Turtle Diary (4 page)

Weekends are dicey. Saturdays aren’t too bad, there’s the shop to go to or errands to do and lots of people on the street, football crowds in the afternoon. Sundays are dangerous, the quiet waits in ambush. Close the museums and there’s no telling what might happen.

Saturday afternoon I did not go to the Zoo, I went to the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich to look at Port Liberty.

There is a connection between my turtle thoughts and my Polperro thoughts but I’m not sure I can find it. Polperro is mentioned in the guide-books as one of the prettiest fishing villages on the Cornish coast. I’d never seen it until last spring when I was visiting friends in Devon. We drove along many narrow roads winding between hedgerows, crossed the Tamar Bridge into Cornwall, passed through Looe and arrived at a car-park. Near it was a whitewashed inn on which was mounted a mill wheel smartly painted black and slowly revolving. I don’t remember seeing any stream to turn the wheel, I have the impression that a little gush of water had been piped in for that purpose.

One of the principal industries in Polperro is parking cars. We parked, then joined many people walking slowly through the narrow streets eating ice-cream, leading, pushing and carrying infants and scowling at such cars as had not parked. There were many postcards, many sea-urchins, many pottery things and shiny coppery things for sale, many Cream Teas. There was a model village, the entrance to which was through an orange-lit souvenir shop with music. We passed through the souvenirs, the orange light and the music as under a waterfall, paid 10p and came out into what must have been the garden once and was now the model village.

There was organ music, very reduced and scant-sounding, playing ‘Abide with Me’. I guessed it was coming from the model church and I was right. The model village was Polperro itself, as could be observed by looking over a low wall towards
the real street. There one saw a full-size sign that said GARNER and next to it the Claremont Hotel, then looking down saw the miniature GARNER and the Claremont Hotel, lumpish and simplified in the model.

The model houses and shops, thick and awry, had an air of stolid outrage. It was as if the anima of each place, private and indwelling, had been nagged into standing naked in the little streets before the deformed buildings. As if someone had said, ‘We need the money, you must help.’ The very boats in the model harbour, oafish and out of scale in the still water, cursed almost aloud, denied any connection whatever with real boats, fishing and the sea, tried by dissociating themselves to make amends to the poor household gods of the port.

A large orange tiger cat settled comfortably on one of the model roofs and a black-and-white cat picked its way through the streets as if looking out for model sinners on a model Day of Judgement. There were pence and halfpence on the bottom of the model harbour. People do that everywhere in fountains I know. Is it possible that they made wishes here when they threw in their coins?

We emerged, went on past Cream Teas and sea-urchins to the full-size harbour, a small one sheltered by a breakwater. The fishing boats were few, there was one called
Ocean Gift.
A young woman with a Polaroid camera repeatedly photographed her bald baby who had the face of a mature publican, showing him the picture each time. Gulls with cruel yellow eyes paced the quay. A jackdaw perched on the sea wall, neat, detached, seeming full of critical comment but saying nothing. There was a sign at the harbour which I copied:

POLPERRO HARBOUR
Polperro is the best example
of the
small Cornish fishing ports
and the Harbour Trustees
are anxious to retain
its character without resorting
to commercialization
The cost of maintenance
far exceeds the income
WILL YOU PLEASE HELP?

There was a box with a slot. A few feet away were a souvenir stand and a shop full of pottery things and coppery things and sea-urchin lamps with light bulbs in them shining through the sea-urchins. I put no money in the box. Polperro seemed to me like a street-walker asking for money to maintain her virginity.

The tide hadn’t come all the way in and there was a patch of dry stony beach on the seaward side of the wall. I went down the steps and walked there. The beach offered little more than broken glass and contraceptives. At least there was some vitality left here, I thought. I contented myself with two stones and three lumps of glass and a bit of china worn smooth. As we left the harbour I saw a boat lying on the mud. It was full of loose planks and had a hole in its side. Someone had lettered SHIT on it with a paintbrush.

