by Simon Barnes
The one thing that really ate her up – apart from the insects, of course – was the feeling that Hello! might somehow be deprived of exclusivity. So she made it crystal clear that no one, no one at all, was to take any picture whatsoever of Darryl. To the subaltern inside David, this was a bugle-call to action. David, as a right-wing lover of freedom, at least his own, deeply resented this prohibition. No one was going to tell him what he could and couldn’t photograph. So he whipped out his little digital camera and turned it not on birds but on Darryl. He kept sneaking up on the shoot to steal pictures. Alison grew apoplectic; David, at first considered an unassimilable outsider, was suddenly vastly popular.
David and I walked back from a spot of birding with Vladi and came on Darryl not preparing for a shoot or resting between sessions, but for once in the full rigour of action, action expressed here as a form of dramatic stillness. She was wearing a sarong, leaning on the jetty. The waters beyond her were spotted with hundreds and hundreds of little bird-houses on posts, homes for purple martins. Yet it was not the martins but Darryl that took the eye. She was unrecognisable from the comely woman I had already met. Here was a woman of quite staggering beauty.
This was not just a tribute to the mysteries of which SJ is a master. The beauty was beyond even his artistry, for you can’t bring out what is not already there. This revelation of Darryl as a beauty of neck-wrenching iridescence was an extraordinary thing. For a start, it was an aspect of performance: a demonstration that beauty comes not just from bones and flesh and expression, but from the desire to be beautiful, the belief in your own beauty, from the knowledge that this was show time and so a show must be given.
It was the camera that made her beauty shine from within: take away the camera and the light would fade away. With the camera before her, Darryl, rock-still, was in flight. She looked pretty good in two dimensions, when I eventually saw the Hello! spread – but she was beyond-belief glorious in three. It was an extraordinary experience to be close to her when she really meant it: when she was prepared to release her inescapably mesmerising, till-then hidden qualities.
Most of us see most wildlife in two dimensions – on the television, in still pictures – and sometimes, it can look as lovely as Darryl as Roxanne, as fierce as Darryl in Kill Bill, as absurd as Darryl in Splash! But even then, all you see is the shadow on the wall of the cave. All you see is the pale memory of what has vanished. Me, I have been closer. I have shared three-dimensional space with some of the most remarkable beings on the planet; I have seen loveliness and ferocity and impossible wonder. But that is what I have chosen to look for. As SJ wanted to be close to female beauty, so I have chosen to be close to the beauty of the wild.
So close, indeed, that Burton was no longer speaking to me, or when he was doing so, he was having a job to ungrit his teeth. He had, even then, been to Belize, say 25 times on World Land Trust business. I should add here that the World Land Trust doesn’t actually own any land in Belize, or anywhere in the world outside Britain, come to that. This is not a neo-colonial organisation. In Belize, the land is owned by the Belizean organisation, Programme for Belize. WLT helps to fund them, offers advice when required, is there always in support. As a result, in Belize there are 262,000 acres of rainforest safe from the destroyers; across the world there are 400,000 acres of endangered habitat that, because of the WLT, are not in any danger whatsoever. This, it became clearer every day that I spent in that forest, is a great organisation.
It is also one that functions to a very large extent on communication between partners. This works best on a one-on-one basis, between people who are both colleagues and friends. A shared aim presides over all that matters. Or perhaps I should say a shared love. The best kind of wildlife conservation has its basis in love. Love of the forest, love of its creatures, love of the wild is something you simply can’t fake. I know: I share it, and when I meet people in the forest or out on the savannah, people I have never seen before, I know at once that there is a conversation, for there is always a conversation when you have a big thing in common. And what we have in common is love. So it was that Burton was in yet another meeting with friends/colleagues when David and I made a trip into the forest with Vladi.
