My Natural History

by Simon Barnes

  These days I write for The Times, about sport as well as wildlife. Some of the letters I have received from readers over the years: well, they make me wonder. I mean, the letters from earnest young people all wanting to take up a job in sports journalism, just as I have. What should I do? they ask. How should I prepare for this great step? Youth for them seems to be nothing more than a preparation for a career: education merely a necessary step towards the attainment of a high salary. They send me their terrifying CVs. They ask me what university course they should take. Should they read journalism? (God no, journalism is for doing, not studying, and besides, do you want to spend three years reading me, or Shakespeare? Work it out for yourself. You should educate yourself for the sake of education, not for the sake of a job.)

  Me, educated, at least up to a point, for the sake of education alone, well, I had a plan. I was not going to rejoin straight society. I was going to take on some salt-of-the-earth dignity-of-labour sort of job and write great works in my spare time. At various times, I worked in a butter factory, as a navvy, and in a cake factory, for strange as it seems, it was easy to get low-grade work in those days. Alas, I swiftly made the discovery that if you take on a full-time manual job, you are too knackered to write anything when you get home. It was also becoming obvious that I couldn’t do anything with any competence except write.

  So I went on the dole and wrote. I began to keep office hours, amazing myself and my visitors by repelling them until the hour of six. I started trying to write for money. At the same time, I began looking for full-time jobs in journalism. Having made this epic decision to rejoin straight society, I had a terrible shock. Straight society was no more keen on being joined than I was on joining it. It took months. I thought it would never happen, but in the end, I got an interview for a job on the Surrey Mirror. I dressed with horror and care, in a suit unworn since my interview for university, and a tie, a garment I had vowed would never again hang from my neck. Once there, I explained why I had always wanted to be a journalist. I remembered not to say “because I can’t think of anything else”. “What is your fantasy of yourself as a journalist?” I was asked, as if this were a question of remarkable brilliance. I said I wanted to be a war correspondent: it seemed the sort of answer that would please. I got the job: a vista of horrors opened before me.

  In all this, I was supported and encouraged by Ruth. Ruth, tall and kind and lovely. She was going to stick by me. She was going to be a teacher: after a series of great adventures and tremendous travels, she too had decided that straight society was beckoning. The Surrey Mirror told me to start in July; Ruth then managed to get a place in a teacher training college in Streatham, of all places. I made a second trip to Surrey and managed to rent a room in a house. In this manner, we were launched together onto a grown-up world that didn’t really want us. We arrived at the house: I started work the following day. My life sentence was about to begin. I seemed to have nothing left but Ruth: well, I reasoned, and rightly, that was a hell of a lot more than most people in straight society.

  The house was in a place called Hookwood. Hookwood is hard by Gatwick Airport. We were living, not with a gang of hippy students with Journey to the East and Bhagavad Gita on their shelves, but with a builder called Derek. Derek had a girlfriend, whom he entertained in the evening, and a secretary who served him in the morning. This led to loud public arguments. There was also a madwoman. She ran a cattery from her home but no longer lived there because, as she explained helpfully, her husband was plotting to murder her. We were a merry household.

  Work was pretty bad for me, but it was worse for Ruth. She got a job making airline meals. Still, at least she knew she would be stopping it in October, when term began. This was what I would be doing for the rest of my life. I had – the horror! The horror! – to deal with suits and ties and endless conversations about cars. A personal means of transport was a prerequisite for the job: I bought an 80cc motorbike which I loathed and feared. On this horrible contraption I got out around Redhill and Reigate to make futile efforts at fact-gathering and returned to the office to try and write it all up as news stories.

  I thought I could write: I found I could do nothing of the kind. I thought I was smart: I discovered I was an idiot. The simple craft of writing a news story for a local paper was set about with insuperable difficulties. I never seemed to establish a fact, never seemed to make a contact. I still had long hair: that didn’t help. I struggled: for a while it seemed that I might suffer the ultimate ignominy and fail to make it, sacked during the trial period, unable to do my indentures, thrown out of the profession of journalism, and no doubt every other profession as well. My colleagues were not even remotely like my friends from university. I had to accept that some of them voted Conservative, had no sympathy with any progressive movement, wanted only a nicer car and a better job. I had thought such people were the fantasies of overwrought student minds.

