by Simon Barnes
Our dog Gabriel, a black Labrador bitch, helped shape Eddie’s universe. A deep joy in Eddie’s life was to curl up alongside her in her basket. If ever Gabriel causes me passing irritation, I remind myself that she is not so much an angel as a saint, whose generosity to Eddie is worth commemorating on a stained-glass window. She has scarcely uttered a cross word in Eddie’s direction, never once snapped: only occasionally, when the ear-pulling and tail-tugging became too oppressive, she would sigh and walk into another room. Because of Gabe, Eddie knew he was living in a world full of kind and generous creatures.
I was rung up the other day by someone I had never met. His wife had just given birth to a girl with Down’s, and he was struggling. So I was happy to talk about my own experience: to tell him that, really, it’s not something to get too desperate about. It seldom occurs to me that Eddie’s life could have been something else: I have never for an instant thought that our family is blighted or even compromised by his existence. The exact opposite is true. Nor am I an angel or a saint: I am just another dad, getting on with things as best he can, trying to emphasise love above exasperation.
We had been told after the scans that there was a 50 per cent chance that he would have Down’s. We didn’t go for an amniocentesis, because that might have killed him, and in any case, Cind was not considering a termination: not her way, to evade responsibility for anyone or anything put in her charge. Long before he was born, or before Cind knew of his nature or his condition, Eddie was the beneficiary of the most ferocious love: of a loyalty without question or constraint. That’s Cind’s way. Me, I followed, a poor but enthusiastic second. So Eddie was born and had two holes in his heart, and our immediate concern was not the nature or the fact of his Down’s syndrome but whether or not he would live. He had open-heart surgery at four months, and now, aged eight, he is built like a little bull.
But it was as a tiger that I knew him in his early years, for his imagination was unreservedly caught by two books. His understanding has always been much greater than his ability to speak. It is hard for him to make words physically, hence the massive importance of the signs. It is not always obvious how much he has understood of any situation or story; the answer always turns out to be slightly more than I assumed.
Like all children, he loved and loves books and stories, and like all children, he loves them particularly when there are animals. Animals were for him, as they are for everyone else, the key to language and the gateway to the imagination. And so, for many nights, every time when it was me that did the putting-to-bed ritual, we read one or other of the tiger books.
The first was The Loudest Roar, by Thomas Taylor, and it is about Clovis. Clovis is a small tiger with an enormous roar, and he lurks about in a jungle full of all kinds of unexpected creatures – Taylor is not pedantic about zoo geography – and he sneaks up on them and he goes – well, I think you can work out what the roaringest tiger always does. But here was a book that Eddie not only enjoyed but also participated in: he too roared. He was Clovis, lurking in the thickets and forests of the blankets and leaping out on unsuspecting hippos and wildebeest and macaws to roar. And it was a special delight for me that Eddie joined in, was fully up to speed with the doings of Clovis. In the end, all the animals gang up and roar at Clovis, and he becomes a much better tiger for ever afterwards… but every night, he regressed and started his programme of lurking and roaring again, and Eddie was Clovis once more and he roared his way towards sleep every night.
The other tiger book was even better. This was Judith Kerr’s masterpiece, The Tiger Who Came to Tea. Kerr fled from Germany at the age of ten in 1933 with her Jewish family and settled in Britain. She wrote the 17 Mog books, but none of them can touch The Tiger, first published in 1968. Sophie and her mummy are sitting down for tea when there is a ring at the doorbell. Sophie’s mummy opens the door and it’s a tiger. “Excuse me, but I’m very hungry. Do you think I could come in and have some tea with you?” Of course!
The tiger is offered a sandwich, but he doesn’t take just one sandwich. He eats all the sandwiches on the plate! Step by step, he eats everything in the house, and drinks everything too, including Daddy’s beer. Then he says: “Thank you for my nice tea. I think I’d better go now.” The pictures show the tiger huge, sensuous, wicked, but not unkind. Sophie is fascinated, always as close to the tiger as she can be as he licks out the saucepans and cleans outs the cupboards. It is the most glorious image of the wild world coming to visit the safe and settled and citified: wildlife intersecting mysteriously with tamelife – which is, of course, exactly what I am trying to do with this book, or perhaps I mean with this life.
