It is more than 40 years now since Richard Mabey published his first and still bestselling book Food for Free, the original British forager’s bible. That book set in motion a trend for the fossicking of local produce and a re-wilding spirit that persists in both country and town. It also was the stepping-off point for Mabey’s own wonderfully outlaw relationship with the British landscape, which led to more than 30 books about hedgerow and forest – quests after nightingales and eulogies for beech trees – that include his magisterial compendium Flora Britannica, and his intimate history of his own battle with depression and its remedies, Nature Cure.
This month Mabey publishes a personal magnum opus of tales of man’s relation with the vegetable world, that takes you from Paleolithic cave art right up to mind-blowing experiments in discovering how trees and flowers communicate with each other and with insects. The book is suitably titled The Cabaret of Plants.
Having lived most of his life in the Chilterns, Mabey has spent the last decade in Norfolk, near Diss. We met in his local, The Crown at Burston, a village famous in radical circles for its “strike school” – in the 1920s and 30s farmworkers defied the curriculum of church and squirearchy and set up their own school on the village green, which became an international cause celebre.
Mabey talks with poetic enthusiasm first about some of that history, and its most recent incarnation: Jeremy Corbyn had his last rally before the leadership election on the same green, and 4,000 people turned out.
“This is quite a radical corner of Norfolk,” he says over a pre-prandial brandy, in a favourite window seat. “The county itself is profoundly Tory for the most part, but there are seams of farmland that are very independent, religiously nonconformist, took part in rick burning or whatever. So the annual strike school jamboree has been very well supported locally – but you also get coaches coming in from the King’s Lynn chapter of Unite or whatever. Tony Benn used to come, and Jeremy Corbyn has come for the last few years.”
Mabey recalls this summer’s spectacle with a smile. “The lanes round here are fantastically narrow with oak trees either side and you could see the trade union banners sweeping under the boughs and activists with Team Corbyn T-shirts the same colour as the hawthorn berries. It was like some bizarre marriage between a WI pastoral and the storming of the Winter Palace…”
We get the food order out of the way – whitebait followed by calves’ liver for me; whitebait and Peking duck for Mabey (“the chef here does rather brilliant oriental flourishes”); a glass of rioja, a glass of sauvignon blanc – before returning to the theme. Was it a sense of this radical tradition that brought Mabey to this spot?
“I wasn’t so much drawn as drifted,” he says. “I had to move because I’d had this bad two years of depression, the family home in the Chilterns had broken up, and East Anglia had always been my second home. I came up here from my late teens and used to go up to the north coast with mates and stay on a converted lifeboat, like something out of Pirates of the Caribbean. We would be running wild on the marshes, birdwatching. So it was very natural when I left home in the Chilterns that I would end up here…”
Mabey lived first in a house he borrowed from his friend, the writer Terence Blacker. He then fell in love with his partner, the aptly named herb-gardener Polly Lavender, who was one of his saviours from the depression that at one point saw him hospitalised (the other was the Romantic poet John Clare). “Polly was of East Anglian stock as well, born and brought up on the Broads. So we thought why not stay up here? So we bought a house a mile or two up the valley from Blackers…”
Mabey has been at the vanguard of what has been called the New Nature Writing, a collective term that included his friends Robert Macfarlane in Cambridge and the late Roger Deakin, who also lived in the Waveney valley. I wonder if the axis also extended to the coast, gloomily mythologised in Peter Grimes, a theme later extended by WG Sebald in his walking tour The Rings of Saturn – did Mabey meet the great German before he died?
“No,” he says “But they had a conference on him at Norwich and I dared to speak up against his imposition of his own melancholia on the landscape, which reinforced the view that flat, strange wetlands were depressing. It doesn’t chime with my experience. There is a passage in The Rings of Saturn where Sebald has a panic attack on Dunwich Heath because the flowers are too purple or something. I was ripped apart by the audience. All of whom insisted on calling Sebald ‘Max’ to affirm their closeness to him…”
Mabey’s own melancholia was cured to an extent in the same landscape. Was the antidote permanent?
“Yes,” he says. “I am still a bit … cyclothymic, I think is the technical term. I get periods of irritability and downness. But the period when I was really ill is long gone.”
And are those periods assuaged or healed by getting out into the fields and woods?
“They are healed by sitting down and writing. It is to do with some sort of feedback between what you want to say about yourself and the world and it coming back to you through the lines on the page. When you are out there you are a watcher or a receiver or an observer, but if I am hit with a bad spell, particularly in winter, it can do two things: it can confirm what I am feeling, that the world is a wet cold windswept place. Or it can cancel out the positive feelings I do get. Depression is all about the absence of connection, but writing can restore that.”
Mabey is a vivid, genial presence, like his prose. He savours his incongruous Peking duck. His connection to the natural world began in childhood. His parents had moved out to Berkhamsted from the East End, after his father, a bank clerk, visited Germany in 1936 and had a premonition of war. They lived on the edge of an overgrown ornamental estate garden which became Mabey’s playground. After a spell in publishing he mined that passion with Food for Free which he refers to as his pension fund. Did he think it was well ahead of its time?
“I always tried to argue against the idea this was something new,” he says. “As I did the research I found a continuous kind of foraging movement that went through the second world war when even the Ministry of Food produced a pamphlet called ‘Hedgerow Harvest’ with a few Heston Blumenthal touches – ‘leave the stones in your damsons when making your jam for a little extra taste of almond’. It runs right back. In the 1700s there was wonderful a book produced by a shoemaker in Great Yarmouth on esculate plants…”
One of the stranger or sadder aspects of his own book’s history is that its sales have always tended to mirror the economic fortunes of the country. When times are hard its sales tend to spike. “One of the many editions is a little one produced by Gem,” he says. “After the crash of 2008 within two months the sales tripled. It could only be something that happened in people’s heads – I mean they weren’t going to survive the downturn by hoping there would be blackberries in January – but somewhere in the psyche there must have been that idea that there might be consolation if not calories in the wild. And since then sales really have followed the economic curve quite closely. While the recession was at its height sales stayed very high; it is since the slight recovery seems underway that there has been a dip and I’ve lost out on my pension…”
Does Mabey still forage himself?
“Not like I used to,” he says. “In season when there are great things about I will. I would never miss picking samphire in north Norfolk in the summer and when it is wild raspberry season in the Fens I will always go out. And in the years when we have a good fungus crop I will do that.”
These days, though, he suggests, in a phrase which might describe Richard Mabey’s whole marvellous writing life, “it’s more I stop along the roadside and really just enjoy what’s there”.
The Cabaret of Plants (Profile, £20). Click here to order a copy for £14 from the Guardian Bookshop
