When I was a teenager in West Somerset, my father would drive me to the school bus stop each morning, about a mile away. During March and April we were frequently alarmingly late…and it was a logistical nightmare if I missed the bus! The reason for our tardiness was that we were watching hares from our upstairs windows. There was a large field immediately behind the back garden and in spring we were regularly treated to delightful entertainment as hares boxed each other and then raced (hared!) around the field before challenging each other again. You could only watch and laugh, hence our reluctance to leave.
After that it was decades before I saw a hare again but last year in Suffolk as we gently queued to get into Center Parcs I saw a hare sitting in the undergrowth. Hares are large and really cannot be mistaken for rabbits. They are not cuddly, rounded bunnies but lean and powerful with of course those amazing ears. The Suffolk hare sat still and silent for several minutes before turning into the rusty coloured bracken and immediately disappearing, totally camouflaged, hidden in plain sight. One of those happenings that are unaccountably special and not quickly forgotten.
I have just finished reading Raising Hare and find that I having difficulty finding the words that will show you just how totally captivating this story is. The author Chloe Dalton was for many years a high powered foreign affairs advisor, working for and travelling with William Hague. Her life was run by phone calls, flying abroad at a moments notice, writing papers with tight deadlines and rarely being at home, either in her London flat or her renovated barn in the countryside… I’m guessing Oxfordshire but I don’t know.
Everything changed with the pandemic lockdowns as she hastened to the perceived safety of a remote country home. And, there, one day out for a walk, she found a leveret. We all know that the advice is always not to interfere, to leave a young bird or animal in the hope that the mother will return. For some reason the author ignored this and took the leveret home. One of the most interesting parts of this story is that she had no wish to domesticate the creature, so she didn’t name it, didn’t put it in a cage and only handled it to feed it, this being done with a vet’s advice. Amazingly the leveret survived and having its own entrance to the house, it chooses to return time and again, obviously feeling completely secure in its freedom. I think you can have secure freedom. Even more incredibly the hare, which turns out to be female, has her set of leverets in the house and uses the garden as their playground.
Eventually of course ‘normal’ life returns, with all its choices and decisions that Chloe Dalton has to make. She does return to what most of us would consider a high octane way of life but maybe with a slightly different mindset. She has a greatly heightened awareness of all aspects of nature and, not surprisingly, the plight of hares in particular. Their life in the wild is incredibly precarious with only a tiny percentage of leverets making it to adulthood. She wants to live more in the present and spend more time writing in her country retreat. I wonder if life overtakes all these resolutions?
I looked into why hares are seen as slightly mystical and other worldly. Everyone is familiar with the image of a hare looking up at the moon. I really couldn’t find out anything particularly useful, so for the time being they will stay as that moonlit mystery. Maybe that is how it should be.
This is a beautiful book to read. If you fancy a change from fiction for a while then this might be something you would enjoy.