My Natural History

by Simon Barnes

  And a bird sang from the hawthorn in my north-north-London garden. I didn’t know what it was. But I was thrilled – thrilled beyond measure – to know that it was a bird I didn’t know: thrilled to have isolated his song from a sea of songs I did know. This was progress; this was the beginning of being an insider. I pursued that bird hard: listening, trying to remember, and then looking it up on the tapes I now possessed. I made several false attempts: but then I had half an idea. I remembered sitting in Rob’s garden after our day of censusing, eating a cheese sandwich and drinking a beer, while the same bird – the same species, anyway – sang endlessly, with a rambling, unstructured, rather inchoate delight in himself and in the season.

  And I looked him up, and I had him: a garden warbler, a long-distance migrant, a late arriver, a song pretty enough if not exceptional, one I had no doubt heard without hearing on those stoned Burwalls dawns, and one which I was to hear, and triumphantly, not to say swankily, recognise in the Luangwa Valley on one of my many subsequent returns, thus very neatly completing the circle.

  Oh, I was an insider now: a multi-sensed conjurer of birds from canopies. I liked to think I was a brilliant field man: I knew I was nothing of the kind. But then belonging is not a matter of expertise and knowledge. It’s a matter of mind. I had walked and talked and listened with Bob and Jeremy and Rob: and as a result, I had changed my mind.

  15. Lion

  Panthera leo

  Cowardice was something of a fashion. Wimpishness was cool. During my time at university, it was very much à la mode to boast about one’s helplessness, one’s neuroses, one’s inability to cope with anything even remotely challenging or threatening. Perhaps there was a complex reverse snobbery in all this, and to do with drugs: if you couldn’t cope with reality, it was because you were doing a lot of drugs. As the old joke had it, reality was a cop-out for people who couldn’t handle drugs. Instead, you were intrepid in mental journeys. You were a dauntless traveller when it came to LSD: small surprise, then, that you lacked the psychic energy to cope with the washing-up, or that going to the supermarket was too heavy. Now I didn’t wholly buy into this, and I was very quickly off the drugs bit, but I went along with the convention that difficult, dangerous, energetic things were not for the likes of us. We were all very amusing about this: certainly we amused ourselves.

  This was not a line always slavishly followed. I had hitch-hiked to many adventures. One of the best of these began when Jim, my great friend from Burwalls, failed to keep his appointment with me in Florence. In the end, with colossal reluctance and with phantasmagorical wimpishness, I struck out on my own: and discovered, as the lone traveller always will, that adventures come far more easily and more frequently when there is no one else to get in the way.

  But all the same, I returned from my travels and rejoined the culture of cowardice. Everything was too much and too heavy, from tutorials to cookery, from social events to human beings, from Pink Floyd to Ulysses, from one’s own bank account to the global distribution of wealth. But of course, the biggest fear of all was scarcely, if ever, mentioned. What we dreaded above all things was the possibility – even, dear God, the inevitability – of entering the real world: of leaving the warm embrace of student life and taking up paid employment. We were paralysed with the fear that the best years of our life were almost over. We wanted to stay indoors, in the warm, knowing our friends would be dropping round any second, and that nothing we did would ever matter. One song haunted me: Bob Dylan’s “Dream”: “We thought we could sit forever in fun, But out chances really was a million to one.”

  Picture me, then, a couple of decades down the road. The Land Cruiser had taken me as far as it could: now I was standing on the banks of the Luangwa River, which was still swollen by rain. I was wearing khaki trousers, a shirt in bush green, on my head, a junglified hat, in my pocket, a knife. On my feet, nothing: socks rolled up inside my Timberland boots. I had bought these boots in New York, on the weekend after the Tyson-Holmes fight, when, reeling with flu, I had for some reason entered a shop and demanded the most expensive boots they possessed. I must have known, in my delirium, that a new phase of life was about to begin. Now the boots were worn-in and dusty. I tied them together by the laces and wrapped them carefully around my wrists, because I knew if I fell and lost them, I was buggered.

