Sophie Gee

And suddenly, again, we see this boy, this 14-year-old who has nothing going for him.

bend down and observe a blade of grass and a drop of dew with the same gravity and attentiveness and actually far more lyrical persuasion than most of Britain's great naturalists and nature writers have done over multiple centuries.

It also sort of reminds us Billy's attunement to the natural world, the way that it becomes his kind of companion or his source of escape and solace and

you know, sort of salvation from his otherwise pretty unredeemed life.

It really puts him in the tradition of the romantic poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge and their whole circle.

But whereas those poets were not

working class people themselves.

They were not members of the rural poor that they so like to describe.

Barry Hines makes sure that we know that Billy and Hines himself really are members of this class and that their sense of nature as a source of salvation, as a source of solace, it's not a literary trope.

It's not a way of kind of making connections between the gentry and the working classes.

It literally is the possibility of making it through your life with some kind of a sense of meaning, some kind of a sense of hopefulness.

And I think those small things.

capacities to attend to nature, even beyond the big story of Kes the bird, but the micro stories in this book of Billy's joy and capacity to really closely observe nature.

I think that's how we know that Billy is someone where there is a sort of shred of hope and optimism and possibility in his life, despite so much being stacked against him.

Yeah, I like that actually.

Totally.

And actually, just as PS to my outlandish claim that romantic poets were never working class.

I mean, some of them were, some of them weren't.

The one that we've missed is William, the other one that we've missed is William Blake.

And it's William Blake, of course, who coins the phrase dark satanic mills to describe this newly industrialised landscape of Britain that he's writing in, in the early 19th century.