And I am deeply sorry to say, deeply ashamed to say that we stole Burton’s love from him. Perhaps it is true to say that we usurped the privilege of the love he had borne longer and deeper than either of us. Burton is a mammal-man before anything else. He is there to save the forests: he is also there to savour them, for his ambition to save these places has its basis in love. In this tract of Belizean forest, he, more than any other single person on the planet, has caused it to continue existing, and with it, all the creatures that have their being there. But he was denied the fruits of that love, and these were, foolishly, recklessly and capriciously, given to me instead. I’ve been trying to repay him ever since.
All the same, I am glad that I was not offered a choice before the trip. If anyone had said to me, what would you like better, to see a jaguar, or to kiss Darryl Hannah? there is only one choice a red-blooded male could make, and I’d have been sad to miss the kiss. But I am getting ahead of myself. There, walking down the road, in glistening, rippling, muscling, maculated perfection, was a jaguar: el tigre: the mammal that everyone who comes to New World forests wants to see and which so few do. Burton, in all those trips, never got so lucky. Vladi had only seen 16 jaguars in six years in the forest. This was not a privilege I had earned: but one I had a duty to cherish.
It was the perfect evening for a night’s crocodiling. The lagoon before the field station was a great place for Morelet’s crocodile, a species that loves the fresh waters of the Yucatan peninsular. We set off by boat once night had fallen, and by dint of good luck and masterful shoving, I found myself sitting next to Darryl. Now I have a gambit that can hold women of a certain sort fascinated for hours. I am a horseman, I keep horses at home and horse-talk captivates me. “Tell me about your horses, Darryl.”
So she was off: she had some rescue horses, all with long flowing tales attached, and she told me them all: their individual stories and their individual charms of character. We talked the horse-talk with great delight as we chugged over the silent black lake, spotlighting for crocs. The Morelet’s don’t get big, not by the standards of the Nile crocs of the Luangwa River, but they can still reach eight feet long and it’s better not to pick a fight with them.
Darryl, it soon became clear, had a powerful and totally unfocused love for animals and for the wild world. She spoke in a breathless, slightly girly voice that was rather at odds with her heftiness. “Are they really blind?” she asked as a bat made a millimetre-exact pass over our heads. At one stage she fished a drowning moth from the water and attempted to dry it out and restore it to life. The attention she gave this was for a while all-consuming. I watched in fascination for some time, and then asked, perhaps unfeelingly: “Why don’t you try mouth-to-mouth?”
“Moth-to-moth?”
And then she was telling me of her encounter with wolves. She had a friend who was making a wildlife documentary, and he had a wolf pack staked out. Darryl begged permission to get close to these wolves, and no doubt bowled over by the full Darryl charm, the friend agreed: “But you must just observe. Don’t do anything but observe. Right?”
So Darryl waited and waited and eventually the wolves appeared: “And I couldn’t help it, I just got down on all fours and said: ‘Here doggy! Here doggy!’
“And the lead one came up to me and sniffed and I just kept real still and then he took hold of my lower lip between his teeth, and then he gave it a little shake. And then he led everyone off.”
Darryl, it seemed, has a genuine affinity for non-human life, of a somewhat unconventional kind. She was prepared to risk everything – as SJ will tell you, looks are quite important for a film star and there is not much work for beauties with savaged lips – for a chance encounter with a wolf. And I thought well, if the wolf is howling, the Darryl is bar
king. I also thought her extremely wonderful as we chugged side by side across the black lake. We found our croc too, a six-footer that stayed in the light for a good few minutes, passing right under the boat, before eventually disappearing into the depths. And so we returned through the black Belizean night: Burton trying to buy up the entire world, Tomlinson with his little camera and his telescope, SJ with his make-up, Alison with her notes and her ailments, Darryl with her lupine memories and her dead moth, me. As mad a ship as ever I have sailed on.
