Return of a Native
The magic of place
I was intrigued by an insight in one of Derrick Jensen’s recent Reading Club posts: “Almost no-one wants to return to places they loved decades before, because the places have by now undoubtedly been destroyed.” I understood that, but it got me thinking about how unusual it was for me to have returned, in my late fifties, to the place I had loved decades before, and had vowed to leave behind. And about Mary Butts, the modernist novelist, who had, decades before me, lived within a mile of my childhood home and had also wanted not to return as an adult.
Mary Butts was one of the three Dorset women whose defence of nature I wrote about here, We both grew up close to the shores of Poole Harbour. The other side of the harbour Butts believed to be “still one of the most beautiful places in the world”, but our side, she felt, had been destroyed by urban sprawl. Her memoir, The Crystal Cabinet (1937), I read and re-read many times as a child, fascinated by her descriptions of places I was familiar with and loved..
At thirteen, I was sent away to a private boarding school, only a few miles from my home. It was hard for me to understand what I must have done to deserve the brutal treatment I experienced there. Only years later did I realise sending me there was my parents’ attempt to give me what they believed their working class backgrounds had deprived them of - not least (they imagined) an ability to avoid the social awkwardness they felt after setting up a prosperous small construction business, living and working in a middle class world whose inhabitants seemed to be obsessed with a need to do everything correctly.
I hated the school, but I could no longer love the home that had sent me there. I spent most of the holidays with a state school educated friend, cycling to as far away from Poole as possible - starting with the North of England, moving on the next year to West Germany and Switzerland, and then venturing the year after that as far as Austria and Yugoslavia. In the few months gap between school and university I worked on a kibbutz in Israel, and after university I worked and lived in London, visiting Poole only occasionally to spend time with my mother after my father died.
Butts left Dorset as a young woman in her twenties to live a bohemian lifestyle in France. When she returned to England in the 1930s, at the end of her short life, it was to the far west of the country, close to Lands End. She kept a vow not to return to her childhood home, except via occasional astral journeys. “Place I shall never see again,” she wrote, “that I can never bear to see. Now they have violated it, now that its body has been put to the uses men from cities do to such places as these.” But she returned many times in her novels and poems to the magical landscapes of Dorset, always highlighting the difference between those who like her experienced the spiritual significance of those places, and the developers who were determined to destroy them.
The magic of place
Like many in her milieu, Butts was fascinated by magic. Rachel Morris has observed, in her study of Renaissance magic, that “magic was viewed with ambivalence since it was believed to come in two forms: bad, black magic and good, white magic” (The Years of the Wizard, 2025). This applies equally in the twentieth century. Butts was an assiduous student of magic, including its darker side, and in 1920 she compiled a ‘Bibliography of Magic Books’. She briefly associated with the notorious Aleister Crowley (aka ‘The Great Beast 666’), who she initially believed to be “a technical expert of the highest order.” She spent the Summer of 1921 at Crowley’s Sicilian villa, The Abbey of Thelema, and participated with increasing reluctance in drug-fuelled group ‘initiations’ devised by him that involved cruelty, sexual abuse, and excrement. Butts’ experience there led her to conclude that “I’d sooner be the writer I am capable of becoming than an illuminated adept, magician, magus master of this temple or another.”
It was as a writer that Butts recovered memories of a more enchanted version of magic, one that was connected with place. This was not just in the woods surrounding her childhood home, but elsewhere in Dorset as well - in “the Sacred Wood” near Tyneham (now part of an inaccessible tank firing range), at “the blunt-nosed cliff of Kimmeridge shale” (now the site of an oil well), and, above all, at “The Rings” (The Iron Age hill fort at Badbury Rings, where she had experienced “the equivocal nature of the contact between visible and invisible, the natural order and the supernatural, between time and eternity … a place for initiation”).
After years spent together in London, Angela and I were increasingly drawn (back for me) to Dorset. We bought a small terraced cottage in Corfe (Starn in Butts’ 1928 novel ‘Armed with Madness’) that had been built with stone looted after the Civil War from the ruins of Corfe Castle. Whenever our jobs in London allowed, we would escape there. It gave Angela space for her writing, and enabled me to spend time in Poole caring for my mother, who was becoming increasingly frail.
Some of our favourite places to spend time in turned out to be places whose magical qualities Mary Butts had identified. I had been involved at a distance with campaigns to open footpaths around Tyneham during times when the tanks were not firing, and we often took advantage of their success to walk them. Kimmeridge Bay was a particular favourite of Angela’s (despite the oil well) - we planned to run a healing workshop there in 1994, which had to be cancelled when Angela came down with severe ME. Blake Hill became a favourite walk for my mother and I in the months before she died - this the highest point in the woods that surrounded Mary Butts’ childhood home (adored by her as “a place where the magics began”). And Badbury Rings was where Paul, Janet, and I spent a special morning three years ago, on one of the last outings we were able to share before his respite from cancer came to a sad end.
Angela and I had intended to eventually move full-time into our cottage at Corfe, but the severity of her ME made that impracticable. When my mother died, around the turn of the century, and she left her house to me, we realised it would be an ideal place for Angela to recover, and it was to there we moved when we were able to leave London for good. And when Angela died, I had become so re-connected with the place that I felt unable to let go of it. My return, not just to Poole but to my childhood home in Poole, was not chosen, but dictated by circumstances. Much had happened to destroy the place. Yet rediscovering what had not been destroyed, and experiencing how the place had fought back against its destroyers, made me love it in a deeper and perhaps more profound way.
