My Natural History (3 page)

3. Beadlet anemone

Actinia equina

I
t troubled me that I didn’t love the sea. Such loving was required behaviour. It was essential that I loved Cornwall with a deep and special passion, and that meant loving the sea. Cornwall was the land of our holidays: family all together, father not at the BBC, mother not writing or lecturing, school forgotten. It was the land of treats and everything could only ever be marvellous. To believe
anything
else would be an unthinkable crime; worse, a kind of blasphemy. But I swam poorly, and the Cornish seas, even in August, sucked the warmth and, it seemed, the life from my body. Most of my encounters with the sea involved brief immersion followed by agonies of teeth-chattering.

Nick was different. Nick, son of my parents’ close friends, had a light covering of adipose tissue, but despite
this, was athletic and courageous. He never felt the cold, and swam in the sea for endless hours, completely at home in its icy embrace. He revelled in every second: he was every parent’s ideal of how a boy should enjoy Cornwall. I envied the approval he won with his exploits: envied him, to an extent, the pleasures he found in the water. I used to tell him that he was a seal. He really did look like a seal, but in truth, he was a human supremely adapted for the aquatic life in a hard climate.

We went daily to Rinsey Beach, descending the
dizzying
cliff path with swimming things and picnic baskets, hours later making the long and wearisome stomp back up again, Nick pleasantly fatigued from his congress with the waves, me exhausted from hours of shivering. As you looked down, you could see the rock pools that punctuated the beach: ancient cracks and fissures flushed and refilled twice a day with the advancing and retreating tides. They were limpet-lined, a strange unexpected shade of pink below the surface, weed-hung, and decorated with sea anemones. They were strange, alien places, more unlike Streatham than anything it was possible to encounter. These pools were my favourite thing about Cornwall, but I was, of course, an outsider, a mere gazer-in. And not just with rock pools: most of nature was like that for me, either imagined, or just a little beyond my scope.

Now Nick, having wealthy parents, wanted for very little. He was also deeply generous and would lend you
anything. So one day I borrowed his snorkel. I don’t know what possessed me to do this. It just seemed a nice toy. In those days, very few people visited Rinsey, and most of those that did were known to us. Because of this, we were able to make our camp in the same place every day, in front of the same rock pool, one in which both my sisters learned to swim. So that morning, I entered it, not without that terrible gasp when the water rises above your crotch, but I endured this hardship, being cautiously in the mood for adventure. I placed the mask over my face. It was an old-fashioned, one-piece snorkel: a tube rising from the mask itself, so if you breathed through your nose, you could continue with your face submerged. I was nervous of it: the act of putting your face under water and then breathing does, after all, go against nature.

First I tried to place the mask in the water without
getting
my whole face wet. This was an instant and dramatic shock, making me gasp and pull my head up again. It wasn’t the breathing that shocked, but the seeing. The transformation was extraordinary. The vista revealed by the second-long glance was no longer a blurry, shifting, distorted mess of colour: it was a clearly-seen world of hard edges and living, breathing things. It invited me in with a seduction so intense that gasping was inevitable. It was almost as if the water had turned warm.

It took a few tries before I was able to do the actual breathing, and a few more before I was able to swim and
breathe at the same time. But swim I did: at once
transforming
myself from an inadequate water-shy human to a great hovering bird, gliding above a vast landscape,
looking
down benignly on crabs and sudden, scuttling
blennies
. At once the remote became near: the foreign became familiar: the separate became unity. Nature, wild things, me: we were all the same thing. That day I lifted my head from the pool only to eat and to shiver. I had found my love.

Cornwall was wild; Streatham, for the most part, was tame. Cornwall was where we went in search of wildness. True, finding actual wildlife was not at the top of
everybody
’s agenda: or not knowingly. That was as true for me as it was for everybody else. But certainly, we went there in order to be surrounded by nature. We sought reasons to believe in the total and utter specialness of Cornwall and of Rinsey, and everything that confirmed this was a joy, from the casual mastery of the seagulls to the emerald lights of the glow-worms along the cliff path.

