Adventure Lit Their Star

Not many novels have a bird – or in the case of Adventure Lit Their Star, a pair of birds – as their hero. Little ringed plovers are small, slender waders with a black face-mask and conspicuous yellow eye-ring. They colonised Britain either side of the second world war, but didn’t nest on some remote mountain or offshore island, or under the protection of a nature reserve. Instead, they chose what nature writer Kenneth Allsop memorably dubbed “the messy limbo that is neither town nor country.”

Allsop, a WW2 veteran, wrote Adventure Lit Their Star when he was a cub reporter in the late 1940s. The story revolves around a young RAF pilot recovering from TB. He joins forces with two young lads to foil the attentions of a dastardly egg-collector, who is intent on stealing the eggs of these very rare birds.

The opening chapter is a tour de force of nature writing, rarely matched before or since. Allsop traces the night-time flight made by hordes of migrating birds as they cross the Channel, on the last leg of their epic journey back to Britain from Africa. In a brilliant and original twist, he imagines them as squadrons of aeroplanes returning home from a nocturnal sortie.