There are many corners of England which are quintessentially English. Our UK tourist industry should be at a pretty pass if there weren’t.
It is not difficult to find one of the Marplesque villages with beamed Tudor houses and village greens. At the weekends the stockbrokers still make their wives watch as they play interminable cricket in whites on those hallowed spaces at the centre of picture box perfection.
These are scenes redolent of Blandings Castle, a creation of PG Wodehouse which just about sums up the whole Green And Pleasant Land business.
Wodehouse created an idyll, when the twentieth century was young. The castle is a Noble Pile, it seems, belonging to Clarence Threepwood, 9th Earl of Emsworth. It nestles in a Shropshire vale and the silver Severn can be seen snaking its way past in the distance. It has a lake, and a rose garden, a Yew Alley and several gamekeepers’ cottages, one of which houses the Earl’s pride and joy, his beloved pig, the Empress of Blandings.
The delightfully potty aristocrats live out their inconsequential lives against such breathtaking beauty. I have always envied their castle: but far more, I covet the fact that little of consequence seems to happen. Small social dramas become great farces of stature. How refreshing. No angst in sight, even on the picturesque horizon.
I strolled into Blandings half way through the cycle, when the dilemmas in question are Pongo Twistleton’s cash crises and the Duke of Dunstable’s dastardly plans to give The Empress a fitness regime.
England, my England.
So it is extremely disconcerting when a marsupial which should be on the opposite side of the globe bounds across our preconceptions.
The New Forest is one of our ancient hunting forests. Here nestles the Rufus Stone, where the hapless Norman William Rufus met his death sometime in early August, 1100. It was our very own grassy knoll: one will never quite know whether Sir Walter Tyrell really did aim at a stag and hit a king by mistake.
Privileged, leafy Brockenhurst, in the heart of the forest, is picturesque to the point of film set. It is a perfect spot for a select hostelry. And lo, there it stands, monopolising the lawn, and calling itself the Balmer Lawn Hotel.
It used to be called Palmer’s Water way back, because an idyllic little river trickles musically along one side of the expanse of lawn at the front of the hotel. Horses graze peacefully. Cricketers sometimes take a turn there. All is serene.
A tourist from Manchester was driving along the road outside the hotel in the Summer of 2007 when he saw a piece of data which did not compute. He tried to call it a hare, but hares are simply not that large, and certainly do not have very long tails stretching out behind them. It looked for all the world, he insisted, like a wallaby.
Locals were abuzz: as suspect crackpot wildlife collections went, there had been one at a lodge in the area for some years.
But here’s the thing: wallabies are not quite the strangers to our shores we might imagine.
Demob-happy wallabies have been escaping with style and panache for some time now, setting up hippie communes in all the right places.
Local word in the Peak District has it that five broke out of jail- or rather a zoo- in 1940 and spawned a whole colony: sightings have been reported as recently as 2009.
But when we turn to the Scottish contribution to wallaby husbandry, things begin to take a distinctly Blandingian turn.
Inchconnachan is an island in Loch Lomond. It is very beautiful, and its inhabitants privileged. Its Gaelic name, Innis Chonachain, means The Colquhoun’s Island. This is because the 1920’s wooden bungalow which occupies its narrows was inhabited by Lady Arran Colquhoun.
Lady Colquhoun liked wallabies so much she introduced them onto her island. They thrived, and they have multiplied. When the Loch freezes over the odd wanderer pops over to the mainland for a visit.
Wodehouse couldn’t have written it better.
Now, their future is in doubt because they have been accused of bullying the neighbours. Those rare woodland grouse, the capercaillies, live there too and the wallabies, it seems, wallabies disturb them.
For a while there, these marsupials looked as though they might become an integral part of our idiosyncratic British landscape.
And you know what they say: it ain’t over till it’s over.
Lyme Regis, Dorset, England. The seaside resort where the Lieutenant’s woman used to stand on the long picturesque bar which stretches out to sea. An idyll steeped in ancient marine history.
Yesterday, Lyme Regis resident Jan Cooper looked out into a garden and saw a wallaby careering round her garden. Lest someone accused her of tippling and telling, she filmed it. It is, unquestionably, a wallaby. It shot round her garden for one and a half hours, but before the RSPCA arrived to take care of it, the interloper had scarpered with all speed over a neighbour’s fence.
The truth is, my England’s changing and evolving endlessly. What was yesterday may not be tomorrow.
But tomorrow promises to be full of surprises.
Kate Shrewsday 
I wonder, is a wallaby is a wannabe kangaroo?
What with parakeets and wallabies and grey squirrels…. there is an amazing amount of wildlife in your neck of the woods, which shouldn’t be there, if nature had its way.
Did I ever tell you about the baboon in the Scots pine at the bottom of our garden? About 1973 or 4 or there abouts, not long after the Safari Park had opened….by the time the police had arrived with guns it had ambled off across tree tops to other gardens.
LOL that is priceless, Pseu! Did you ever get photos? That is a story to tell one’s great-grandchildren!
No photo. My bother, about 11 at the time, I guess, had come home for lunch and Ma didn’t believe him when he said, “there’s a monkey at the bottom of the garden” – until he made her look.