My mother had a special love for the choughs that thronged the cliffs, tumbling in the wind and calling “Jack! Jack!” to each other. It will be clear here, at least to the birdwatchers among my readers, that my mother’s sense of what was appropriate was more sharply honed than her powers of observation. At the time, choughs were extinct in Cornwall, surviving only on the county coat of arms. The bird had long been part of Cornish life, and was still
part of Cornish folklore, but it was no longer there in
flying
and nesting reality. It was jackdaws that stall-turned and barrel-rolled in the updraughts along the cliffs.

My mother loved being in Cornwall more than
anywhere
else, with the family together and harmonious, and partaking of ritual meals together on a nightly basis, and with friends constantly coming round for food and drink and laughter. Cornwall’s specialness mattered to her even more than it did to the rest of us: she, I think, set the tone for specialness. But her choughs were the choughs of imagination.

With the dead, there is an eternal regret that you can’t tell them things any more, or show them things. I can’t show my mother my children and her grandchildren; I can’t show her this book; I can’t show her choughs. For it is a matter of sweet sadness that the choughs came back to Cornwall a dozen years after she died. It is a strange and deeply cheering tale. A number of farmers had been
persuaded
, with financial inducements, to manage cliff-top land in a manner sympathetic to choughs, for choughs
traditionally
feed on rough pastures near the sea in frost-free places. Cornwall lost many of its rough pastures when farmers took to tractors and no longer needed horses for farm work. Once these pastures were re-established, the plan was to release captive-bred birds and see what
happened
. But before this could take place, the choughs came back by themselves. As I write, there are half a dozen pairs
and family groups, and one of these is regularly seen about Rinsey. I remember the extraordinary pleasure I had in seeing them for the first time: deeply black birds with
firered
beaks and legs, flying together in family groups in the big cliff-top winds, looking like a handful of old dusters. And they don’t say “Jack!”. Instead they give out a long drawled “chooooow!”. It was the voice, one I had heard a few times elsewhere, that drew me to them first: and in disbelief. I found them with my binoculars and waited till the sun caught their legs and their redness to give me full certainty. They were choughs all right, but I couldn’t tell my mother about them, and I regret very much the
pleasure
it would have given her: pleasure in the wildness, in the specialness, and perhaps above all, in the appropriateness. The Cornish chough was back in Cornwall.

But she did have one glorious and unforgettable
birdwatching
experience in Cornwall: and this from someone who was never a birdwatcher, had poor eyesight and was never much at good at observation of any kind. She was sitting by the window in the cottage in Cornwall, reading, or more probably, doing the
Times
crossword, for it was a disappointing day when she failed to complete it. She looked up, no doubt thinking of an anagram or a
quotation
, and saw a bird. And it took her breath away. At once, she was in a world of wonder and delight and disbelief. It was as if she had dived into my rock pool.

For the bird was a hoopoe. A hoopoe! How did she know this? I wonder. True, a hoopoe is remarkable and extraordinary and unmistakable: she must have come across the bird somehow in the course of her eternal task of reading. A hoopoe is the most exotic of occasional dropper-inners, salmon-pink, black-and-white wings, a huge and ridiculous crest, and a flight like a demented
butterfly
. It is the most eye-catching of birds, even in the places where it is common, and my mother’s eye was well and truly caught. She rang me to tell me about it that evening, breathless in the excitement of the telling, saying, without a shred of irony: “It really was one of the most wonderful moments of my life.”

All her life she had been caught up with the telling of tales: often recounting the lives of great humans for the children’s television programme,
Blue Peter
. She liked
cities
. She had deep sentimental feelings about Rome. She loved to sit in that
campo
or this in Venice and take a glass of something cool and cheering as Venice performed for her benefit. But all her life, she had this nagging, scarcely understood nostalgia for wild things. After she had her first terrible stroke, she was filled with a thousand regrets, and one of the greatest of those was that she would never be able to go to Africa. She understood, too late in life, that this was something she had always longed to do. And I remembered Alice and the beautiful garden, the garden she can’t get into because the key is on the table and she is
too small to reach it. Alas, when she grows tall enough to reach the key, she is too big to get through the door and can only peer along the short passage to the place of
perfection
that lies beyond.