Would it be just as well for Polperro to break up its boats and pave its harbour for a car-park? But of course without the harbour and the token boats no one would come to park there. If the turtles were set free, where is there for them to go really? To what can they navigate? They swim hundreds of miles to the beaches of their breeding grounds. The hundred eggs the female lays each time are just barely enough to ensure the race against wild dogs and predatory birds on the beaches, sharks in the water. I’ve read in Carr that wild dogs from far away travel to the beaches to wait for the arrival of the turtles. Still the hundred eggs would be enough, but nothing ensures the turtles against the manufacturers of turtle soup. Three-hundred-pound turtles navigate the ocean and come ashore to be slaughtered for the five pounds of cartilage that gets sold to the soup-makers. They’re torn open and mutilated, left belly-up and dead or dying on the beach.

Is my wanting to set the Zoo turtles free a kind of Polperrization, a trying to pretend that something is when it isn’t? Would they have
to swim with signs and slotted boxes begging for protection and support? There’s rubbish in the oceans now far from any land, Coca-Cola tins perhaps circling among the icebergs. If turtles have memories the beaches the old ones remember are not what they would find now. Perhaps the only decent thing would be a monster Turtlearium charging a proper admission, with turtle rides 10p and YOUR PHOTO WITH A SEA TURTLE 50p. Something has got to be whole in some way but my mind isn’t strong enough to work it out. Carr’s turtle station at Tortuguero in Costa Rica sounds a lovely place in his book. It sounds the sort of place where at night if you looked through the palm trees there’d always be lights on and coffee and people with clip-boards. Tortuguero. The name sounds like hot sun, blue water, white surf.

Often in the evenings Madame Beetle hangs head-down in the water cleaning her legs with great diligence like a woman really looking after herself. She seems to have settled in quite nicely, has a good appetite. She attacks the raw meat vigorously when I drop it in, then hangs head-down holding it in her front legs while her mandibles are busy with it. I don’t know whether any of the meat actually disappears, there’s always a good deal of it about that goes white and filmy after a while, but she must get something out of it because she’s still alive. I remove the old bits from the tank with a skewer. When I first took the cover off to do that I thought Madame Beetle might fly away but she simply retired inside the shipwreck until I’d finished.

I’ve bought a little china figure, a bathing beauty in a 1900s mauve bathing-suit and cap, red bathing-slippers. She’s sitting on a rock leaning back on her elbows, her right knee raised and her right ankle resting on her left knee. Her pretty rosy-cheeked face is turned to the side and as she sits before the aquarium on my desk she looks as if she’s been watching Madame Beetle and has just turned away towards me. Possibly there’s a story in her as well. Possibly there’s no story either in her or Madame Beetle. It may happen to me at any time that everything will be just what it is, with no stories in anything.

Briefcases. Businessmen, barristers carry briefs. When I was in advertising we always talked about what our brief was.
Brief
means letter in German. Brief is short. Life is a brief case. Brief candle, out, out. In the tube there was a very small, very poor-looking man in a threadbare suit and a not very clean shirt, spectacles. He made a roll-up, lit it, then took from his briefcase a great glossy brochure with glorious colour photographs of motorcycles. Many unshaven men carry briefcases. I’ve seen briefcases carried by men who looked as if they slept rough. Women tramps usually have carrier bags, plastic ones often. I carry one of those expanding files with a flap. Paper in it for taking notes, a book sometimes, sandwich and an apple for lunch. The apple bulges, can’t be helped.

I took the tube to Surrey Docks, the 70 bus from there. There were some children on the bus singing ‘Oranges and Lemons’ and they seemed to spin it out very slowly. I found myself waiting, waiting for ‘Here comes a chopper to chop off your head, chop, chop, chop!’ which arrived in due course and very loudly.

At Greenwich I went straight to the Port Liberty model after the guards at the door had looked into my envelope and found no bombs. They have to take precautions, that’s understandable. A place like Greenwich is a temptation. The greenness and the stillness, the augustness of the buildings and the observatory dome almost make one want to set off a bomb just out of respect.

