Turtle Diary

by Russell Hoban

  Having reviewed my customary fountain thoughts I find all at once that I really don’t care about it at all. Let the square be however it is, it doesn’t matter to me any more.

  I have only one beach pebble from my childhood, from Caister. I don’t suppose it makes any difference, the others are always there in a way. The books call them pebbles but I always think of them as stones. I have many stones from beaches I’ve visited as a grown-up, one bit of sea-china with a voluptuous fairy with little butterfly wings on it, and several bits of sea-glass. The stones from each place are in separate baskets: St David’s Head, Folkestone, Staunton Sands etc. At Folkestone I gave a talk to teachers and librarians one evening, and in the afternoon of that day I went to the sea front and down steep steps to the narrow pebble beach and the sea.

  There was a long row of little beach-huts side by side like garages. It was a rainy day in early spring. A man had his hut opened up, the whole front open like a dolls’ house. He was doing the sort of things men do when they smoke pipes and repair their boats in early spring. Mending something I suppose. There was no boat, his hut was his boat. All the little beach-hut fronts pushed me towards the sea and I jumped down from the wall on to the pebbles that rolled and clicked under me as I walked. I thought: what if there were a stone with my name on it? Then I thought, what if my name were on every stone? Then: the name of every stone is in me. I can’t say the name of every stone but it is in me. There were no birds that I remember that day. The hotels along the front were as high as in childhood and as remote, even when seen close to.

  This afternoon I bought a marked-down bird book with plates by John Gould (1804–1881). There’s a handsome picture of two oyster-catchers. ‘At running, diving, and swimming they are unrivalled, while their vigilance is greatly appreciated by the other birds of the shore,’ says the book. The newer bird books have hundreds of posh pictures, the proficiency of the artists is dazzling. But the birds all look as if they’d been done from photographs. Certainly there were no such bird pictures before the camera came into use. Gould’s birds are beautiful but modestly done and he seems to have looked at each one carefully and long. His eagle owl, Bubo bubo, is all ferocity but without malice. Dangling from his beak is a dead rabbit who looks exactly like Peter Rabbit without the blue jacket. Bubo bubo’s dreadful amber eyes say simply, ‘It has fallen to me to do this. It is my lot.’ His fierce woolly owl-babies huddle before him waiting for their dinner.

  5

  William G.

  I went to the Zoo again.

  Cold day. Windy. Walking down Parkway from the Camden Town tube station I passed a girl with her anorak zipped up pushing a baby in a push-chair, looking cold. Autumn? No, spring. Summer next. Four seasons to a year. I can easily imagine getting up one morning and deciding not to bother with any more seasons. I went in by the South Gate and passed the Waders Aviary on my way to the sea turtles.

  Lots of noise from the reeds and marsh plants inside the cage. More than one voice, some sort of a controversy: kleep kleep kleep. Kleep kleep. Two black-and-white birds with orange-ringed eyes set neatly in their heads, long orange bills and the sort of chilblained but durable-looking purplish legs one sees on some lady birdwatchers. But these birds were both men I think. Maybe it was one bird and a doppel-ganger. They were walking side by side shouting at each other. They passed out of view behind the reeds. I went round to the other side of the cage where I could see them as they came out on to the concrete beach round their wading-pool. They were walking with their heads down and if they’d had hands they would have had them clasped behind their backs. Each one’s bill was pointed down and away from the other and they looked stubbornly sideways at each other as they conversed.

  ‘Kleep it and have klept with it for God’s sake,’ said one.

  ‘I don’t have to kleep it just because you klawp I should,’ said the other.

  ‘Then don’t kleep it,’ said the first one. ‘It’s no klank off my klonk.’

  ‘Oh aye,’ said the second one. ‘You klawp that now but that’s not what you klawped a little klink ago.’

  ‘I klick very klenk what I klawped a little klink ago,’ said the first one. ‘I klawped either kleep it or don’t kleep it but stop klawping about it. That’s what I klawped.’

  ‘It’s all very klenk for you to klawp “Kleep it,’” said the second one. ‘You’re not the one that has to kleggy back the kwonk.’