The entire wild world was like that for me, even in Cornwall: there, but just beyond my reach, just beyond my scope, just beyond my understanding. I remember my almost hoopoe-esque delight when a couple of gannets came close enough on shore to be seen with the naked eye, plunging crazily into the water with their spear-beaks. I remember a pair of common terns, diving as dizzily but somehow more daintily. I thought these were miraculous appearances: I know now that they are available for
anyone
with the desire to see, with the right understanding, with the knowledge of how to look. From Rinsey cliffs you can see terns passing by as a regular thing, and if you look out to sea, you often see distant gannets cruising the airways and, every now and then, swivelling on a wing-tip-tip to make a crazy-lethal plunge at the waters below.

Wildlife is like that for the unawakened. Sometimes it comes in a blinding hoopoe flash: but more often, you feel most dreadfully excluded. You have to find a way. You need to find a new way of seeing. It all adds up,
eventually
, to a new way of being. That is what I learned when I borrowed Nick’s snorkel: but it took me years to learn that this lesson had a meaning far beyond rock pools. Meanwhile, I looked at sea anemones and wished that
Streatham was wilder, not knowing that the main fault was not with Streatham but with my seeing, my being.

4. Great northern diver

Gavia immer

I
went to my big school, and was rewarded for my
attainment
in getting there. I was liked. I was popular. I was, in a narrow kind of way, a success. But Lord, I was bored. I was so bored, I can’t look back on those years – five of them – without a shudder. I got through them easily enough though. That’s because I didn’t realise I was bored. I just assumed that this was what life had to offer: that this was what it was supposed to be like.

I had friends, I always had friends. I had some really great friends. Stuart Barnett was as nice a fellow as anyone could hope to meet. We made a pair: we also made a trio with Ian Hart, whose attitude of fine contempt for
everything
to do with the idea of education for its own sake was shocking and exhilarating. But God, those days were dull.
It wasn’t the fault of the days and it wasn’t the fault of the friends. It was my own most grievous fault: and it came about because of my problems with such things as seeing and being.

I mustn’t overdo the Stephen Dedalus stuff, or make too much of the different-from-other-boys line. There was no martyrdom, no persecution, no ill-will; for that matter, no thwarted artistry, no sense of destiny, still less of superiority. They were just years without passion: years without much meaning: years in limbo. Perhaps that is what this awkward period of life is supposed to be like: neither child nor man, not even a teenager, in any exacting sense of the term. I was just some one who did homework – we called it prep – and watched telly and made jokes about the teachers. A time of nothing: a time in life’s
waiting
room.

My limited popularity initially went to my head. I was at Emanuel School; you can see it as you pass southwards from Clapham Junction, heading for either Wimbledon or Streatham: the line splits and passes either side of the school. There was a school review called
Between the Lines
. At the time, it was a lapsed public school, its
clientele
unrestrainedly middle class. I was no longer a misfit. The pupils of Emanuel were a great deal more like me than the pupils of Sunnyhill: but all the same, I wanted to be a great deal more like them than I was. I wanted to be a conformist, I wanted to be a fitter-inner. I wanted to have
a place: and it seemed to me that the way to do this was by means of sport. There were disadvantages to this plan: the greatest of which was the fact that there was no sport that I was any good at. I was still undersized, physically
insignificant
; I did most of my growing later, in a great hurry, after every one else had stopped.

