Literature

LITERARY REVIEW Jonathan Stones, Sherborne Literary Society

Rag and Bone: A Family History of What We’ve Thrown Away by Lisa Woollett (John Murray 2020), £20 Sherborne Times Reader Offer Price of £18 from Winstone’s Books

The author, a lifelong mudlarker and beachcomber, is searching for traces of her ancestors; a succession of scavengers and dustmen who eked out a living among the stews of the Thames embankment in the last two centuries. But while digging up unconsidered trifles in the ooze of the great river, her keen social historian’s eye takes her up and beyond ancient stairways leading into the former heartlands of her ancestors lives. Informed both by her own imaginative empathy and her meticulous researches (she frequently quotes, for instance, from Henry Mayhew’s ground-breaking work published in 1851, ‘London Labour and the London Poor’), she employs her gift for evocative imagery in often intriguing revelations. Did you know, for example, that in an attempt to curtail the outbreaks of bubonic plague, which had broken out in the area in the fourteenth century, Smithfield’s butchers were instructed to dump their waste in the Fleet to keep it off the streets, and that Pudding Lane derives its name from the entrails – ‘puddings’ - that slipped from their carts on the way to the Thames?

But when the author travels down the estuary into the North Kent marshes and winds up on the Isle of Sheppey, the mood gradually darkens as she encounters the waste created by the radical changes in our culture in the middle of the last century, brought about by the combination of planned obsolescence and industriallyinduced consumption. By the time we arrive at Whitsand Bay in Cornwall, where she now lives, apocalypse beckons. There she observes, after a storm, that ‘plastic still carpeted much of the sand, graded in ever smaller pieces as it ranged down the beach’. And in the pools, we find that much of the floating debris is made up of ‘nurdles’. These are resin pellets, about the size of lentils; the raw material that is melted to make almost all the plastic we buy – from carrier bags to plastic chairs. Never meant to be seen by consumers, they will have been lost in industry spills during transport and manufacture. Being small and light, they are easily blown by the wind as they enter our waterways and eventually end up in the oceans, where seabirds and fish mistake them for food. ‘Today, like other microplastics, nurdles turn up on the most remote beaches and are found throughout the world’s oceans.’

Filter feeders are among the organisms worst affected by microplastics. A single mussel can filter up to twenty litres of seawater in a day – leaving them vulnerable to ingesting microplastics drifting in the water. Blue whales are also filter feeders. The recent ban on oyster farming in Chichester harbour because of an 80% decline in their population, as a direct result of this ingestion of toxins, is but one example of the disastrous effect plastics are having on the environment.

That our wastefulness is already having dire consequences is now incontrovertible - the only questions which remain: what we are going to do about it and do we have the will to do so before it is too late?

This deceptively important book is an urgent warning which we ignore at our peril.

'Independent Bookseller of the Year 2016’

James Rebanks English Pastoral

A new James Rebanks is always an event. The No.1 bestselling author returns with a stirring history of family, loss and the land over three generations on a Lake District farm. Highly recommended. Sherborne Times Reader Discount - £1 off