  I am not sure to this day why Iain wanted me to wade the Luangwa River. Iain MacDonald was then running a safari operation in North Luangwa National Park, where there were no roads and no permanent camps. It is one of the world’s wilder places. His camp was on an island on the edge of the park, and the river was too deep to cross by vehicle. There was a pontoon for bringing across heavy equipment, but Iain said that it would take too long to wait for them to get it ready. We should wade.

  Now on my previous visit to the Luangwa Valley, I had observed the river, and as a result, I had seen crocodiles in extraordinary numbers and of extraordinary size. In the dry season, they could be found in groups of 100 or so, and up to 15 feet in length, some maybe even bigger, though I wasn’t about to put a tape measure to them. On subsequent occasions, I was to see crocs taking large mammals. A baby elephant, for example. A croc, it seems, has two speeds, stop and light. They will lie without moving for days, immune to boredom, immune, it seems, to time itself; and then they will strike before you can begin to wonder if striking is an option.

  So we waded. Iain led the way, while I recalled the theory that the leader is the safest: because he merely warns the crocs that others are on their way. It is the person who comes second that the crocs take. Me. The water was armpit deep and swift, and about 200 yards across. I held my boots high. Sergeant Wilson from Dad’s Army whispered in my ear: “Do you think this is quite wise?”

  It wasn’t, to be frank. It was ever-so-slightly bloody stupid. I suspect that Iain was setting me a virility test: if I said too heavy and too much and I can’t take it, or even is this wise, then I had failed and plans would be made accordingly. He had, after all, stressed the stressful nature of the trip when we met up in Lusaka. So I followed, splashing, swaying lightly and waving my boots about for balance, the water tugging at my trousers and playfully trying to unbutton my shirt, and the river got deeper and then it got shallower and in the end I was walking on dry land uneaten and in a glade of trees before a lagoon, and the lagoon was ringing with the triple whistle of white-faced duck and really, I was really rather in heaven. It was worth going through the crocs to get to this place. Or was the place just an excuse to go paddling with crocodiles? That was a dizzying thought, but I thrust it aside. We had more urgent matters to attend to. We had to find new camping places, a new marching route, and we had to get to the Mwaleshi River. And the Mwaleshi means one thing to old Luangwa hands. Lion.

  Iain’s safari operation was more than usually adventurous. You walked across the face of Africa, slept in a tent and lived right in the guts of the wilderness. But I wasn’t on a proper safari with guests: this was a rigorous march to set up the operation for the new season. Now to be fair to myself, I had done a few reasonably intrepid things in my time, but all the same, this out-in-the-wilderness stuff was a step I had never considered. In normal circumstances, your life traces a continuous line from past to present: a process with at least some kind of logic. But this move from a horizontal, sofa-dwelling, fearful, life-is-too-heavy creature to someone who was about to walk across the face of Africa. This was not continuity but a violent rupture. This was not logic but contradiction. This was not an inevitable result of what had come before, but a violent, perhaps disastrous assertion of the will. Naturally, I was feeling a little wary. It was not just the question of whether I was physically up to the challenge: far more important was the question of whether I wanted to be there at all. Once out there – once committed – I might wish acutely to be somewhere else.

  We all of us set off with some trepidation, then: me about whether or not the experience would be anything other than hideous, Iain about whether or not I
would be a pain in the arse from beginning to end. He had told me about clients who had come with a wrong attitude, like the German who insisted on walking in motorbike gear to avoid the bites of tsetse flies. He collapsed with heat exhaustion on the first day.

  So I set off in my bush gear, my binoculars in my hand, and off we marched. And marched. Now I had imagined that this would be much like the bush-walking I had already done: an easy stroll from one crowd of large mammals to the next. Instead, it was a rather dismaying revelation of African ecology. We saw nothing. Or very little. Eventually I understood why. If you walk close to the banks of the Luangwa River during the dry season, you see lots of animals because there is nowhere else for them to go. They have to drink, so they have to be in touch with the river. As the season moves towards its climax, the rush-hour crowds build up around the only water that can be had for miles, and the herbivores cling on while the carnivores make hay. This tension provides the best game-viewing in Africa.

