In The Grip Of Winter by Colin Dann

In the Grip of Winter by Colin Dann

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve been picking my way through the Farthing Wood series, driven by an urge to revisit these emotionally scarring books of my childhood. Though somebody like Richard Adams will always have the crown of accidentally emotionally traumatising children (Plague Dogs! General Woundwort! the! horror!), books like The Fox Cub Bold are right up there with them. This isn’t a situation where everything always ends up well. Dann was a naturalist and wrote from experience and although the Farthing Wood animals remain bound by a vow of mutual friendship, others do not. There’s a blunt honesty to these books that even now I am rather fond of.

In The Grip Of Winter is the second book of the series. The animals of Farthing Wood have relocated to White Deer Nature Reserve, a space of safety and sanctuary. Everything is going well until winter arrives. It is one of the coldest and hardest winters on record and the animals suffer. Not only do they have to deal with the fierce temperatures and the lack of food that brings, but they also have to face poachers breaking into the park. The poachers are armed with guns, and killing – inevitably – occurs. It’s down to the wiles of Fox, supported ably by Vixen, to sort things out…

Upon rereading this, I had quite the memory realisation. When I was a child, I had an intermittent cast of imaginary friends that would join us on car journeys, running along the side of the road at the same pace of the car. I don’t think I ever imagined them to anybody but there was White Rabbit, White Horse, White Tiger and – you get the picture. But I realised that this naming comes from the Farthing Wood books – a series where animals are mainly named things like Hare, and Ginger Cat, and Tawny Owl until mates, children and friends of the same species turn up and start to complicate things. My adult feminist side kicks slightly at Whistler’s mate – a heron, so named because of a hole in his wing – being called Whistler’s mate throughout this book but that’s a small point to pick.

In The Grip of Winter is an impressive piece of work and functions as an honest and good introduction to stories about animals for young readers. It feels different to much of today’s children’s literature and I suspect much of this comes from Dann’s naming style – Fox, Vixen, Kestrel etc – but also from his matter of fact knowledge about the natural world. The domestic animals remain domestic, the wild – wild. The biggeranimals eat the smaller (though, as I say, the Farthing Wood creatures abstain from eating each other) and Simba, we eat the antelopes and then we turn into grass and the antelopes eat the grass and it’s the circle of life.

I don’t think we write children’s books like this any more, and I suspect there’s a space in the world for a reprint of at least the first in the series. But, for now, I’ll continue picking them up when I find them in the charity bookshops and continue to savour this intriguing, occasionally brutal, and somewhat rather fascinating series.



View all my reviews