  Back “home”, things were not much more amusing. Ruth would be exhausted from a day on her feet putting together “meals”; I would be bewildered and stressed. We would cook food in the shared kitchen, sometimes watch television, while the madwoman harangued us disjointedly. Derek lurked in his room, from which raised voices or the sounds of reconciliation could frequently be heard. Sometimes the madwoman played the radio at full volume while we watched television, in order to assert some important point of communal living.

  And so we went to the pub. True, this was something of an extravagance, but since our sanity was involved, it was money well spent. The pub was a 15-minute walk away and it was called, unpromisingly, Ye Olde Six Bells. It was a hot summer: the pub had a garden. It was always full of Gatwick types: adulterous pilots luring willing hosties to their doom and so forth. There being many such people, the place was always crowded to an almost ludicrous degree. There was never a chair to sit on, inside or out. So we established a routine: Ruth would find a patch of grass to sit on, as near to the river as possible, and I would brave the pub itself. It would take about 15 minutes to get served, so I adopted a policy of buying two drinks at once, or rather four, and then carrying them out to see what sort of vantage point Ruth had secured for us.

  It was, astonishingly enough, a rather lovely place. The River Mole flowed past and the garden reached the river’s edge. And it was here that I, that we, found respite from the insoluble problems of weaselling our way into the grown-up world. Watching the river go past is one of life’s most riveting occupations: the thinking man’s television – and it is all the more soothing after a day trying to be a grown-up, telephoning Reigate and Banstead Borough Council and asking, must someone be killed before something is done about the Buckland bends? Planning applications, rows about council houses, knocking on doors – would you say it was hell living here? – failing to whip up non-controversies, trying to remember to get the big facts in the intro, remembering when to say “alleged”, finding that that bastard Coulson was unavailable for comment as usual, writing something about traffic lights, writing something about dogshit (“walking along this path is like playing hopscotch”), looking for the local angle, doing stuff about parking, interviewing friends of the editor from the Rotary Club, and occasionally, as a real treat, doing a story about pets. A year before I had been trying to write stuff that would take in the entire sweep of the cosmos: now I was restricted to Redhill: with, it must be said, Reigate, not to mention Merstham, Salfords, Earlswood, Bletchingly and Betchworth – though not, of course, Caterham, Godstone or Oxted. That would be going too far.

  Having my work despised by people I despised. Learning not to despise the people I despised. Learning, humiliatingly, that the people I despised could do – and write – some things infinitely better than I could. Realising that such talents as I possessed were not terribly helpful to the profession of hard news journalism. Knowing that there was nothing else I could conceivably do. But never mind: at least, every two or three days, when I didn’t have a night job, Ruth and I could go to the pub: I cou
ld drink my two pints of beer, and we could then walk home with my arm about her waist, for, tall and slim and elegant as she was, I couldn’t reach her shoulder with any degree of comfort. There was nothing, then, to complain of.

  It was even better than I have let on, that place by the river. Most evenings, as we sat and watched it doing its stuff, we would see a small bow-wave move urgently from one side to the other. Sometimes back again. It had a brown little face with whiskers. A grave, round face, with the same twinkle in its eyes… Small neat ears and thick silky hair. It was the water rat!… Lines from The Wind in the Willows, a book I had adored, read, reread, and even rewritten, in riverbank tales of my own.

  I loved Ratty best of all, though I had never, till I came to Hookwood, seen a real one. And even without literary and personal associations, the water vole, to give him his proper name, is the most winning of creatures: a little, furry, wet-loving teddy, pursuing its life with great seriousness right in front of us. It was the pub, the river, the beer, the water-vole that made everything all right. It really was. The water vole put a little magic into daily life: he gave us a small reward for the huge efforts we were making to become grown-up. Because of the water vole, we found ourselves able to function in this alien and grown-up world.