The school played rugby. I was determined to make my lack of size an advantage: I would be the most elusive
runner
the school had ever seen, or at least, the best in my class, or form, as we called it. But I lacked pace, I lacked physical resilience, I lacked the taste for manly encounters in the mud. I didn’t care for tackling or being tackled, though in this I was hardly unique. After a couple of weeks’ trial, I was a failure and sent off to play in the useless-buggers games while the half-decent players were trained up to represent the school. The games my lot played were awful. They were painful for the participants and they must have been agony for any of the teachers (masters, we called them) who actually cared about sport. No one cared who won. No one wanted to be out there in the cold and the mud. We only did it because there was no escape. No one tackled. The worst that might happen to a ball-carrier was to be seized in a half-hearted embrace. No one went to ground if it was at all avoidable: one of the objects of the game was to get as little mud on you as
possible
, and so avoid the post-match shower. Scrums were a torment: no one wanted to be in a hugger-buggering mass
of 15 others, in serious danger of getting dirty. I was once, absurdly, sent to play hooker as punishment by our
understandably
frustrated captain. He thought I wasn’t trying, and reader, he was right. I gleefully punted the ball into the opposition scrum every time it came to me.

We didn’t have many good runners, but we were all great passers. There was always a danger of getting
tackled
, or at least embraced, if you happened to be carrying the ball, for the ball was like the black spot, the runes that were cast in the MR James story: a portent of doom unless you could somehow divert the furies onto someone else. It follows that one of the signature moves of these games was the pass into touch: if by some mischance you had the ball, and were forced to run with it, and then saw a
decent-sized
opponent ahead, you passed the ball, obviously. If there was no colleague in sight – and there was always a curious melting-away in the face of anyone who might be considering a proper tackle – you passed the ball over the white line and so avoided the dreaded embrace. We neither got fit nor enjoyed ourselves, nor fulfilled any useful
function
. If we learned team ethics it was in the shared desire to avoid anything that sport of this kind could offer. Those games have stayed in mind as the ultimate expression of the futility of those years: a game played for no reason, in which no victory was savoured and no defeat painful, in which none of the players desired anything except its conclusion.

On days when it was too wet to play rugby – mustn’t spoil the grass – we were told to run around the field half a dozen times. Unexpectedly, I turned out to be rather good at that. Most people, even the rugby keenies, jogged three or four laps and then sloped off, because no one counted the laps; the whole process was an initiative test for cheats. The fatties merely walked a couple of laps, an admission of failure. But I was not only honest, after a fashion, I also liked running. I was fast and I never got tired. I used to enjoy running off the serious rugby
players
, and they didn’t like that. But running didn’t count: running couldn’t be serious, if someone like me was good at it. Still, it was running that brought me my friendship with Stuart.

Stuart loved sport of all kinds and was naturally
talented
at everything he took up. He was school scrum-half; he was the wicket-keeper-batsman; in the brief athletics season, he was unbeatable. But he was never at all swanky about it. He just saw it as the natural turn of events. And he could run. He could run almost as well as me. One wet Thursday afternoon, I noticed him behind me, so
naturally
I resolved to run him off. I could run everyone off. But for once, I failed. Every time I looked back, there he was behind me: a lot of freckles, a pale ginger flop of hair and a challenging, but somehow unthreatening grin. He was enjoying the tussle: enjoying my discomfiture,
enjoying
the fact that at last, he had found someone to race.

I think I won that one, but no matter. We became friends, and sport was at the centre of it. True, I hated sport, but Stuart was so nice that this didn’t matter. We formed a sort of sporting alliance, along with Ian, and every break, morning and lunchtime, we played football against Chris Ellis, Stuart Lloyd and Mick Moutrie. We played with a plastic ball with holes in, the only permitted kind, since balls like that didn’t break windows. I was
useless
and I hated every minute of it. But it was good to do something I hated with people I liked. I was accepted.

We went to lessons, did our prep and we went up through the school. As we did so, our style changed by degrees. Our cropped or unruly hair evolved into
carefully
combed styles. Shoes that were used to dam streams were swapped for shoes of finicky elegance, though we still played football in them, my illegal elastic-sided shoes occasionally soaring skywards from my flailing feet. Collars were no longer frayed and twisted: we now wore exotic “tab” collars and button-downs. We put cuff-links in our shirts and wore our ties in a half-Windsor knot. Those that could grew side-whiskers while those of us that couldn’t died of shame.

