn on Aldabra

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