There seem to be more children than there used to be. Always lots of them about even on school days. Children seem to be the permanent population while adults drift in and out and fall away. Each year the schoolgirls in their white knee-socks seem more erotic, more secretly knowing, one thinks probably nothing would surprise them. There are always children at the Port Liberty windows. I looked over the shoulder of a girl who must have been about twelve, the scent of her hair was in my nostrils. I don’t know where my daughters are now. I don’t know if Dora’s remarried. Someone pressed the button and the three-minute sequence began. The model sky grew slowly dark. Such a perfect world, so small and yet so full of distance. A long time ago I copied the signs that tell about Port Liberty:

APPROACHING PORT LIBERTY BY NIGHT

When night falls the navigator has to rely on the navigation lights shown by other vessels to avoid colliding with them and the lights shown by buoys, beacons and lighthouses to keep him in safe waters.

A confusion of fixed and flashing lights confronts him when he approaches a port but trained to interpret the various light colours and sequences in conjunction with his chart he can safely identify and follow the correct channel into port.

What you can see
The lighthouse on Patrol Point, whose white light is visible 20 miles out at sea, occults once every 30 seconds, while dead ahead can be seen the white light of the Landfall buoy, flashing every second.

A steady red light over a steady white light near the Landfall buoy identifies the pilot launch waiting for our arrival with a pilot ready to board and assist us through the channel to the anchorage.

The white masthead lights and green starboard navigating lights
of a large vessel can be seen moving down the main channel, while the navigation lights of a smaller ship are visible coming out through the secondary channel.

Three white lights in a vertical triangle indicate a dredger working at the inner end of Crusher’s Bank and that it is safe to pass on either side of her.

The masthead light and port and starboard lights of a small craft off our starboard bow indicate that she is heading towards us. The edges of the main channel are marked by the flashing lights of buoys, and further up the river the lights of fixed beacons can be discerned which assist the navigator to keep in the deeper water. Model made to the requirements of the Department of Navigation by Thorp Modelmakers Ltd.

There were the lights fixed and flashing, each in its proper place in that perfect night miniature and vast. Then the night faded, there was sunlight on the distant hills of the port, sunlight on the water before me and on the vessels coming and going, and I was:

APPROACHING PORT LIBERTY BY DAY

When a ship approaches port the navigator has various aids to help him.

He has a chart of the area, which he keeps up to date by Admiralty Notices to Mariners, issued weekly.

He has leading marks and the international system of buoys and beacons which mark the channel which he will have to follow and which he has to look out for as he approaches.

In most ships he usually has an echo sounder to indicate to him the depth of water and a radar set to supplement his eyes if visibility is poor because of fog or rain or falling snow.

What you can see
Imagine you are standing on the navigating bridge of a
ship approaching the estuary of the River Line and Port Liberty.

The Landfall buoy marking the entrance to the channel is right ahead of you and close by you can see the pilot launch displaying its distinguishing code flag waiting to put a pilot on board. Steaming out through the main channel is a 12,000 ton cargo vessel and astern of her a coaster is about to pass through the secondary channel used by smaller craft.

There is a fishing boat heading out to sea off Plushers Point and at the inner end of Crusher’s Bank a dredger is working.

Port Liberty can just be seen around the bend in the river and the buoys marking the main and secondary channels into the River Line and up to the quay are clearly visible.

Model made to the requirements of the Department of Navigation by Thorp Modelmakers Ltd.

So clear and sharp, Port Liberty. So precise and real. Realer than anything else I know. Of course it doesn’t exist. There’s no such place. There is no River Line, no Crusher’s Bank, no Plushers Point, no Port Liberty. The chart and the soundings, the channel markers and the buoys have no counterparts in the full-size world. Port Liberty is a fiction invented by the Admiralty as Fig. 67 in the
Admiralty Manual of Navigation
Volume I, and the National Maritime Museum commissioned a model of it.

There’s more to the model than meets the eye. I once got in touch with Thorp Modelmakers Ltd and was astonished to find that the tiny fixed and flashing lights are not actually on the tiny vessels, the lighthouse, the buoys. I couldn’t believe it. The scale was too small for that, I was told. The lights are underneath the model and there is a system of mirrors derived from an old theatrical illusion called ‘Pepper’s Ghost’. The night window is a mirror and the lights fixed and flashing so perfectly, each in its proper place, are not in fact where one sees them. I think about it often.