Chloe Dalton: People said I was a workaholic. Raising a hare changed my life

Telegraph

7 days ago

'She belonged to the wild, and my job, to the extent that I had one in those early weeks, was to try to keep her alive so that she could return to the wild,' says Chloe Dalton, the author of Raising Hare. The 'she', of course, is the long-eared title character of this remarkable real-life tale, which has been short-listed for the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction.
Dalton, who's sitting smiling opposite me, sipping herbal tea, is the former government Spad whose lockdown debut has become a surprise bestseller, racing past 50,000 copies in hardback in just a couple of months. She's relaxed and happy, albeit already a little hoarse from talking about the book, just as she embarks on a month-long tour to promote it.
Raising Hare is a marvel. It takes only a couple of pages before one becomes completely rapt in this story of a chance encounter with a newborn hare as Dalton watches it grow up alongside her over the course of almost three years. Closely observed images of the creature take up long-term residence in the mind's eye – 'The sticky, squishy sound of a hare eating a raspberry', for instance. At the start, Dalton knows no more than the rest of us about hares ('one of the things I discovered about myself is that I love being a novice, a beginner') but as she explores their history, we witness their struggle to survive in a country where the brown hare population has declined by 80 per cent in a century, harried by industrial farming, shooting and illegal hare coursing.
Dalton, who is 45, saw with admiration 'what it takes to exist in a world that's largely concreted over, if you're a wild animal that needs an enormous range, that has no burrow to hide in, that only has its speed, that lives in ever smaller, shrinking pockets of land and has to raise its young above ground, when every single predator that we have eats hares.'
She's aware that without the several lockdowns and her split-second decision to pick up the baby hare, the events of the story would never have happened. She's struck by how many things in life are like that, 'that sometimes the most significant events in our life mean so much because they come so close to not happening. We're not looking for them. I certainly wasn't looking to change anything about my life.'
Dalton had been blown home by the Covid pandemic from her job as a London-based foreign policy adviser to spend the lockdown in a converted barn close to her parents in the North East. On a winter walk, she spotted a tiny leveret, 'no longer than the width of my palm', alone on a track. (She later worked out that, weighing under 100g , or 'less than an apple', the animal can only have been a day or two old.)
At first, conscious that human interference might do more harm than good, she left the leveret where it was. But on finding it still there four hours later, with buzzards wheeling overhead, and the possibility of cars on the track, she hesitated, then acted on instinct and brought it home to keep it safe until nightfall.
A call to a former gamekeeper soon convinced her that its mother would not take it back after her intervention, and so Dalton began to try to work out how to care for the leveret. Thus began the story of Dalton's co-existence with the hare, one in which she would first have to learn how to feed it, initially on powdered kitten milk formula, later – with a little help from verses by the 18th-century poet William Cowper, who kept hares – on porridge oats.
That first night, she fed it from a washed and sterilised cosmetics bottle with a pipette, a few drops at a time, and created an improvised hide for it in her office from a shoebox filled with grass. Overnight, it made a nest among the stalks. She moved it to a spare bedroom; she also learned that hares 'don't do well in human hands', reading how leverets in captivity often die from stress caused by noise and excessive handling. But the hare began to feed properly and after a week had started to run around after feeding. Placed in its box, it would stay still for hours, mirroring baby leverets' behaviour in the wild.
A website recommended moving it to an enclosed run to prepare it for return to the wild after weaning at eight weeks, but the leveret showed physical signs of distress and Dalton soon abandoned the idea. It chose instead to spend time in her office and living room, then took to sleeping under her bed during the day.
Every day at four it would rise and wander out into the garden and she would bring it in to feed at dusk. She realised that, contrary to most accounts, it was not solitary by nature and would spend its time close to her as she worked, and find its way under her bed at night, too.
'I think we all have in us this desire, whether we're male or female, to nurture, and that takes many forms, and to protect something that's young and helpless,' she says. 'The rather beautiful twist in the story, from my point of view, was the realisation that as a human I felt at the beginning that I was quite central to this animal's existence. But I realised quite rapidly that actually, I really wasn't, I was in her space. She tolerated me. She felt safe around me.'
Dalton discovered that the animal's 'calmness and tranquil demeanour' soothed her. For the previous 15 years, her life had been frenetically busy. For the first decade of it, she had worked in politics, including as an adviser to William Hague when he was Foreign Secretary between 2010 and 2014. 'I was a Spad,' she acknowledges. 'But before I was a Spad, I was a humble researcher in Parliament.
'When I was in the Foreign Office, phone calls would happen at all hours and I did the drafting [of speeches] for the Foreign Secretary. So if something happened in the middle of the night that affected Britain, and Parliament needed to be updated on a Sunday, I would go to work and I would write it.
'I would always hear people's warnings about burnout,' she adds. 'There's a funny photo of me somewhere where I'm literally juggling multiple telephones. People might have looked at me and said that I was a workaholic. I just was really passionate – I still am – about my work.'
Dalton stayed working with Hague – who will interview her at the Hay Festival this week – after David Cameron's 2014 reshuffle ('loyalty is a very important part of my make-up'), but when he stood down at the 2015 election, she chose to continue as an independent foreign policy expert, working on campaigns with among others, Angelina Jolie, with whom she formed a partnership in 2015 to fight for women's rights and international justice. The author thanks Jolie in the book for 'giving me the courage – and inspiration – to experiment with my writing'.
