By chance I come across an old staff list from the university. I think it was from the 1960s: there is a Peter Thomson, who seems to be in the physical sciences, engineering perhaps, and a John Thomson in the zoology department. I know two of the names next to John’s. They were still in the department when I joined it, twenty years ago. My colleagues tell me John is a geneticist, who went to the University of Sydney. I trawl through the contact lists at Sydney, through their lists of alumni. And there he is. Retired, but not relinquishing his research. I send an email, crossing my fingers that I have found the right John Thomson and that he can lead me to his brother Peter as well.
Within half an hour, John replies. He is Edith’s grandson, and is only too delighted to help.
Edith’s parents married in London and their oldest child, Harry, was born in Richmond, but they soon returned to Old Woking. By the time of the 1871 census, Henry and Lottie were living in Church Street, next to St Peter’s Church, with four children under four – Harry (four), Lottie (three), Annie Maria (one) and Harriett (one month) – along with a twelve-year-old nurse girl, Jane Tickner. Henry is listed as a carpenter. It is hard to imagine how they might have all lived comfortably in the tiny three-bedroom stone cottage, ducking beneath the curved and rough-hewn beams that supported the roof.
By 1874 the family had moved half a mile down the High Street, to Hale Lodge. Reputed to have once been the hunting lodge of Queen Elizabeth I on her forays from Windsor Castle, Hale Lodge was, in fact, even smaller than the tiny Church Cottage. But in Edith’s memory it would loom large. It was in this house that Edith was born, on 29 July 1874.
‘Like Hood,’ Edith later wrote, ‘we all remember the house where we were born, “the little window where the sun came peeping in at morn”.’
Hale Lodge was smothered in ‘an avalanche of summer greenery’ that screened all but the main outline of the house: ivy scrambling over the double-framed white casement windows and steep tiled roof. The front portico was a riot of flowering climbers; the garden was filled with flowering shrubs protected to the east with a row of small pencil pines. Harry mentioned that they were often awakened by bird netters looking for nests hidden deep in the ivy.
It is the ivy that Edith remembers.
‘My earliest memories are of its tiny, greenish flowers, and their warm odour that floated up to me as I leaned from the windows they curtained,’ Edith recalled. ‘Sweet? Ask the bees that browsed among them all through the sunny hours, and the birds that cradled their babies in the cosy depths of polished leaves.’
Hale Lodge, High Street, Old Woking: Edith’s birthplace, from a picture in one of Edith’s articles
Hale Lodge still stands today, its red-brick walls now stripped neat and bare, the portico empty of flowers, save two small hanging baskets, and the front garden mowed into low-maintenance squares of grass. The long-lived pencil pines are the sole survivors, grown taller than the house now and fattened into century-old adolescence.
The only picture of the house in all its floral glory seems to have been taken by the previous owners, the Jervis family, who lent the Harmses a photo taken a few years earlier. Harry rephotographed the image with an extension to his plate camera and reproduced a number of copies which he gave to family members, including Edith, who used it years later in a newspaper article on ‘wall gardening’.
Guildford is 40 kilometres north-east of Selborne, once home to Gilbert White, England’s most famous naturalist. Surely that cannot be a coincidence. And yet there are few mentions of White in any of Edith’s writings, which surprises me as she remained strongly attached both to her home county and to the authors who wrote about the English countryside. Edith’s literary allusions are frequent and broad, even in her most biological articles, and yet to the modern eye, they are highly eclectic as well. Emerson is a firm favourite, while Thoreau is rarely mentioned. Her fondness for Richard Jefferies was well known to her daughters and grandsons, and yet of White, who lived so near to her home, who pioneered the close examination of the minutiae of local ecologies, who brought nature writing to such a wide popular audience, there is very little. White’s Natural History of Selborne was not immediately successful. First published in 1789, in the same year as the French Revolution, the book made few waves, but a fourth edition in 1827 marked the beginning of White’s longer-term fame. His book has never been out of print since and has run through some 300 editions.
And yet in his introduction to the 1887 edition, Richard Jefferies wrote that White had fallen from favour. Jefferies discovered White’s writing ‘late in the day’. He speculated that White’s style of writing – fresh, naïve, simple, with an impression of effortlessness – was perhaps not popular at a time when nature writing abounded in ‘long words and sentences that come out with a slow, crushed motion, like a rail from the rolling-mill’. The same engaging effortlessness is apparent in Edith’s writing.
Edith does not cite any writer as the inspiration for her interest in nature. It was from her uneducated father – builder and beekeeper – that she inherited her skills in ‘the close and loving observation that enabled her to make her notable and valuable insect biological discovery’.
‘Father was a natural observer,’ said Edith. ‘He noticed at once anything unusual. He questioned why it was unusual, then waited patiently watching, till