  I didn’t want to hear any more. There was a sign inside the cage with pictures of the inmates. Those two were oyster-catchers. That’s a laugh. I’d like to know when the last time they caught an oyster was. At one end of their pool, which was nothing more than a depression in the concrete with some standing water in it, some very old mussels were lying about. There were other birds with their pictures on the sign but I didn’t want to know.

  Have the gibbons been corrupted by captivity? How can they possibly be happy in a cage, but they seem not to care about it especially. Debonair is the only word for them. Maybe aerial acrobatics are to them what jazz is to musicians who do it wherever they are and whether they get paid or not, just for the thing itself.

  They have quite a large sort of flight cage with transverse bars at regular intervals for them to swing on. They saunter through the air in great long easy arcs, long arms revolving alternately: catch, let go, catch, let go, and all the time not particularly paying attention and as if with their hands in their pockets. Their manner is cool but lively, not withdrawn. Their small black faces are full of Zen. Jazz acrobats is what they are and they seem philosophically beyond such trifles as a cage. They’re above me, I admit it. And they don’t seem to be snobs about it either.

  I had sort of a bursting feeling as if my self were a wall round me that I couldn’t knock down or climb over. I have no talent, no Zen like that of the gibbons. Once, twice, long ago. Out of it, away and in the clear. What’s the use of remembering. Out of it was at the same time into it. There’s a wall inside the self as well. Can’t get through any more. Can’t live is what it amounts to. No place to live. Get through the days, the seasons, oh yes. But no place to be. No way to hold the sun in the eye, be held by it swimming, swimming.

  The wax people downstairs at Madame Tussaud’s contemplating in wax their crimes get through the days, the nights, the seasons. The thought escapes me, there was more to it. Prisons are all we know how to make, even in wax. No wax sea turtles, thank God for that.

  There they were in the golden-green murk of their little box of sea, their little bedsitter of ocean. One almost expected a meter in the corner of it where they had to put in 5p to keep the water circulating. Thousands of miles in their speechless eyes, submarine skies in their flipper-wings. No beach of course, no hot sand for the gravid females to crawl up on to, to lay their eggs.

  A little boy pointed to the big loggerhead turtle. ‘Could he get rid of me?’ he said to his mother. She was ever so well-groomed.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said, laughing upper-class and mumsily. ‘They’re quite harmless.’

  The male loggerhead bit the female on the neck and tried to mount her. Not on. She wasn’t having any. Maybe the females in the Aquarium don’t get gravid, have no eggs to lay. The lady walked away with her knickers full of gentility, her son followed, still not got rid of.

  Thousands of miles of navigation, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. There was a girl standing next to me, a burstly sort of girl, bursting out of her tight trousers and blouse, bursting with health and burstly genes. She’d have no trouble getting gravid whenever she liked. I was still thinking of the thousands of miles. ‘Nobody knows how they do it,’ I said.

  ‘You just have to be here at the right time and you can see them do it,’ she said, Burst burst.

  The air seemed full of noise, I sat down on a bench and closed my eyes, saw golden-green water, thousands of miles.

  6

  Neaera H.

  Madame Beetle seems not to fancy raw meat. All of what I’d given her lay about in th
e plants and on the shipwreck and went white and sodden. On the other hand, maybe she has eaten it. In the larval stage the water-beetle doesn’t eat in the ordinary way, it injects digestive fluid into its prey and sucks out the liquefied tissues. Maybe Madame Beetle’s never grown up. The meat certainly looks as if there’s no nutrition left in it. I tried her with a bit of braised beef and I think she ate some of it.

  She spends a good deal of her time hanging head-down with her bottom just breaking the surface of the water. That’s the end she breathes through, where her spiracles are. Might she have a periscope? Victoria Beetle, Submariner. When she dives she takes a shining bubble of air with her under her wing-covers. If I took the lid off the tank and opened the window she might fly away but it would be a long trip to the nearest pond. I sometimes think of her as waiting patiently but I doubt that she really experiences what people call waiting and if she doesn’t then she has no need of patience.