Darryl cheek-kissed farewell with us all, and said it had been an unforgettable trip. She wanted to be deeply involved with the WLT, but nothing came of it. Alison’s piece made Hello!, and Nana’s pictures (and Darryl’s face) looked gorgeous. Emma had a damascene experience, resolved to work for conservation instead of the luxury market, and now does the PR work for the WLT. Nana, also enthralled, contributes pictures for the WLT whenever she can. SJ moved into event management, and is planning a big one for the WLT. David went back to the Home Counties a more worldly man. And me, I was asked to become a council member for the WLT, and have done my bit for this remarkable organisation ever since.
22. Badger
Meles meles
I have written about sport for The Times since 1982. Sport is part of my life. I talk sport all the time, by way of business, or for the fun of it: the new England cricket captain will do a great job, or maybe he won’t; the new England football manager hasn’t got a clue, or maybe he has. These conversations are part of my life: they’re an important part of the way many people relate. It is one of the great male traditions: your friend’s wife has just left him, so you take him to the pub and talk about Arsenal. It also tends to be one of those things that pass from father to son: to this day, my father and I energetically talk cricket and rugby.
We played cricket in the garden when I was young and still thought my father could play; he eventually turned out both for and against the cricket team I co-founded, when I still thought I could play. When it was my turn for fatherhood, I made sure Joe had bats and balls as soon as he could walk. His response from the earliest age was to ignore the bat and toss the ball into a bush. Then he got on with something interesting. Eddie, however, loves a ball, and we have invented a number of curious games that suit his take on the world. Throwing the ball up and down the stairs is a favourite, and there are strange garden games that involve the slide and the bushes, or best, a precipitous bank. He stands at the top with me at the bottom and throws at me forcefully and ambidextrously and occasionally accurately.
But Joe has never played a ball game in his life. Energetic and crazed movements on the trampoline have given him pleasure across the years, but the idea that anyone could enjoy kicking a ball or catching it baffles him entirely. He has never watched a second of televised sport of his own volition. I watch a fair bit: when Joe catches me at it, he politely walks away. These things no more involve him than a discussion of Finnegans Wake. I have occasionally attempted to explain it to him – sport rather than the Wake – and though he has listened amiably enough, it is clear that sport will never touch him. He is mildly intrigued that this rum stuff absorbs me: but sport is something we will never share.
He looks a bit like me, with a long bony face. He has long hair, as I do, which he ties back, as I do. He is home-schooled, being a natural not-fitter-inner: I was self-employed for 24 years, so I can relate to that. On the other hand, at 15 he is six foot three, already six inches taller than me.
He doesn’t read much, which saddens me. Narrative enthrals him, as it has always enthralled me, but not so much in book form. I read him all The Chronicles of Narnia and then the Harry Potter series until he was old enough to read them for himself, so that was something. I read him My Family and Other Animals two or three times. He loves comedy. When he was nine, he discovered Dad’s Army: I purchased the entire series and it kept us going for months; years, really: we watched the lot and then watched it all over again, and we still watch favourite episodes. We share other ancient sitcoms – The Good Life is a favourite – and some carefully selected modern comedians. Laughter and narrative: great things.
He has talents I don’t begin to understand, still less possess. For some years he made thrilling models of animals in clay, with a natural sense of proportion and drama. He makes model stage sets for Doctor Who and Torchwood, initially from cardboard boxes, more recently from plywood. He has a natural dexterity that is utterly foreign to me: a love of practical solutions that leaves me bemused. He recently completed a scale model of the moon-buggy from the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever. The tricky thing was the wheels; he eventually mastered them with a soldering iron. I have never soldered anything in my life, nor will I. He uses these sets and props for animated films, and they tend to end with the whole lot going up in flames. The stars are plastic figures that he creates himself. He buys conventional figures and transforms them with knife and putty and paint. As a virtuoso piece of work, he created Bertie Bassett, the Liquorice Allsorts man, out of a figure of Batman. Inevitably, he can also do extraordinary things with a computer, and uses these baffling skills for his tales and his videos. He now devotes himself to the guitar with an extraordinary passion.
