The March meeting heard a fascinating account of the life and writings of Richard Jefferies, a Victorian author and country-lover who spent the last years of his short life in Goring and is buried in Broadwater Cemetery. Chris Hare told the story of his upbringing on a small farm in Wiltshire, his work as a journalist in London and his move to Sussex in 1883 for the sake of his health., first to Crowborough, then to Hove, and finally to Goring. His house is still there, in Jefferies Lane, off Sea Lane, with the blue plaque set up in 1939.
Jefferies wrote many articles and a few novels about the countryside, but he was not a scientific naturalist. His writing is more an evocation of country life as it was lived by the shepherds, farm labourers and woodsmen, their dignity and simplicity. He refused to patronise or romanticise them but showed how they experienced the natural world in a direct and transcendental way that townsmen and city dwellers could only feel when they were in intimate contact with the fields, woods and streams and opened their minds to the beauty around them.
He loved the South Downs, as an almost primeval landscape still haunted by the ancient peoples that lived and worked there .He hated Brighton for its vulgarity, and Hove even more so for its mean streets and grandiose town hall. Jefferies died in 1887, at home in his cottage, of the tuberculosis that had plagued him for many years. He was just 38. In 1899 the naturalist and writer WH Hudson stayed in the house where Jefferies died, and here he started writing his book Nature in Downland, which he believed Jefferies would have written had he lived longer.
The well-attended meeting had a review of local wildlife from Graham Tuppen, including sightings of Peregrine Falcons, the Kingfisher on the Rife, early Bluebells and anemones in Patching Woods, and butterflies appearing everywhere. Stephen Abbott gave an update on local planning decisions appeals and applications – the most alarming of which was for a large housing estate on the fields opposite Sainsbury’s in Rustington.