‘When Roo, my cat, looks in the mirror,’ explained Mr Markham, ‘he thinks he sees another cat but when we look in a mirror we know that we are looking at ourselves. This is because our human minds have evolved to the point that we are aware not just of ourselves but of other people and the world in a way that gives us the power to change things through what we think and imagine. This makes us responsible for what happens in life because we can do something about it.’
He asked me if I understood what he said and I told him that I thought it meant we could do things to help nature since we could see what needed to be done but a bird or a rabbit couldn’t do that.
‘Good boy!’ he said.
Later in my life I came to the same conclusions as Mr Huxley and Mr Markham.
On many days, after I’d run his errands, he would take time to describe some of his experiences with animals whilst he lived and worked in foreign countries like Egypt and Morocco. Recognizing my appetite for knowledge about the natural world he astounded my mind with stories of exploring the Amazon forest and hunting for unknown kinds of orchids and other plants. One of the tales he told me was about a ferocious man-eating jaguar that stalked his party in the deep jungle and attacked one of his native bearers one night when they were camped near the river. He told me that they tried to escape from the big cat by travelling downriver by raft and canoe, but the creature followed their progress from the riverbanks. The party was filled with fear as the huge yellow beast, with its black spots and markings, moved stealthily along the bank and affixed them with its fierce stare from the jungle shadows.
‘Why didn’t you shoot it?’ I asked him.
‘We did not go there to kill but to explore and learn. The jaguar was only following the instincts of her nature as a wild inhabitant of her jungle world, she only killed for food; if we had killed her it would have been out of revenge, which is a petty human trait.’
‘So you were the intruders into her land where she had the right to roam free,’ I replied.
‘Why, Denis O’Connor, my boy, you’re a psychologist!’ He said with an approving nod and benign smile.
‘What’s a psychologist? I asked him.
‘A learned person who seeks to understand why animals and people do the things that they do.’ Mr Markham didn’t realize it, but he had just opened the door to my future profession in psychology.
His attention and approval started to boost my feeble self-esteem and fuelled my appetite for knowledge. I was beginning to look forward to the times when Mr Markham wasn’t busy and had time to talk with me, which was usually on the weekends or school holidays. I learned through him that some people can talk to children in a way that puts them at ease and that these adults make the best teachers. He was helping me to learn about life and was feeding my awakening interest in all things natural. He let me look at his aquarium, which was full of exotic coloured fish. I never tired of watching the different types of fish, which would swim, flit or just stay almost perfectly motionless in the water. He also let me stroke Roo, his ginger tomcat. He said he called the cat ‘Roo’ because he ‘rued’ the day he’d allowed the cat to stay and ‘take over his house’. In truth, he seemed to have a great deal of affection for Roo, a healthy looking cat who had his own cushion and feeding bowls, and appeared very comfortable and pleased with his lot.
One day before school I brought Mr Markham’s newspaper and loaf of bread back from the local shop, but he didn’t answer when I called to him at the half-open back door. Thinking he was perhaps busy with his aquarium, I pushed the door open and went inside. He was sitting on his wooden chair by the table, wearing the black beret he usually wore, but something was wrong about the way he appeared. He was staring ahead but not looking at anything. I called to him again but he just nodded his head and didn’t respond to my urgent enquiries about his condition. Then suddenly he spoke.
‘I’m cold, so cold!’ he said.
He then just gently collapsed forward and laid his head on the kitchen table, which was covered in worn, flowered oil cloth.
I stood there in a sort of paralysis, not wanting to move, until Mrs Angus, his cleaning woman, breezed into the room. She took everything in at a glance, immediately understanding what must have happened.
‘Go and be about your business, lad,’ she said to me and I ran to tell my mother.
I later learned that Mr Markham had suffered a kind of illness which my mother called a ‘stroke’ and had died shortly afterwards. His married sister came to claim the house and one day, when I saw furniture from the house being loaded into a cart, I went into the yard and asked a workman if he’d seen the cat. He told me that I’d better ask inside. Just then I was confronted by a large woman who demanded to know what I was doing.
‘I’m looking for Roo, Mr Markham’s cat.’ I then explained to her how I had known Mr Markham.
‘Well, boy,’ she said in that haughty way that some adults use to address insignificant children, ‘I do not want my brother’s cat so if you like it then I suggest you take it otherwise I’ll have it put away.’ With that she stomped back into the house and disappeared, leaving me standing in the yard. Workmen kept pushing past me as they carried one item after another from the house out to the cart and kept telling me to ‘Mind yourself’ and ‘Get out of the way.’
Deciding to be bold I sneaked into the house and began looking for Roo. Since the sofa had already disappeared along with the cat’s cushion I couldn’t think where to look for him. Suddenly I heard a screech as one of the furniture removers stood on Roo’s paw. This was accompanied by a curse from the workman and a sorrowful looking Roo limped into sight.
‘Come on pal,’ I said. ‘You’re with me now!’
After a brief discussion my mother agreed to let me keep Roo but with the proviso that she didn’t know what my father would say about it. She also added that she had no housekeeping money to spend on feeding a cat and so I quickly agreed that he would share my meals.
