Jock of the Bushveld

"I read it when I was quite young and I fell in love with terriers—for years I pestered my parents about getting one, and finally I did. I spent a lot of my teenage years exploring the woods and the river and the fields around my house with that little dog—it gave me a great a love of place and natural beauty. But about the book: it’s a fascinating look at South Africa in the early 20th century. In the story, this guy gets a little terrier, the runt of the litter that no one wants, and it grows up to be a mighty dog who he has great hunting adventures with. It’s a book that really stayed with me, but I have to say as a disclaimer that it’s very much a book of its time. What I liked about it was that it’s very much about the landscape: it’s about a place with no big game in it, because all the big game has gone—it’s been hunted to extinction. They have all sorts of pursuits with ungulates, different deer and antelope, but there are no elephants because they’d already killed them all off. So it’s a book about a place that’s changed. Writing about place can create a snapshot of somewhere at a certain moment in time—it’s really interesting to compare such writing with other depictions of the same place, at different moments, to see what is there and what’s not. In a simple way too, it was one of the first books I read that really made me feel, quite viscerally, the beauty of landscape. A little like Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie , the beauty of the natural world in Jock of the Bushveld hits you pretty viscerally. Well, yes. Kind of. It’s funny to look at books that were aimed at children in the early 20th century. You think, how on were children reading this? Now children’s books are like ‘stroke the fluffy dog!’ whereas then they were reading pretty serious literature. I suppose Jock of the Bushveld sparked a bit of interest in post-colonial literature . Jock of the Bushveld ultimately led me on to Doris Lessing, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Elspeth Huxley. I suppose Jock brings me back to that idea of how different people will have different takes on the same place. This is very much written from a white settler viewpoint. Things are left out that I ultimately went in search of in other books. It gets back to that idea of place in literature being a patchwork that’s built up and developed. It’s very interesting to see how more and more poets are writing fiction and nonfiction, that concerns itself with place. I think that’s a really great thing. They often have an interest in minutiae. A.K. Blakemore and Kathleen Jamie, for example. There is a brilliant writer who features briefly in my book, Alison Brackenbury, who is currently working on a nonfiction book about the women in her family and village life. I’m really excited about it. Last time I saw Tom Pickard he told me he might work on something about the time he got banned from the North Sea. It’s a hilarious and crazy story—writing on place ought to be funnier I think. People are funny."