But there was still nothing I was interested in. Nothing I was passionate about. My love of the wild had been
subsumed
by my popularity, such as it was. Oh, I still read the books and watched the programmes, but the wild world was no longer the centre of my life. It seemed to me then
that my passion for wildlife had, after all, been nothing more than consolation for unhappiness: something to grow out of. And swap for what? I had yet to learn that if the non-human world is a consolation in times of
unhappiness
, it is a lot of other things as well. Back then, though, in Upper Four Arts, there was no one to show me that the wild world offers joys, an endless store of questions, a wonder and a beauty that can improve the lot of the
happiest
person on earth. There was no one to share my
passion
for the wild. There was no Bird-Spotters Club, no Natural History Society, no Bug-Hunters. Instead, there was only conformism, the playing field, the quad and the ball that didn’t break windows. It didn’t seem enough, but I thought that was all there was.

So I joined the Boat Club. I was in search of prestige, in search of meaning. I wanted to make my size a serious sporting asset. I wanted to be upsides with Stuart in the sporting arena. So I became a cox. This was a terrible idea: the worst. The Boat Club saw itself as the natural home of the school’s sporting elite. For some time before I joined, I scanned its notice board: not that it meant anything to me, but I loved the sense of self-belief that emanated from it, that sense of corporate identity. I longed to be a part of it. Eventually, I was. And I hated it.

I was the right size, true, but I had neither the gift of watermanship nor the taste for command. I also felt the cold bitterly. When we stopped for a session of talk from
the bicycling coach who followed our haphazard progress from the towpath, the boat drifted alarmingly. My
instructions
for its righting were always panicky and ineffective. I never knew the wise course to steer. On more than one occasion I ran aground. I hit at least a couple of bridges, which is easier to do than you might think, though you have to put your mind to it. I once rammed another eight; another time I sent my boat and its hapless crew careering on a flooding tide into a moored motor-boat. In short, the Boat Club was a torment to me, and I was a torment to the Boat Club. Eventually, and rightly, they asked me to stop.

My enduring memory is the stink of the river. The Boat Club required my presence on Wednesday afternoons and Saturday mornings: I would arrive at Barnes Bridge Station and all but taste the vile effluence of the water. The stink of the Thames of the 1960s was the stink of a dying river: sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song. The smell was the smell of my failure: my failure to master the arts of coxswainship, my failure at sport, my failure to find anything in life that I cared about. And so I sat on the little wooden shelf at the back of the needle-shaped boat with eight larger boys in a line before me, them grasping the handles of their oars, me holding the wooden toggles attached to the rudder, and off we went, me steering another hellship to God knew where. Lessons and
playground
football and the riverine stink: and thank God, friendship. I thought then that this was life: all it had to
offer: a succession of one boring thing after another; a process in which you went through the motions, not really caring about what you were doing, in which neither
victory
nor defeat had any savour. Life had nothing to stir my blood.

I was standing at the boathouse, looking out at the river, when I saw it. A bird. That itself was enough to make it rare in those days. The river held very few birds, for it contained nothing to eat: the fish had been stunk out. But here was a big, big bird, and it was sitting low on the water, a cigar-shaped body, a bit of a neck (but not like a swan or a goose) and a long, sharp beak. I looked on it with astonishment: it could only be a diver. It was
seriously
big: that meant it had to be a great northern diver, the very first bird in
The Observer’s Book of Birds
. I gazed at it in disbelief: there was me, and there was a genuinely rare bird: almost an Accidental.

As a point of information, I should say here that it wasn’t a great northern diver. I know that now. It was a cormorant, seen from an unfamiliar angle and in an
unfamiliar
place. But that’s not the point. The point is that I saw this thing of wonder: and I didn’t know what the hell to do about it. I had no one to tell. No one would be
interested
, no one would care. It was outside the concerns of Emanuel School. Stuart would make a joke, a friendly but mocking one; Ian would make another, sharper, more destructive. So I never mentioned it to any one. I didn’t
know whether to be happy, whether to go home and look it up, whether to forget about it. Well, I didn’t forget about it. The bird, the memory stayed with me. I knew it wasn’t a joke, but I didn’t know what it was, what it meant, how I was supposed to react. It wasn’t a joking matter; but then it wasn’t anything else, either.