Later that week, one day when I was alone in the house and was busy reading my Dandy comic, there was a knock on the door and Mr Markham’s sister stood there looking down at me.
‘My brother’s will has just been read and he left you £50,’ she said. She then thrust an envelope containing pound notes into my hand and walked away.
My mother was out shopping so I decided to keep the money a secret until I had decided what to do with it and immediately hid it in amongst my comics in a cupboard upstairs in my room. The next time I went to the post office I would put the money in my savings account, which already held the grand total of seventeen shillings and sixpence – everything I had managed to save so far.
The following day when I came in from school my mother was waiting for me and beside her sat my father, wearing his ‘Day of Judgement’ face. Spread out on the table was the £50 which my mother had discovered when she was tidying my room.
‘Where did you get this money from?’ growled my father.
‘It was from Mr Markham. He left it to me when he died.’
I didn’t see the slap coming but I reeled and was knocked to the floor by the blow.
‘You liar,’ he shouted. ‘You stole this money from that neighbour’s house, didn’t you? You took the money from where the old man kept it, didn’t you?’
My father refused to listen to my protests and urgent explanations. Still dizzy and feeling sick from the smack, I was grabbed by the ear and marched into the backstreet where my father banged on Mr Markham’s back door. Eventually the old man’s sister opened the door in answer to my father’s loud thumping. It clearly emerged in his conversation with her that I was telling the truth – not that he was placated in any way by that information.
‘So you thought to keep it hidden from me, you greedy little sod, in spite of the fact of what it costs me to feed and care for you. Well, mister, that is the last you’ll see of this money. It can go a part way towards your upkeep from now on.’
Luckily my mother hadn’t tol
d my father about Roo, so I sneaked him up to bed that night and in the semi-darkness told him all about the events. The big ginger tomcat liked a comfortable life and spent most of the daytime sleeping. He preferred to roam the streets and gardens at night but he was always there in the morning awaiting his breakfast. In the end, despite my best efforts to rehabilitate him, Roo would not stay with me. He was not partial to eating egg and chips nor did he relish homemade broth. It pained me to see him go but I was pleased to learn that he had decided to take up residence with a retired couple in a house not far from our own. I’m sure Mr Markham would have been pleased. I rarely saw Roo again but sometimes I caught sight of him high up on a backyard wall looking very superior. I do not think he thought much of me or my diet.
As for my £50, my mother saw little of it and the bookmakers no doubt profited the most from it. I respected and admired Mr Markham and it was generous of him to leave me some money. I still remember many of things he said to me. One of them was to save my pocket money and buy books because ‘books are the keys to learning.’ Another thing he told me was the only real sin in this world was when people made war on nature.
‘Remember,’ he said, ‘if you destroy creatures, trees and plants then you destroy something in yourself. Humanity is as much a part of nature as the birds and the butterflies.’ Later in my life his words found resonance for me in the words of the Indian philosopher Satish Kumar, who said that we are not life separate from nature, we are nature.
I took these words to heart and they remained a significant part of my thinking for the rest of my life. Mr Markham was a very wise man, far superior to my teachers at junior school who seemed obsessed with religion and rote learning. I hated school but I had a high opinion of Mr Markham, a dignified but unpretentious old man in a black French beret who took the time to talk to a curious boy. You can never tell who lives across from you and what surprises each day might bring.
A WILDCAT IN SCOTLAND
When I was growing up the relationship between my parents was fraught and there were many fractious rows, which often took place in my presence and caused me no end of stress.
On one occasion, when I was four-and-a-half years old, I saw them rowing on the upstairs landing when my father hit my mother with his fist. She fell back and tumbled down the stairs. On impulse I charged at him and started pummelling his legs and screaming. With an open-handed swipe he sent me flying down the stairs after my mother. I rolled down the whole flight of stairs, landing in my mother’s lap as she sat stunned on the floor near the front door.
No further words were spoken but that evening, when my father was out working overtime, my mother packed a small suitcase with some of our clothes and took her ‘running away money’ from its hiding place in the back recess behind a drawer. We left on the night train to Inverness in Scotland. We were going to the home of my mother’s aunt, sister to my mother’s father, who lived in a big old house on the west coast. My mother had stayed there a few times as a girl and had been told she would be always welcome. We travelled fast and far during the night, but by morning we were still miles away from our destination. I was tired and hungry but there was no let up in our travels until a rickety old bus deposited us in a small village on the border of the Highlands.
We walked by the path along the sea shore until we came to a stalwart grey stone building that stood at the end of a row of houses facing the sea. We were exhausted. A knock at the heavy-looking wooden door brought a gaunt woman bustling to see her unexpected visitors. Once she recognized my mother her surprise turned to evident delight and we were welcomed into a warm home that smelled richly of homemade food. I was tired but desperately hungry and although Aunt Sheilis made a terrific fuss of me it was only when I had supped a bowl of hot highland broth that I was able to fully relax at journey’s end. I looked across at the relieved face of my mother and wondered, as only a child can, what would happen to us now. But with the warming essences of my new found aunt’s soup in me I snuggled into a corner of the long sofa and drifted into dreamland. The murmur of the adults’ conversation and the warmth from the coal fire lulled me far away to a secure place in my mind where I could totally rejoice in being safe.