  But we walked not along the river but against the grain of the country, up and down and across, through large tracts of miombo woodlands: beautiful enough but all much the same and none of it exactly jumping with life. The spectacular gratifications of African travel were denied me. But I walked on, and I walked on, and I minded less and less. I began to feel something, not of the traditional African tourist’s vision of the teeming of life, but of the African immensities, of the global remoteness. The only way on was walking: the only way back was walking. There was something oddly soothing in that thought. There wasn’t much of an element of smugness in this either: get me, aren’t I intrepid. No: there was a strange peace about it, a feeling that I had pushed my desires to be in the wild a fair old distance, and that I was still ready to keep going. This was not bravery. This was not even intrepidness. I was simply doing what I wanted to do and being where I wanted to be.

  It was Africa that drove me on: the beauties, the vastnesses, the knowledge that whatever I saw, a great deal more saw me. A demented passion for the place slowly filled me: a wild, almost self-destructive love marked me for ever on that walk. At one stage we made a passage through ten-foot-high grass: the sort old Africa hands call adrenaline grass, because you can see nothing and you might walk into anything. And I was aware of the dangers, and aware of the excitements, but in a remote kind of way. I was, to be frank, filled with an insane joy at being where the big beasts were.

  I remember one moment of revelation, when we came from the miombo and saw a vast open plain before us, full of short non-adrenaline grass and the animals that graze on it: impala, puku – a small toffee-coloured antelope that is something of a Luangwa speciality, zebra. There is something in such prospects that always catches at your heart: so many. It is a revelation of innocence, a revelation of a perfect world, a welcome to Eden. Of course you know that there might be lion or leopard under a bush and out of sight, but no matter: the sight of large numbers of large animals at peace with the world is something that goes very deep – well, humans first walked upright in plains just such as this; it is hard to think of anything that could possibly go deeper. We made a camp a short distance further on, for the river was, of course, close at hand. The next day we walked on.

  Eventually, we reached the Mwaleshi, a tributary to the Luangwa that, unusually, flowed for most of the year. We camped there, ate as the sun went down and sat up in the growing dark while Iain told lion stories. Especially the one about the man who camped by this very river, perhaps in this very spot, or if not, scarcely a hundred yards away, and how he was taken by a lion, taken from his tent while he slept, and devoured as sleep turned to waking and dream turned to reality. It was a lullaby. My profound and heartfelt response was to concentrate my mind on the urgent need not to get up and piss during the night. The vision of walking into a lion’s mouth with nothing but my dick in my hand came to me with immense clarity. I found myself refusing water, tea, coffee. We had no beer: would I have refused that? I wasn’t put to the test.

  Around us, the lions began to wake. Now let us not think that a lion’s call is anything like the petulant snarl you get before a Metro-Goldwin-Meyer film. A lion’s roar is intended to be heard for miles. And in the Luangwa Valley, they use the rivers as amplifiers, as telephones, as channels of communication, and the roars fill the heavens. Not a single syllable, either, but a crescendo of coughing grunts impossibly loud, like a giant vomiting his heart out after the mother of all benders. This is followed by a prolonged, huffing diminuendo. It often ends with a sigh: inaudible at distance. How close is a lion when you can hear the sigh? Old joke: too close.

  I tried hard to piss every last drop from my bladder. And so to bed.