  Drinking with Ratty told us that we needn’t grow up altogether: that small things could still give delight: that the world had its solace even for people who prepared airline food, even for people who had ridden the hateful little motorbike all the way to Bletchingly and back and still failed to get the story.

  The Hookwood water vole was our passport into the adult world: a furry specific against the bends. We hadn’t entirely left the world of wonders behind. Even though we were marooned in a commuter village and trapped in jobs that offered little satisfaction and surrounded by alien and unsympathetic beings, there was delight to be found in the world. We had a pub, we had a river, we had pints, we had a vole: and we were together. As a result, we made it. By the time the autumn had come, we had a flat in south London with a troop of friends, Ruth started her course and enjoyed it, and I began to find some kind of accommodation with the demands of news-gathering. Hookwood had put us to what seemed a pretty extreme test: and yet we passed. Ruth got us through: for that, eternal thanks. She did it, with the help of the water voles.

  9. Himalayan pied kingfisher

  Ceryle lugubris

  For a time, we were four. It is a period that many people go through at a certain time in life: paired off but not yet procreating, bravely independent yet still seeking some kind of familial closeness. It is, I suppose, a relatively new kind of relationship, an aspect of contraception and the end of the extended family. And there we were: me and Ruth and Mark and Lucy. I suppose we spent three or four evenings a week in each other’s company.

  Lucy and I met as colleagues on the Surrey Mirror. She was small and pretty, thrillingly strong-minded and being Indian, gorgeously brown of skin. Naturally, I made a pass at her at the Christmas party, for no journalist can resist a cliché. She explained that she had a boyfriend to go home to: the fact that I had Ruth to go home to had momentarily escaped my attention. After that, Lucy and I became friends instead. So then we met each other’s partners, and we all four became friends: each individual relationship drawing strength from, almost defined by the others.

  I worked it out graphically: a square with a person at each corner, each linked either by the side of a square or a diagonal. That makes six lines, six relationships in all. Or should that be 12? Do you count, say, my relationship with Lucy as one relationship or as two, to include her relationship with me? You decide.

  If I were writing about these six or 12 relationships in a novel, I would naturally bring in all kinds of subtle sexual interplay between the four characters. It would be against nature if this were not the case. Desire, conscious or not, would add a thrilling subtext to the easy, ostensibly innocent times we spent together. Surely we would seek for little moments when we could be alone with the wrong partner, the whiff of the swap never entirely absent, the tiny seeds of jealousy implanted when one opposed pair seemed to be having too good a time together. The diagonals are the thrilling ones for a novelist: the line that linked me and Lucy and the one that linked Ruth and Mark. It was inevitable that there would be sexual tensions: such things are a staple of human life: you can see it all in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, after they had taken a love-potion; it was there in the BBC series, The Good Life, after they had overdone the pea-pod burgundy, clearly another love potion.

  But it really wasn’t like that with me and Lucy, despite the pass and the miss. Oh, I never minded looking at her, never avoided the chance to throw the occasional discreet glance in the direction of her trim body as she dressed or undressed, at times when we found ourselves sharing accommodation. But there never was a flirtatious thing between us. Nor was she the sister I never had: I have two perfectly good sisters of my own. If anything, she was the brother I never had: teasing, competitive, sporty, bantering.

  I was prepared to have a sticky relationship with Mark. I thought he would resent my admiration for Lucy, suspect the purity of my motives in befriending her, and that we would establish a relationship based on polite male head-butting. But not a bit of it. We established the great antithetical friendship of my life: sometimes I think we have nothing in common except our friendship. He trained as an engineer, moved seamlessly into the world of computers, was always effective at making money while being well aware that other things in life mattered more. He was immensely practical and could do absolutely anything. I was fascinated by his ability to fix things. He used to fix cars and motorbikes as a matter of course, but nothing stayed broken around him for long. I was enthralled by the way he fixed his digital watch: how can anybody do that? He played the guitar, hated folk music with a strange passion, had little interest in sport unless he was doing it himself. He liked to have loud music playing around him most of the time: I love Bach, birdsong and quiet. And yet, by the magical process in which friendships happen, Mark and I were friends at once.

