The Little Grey Men was published during the misery of the second world war, with destruction all around and a sense – familiar to us today – of a world in terminal decline. The charge it carried felt electric, and even opening the cover felt risky I braced myself in case its magic had faded in the 40 years since it had been read to me at bedtime. Dara McAnulty, the author of Diary of a Young Naturalist, described it as “an amulet” that “can be carried like a talisman, out into the world where it is very much needed”.A couple of years ago I found myself gazing at the cover of a book I’d loved as a child: the 1942 Carnegie medal-winning The Little Grey Men, by the naturalist, illustrator and sportsman Denys Watkins-Pitchford, who wrote under the name BB. Unlike The Lost Words, which started a trend for the oversized book format, The Lost Spells is pocket-sized. And respect, for the wisdom of trees, the shape of a bird, the wild of the fox.” If there is a message there, it is simply wonder and awe at the beautiful complexity of the non-human. The group have announced they will turn The Lost Spells into another album and they hope to tour the new music next year.Īsked whether there was an environmental message in The Lost Spells, Morris said: “It’s a celebration of the nearby wild. The Lost Words led to the formation of a folk and world music “supergroup” that included the musicians Karine Polwart, Julie Fowlis, Seckou Keita and Kris Drever, who wrote and performed live a critically acclaimed Spell Songs album that reached No 2 in the iTunes chart. He added: “The amazing thing about the success of The Lost Words was it was nothing to do with the publishers’ promotion, it was entirely to do with the public picking it up and running with it.” Everything about it is absolutely beautiful and we will be getting behind it in a big way,” he said.
“The spells are even better and I love the fact that it says explicitly ‘this is a book of spells to be spoken aloud’.
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