  Victoria Beetle’s Summer Holiday. Bugger that. Sunken Treasure is better. What would a beetle treasure be? I’ll try catching some flies for her. Maybe a moth will turn up, she’d like that. But the treasure in the story should be jewels or money.

  It was a lazy summer afternoon,

  and Victoria Beetle was enjoying a quiet cup of tea

  when she heard a knock at the door.

  She looked out of the window

  and saw Big Sam Bumblebee the gang boss.

  ‘If he thinks he can try on that

  protection lark with me he’d betterthinkagain,’

  said Victoria, and she picked up the poker.

  Victoria Beetle or Victoria Water-Beetle? The hyphenated name sounds better. How would Snugg & Sharpe feel about gangsters? After all they’re part of modern life even at schools nowadays, according to the newspapers. Big Sam knows where the lolly is but he needs Victoria’s help because it’s at the bottom of the pond. Dropped there by Jimson Crow perhaps, whilst making a getaway. He’s always stealing things. He was flying over the pond with Detective Owl hot on his trail.

  I wanted to see an oyster-catcher so I went to the Zoo, not feeling at all good about it. The Zoo is a prison for animals who have been sentenced without trial and I feel guilty because I do nothing about it. But there it was, I wanted to see an oyster-catcher and I was no better than the people who’d caged oyster-catchers for me to see. And I myself have caged a water-beetle. On the other hand perhaps some of the birds and animals don’t feel the Zoo to be a prison. Maybe they’ve been corrupted by it.

  At the Waders Aviary a little sandpiper who would never have allowed me to come that close in real life perched on a sign a foot away from me and stared. He knew that he was safe because the wire mesh of the cage was between us. He has lost his innocence. He appeared to have lost a leg as well, and for a long time stood steadfastly on the one very slender remaining member whilst looking at me through half-closed eyes. Having kept me there for nearly half an hour he revealed a second leg that matched the other perfectly, then flew down to the sand and entertained a lady sandpiper with an elegant little dance that seemed done less for the lady than for the thing itself. He made his legs even longer and thinner than they were, drew himself up quite tall in his small way, spread his wings, wound himself up and produced a noise like a tiny paddle-wheel boat whilst flapping his wings stiffly and with formal regularity. At the same time he executed some very subtle steps almost absent-mindedly, with the air of one who could be blindingly nimble if he let himself go. The lady watched attentively. At a certain point, as if by mutual agreement that the proprieties had been observed, he stopped dancing, she stopped watching. They went their separate ways like two people at a cocktail party.

  Oyster-catchers were what I’d come to see and there were two or three of them mooching about but there was something wrong that made the seeing of them flat and uneventful. I’d never been that close to them before, part of their character had been that they were always seen from a distance on the open mudflats with a wide and low horizon far away. These oyster-catchers were so accessible as to be unobservable. One of them wound himself up as the sandpiper had done and released quite an urgent kleep kleep kleep. The sound independently hurried off round the pool and the bird hurried after it like a cat or a child working up interest in a toy. When the sound stopped the oyster-catcher abandoned it and began to potter about with some rather old-looking mussels.

  There were all sorts of waders in the Waders Aviary, not all of whom would ordinarily have been seen in the same place I think. The sign showed pictures of a redshank, guillemot, razorbill, eider duck, oyster-catcher, ruff, kittiwake, white-breasted waterhen, rufous laughing thrush, curlew, laysan duck and hooded merganser. They had their concrete pool to wade in, they had reeds and bushes and a strip of sand. The Zoological Society had pieced together a habitat that was like the little naif towns one sometimes sees in model railway layouts. The elements of it were thing for thing a rough approximation of reality but the scale wasn’t right and the parts of it didn’t fit together in a realistic way.

