My Natural History

by Simon Barnes

  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 subsu
med 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.

  It was like seeing the Holy Grail bobbing about in the river and watching it float by. Isn’t that the meaning of life? Never mind, what have we got for prep? The thing I sought more than anything else in the world was already in plain view, and I did nothing. In this way, life, wild or tame, carries on. And so I went out and coxed the Colts A, brought them back for once unscathed, caught the train to Streatham, changing at Clapham Junction, wishing I had already done my prep. Wondering why life was so dull.

  5. Adder

  Vipera berus

  He was pretty formidable. He had heavy black glasses, side-whiskers that reached his jawbone and an air of knowing what he was about in the world. We had never spoken: he came to Lower Six Arts by a different route. That’s why I expected him to be a second-rater, but right from the start, it was clear that he had the sharpest mind in the history group, the only one of us with a proper grasp of the subject. He was in a different English group, but I gathered that he excelled there, too. So I was distinctly wary of him. It was he that spoke first, observing that I had come to school with an armful of LPs borrowed from the gramophone library in Streatham; I was planning to change them on the way home. I can’t remember what the records were, probably Bach. We established that he too had a taste for music. He was especially fond of the Bartok string quartets. This was a bit beyond my scope, but I countered gamely with Scarlatti harpsichord sonatas.

  His name was Ralph, rhyming with safe rather than Alf; though Ralph was never safe. He was the most dangerous boy in the school. I had no objection to that. Gradually, a new alliance was formed. I started to spend time with Ralph and his friend Ted. Ted was an artist’s son, shockhaired, singular, with a mind that strove constantly for the bizarre. Radical politics became part of our conversation: here, Ralph was the leader. We let our hair grow. I abandoned cuff-links and tab-collars: I reverted to my first-form scruffiness, save that this state was now cultivated with dandified care. We affected illegalities of dress: Ralph had black flared (flared!) trousers worn with brown zipper boots; I had grey suede Chelsea boots.

  It is accepted as a truism of history that the 60s were about pleasure and excitement, that all young people were on the same side, that everyone who lived through those turbulent years was part of it, out there on the cutting edge, having the time of his life, enjoying guilt-free pleasures, cultivating an exotic appearance, rebelling against outmoded traditions, establishing a new and vibrant future. But it is a flagrant lie. It wasn’t like that at all. It was a time of polarisation: of bitter oppositions.

  The strongest opponents of these burgeoning freedoms, this incipient rebellion, were our own classmates. It was not the masters but the prefects who lined up against us. They saw themselves as mature. They aped their elders. They dressed as smartly as possible. Most importantly, they sincerely believed that conformity was not a matter of taste and temperament but a moral obligation. My French group was asked to write an essay about the Anouilh play, Antigone, declaring whether we sided with Antigone and the forces of freedom and individuality, or Créon, conformity and obedience. Four of the class, all of them prefects, took Créon’s side: so much for the wild 60s. They didn’t know, or if knowing, didn’t care, that the play was a coded examination of the polarities of Nazism and the French Resistance, and that Créon spoke for the Nazis.

  I was in the forefront of the Sixth Form Resistance myself. Momentous things were happenin
g in society: momentous things were happening to me. I too was taking part in a drama: I had a part, and it wasn’t Créon. I had an identity. I wasn’t bored. I read passionately, and Ralph and I talked books eternally: he was for Lawrence, I was for Joyce. Art mattered. For the others, art was just a subject useful for the passing of exams, we scoffed. We knew better. And when we walked through the school, people knew who we were. We were stars. I was no longer a reluctant football-player in a tab-collared shirt: no longer a third-rate imitation of the “mature” boys, the would-be prefects. No: I was a first-rate intellectual dissident – the best the school could come up with, anyway – with hair bouncing on my coat-collar. Ralph and I helped to set up a unilateral sixth-form council, a piece of insurrection that alarmed the headmaster and absolutely horrified the prefects. We were proposing democratically elected leaders instead of unilaterally appointed ones: this had to be stamped out, and was. Still, we had a fine old time stirring things up.

  A moment of apotheosis. Ralph had pinned to the noticeboard an inflammatory document, calling on we the undersigned to condemn something or other: the way the school was run, or maybe the way the headmaster refused to speak against American intervention in Vietnam. The subject doesn’t matter. What mattered was that the headmaster, Charles Kuper, elected to make the judgment of Voltaire. He made a fine speech before all the school, speaking about the freedoms a previous generation had fought for, and said that while he disagreed with the document, he would defend to the death our right to pin it to the wall.