Joe had also adored The Tiger in his time. He was, of course, younger than Eddie when he first encountered it. He was so much in awe of the book, its subject and its themes that he never spoke of the tiger at all. When he wanted the book read, he asked always for “Sophie”. The tiger was too deep, too mysterious, too awe-inspiring, too important for casual mention. Eddie’s love for the tiger was different from the almost religious feelings that Joe held for it: but it was the same silent fascination, the same glorious respect for the wild possibilities that were inherent in the book, in the kitchen, at the tea table. The tiger was a member of our household.
So when it came to National Book Day, and all the children had to dress up as their favourite literary characters, there was no questioning the matter. Eddie goes to a village school in Suffolk, where he is much cherished and has tremendous support. We got him a tiger costume, and he was so delighted he couldn’t speak. Then came the day in which he was to go to school as a tiger, as the Tiger – but alas, he went down with a cold. A cold is a hard thing for a child with Down’s, because their tubes are extremely narrow. Breathing is difficult even at the best of times; a cold robs Eddie of sleep and of comfort, for he can’t suck his thumb, and it casts him down, utterly. He was deeply dispirited, but determined to go to school as a tiger: a very sad, tearful, snotty, red-nosed tiger he was too. He threw up in his tiger-suit and he had to come home before the day was done. Eddie the sad tiger was a heartbreaking sight: it had all started so well and ended so poorly. Eddie lacked the philosophical basis to give these things the perspective most children his age possess. It was a bitter blow.
But the following year, the two tiger books were still part of our lives, and the Tiger, the one who ate the cakes and drank the tea from the teapot and drank all the water in the tap, was still Eddie’s favourite book. And so he went to school in his stripes once again, this time as a happy tiger. So the story, like all the best stories, has a happy ending.
What’s Eddie for? A question worth asking, I think. The Nazis sent people with Down’s to the ovens, because they polluted the purity of the race. And before we shudder at such barbarity, we should remember that most women pregnant with a child with Down’s syndrome choose to abort. It’s clear that many people believe that a child with Down’s has no point: that such a being is extraneous to human needs, a mere burden on society and in particular, on the parents. Best get rid of them.
The reality of Eddie’s life contradicts all of that. At school, he is held very dear. The headmistress has said that her school is a better place for his presence: because Eddie is there, the school’s small society has become more caring, more gentle, more at ease with itself. At the end of the last school year, Eddie won the Peace Prize, voted for annually by the entire class. The prize is given to the kindest, most generous and most helpful child.
Eddie comes with us to shops and restaurants and pubs and cafés, and I have never heard a whisper of distaste. Au contraire: Eddie, when in a sunny mood, becomes an instant favourite, the people he encounters relishing the chance to do small things to make him happy.
Is that enough, though? Shouldn’t an individual contribute something to society? Eddie’s function is to be loved, and to love in return. Perhaps that is everybody’s ultimate function. Eddie enriches the lives of his family and enriches the lives of those he comes
into contact with outside. That seems to me to be a life right on the cutting-edge of usefulness.
It’s some time now since Eddie was last a tiger. He is often a dog, and will fetch sticks and bark; and he is sometimes a cat. His current favourite book is about a dog called Floppy who rescues a litter of puppies from a fire, part of an inspiring series with which he is learning to read. He does, however, still sometimes give a jocular roar when it seems appropriate. Once a tiger, always a tiger.