The safari park had several escapees at first, including huge cranes in a friend’s garden and reputedly, though this one is probably an urban myth, a sea lion in the middle of the main road at night. The baboons however were clever and it is said they devised a way of hanging off the bottom of cars. I know they certainly tried to pull off attachments from visitors cars, such as windscreen wipers and I really wouldn’t have wished to meet one face to face!
Priceless. That story should be written and entered into something. I howled!
So glad to know my husband’s ancestors have something to do with this uni-ecological, one-world, wildlife movement! Long live the Colquhouns! “Si je puis!” (Since I’m only a Colquhoun/Calhoun by marriage, I can laugh at that clan motto: “If I can!” Yes, of course, your magesty, I’ll help you out IF I can! If I’m not too busy with other things, If I’m awake, If I haven’t other better things to do, you can count on us – If I can!) That very snarky comment is said here only because I know hubs won’t be reading this. I know that “Si je puis” has a slightly different translation that is generally used for this motto, along the lines of “As long as i am able,” “As long as I have breath in my body,” etc. etc. but I like the laconic translation best. Particularly in times of questionable war, it suits me better!
Oh well – the good old USA has gotten itself in heaps of trouble by importing non-native plant and insect species to supposedly take care of other pesky problems, and found out that the transplant backfired!. I think of all the people who moved to the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico to help with their allergies, but just had to bring all their house plants and other flora with them, transplant it all, and then ended up with allergies just as bad in the desert as anywhere else. D’uh!
And weren’t the “bunnies” of Australia that have created such havoc brought over by English and Irish settlers who missed them. Since the natural predator wasn’t in Australia, they multiplied like, well, rabbits. . .or so the story goes. I’ve said enough. . .Lovely post, and lots of fun! Thanks! Now! That’s enough. . .I think. . .
Paula, I never made the link with the name! You must visit your island and commune with the capercaillies!
First fox, then forest fires, now wallabies. Would you like some of our deer?
LOL I’ve alway fancied racoons, Penny, or are they much further south?
I did a double-take there, Kate!
I love the way the cash crises of the English aristocrats seem to have absolutely no effect whatsoever on their lifestyles – charades and facades 🙂
Ain’t that the truth, BB! You remind me of Becky in Vanity Fair, who created a whole lavish lifestyle by relying on tradesmen whom she simply never paid…
What a lark to have a Wallaby bounding and bouncing around in one’s garden. Quel surprise!
Such a surprise it made the top national news programme on the BBC! Lovely breakfast viewing 😀
tippling, you say, ha! I’ve a new word to get ’em with tomorrow at the library (it’s the little things for we who love words)…a wallaby, well, at least she didn’t love dingos!
Here we often tipple, Angela: it is the word for worrying a bottle of something with kick in it, sherry or whisky: a little bit now and then all through the day. A very silly Wodehouse-type word.
Sometimes I quite like the idea of foreign animals surviving somewhere. then you hear about the locals who die because of it and I am saddened.
Then I think of the people who have spread out across the world, changing racial profiles of their new country and I realise it’s usually the aftermath of that . So if it’s ok for people to emigrate, maybe it’s also ok for animals?
Maybe this is the way odd species get saved from extinction?
Maybe, Sidey…we know so little about the complex balance of our ecosystem. Some visitors it can tolerate, some blow a hole in indigenous species: it’s just a case of how much they bother them. I have no idea precisely what the wallabies were doing to the capercaillies. But even if it were only holding loud parties I can see the plump little birds wanting the foreigners to go home…
I’m quite astonished, woke up with Rolf Harris’ Tie me kangaroo down, Sport as an earworm this morning!
Now that’s synchronicity, Cindy. Rolf’ll be going around and around in your head all day now. Good luck with that 😀
Hope you’re feeling better. Flu is horrid.
Astonishing! I love the idea of wallabies in England. Sweet revenge for all the pests the English (unknowingly) let loose in Australia (and other places).
Ah, the dubious glory of the British Empire, Earlybird 😀 Rigorous and enthusiastic the British were, but playing chess with species and the globe was not one of their greatest moves.
I’m so glad my husband is not a stockbroker 🙂
I love that the wallabies escaped and set up a commune 🙂
Who knows, one day we’ll be watching them in the park, like the ubiquitous (American) grey squirrel.
Yes, we will, Tilly, muttering under our breath about interlopers who come into our gardens and eat all our veg….no fence will be high enough…
Yes. Cricket all weekend, every weekend: it’s not my bag, baby…
How interesting… I never knew that. As an immigrant to Australia (from New Zealand), and as someone who lives in the countryside, wallabies and kangaroos are familiar sights to me now, but never fail to remind me that I’m in Australia, not in New Zealand.
Unfortunately, an immigrant to this area soon learns that roos can be hazardous as well as ornamental – when I’m driving on the highway at dawn or dusk I’m always on high alert for marsupials jumping at high speed into my path, and I’m a more wary driver than I once was. They can (and do) cause fatal accidents in these parts. It’s amazing how fast they can go – I had two wallabies in front of me on the back road a few days ago, weaving their way in front of the car so I couldn’t get past. It didn’t really matter. I was going 50km per hour.
Hi Stace! Never thought of the driving hazards, these are quite vivid accounts – 50km and hour is very fast indeed….I suppose we must be thankful ours have been on an island so far. Until you’ve lived with a species you are never quite sure what the pros and cons are going to be…
Thanks for coming along and taking a look. It was lovely to find someone who thinks as much about the language as you do 🙂