The thing
Mary Butts’ hatred of what was done to her beloved childhood home was expressed many times in The Crystal Cabinet. Its neighbourhood , she wrote “became a place which has lost centre, character, distinction , hierarchy … almost as if some new and vile form of marine life had crept out of the Harbour mud and spawned and spread itself on land.” This, she believed, was evidence of a negative spiritual process - “The thing had won. It could not be stopped … Only greed, the vulgar tastes of the speculative builder, the most casual economic chances, all operating together, have changed one of the flowers in England’s cap into a place where every detestable urban feature has been reproduced, and only too little of its civilisation or its delights.”
The Poole of my childhood was very different from the Poole of Mary Butts’ childhood, and Poole now is very different from the Poole of my childhood. The main industries when I was a child were potteries - Poole Pottery by the Quay in the Old Town, famed for its hand-painted ceramics, and South Western Pottery, very close to where my family lived, which made industrial pipework. This pottery (described by Butts as “a coarse industry, drain-pipes and bricks - and on one side acres of workings, pale clay-pits.”) had a rail link to the main line, and if I asked the driver of its locomotive nicely, he’d let me ride home from school on the footplate.
Neither pottery has remained. Poole Pottery still exists, but it is now made in Stoke-on-Trent, and its factory by the Quay has been replaced by luxury apartments. The South Western Pottery’s drainpipes were no longer needed after plastic alternatives took over the market, and its site is now a drab housing estate.
The main industries now are Sunseeker, which builds super-yachts for the super-rich, and Lush, which develops and makes in Poole the cosmetics it sells in its shops worldwide. Lush is so ‘woke’ it sells breast binders to girls to encourage them to avoid becoming healthy adults - definitely a sign of the times. As was the demolition of the oil-fired power station by Poole Quay whose chimney dominated the skyline when I was a child, but also the development of Western Europe’s largest onshore oil field at Wytch Farm on the other side of the harbour, which is carefully shielded by tree planting so that no-one needs to see it.
The earth is strong
Mary Butts may have believed that “the thing had won”. But she was consoled by the thought that, in the long term, “this leprosy on the face of our land will rot away. Leaving no lasting scar … And the earth is strong.”
She may, though, have underestimated wildlife’s ability to adapt to the new built environment, before that environment has time to rot away.
In the 1880s, the railway line connecting Poole to Bournemouth was constructed, cutting across a corner of Poole Harbour. The town authorities created Poole Park around the seawater lake and two freshwater lakes that were separated from the harbour by the railway embankment. The lakes have been taken over by breeding swans, geese, and ducks. In the 1970s, a strip of land along the harbour side of the railway embankment was reclaimed. There was a mad plan to construct on it a new road linking Poole and Bournemouth, to ease congestion on the existing road. This was stopped by local opposition, and the reclaimed land was turned into a cycleway and a footpath, which I regularly walk. A bonus for me is that each winter low tide I can see and hear some of the 300+ bird species that are in the harbour, as they wade on the mudflats next to this footpath.
The Tide
Mary Butts called the suburban development that she felt was was destroying her sacred land “the Tide”. This was creating a conurbation that linked the old towns of Poole and Christchurch with the more recent development of Bournemouth. This emerging conurbation, she sneered, “made in England a City of Dreadful Joy.”
The road I live in was part of that tide, with 70 detached houses and their gardens taking over what had remained meadowland until then. My home is one of the few original 1930s houses that remain. As owners die off, a new tide is emerging, as their homes are bought up by a different class of super-rich - hedge fund managers, property developers, professional soccer players, and the like. The 1930s houses are one by one being demolished, and replaced by huge mansions. Vegetation is ripped out, and gardens are replaced by swimming pools. saunas, gyms, and concrete terraces.
One of the mansions near to me was built three decades ago. It was rebuilt this decade, this time with the addition of a nuclear bunker by the harbour shore. I don’t know what motivated the owner to have this constructed. The bunker may or may not be strong enough to withstand a nuclear strike, but I doubt it will survive a different tide that will almost certainly submerge it some time later this century - the rising sea levels from global heating that may be difficult to detect from year to year, but are easily noticed when you’ve been around for decades. It’s another reminder of how little the super-rich appreciate how damaging their actions are to the living planet.
One consequence of the arrival of super-rich human newcomers is that wildlife displaced by their mansions finds refuge in my garden. In the winter, foxes turn up to drink the water I put out for birds. In the Spring, bees arrive to gather pollen and nectar from the apple blossom and bluebells, moving on to the lavenders and pyracantha in the Summer. This is when foxes play on the lawn, and lizards sunbathe on the Purbeck stone wall. In the evening, after sunset, pipistrelle bats fly in darting circles over the garden, hoovering up its insects.
I’m glad my staying here has enabled that. I don’t like the mansions that surround me and the world they represent, but I don’t regret my return and my connection with the wildlife who share the garden with me.
“When I first got away from home I thought this place was not worth troubling about. I thought our life here was contemptible … I was endeavouring to put off one sort of life for another sort of life, which was not better than than the life I had known before. It was simply different .. . I have come home.”
(Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, 1878)