  I had a tent to myself: flimsy, not sound-proof, not lion-proof. I stripped, clambered into my sleeping bag and prepared myself, not for slumber, but for the unfolding concert. I have never known a night like it for lion-music, neither before nor since. The Mwaleshi is one of the lion capitals of the world, and our unaccustomed incursion had stimulated them into song. And so one lion would call out: and a full pride chorus would answer. That is the best, or perhaps I mean the worst sound in the world: lion in the most ferocious numbers. I told myself, with impressive ethological understanding, that lions don’t sing when they are hunting, because to do so would be counter-productive. You sing to other lions, and perhaps to humans, to point out that you are here and that this land is your land. When you hunt you do so in silence: you don’t want to tell the buggers you are coming, after all. The lions were not hunting us: they were telling us about this part of the world and their place in it. And perhaps about our place in it.

  Deafening, and all around, lion answered lion and pride answered pride and did so with heaven-splitting delight. It was as if they had found their voices for the first time: the first night of song in a world made new, one chance to raise their voices and they were going to get it absolutely right.

  This trip to North Luangwa was the first time I had thought of myself as prey. This is quite different to being in a position of risk. It is not like the mischances and the perils you find as you knock about the world: the time when a car in which I had hitched a lift performed a 360-degree skid; the time a driver commenced a vigorous sexual assault on me at 60 mph; the midnight encounter with a gang in Port of Spain; the accidental small-hours hike up Eighth Avenue. This was not the same thing at all. I was not at risk of being injured or killed; I was at risk of being eaten. That is quite different from merely dying. The possibility puts the human being in a very different relationship to his environment from the one we normally accept. I was subservient to the landscape and to the big beasts that inhabited it. There were animals out there that saw me – at least to an extent – not as a source of threat but as a source of protein. I was not master of all I surveyed: I was merely part of the economy of the soil. Humans have been prey across the millennia: how ridiculous it is that we think of man-eating as an aberration, something that goes against the natural order. The exact opposite is true. It confirms the natural order, and our own place within it.

  And I found that this experience had a potent savour: a profound resonance. I was not a unique and privileged thing, but part of the continuum of species. I was one with the impala and the puku and the zebra: we were brothers in edibility. I mean this in no fanciful way: we were all mammals together, and possessed broadly the same body-plan, and to a crocodile or a lion, there was not much difference, save that my Timberlands were probably more indigestible than hooves: and both should be left for the hyenas.

  This sense – not so much of kinship as of oneness – was something I woke with, for I did manage some sleep on that cacophonous night. I got up, walked a certain distance from the camp, pissed long and gratefully and so returned to the human condition. But not entirely. Never again entirely. That sense of oneness, awakened by the night of music, was never to leave me. We walked back: and as I sipped at last a beer back in Iain’s island camp, a bat hawk stole past at dusk.

  16. Willow
warbler

  Phyolloscopus trochilus

  My mother wanted me to be an international lawyer, a fact that tells us all kinds of interesting things about the relationship between fantasy and reality. She had lofty ambitions for me, and they cast a shadow over both our lives. These ambitions, as I knew from the time I took my eleven-plus, asked deep and searching questions about the nature of love: in particular, the extent to which love is conditional. These matters were not, perhaps, fully reconciled till the end.

  I still turn my head away as the train pulls out of Barnes Station. I still stare down at my newspaper or my book, or out of the window on the opposite side of the tracks. I prefer not to look at the line of hedge that hides the path beyond, the path that leads to Putney Hospital. The hospital has long been demolished, but that’s not the point. To gaze on the path I took so many times, always with such craven thoughts in my head, is still too difficult. I prefer to keep my eyes elsewhere.

  Education and subsequent high achievement was never my goal. Rather, it was my duty. My father, despite leaving school at 14, had become a high-up in the BBC, an oppressively hard act to follow. My mother had been unable to take up her place at Oxford because of the war, and this disappointment had marked her life. So I not only had to follow that tradition, I also had to make good the wrongs of the past. I was a vector for the ambitions of others, and my mother took on the job of keeping me from backsliding. A glorious future in international law was surely within my grasp.

  But if these ambitions created tensions, they also created a kind of intimacy. There was a sense, when things were going well, of a conspiracy between my mother and me: against the rest of the family, against the rest of the world. We did it through books; we did it through scripture; we did it through narrative. There was something of a shared mindset.