  Ruth and Lucy established a friendship just as quickly. Ruth was naturally concerned when she first heard my tactless accounts of Lucy’s qualities, but Lucy’s nature made it immediately clear that there was no flirtation involved. And as for the other diagonal, the Mark–Ruth line, that, so far as I know, had no elements at all of thwarted desire. Rather they had an easy brother–sister relationship that completed the four-sided nature of our friendship.

  We mostly expressed this by going into the pub together: often the Tulse Hill Tavern. There was a garden, where we sat when the weather permitted. We all had the same drink, which simplified matters: perhaps there was a sound bit of feminism in action here; no pints for the boys and halves for the ladies. We drank the drink that was then called Pils: a pilsner made by Holsten that was then rather in vogue, a forerunner of the designer lagers and foreign bottled beers that became so fashionable later. Lord knows what we talked about or what we laughed about. It doesn’t really matter. Whatever we did, it was a shared celebration of the fact that we were all in the grown-up world and surviving: and what’s more, we were doing so while retaining many of the things in our youth that we still treasured: things like laughter, frivolity, talk, friendship.

  And then came the drink at the Tulse Hill Tavern that changed everything, that made the four-cornered friendship, for a while, the central matter of our lives. I had made a rather decent bit of money with some freelance work, and I was wondering how best to get rid of it. My plan was to spend some of it on a stereo and some of it on a mildly exciting bit of travel. I asked Lucy’s advice, for she was (and indeed is) a great travel bore. At the time, she was planning a trip back to India, to see her father and to see a bit of the country with Mark.

  Now one of the things about strict sexual equality in drinking is that women have smaller livers than men. As a result, women can’t process alcohol as efficiently as men. To put it bluntly, all things bein
g equal, if they drink on equal terms they get pissed quicker. This was always disputed by Lucy, but then most things were. “It simply has no effect on me!”

  Anyway, the evening was a good one, and we kept going back for another four bottles of Pils, and we were loud and hilarious and happy. Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, Lucy, no doubt affected by the smallness of her liver, said: “Bollocks to your stereo. Spend it all on travel! Come to India with us!” That was nice and friendly and utterly impractical, because she was leaving in a fortnight. I said these things: but Lucy was unstoppable. This should not have surprised me: unstoppability is perhaps her defining trait, and perhaps doubly so when inflamed by the Pils. She argued and bullied us: for she was now set on the idea of bringing us to India. As more and then more Pils were purchased, so the inevitability of the journey made itself plain. By the time we left the pub, we were committed.

  I had never seen myself as the sort of person who went out of Europe. I had thought I was a safe-options sort of chap. But I found myself on a plane and bound for Delhi: and then living the strange dream of arrival. It began with heat, 50 degrees of it, and jet lag, a new experience, and culture shock that deprived me of speech for several days. I remember lying on a bed in the YMCA on that first morning sweating and listening to the sounds of two maniacs playing tennis. It was doubly hot because Ruth refused to have the ceiling fan on: she was afraid it would come loose and go spinning about the room in a generally decapitatory fashion. It was of course Lucy who made the decision to leave that very night: and so we took the train to Jammu. The following morning, mad with sleep deprivation, we entered a scrum and somehow emerged with four tickets for the bus. After that, the eight-hour journey into the hills: the ever steeper, ever more dramatic hills of Kashmir, and a notice that read: “This is not a race or a rally! Drive slow and enjoy Kashmir Valley!” Valleys and hills: hills becoming mountains, mountains becoming the most stirring peaks on earth: before us, impossibly but incontrovertibly, the vertical white walls of the Himalaya.