Penguin, 2024
ISBN: 978-1804940525
Reviewed by Alan Dearing
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Jade Fitton wanted to escape her messed up life and the ceaseless busy-ness of society, and decided she would take drastic action to bring it about. She would go it alone. Warnings about the negative effects of loneliness are easily found, but solitude can be, for a very few people, a different state altogether. Most people need frequent contact but Jade Fitton describes her solitary state quite succinctly; ‘Some people thrive on company – I don’t’. She was tired of having to justify her existence within the remits of convention and she wanted to be part of the land, an elemental force and an unsullied observer.
Her life up to the point of her isolation had been like a training course in aloneness. Her parents had moved from London to Devon when Jade was a young child, and soon she was wandering the fields and woods around her home, taking an interest in her natural surroundings. Her parents split up when she was fifteen and she had to move into a bleak London flat with her mum. She calls the loss of her rural idyll catastrophic. The wrench could only have strengthened her longing for wild surroundings. She escaped through reading, with a particular interest in alchemists, hermits and the monastic life of creating illuminated manuscripts.
She moved in with a partner who turned abusive but they moved back to Devon in the hope of relationship redemption. When the inevitable split happened, Jade was left in a house far from shops. She did not set forth with hermit intentions, but events made their own decisions on her behalf. She decided that she wanted to find something more mysterious and deeper than to re-create a golden bygone time, but practical obstacles needed to be overcome.
Jade knew that her innate need was something to be nurtured, but where were the financial resources to come from? Two years of effort secured the qualifications to enable her chosen direction. She also picked up a like minded husband and they ended up working from home on Lundy island. Jade was looking for an almost extinguished magic in the world. She saw midges dancing in the sun as deities and in thick fog her breath was taken away by the sight of a herring gull’s eyes. Whilst on Lundy she believed that each of the islanders saw the god of the place in different guises; like a gull’s wing or the green sea glass. She says that whatever her own god was, it was in that isolated spot, somewhere between the layers of reality.
The last few pages of the book describe the last few days of Jade’s time on Lundy. When she was a newcomer Jade could find a quiet spot to gaze at the delights of the place. By the time she was ready to leave, tourism had really taken hold. Jade describes tourist ships as huge, dark high-rise shadows and she felt trapped by the eyes of tourists as they passed her vantage point and then, in a jolly but well meaning gesture, waved their greetings at her. She was unable to come to terms with this innocent intrusion, she felt ‘a bitch’ for her mean perceptions, but they were a part of her honest inclinations. I feel exactly the same as Jade about my own county, which has seen a large increase in visitors, and I have, for some years, just not wanted to visit its well advertised attractions in summer.
There is one exception to over use; We approach the cathedral with some sense of sanctity and its atmosphere remains reverential. Perhaps if we could recapture a sense of the sacred in Nature our visits would be a special occasion of renewal. A report in The Independant on Nov.3 said that spirituality is the key to connection, and that Britain is 55th least connected out of 61 nations.
I could read Jade’s book many times to grasp in full the perception of Nature that she enjoyed.