21. Morelet’s crocodile
Crocodylus moreleti
The first thing you need when putting together an expedition to the rainforest is the right company. You want people who love wildlife, are prepared to put up with discomfort, are unfazed by things like remoteness and wildness and lack of room service and what would happen if you got appendicitis, who do not have a problem with the fact that there is absolutely nothing to do except look at wildlife (and in the rainforest, you don’t often see very much of it), who will not be overly twitchy about the possibility of snakes and can cope with the omnipresent actuality of invertebrate life. So here’s what we came up with: one PR person from Jaguar, one very small female Greek fashion photographer, one very large male Canadian make-up artist, a celeb journo (“I’m not a celebrity journalist; I mainly write about alternative therapies”), an obsessive birder with a passion for digi-scoping, and me. Oh, and a film star. Darryl Hannah came with us to Belize. She, should you need reminding, was Madison, the mermaid in Splash!; she was a somewhat unexpected astronomer in Steve Martin’s Cyrano remake Roxanne, and if you seek something more gritty, she was in Blade Runner and Kill Bill and, since you need to know, Attack of the 50ft Woman.
I got involved in this lunatic trip because of a man I met in a pub. John Burton has a long, distinguished and exotic CV, but the first and most remarkable entry is Sunnyhill School.
At our first meeting, over pints in the White Horse, the topography of south London came into the conversation, and one or other of us revealed an unnatural familiarity with the postal district of SW16. Burton then talked of the days he spent Gerry-Durrelling round Biggin Wood, capturing hedgehogs and seeking birds’ nests in a manner later and rightly considered reprehensible. But it was clear even then that Burton has had a taste for reprehensibility. It was this, allied with recklessness, that prompted him to assemble this extraordinary gathering of rainforest explorers.
He was at Sunnyhill a few years before me. Odd to think that Burton was doing for real what I was doing in my imagination: seeking out, contacting, living with wild creatures, touching the wild world. He has done much the same thing ever since. Not that Burton is eccentric. It’s the rest of the world that’s a bit peculiar. That became clear as pints became whiskies. He is also a scientist who never got round to collecting any qualifications, a musician with infinitely eclectic tastes, author of a remarkable number of books and a man whose every spare bit of wall is hung with paintings and drawings, almost all of them to do with wildlife. He says it is his ambition to die in as much debt as possible.
Here, then, is a classic British maverick. As a pioneer conservationist – he worked for the Natural History Museum, ran the Fauna and Flora Preservation Society and founded TRAFFIC, the organisation that monitors the trade in wildlife – he was by definition a maverick. But as conservation established its own orthodoxies, Burton became a maverick of the conservation movement. He founded the World Land Trust, an organisation conceived under the simple, brilliant, cut-to-the-chase, let’s-do-the-show- right-here notion of saving endangered habitat by buying it. I don’t think I am overdoing the filmic imagery here: after all, we have Darryl waiting to take an Amazonian step onstage.
David Tomlinson, the digi-scoper – one prone to taking photographs of birds by combining a digital camera and a telescope – has known Burton for years. He has spent most of his professional life working for Country Life magazine, and though a birder before all else, he chooses to play the part of the shootin’ and fishin’ squire, a role combined sporadically with that of the World War One subaltern. He is also keen on the arts of one-upmanship. He’s an agreeable man in many ways, it must be said, and he has been a great supporter of the Trust. I had known him off and on for a good while myself.
Despite posing as a man o’ the world, he is nothing of the kind. His Home Counties sensibilities were utterly confused by his arrival in the jungle with this crew of dazzling urbanites, none of whom would know an ocellated turkey from a wedge-tailed sabre-wing. This was puzzling for David, especially when you consider that the sabre-wing is a hummingbird and the turkey is, indeed, a turkey and genuinely enormous. He was still more confused about the nature of human sexuality. When we arrived at the field research centre, a pleasant place of wooden buildings in a forest glade, above which keel-billed toucans gave us a polychromatic welcome, we divvied up the rooms. I got Burton while David got lucky, and a room to himself.
The following morning, as David and I worked the forest edge with Vladimir Rodriguez, a Belizean field naturalist, while the fashionistas slept off their jet lag, he finally nerved himself to ask me the question that had been troubling him. “You know that make-up chap?”
“SJ, yes?”