  The birds were all quite good-natured and reasonable about it, they seemed more grown-up than the Zoo management, as if they’d been caught and caged not because they weren’t clever enough to avoid it but because they simply didn’t think in terms of nets and cages, those were things for cunning children. So here they all were, interned for none of them knew how long. They made the best of it better than people would have done, I think, and all of them appeared to get on rather neatly together. The sandpipers, the curlews and the redshanks, all pure Bewick, seemed to draw serenity from the sheer detail of their markings. A ruff was bathing with its ruff spread out as large as possible. It looked of the film world and as if it might call everyone ‘Darling’.

  I felt dissatisfied, as one does when morally strong preconceptions have to be questioned. The birds were not silent prisoners wasting away like Dr Manette in the Bastille nor were they beating pitiful wings against the wire mesh of their captivity. Their understanding of the whole thing seemed deeper and simpler than mine. Of course it may be that they’re going decadent. I’ve seen a film in which Dr Lorenz pointed out the difference between two colonies of cattle egrets, one free and one caged. The free ones, who had to provide for themselves, were monogamous and energetic and kept their numbers within ecologically reasonable limits. The captive egrets were promiscuous, idle, overbreeding and presumably going to hell fast.

  I passed the gibbons who seemed at the same time active and reflective, of more mature understanding than the party of French girls who stood before the cage shouting, ‘Allez, allez!’ at their aerial artistry. I avoided the lions, the rhinoceroses and the elephants, walked along with my head down, not wanting to see anything and not wanting to go home. I fetched up at the Aquarium as it began to rain, and went inside.

  Aquaria have always been interesting to me as sources of illumination, the fish are secondary. Madame Beetle’s tank with its sunken wreck, water plants, pebbles and one bit of sea-china is very pretty when lit in the evening. Madame Beetle is more active than she was at first, submarining elegantly, her red fringed hind legs going like perfectly coordinated oars. I like the sound of the pump and filter too, it’s better than the ticking of a clock.

  When I was a child I had a fishless aquarium. My father set it up for me with gravel and plants and pebbles before he’d got the fish and I asked him to leave it as it was for a while. The pump kept up a charming burble, the green-gold light was wondrous when the room was dark. I put in a china mermaid and a tin horseman who maintained a relationship like that of the figures on Keats’s Grecian urn except that the horseman grew rusty. Eventually fish were pressed upon me and they seemed an intrusion, I gave them to a friend. All that aquarium wanted was the sound of the pump, the gently waving plants, the mysterious pebbles and the silent horseman forever galloping to the mermaid smiling in the green-gold light. I used to sit and look at them for hours. The mermaid and the horseman were from my father. I have them in a box somewhe
re, I’m not yet ready to take them out and look at them again.

  Here in the dark of the Aquarium were many green-and-gold-lit windows, huge compared to mine but not magical. The fish all looked bored to death but of course fish aren’t meant to be looked at closely, will not bear close examination. The lobsters scarcely looked more alive than those I’ve seen waiting to be selected by diners at sea-food restaurants. I don’t think the Aquarium ought to do a shark at all if they’re not going to lay on a big one. The leopard shark they have is so small that his vacant stare and receding chin make him seem nothing more than a marine form of twit rather than a representative of a mortally dangerous species. Rays I think ought not to be seen at all outside their natural habitat, too many questions arise.

  I’d been aware of the turtles for some time before I went to look at them. I knew I’d have to do it but I kept putting it off. When I did go to see them I didn’t know how to cope with it. Untenable propositions assembled themselves in my mind. If these were what they were then why were buildings, buses, streets? The sign said that green turtles were the source of turtle soup and hawksbills provided the tortoise-shell of commerce. But why soup, why spectacles?

  Relative to her size my beetle has more than twice as much swimming-room as the turtles. And in that little tank the turtles were flying, flying in the water, submarine albatrosses. I’ve read about them, they navigate hundreds of miles of ocean. I imagined a sledge-hammer smashing the thick glass, letting out the turtles and their little bit of ocean, but then they’d only be flopping about on the wet floor.

  I’m always afraid of being lost, the secret navigational art of the turtles seems a sacred thing to me. I thought of the little port of Polperro in Cornwall where they sell sea-urchin lamps, then I felt very sad and went home.