All this is quite beyond me. The story, the cliff hangers, the jokes, the imagination: all this I can relate too. But to see him paint the smile on the face of the Joker with a paintbrush three hairs thick is something that makes me say: who is this guy? What on earth has he got to do with me? What on earth is fatherhood, what does it mean, what kind of legacy is this, a son who towers over my head and makes working cars and animated films?
Parenthood is a perpetual compromise between neglect and pushing. The last thing you want to do with anything that matters to you – art, books, wildlife – is to ram it down their throats, as the process is always called. I didn’t try to ram animals down Joe’s throat, but the first word he spoke was bird. I started taking him to the zoo as soon as he was able to deal with it. There are a lot of bad things said about zoos, and I’ve said some of them myself: that they don’t celebrate the animals, they celebrate the cages, that the subject is not wildlife but bars, that they don’t teach about our kinship with our fellow-animals but the barriers we erect between them and us.
But if that’s the lesson zoos are supposed to teach, it was just one more lesson that Joe didn’t pay attention to. Right from the first, as other families hustled past at high speed – “I don’t think much of that!” “He isn’t even moving!” – Joe would settle down for a good long gaze, silent and absorbed. I told him about a survey done at Antwerp Zoo, in which it seemed as if the researchers were working on the famous chimp colony. In fact, they were working on the visitors. The most frequent remark they recorded was “I could watch them all day”. The average length of stay was one minute. Joe laughed at this: and settled down to watch, to seek an involvement, to establish a belonging.
When I was young, I sought the wild through books and through the imagination. Joe had the real thing. Cautiously, anxious at all costs to avoid the dreaded ramming-down-throat scenario, I introduced him to accessible wild things. Gradually, we acquired a double pattern: that of relishing the wildlife all around us, the sort of thing casually encountered in the garden or on journeys, and that of making expeditions to enjoy special things. We have been to Africa, to the Luangwa Valley, of course, to see the great beasts. We went to Slovakia to find bears. And we have made other, shorter journeys. I have shown him the wild, and we have done things together that, when I was his age, I had believed were for ever beyond my scope. Joe enjoys the occasional morning’s birding at Minsmere, without getting too obsessive about identification. If he undertakes these trips in a small way to humour me, then I am honoured. Mammals touch him more deeply. We have been to look at the red deer rut, and walked among the belling stags and the coolly assessing hinds. We have watched foxes at play, we have watched water voles at swim. All this I do to enjoy the moment, the expedition and the companionshi
p: and yet, I can’t quite stamp out the spark of fatherly ambition, the hope that each trip is an experience that will keep him interested in wildlife for the rest of his life, that will, by no means incidentally, give us something to share for as long as I’m around to share things. Naturally I want him to enjoy wildlife: how could I not wish him one the greatest joys available to humankind?
But of course, I also want to have stuff we can enjoy together, and in this, I suppose that I am seeking some kind of confirmation that he is, at heart, ever so slightly like me: that the something of me in him can show itself in a way that brings us both joy. It’s a rum and complex business, but anyway, he was unambiguously pleased when I suggested that we spend an evening badgering. It’s something we had done a couple of times before, the first time when he was no older than ten. Both times, the badgers came, we had our reward and it was all great. But now he was 14, absurdly tall and with more and more complicated teenager things in his life.
So I organised a visit to a badger hide set up by the Suffolk Wildlife Trust, and when we arrived we took a pot of peanuts from the stash provided and cast them in front of the little hut. The hide is a comfortably appointed place set up for long vigils, and we entered and began to wait as the light started to change. We sat behind sealed windows: it was not just our shapes we needed to conceal, it was also our smell.
But a bad thing happened as we closed the door and took our places. Someone raced an engine flat out, screaming it, again and again, for a sustained period, maybe five minutes, the sound ripping apart the mild Suffolk air. It was enough to keep any sane animal hunkered down and out of sight for hours.