“Well, I thought he was frightfully – you know – camp.”
“Yes.”
“But now he’s sharing a room with a young lady!” I hadn’t thought David’s voice capable of reaching such a note.
“David,” I said as gently as I could. “He is a young lady.”
“Oh!” said David. “Oh… Oh.”
Well, it was a confusing trip. That had to be admitted. Jaguar (cars) were involved because they like to be associated with real jaguars. Hello! magazine were involved, because they were paying for a photo-shoot of Darryl in the rainforest, plus a celeb interview. David and I were invited as wildlife writers, and it was hoped that all these – apparently quite contradictory – aims might mysteriously combine and bring about good things for the forest and the World Land Trust.
I was there because I have a passion for wildlife; SJ was there because he has a passion for Audrey Hepburn. Hepburn’s cheekbones are not the subject you expect to discuss when you are staying in a hut in the jungle, but it is a subject that has consumed SJ since he was a boy. I have always been enthralled by passion, no matter what form it takes, and so I asked him over the dinner table on our first night about what mattered to him. SJ spoke his heart. It was clear right from the outset that he loved young ladies. He was absolutely enraptured by the beauty of women. He had a Hepburn epiphany: “I realised right then that what I wanted to do was to help women look beautiful.” Women did not strike a sexual response within him, but it was women that delighted him above all else in life. Mrs Watson would not have been impressed.
There was a little antipathy, a little wariness between David and the urbanites at first. But this dissipated quickly – in fact, as soon as he became overwhelmed by an ambition to take pictures of Darryl Hannah.
Darryl arrived with her gofer, Julie, and took up residence, but I shall spare you the details of how her room was prepared by all those with an interest in her comfort and good temper, especially Alison, the celeb writer, who filled the room with samples of all sorts of alternative beauty products in which she had an interest.
So enter Darryl. A strapping, handsome woman in her early 40s, blonde, strong face, worth a look, even two, but you wouldn’t say: my God, she must be a film star. Perhaps that’s what it’s always like when you meet film stars. She was perfectly pleasant with everybody without trying to make conquests of us all; she was prepared to muck in; she felt a certain sense of privilege in being in the forest. She certainly didn’t expect the forest to operate with Hollywood standards of cleanliness and freedom from insects. The only way you would realise that outside the forest she was a staggeringly famous person was in the matter of caution. There was a natural holding-back of herself: something you get to recognise in people from whom everyone wants something. Even people who have nev
er seen your movies want a little fix of your fame.
So the fashionista side of the party set to work at a ruined temple a short walk from camp: a photo-shoot for Hello!, with Nana clicking away, Alison flapping about and trying to seize control, while Emma from Jaguar spread massive waves of calm and SJ sought some magical combination of cosmetics that would not only enhance Darryl’s already lovely face but stay on it for longer than two minutes.
In the rainforest, even film stars sweat: not in drops but in buckets. As we passed by looking for wildlife, I noticed that Darryl’s legs bore trickles of blood from the mosquito bites, but she took this in her considerable stride. David, Vladi and I moved on and managed to get close encounters with Yucatan black howler monkey and Central American spider monkey, two great rainforest specialists. The spider monkeys climbed impossibly above us with the fifth limb giving them a convincingly arachnid appearance. The howlers keep in touch across the impenetrable thickness of the canopy by singing to each other. The first time I heard this song was from my bed: I thought for a long time that it was Burton snoring.
We switched camp, to a place by a lake. By this time the tension among the fashionistas had escalated alarmingly. More than ever, Alison wanted control of everything that everyone was doing: with a bunch of anarchists like this, such an ambition was unrealistic to say the least. When not telling people what to do, Alison suffered. It was sad but true that every insect in the Belizean forest had a personal vendetta against her. She developed a limp from a bite on her ankle: would it never heal? The forest became her enemy. She wasn’t happy. She wasn’t mucking in. But she wanted her story all right, and what’s more, she wanted it on her terms. This ambition made no one happy, herself least of all.