Dalton lived with a suitcase always packed and ready to go, she says. 'I was notorious for not wanting to commit to attending a family wedding because I might have to be in Iraq… I had no idea how much it would enrich my life to stop.'
It has made her a warmer person, she tells me. She's the third of four siblings – two brothers and an elder sister. Her father's career as a British diplomat meant that Dalton grew up largely in the Middle East, as the family moved around with his overseas postings to places such as Oman and Jerusalem; her mother gave up her own career to 'devote herself to us,' Dalton says – her parents remain indispensable 'intellectual and emotional allies' to one another, she adds.
Dalton still treasures 'those early experiences of seeing desert or very rugged mountains or the sea – places that are vastly different from the landscape here'. She went to 'lots of different schools' in the UK and overseas, before studying at Oxford University, and embarking on her career in politics.
Hares need protection, Dalton insists, and 'I know a thing or two about putting a little bit of pressure on government.' She's lodged a petition to protect hares and their young from shooting during the breeding season – at present, they're the only game species that can be shot all year round. It had almost 17,000 signatures when I checked (100,000 is enough for it to be considered for debate in parliament). She's now working on an open letter as a next step. I note that wildlife presenter Chris Packham recently called on people to sign the petition on social media. She's delighted. Does she think the hostility that Packham sometimes attracts is personal or reflecting of a broader antagonism towards environmentalism in this country? 'I don't feel qualified to answer that,' she responds. (She also knows a thing or two of the politician's art of avoiding hot potatoes.)
Her sister has a small farm nearby, though, and she has no hesitation in saying, 'I'm certainly worried and with the farming community in terms of the outcry that there's been about the impact of changes to inheritance tax and how it's going to affect small farmers... I share the concern about how careful we have to be about things that change the long term nature of the landscape. Once a family farm is gone, it's gone.'
When the hare did make its first foray from her garden into the wild at six months old, and almost fully grown, leaping up one day onto the dry stone wall before bounding into the fields beyond, Dalton cried. 'It took me a while to admit that,' she says. (The hare, of course, would return, though Dalton didn't know it.) The book has an emotional restraint that only adds to its spell, yet there are moments when it communicates emotion very directly. In one episode involving the death of one of the hare's own leverets, the actress Louise Brealey who narrates the audiobook of Raising Hare, clearly struggles to hold her voice steady as she reads.
'I was writing things as they happened,' Dalton says, 'including the death of the leveret. I wrote it that afternoon, that passage, and I was full of emotion about it. No one ever said to me in my life in politics, I should be unemotional. But when you're trying to make your way in a world of politics, as in many walks of life, as a young woman, you want to make sure you're putting a professional face on and keep your emotions in check. Particularly dealing with issues as I was, related to war and peace and national security, I developed a little bit of a habit of shielding my emotions, and it was rather wonderful during the process of writing this book to be able to recognise that there's something about the relationship between humans and animals which is very special for humans, it brings out certain emotions.'
She is at pains throughout the book to stress how determinedly she was not trying to domesticate the hare or anthropomorphise it. 'There's been this cultural shift that we treat pets as children, or as members of the family,' she notes. 'I never thought of the hare that way.'
It has changed the way she approaches life. She continues to work as a speechwriter and consultant on international issues, particularly focusing on women affected by conflict, while splitting her time between London and her home in the barn. 'I wanted to be more dependable, for less of my life to be tied to things that were completely beyond my control, in terms of world events and I've rediscovered our country, which is beautiful, and have thought differently about the sort of dignity and value and meaning of lives spent in one place, rooted to a particular community or a particular home.'
And what of the hare, which continued to treat the barn as its home, even giving birth there, I ask tentatively. 'I think she's gone,' Dalton says, quietly. 'It wouldn't surprise me if one day she didn't just reappear the way she always did, but I think she's run her last race, because she's been gone a while. You know, there's still a possibility that she's raising leverets, or that she's been sort of temporarily displaced by her offspring, because my garden is full of hares, including the latest set of leverets that have been born, which are either the third or fourth generation. But I'm pretty sure that if she were alive, she would be at my door, and she's not.' The hare vanished just before New Year and has not returned since.
She accepts that this moment was always going to be part of her experience of 'feeling a strong bond to an animal that you knew could end at any point, could be taken by a predator at any point. But I feel rather fortunate that I haven't had to see her dead in the grass or something, which would be very, very painful and poignant.'
The success of the book has brought consolation. 'I've had this incredible experience of going to bookshops up and down the country and people telling me all their stories of experiences with animals. A woman on the train told me about raising a piglet that had fallen off the back of a lorry, people tell you about hares from their childhood, or how they tried to raise a leveret or how they feel about the squirrels in the landscape.'
And she has begun work on a second book, Pet, which leaps off from what she learnt about human-animal relationships from the hare, and 'how meaningful those kinds of ties are to people at all stages of their life. As a child, I loved animals, of course. But to see the sheer range and variety of those kinds of relationships... I have this feeling writing Pet that the hare is gone, but has left me these tracks and traces, and I want to follow them.'