I awoke slowly as though emerging from a fog. Outside I could hear the wailing of what seemed to be a huge chorus of seagulls as they cried their hymn to the sea. The sea in turn seemed to sigh and commenced a rhythmic tempo as the waves pounded and crashed on the rocky shore of the bay. I was lost, far from home, in a foreign country, in a strange bed in a different house and I was sore all over from my fall down the stairs at home. Yet I felt strangely comforted as my head filled with the soothing primeval noise of the sea from outside the bedroom window.
Soon I could hear my mother’s voice talking to someone nearby but I didn’t move since I was more content just to lie quietly and listen to the gulls. I was happily reminded of the holiday in Clacton-on-Sea with my Uncle Fred, aunts and cousins, but this was much further away from home and I wondered if we’d ever be going back. The bedroom door opened and there was my mother looking bruised and flushed as if she’d been crying.
‘Wake up, sleepy head,’ she called cheerily.
After a quick breakfast of toast and jam I was soon seated in a huge, white stone sink in the kitchen being bathed by my mother. Through the window I could see some fishing boats bobbing about in a sea swell. Men were carrying boxes of fish up the pebbled beach to the road where a few horse-drawn carts were waiting. Flocks of hungry seagulls circled other men as they laboured over fishing nets at the edge of the bay.
Nearer to home, just outside the window, I could see a small kitchen garden filled with vegetable plants, which were shielded by a stone wall. There was a little path through the garden lined with what looked like seashells, all broken and crunched, while a large garden gnome in a red hat stood sentry near the gate. A crowd of starlings were busily strutting between the plants, pecking at the ground and competing noisily with each other for anything they could find to eat. My mother pointed to a robin, perched on the stem of a climbing rosebush outside, who was staring wistfully at us in anticipation of a treat. There was a warm and safe feeling about the big kitchen and the solid stone walls, which was a comfort after the traumatic events of the day before.
‘Your Aunt Sheilis owns a family fish and chip shop and we are going along to help. Perhaps she’ll let you work the chip machine. Would you like that?’
Suddenly feeling hungry I nodded and hurriedly rubbed my body dry with a thick patterned towel that smelt strongly of carbolic.
The fish and chip shop that my new aunt’s family owned was in the middle of the high street and faced out over a headland towards the sea. It had a clean and shiny interior with lots of steel mountings on the fryers and spotless green plastic counters. My aunt’s grandson, Stuart, a young man in his early twenties, was in charge and there were two local women who did the serving and cleaning.
Stuart was very friendly to me. He said he liked to be called Sty by his friends and he expected that now I would be his friend. He showed me how to peel the skin off potatoes so thinly that none of the flesh was wasted. Then I had to learn how to position a peeled potato on a machine that had serrated squares. When the handle was pulled down the potato was pressed through the squares and dropped down into a large bucket as chips ready to be cooked in the large fryers.
When Sty saw how helpful I was and how I did not shirk the work he whispered a secret to me. He told me that he would take me up the coast in his little boat, which had an outboard engine, to search in the sheltered bays for gold doubloons. He said that they had been washed ashore from sunken ships of the Spanish Armada that were shipwrecked during the reign of Elizabeth I, which I gathered was a long time ago. He explained that it all happened in the year 1588 when the King of Spain, Philip II, sent a huge fleet of ships and soldiers to invade England but was beaten back by English ships in the Channel. The scattered survivors of the Armada tried to return home by sailing north a
round Scotland but many were lost in fierce storms. Each ship was carrying gold coinage on board to pay the Spanish soldiers. It was such an enticing story that after so many years there could still be the odd gold coin washed up from a sunken hoard by the wild seas off the west coast. Sty told me not to tell anybody else so I didn’t.
One very special day, when we were clearing up after the shop had closed, Sty drew me aside and withdrew a bright golden coin from his pocket. It was a doubloon. It was old, used and really heavy to hold, but it was beautiful to look at. Sty told me that he had one more hidden away. He said he planned to take me in his little boat if the weather was calm and clear on Sunday. We would search one of the numerous sheltered inlets which were blasted by the sea and overwhelmed when the furious storms from the Atlantic Ocean invaded the coast, sometimes depositing a doubloon in the sand and shingle.
At the end of the week, true to his word, Sty called round for me after breakfast and, with my mother’s reluctant permission, we embarked in his small boat. Powered by the outboard engine, we went along the coast and up into one of the prettiest inlets I have ever seen. There were stony crags either side of us as we wound our way up the creek, which was filled with sparkling clear water. We could clearly see the bottom which, as we advanced further up the stream, was now only a few feet deep. At last we stopped and Sty cut the engine. He anchored the boat by throwing overboard a huge stone tied with a rope wound through a hole bored through its middle. After the roar of the little engine everything seemed appealingly quiet.
Paw Tracks Page 5